Luiz Roberto with unidentified friend

interviewed by Luiz Roberto Oliveira english translation: Jerry Lombardi photos: Eduardo Pires Ferreira

Luiz Roberto Oliveira: 16 November, 1996. We're with Chico Buarque in his apartment in the neighborhood of Jardim Botanico (that's the "Botanical Garden", for those of you who've never been to Rio). I'm sipping a whiskey and I'm a little bit unsure of what to do, and I think Chico is feeling the same way, but . . . Chico Buarque: Without a clue and without a whiskey! LR: So how come you're sans whiskey? CB: Because I don't drink! LR: You never drink anything? CB: I'll have some wine at night. . . Actually, I stopped drinking not out of sheer willpower but because of Tom. It was all his fault! There was a time when he stopped drinking and he had become acquainted with a sort of magician, a "spell-caster". I was still drinking pretty hard and I asked him to give me some herbs that would let me go for a month without drinking; I wanted to dry out. This guy said: "You will never drink again." And then I said: " 'Never again' I don't want! I want to be able to drink, I just want to stop for awhile". I just wanted to give it some time, stop for a month, preferably the month of February, since it's the shortest month of the year. And do you know I got sick? I got sick whenever I tried to drink whiskey, the hard stuff. So now it's just a little beer and wine. And afterwards Tom went back to drinking. LR: Yeah, and this spell-caster disappeared and Tom went back to the bottle. But he never drank too much after that. CB: Beer was what Tom really loved. LR: But it was Vinicius who got him into the hard stuff. CB: Well sure, Vinicius was a diplomat, he travelled a lot, but Tom was a Rio guy, a Carioca. In Brazil, up to the 50s and 60s, we drank very little whiskey around here. The domestic brands were terrible, and the imported ones cost a fortune. Tom had a huge capacity for lager and draft beer.

CB: Later on, Brahma, the big beer company, even installed a beer bar in Tom's house and kept it stocked all the time. LR: Brahma did that? CB: Well, it was like free publicity for them. And at Plataforma, the big nightclub, it was "Brahma" all over the place. LR: No doubt about it, Brahma was his beer. He even mentions it in the lyrics to "Chansong".

I've never been in Paris for the summer I've never drunk a Scotch with this bouquet My life is such a mess, let's have a Brahma (excerpt from Chansong)

In the next installment: Chico talks about Vinicius, a friend of the family. Also: the first time he heard Tom and João Gilberto.