But how beautiful he sang Javier Solís. At first, a frustrated imitator of Pedro Infant. And in the end – soon to end – a unique singer … inimitable.
Her real name was Gabriel Syria Levario. On April 19, 1966, exactly 55 years ago, he died at the age of 34. It happened in room 406 of the Hospital Santa Elena, in the Rome colony. No one expected it … no one. Not even him, though he always warned the foreboding that his life would be short. But not so much.
“I was able to be happy / and I’m alive dying / and in tears living / the most horrible passage / of this drama without finaaaaal … / shadows nothing more / caressing my hands … / shadows nothing else / in the trembling of my voice “.
The best performances were achieved with songs touched by sadness. He knew how to feel it better than anyone. How and more if he had been a child — son of an alcoholic father who soon died — to what his mother, before leaving, had given it away to some uncles. From there, the harsh poverty with which he grew up in the Tacubaya neighborhood, was already the least.
In adolescence, the need became stifled … more. He doesn’t even finish primary school … and he has to change in the school of life: Apprentice mechanic, baker in an oven and before dedicating himself to singing, he is a butcher … mainly in a place called providence, In the colony Countess. He has been working in this profession for ten years … exactly the same as his professional artistic career. Ten years.
Now yes to complete the rib -never more congruently said- arms a musical trio with two friends and on the way some mariachis invite him to work in the then tourist Garibaldi Square… in -in the Tenampa- or on the sidewalk, hunting wounded people of love who did not have to get out of their car to ask for and pay for a song. At the butcher’s he earned 17 pesos. In Garibaldi, 40.
An admirer of Pedro Infant’s pier, he discovered that imitating him, he liked. And it was valid: It was about being able to eat and being able to save yourself. It was the best solution … which would later become his main problem. Sing tangos, boleros and the hits of the idol of Guamúchil. It takes by artistic name the one of Javier Luquín and is creeping into neighborhood slums, oil-soaked bread restaurants and major canteens like the Guadalajara at night, Where he sings from table to table. This audience is already looking for him. The owner of the site realizes and moves him already with a good contract in the ‘ Aztec Bar, en Sant Joan del Laterà (Today Lázaro Cárdenas) i Waterfall. Place frequented by celebrities. Here the members of the famous Los Panchos trio will see it and one of them, the Puerto Rican Julio Rodríguez, Get two great composers to listen and at this time manaires on the powerful Columbia label: Felipe Valdez Leal and Fernando Z. Maldonado. They both discover a unique voice, they record two songs for him. Valdez Re-renames it: from that moment it is Javier Solís. They sign a contract for him in 1956, but nothing happens and they can’t take away his main defect … he doesn’t understand … he is mimicking his idol and has a tattoo on his forehead Pg (… of Peter).
On April 15, 1957, Infant perishes in a avionazo by own tragedy and of Solís. Idolatry is added to that and sales of their records multiply. What is least required is someone who looks like you. And when they are about to terminate Javier’s contract … Felipe Valdez takes Rafael Carrión, arranger and comparer of Infant, so that in a last opportunity, he removes the imitative tone to him and he removes an own voice to him. After a thousand essays on the subject You will cry, you will cry (… my partidaaaa / even if you want to start from your being / when you feel the warmth of other cariciaaaas / my memory must shine dooonde tu estéééés), Carrión makes him sing with his voice and that of the best instruction of his life: “now imitate yourself.” From now until the end of his days, Javier Solís he manages to change the coin he always carried in his bag.
‘You’ll cry’ … the theme with which he imitated himself and made it come up
Then the record industry, decided to move-like the king of the rancher bolero… actually created many years ago by Rubén Fonts, When he made the mariachi arrangement of the subject Love and put it in the voice of Pedro Infant, the true pioneer of the genre that exploded with countless songs. Javier Solís arrived later, but with a dominance on his perfect half voice that the sinaloense did not have and that he has had no one else.
In a short time, Javier Solís became a phenomenon as a record seller… with dimensions such that by 1960, New York Columbia set out to record it internationally. To sponsor he showed up Frank Sinatra, That I knew something about this business. It had, for the purposes of world industry at that time, the blessing of God.
In the movies things were not the same. On the death of Infant (… his karma), a decadent and voracious industry ‘used’ to Solís to replace an irreplaceable one, exposing him to show it off in about 30 cheap movies, like what he wasn’t: actor. This, in order to jam the box office which of course, were jammed.
The current -by memorable- is what he left in songs … three hundred and twenty! Between them What’s up! (Which was also his battle cry), the sinner, Moonlight, You forget, ashes, waiver, I knew I loved you, Lie, lie, If God takes my life and recording the Spanish suite of Agustín Lara, The recording of the pasodobles was left as a gift for the bullfighting culture Alejandro Algara he was also able to record with this level of perfection (… at least the themes mentioned in this paragraph are a task).
And well, clown, four Syrians, In my old St. John, you will cry you will cry, the madman… they are cooked separately. And above all that he achieved, on his pedestal, he remained shadows… the original title is Shadows nothing more, An old Argentine tango composed in the 1930s, With letter of José María Contursi and music from Francisco Lomuto. He just recorded it with mariachi arrangements Javier Solís in February 1965, 14 months before he died; the subject became since then the flag that today waves in its memory.
Beyond the rancher bolero, recorded a lot of ranch ballad and was meant among other important singers of the vernacular genre like the huge one Miguel Aceves Mejía, Antonio Aguilar, El Charro Avitia i Luis Aguilar. This in a decade (that of the 60s) in which they faced the era of rock in the musical and in the cinematographic, to a golden age of mexican cinema which, in general terms, did not await them.
On April 12, 1966, Solís was hospitalized with a stomach ache, The attention had been postponed. On the 13th he underwent surgery for the gallbladder and postoperative complications resulted in the morning of the 19th, in a heart failure two days before he was discharged, due to his good evolution: “We did not count on the heart”, he would have said the doctor as a final explanation to his closest relatives. This beyond the newspaper myth of the time, in the sense that he had died to drink a glass of water that was contraindicated.
“If Juárez hadn’t died, he would still be alive …” says the danzón. In similar circumstances, Javier Solís (1931) would turn next September 1, 90 years old.
His personal-sentimental-conjugal-extramarital-paternal life was, to say the least, a complicated thing: at 34 years old … 11 children with five women in simultaneous relationships. With the corresponding torments … previous and subsequent. One of them, the dancer Yolanda Mollinedo -with whom he had a daughter- he shot himself in the temple while listening to an album by Javier, in April 1967 … a few days after his first mournful birthday.
Inside he was a man who managed to leave behind his name, his poverty and his past in general, Plowing against the current of a successful present and a future that 55 years later has us here dealing with his legacy … and to date, selling twice as many catalog records that Pedro Infant… that character, to whom in one way or another, he wanted to look like.
With all the complexities that poverty, hunger, pain and abandonment propose … that child had a lot of merit and greater strength to reach the top. And to stay as it is in the memory of a people.
If his mother had suspected it … he wouldn’t give it away.