“I have had clashes with artists in which only the revolver was missing”: the last great boss of the Spanish music industry speaks

that meal with Enrique Bunbury It resulted from “tremendous aggressiveness.” Says Manolo Díaz, at that time president of Emi. He made an appointment with the singer on the terrace of the ostentatious Ritz hotel in Madrid. “There is a problem, Enrique, my predecessor at Emi, made a contract with you in which the more records we sell, the more we lose as a company. That can not be. It’s a bargain for you, and you know it, and a disaster for us. In order to continue working well together, you would have to lower your copyright.” Bunbury slowly got to his feet and suddenly began to scream wildly, as if he were shouting the most demanding song in the world. Heroes of Silence in a packed bullring: “I shit on dioooos, I shit on the virgin”. The waiters, “extremely elegant, like something out of a Visconti movie”, froze. The dining room, full of wealthy customers, was unbelievable. “I scared the shit out of me,” says Díaz. “Then she calmed down and we said our cold goodbyes. When I got to my office, worried about Enrique’s negative reaction, I opened the mail and there was a message from Bunbury: ‘Manolo, I agree with everything’. Relief.

Manolo Díaz, 81 years old, tells the anecdote between laughs on a beautiful terrace of his house in the Asturian town of Luanco. The murmur of the waves sounds suggestive in a calm sea. Like every year, he spends the summer in his land (he was born in Oviedo) and in a few days he will go to Florida, where he lives with his partner, the American Rose McVeigh. Díaz is the last great boss of the Spanish music industry. There is no one with his resume: he has been president of major Spanish record companies such as CBS, Sony, Polygram or Emi, and president of the Federation of the Phonographic Industry of Latin America. With the death of his mentor last week, Tomás Muñoz, and of his rival (they bid for the artists) José María Cámara a year ago, Díaz is the only memory of a basic time in Spanish culture: the formation of the modern music business. Despite the digital revolution in the sector, nothing we enjoy today would have been possible without the enthusiasm and talent of pioneers like him.

Díaz has just been awarded the Honorary Latin Grammy for his contribution, an award that will be given to him next November at the awards ceremony. He hangs from his bedroom in Luanco a collage of photos where with a glance one can get an idea of ​​the relevance of this educated man and eloquent conversation. Photos with Julio Iglesias, Frank Zappa, Michael Jackson, Xuxa, Billy Joel, Isabel Pantoja, Bon Jovi, Carlos Vives… “Musicians are vulnerable, insecure beings and they are very alone. It is terrible to live in the world of artists and their whims. You had to conquer them and it was complicated, but I admit that he did it quite well, because he had been an artist and somehow he didn’t ask them for the impossible. He put me in their shoes, which is something you should never do in this business, but he softened them up. They would relax and take off their boxing gloves,” he recounts.

Indeed, Manolo Díaz was an artist. And relevant. Before joining CBS in 1977 as an executive, Díaz was one of those heroic pioneers who created Spanish rock in the late fifties in the context of a dictatorship and in a country where acquiring an electric guitar was a titanic task. Díaz formed, with his guitar, part of bands like Los Sonor or Los Polaris. We talked about when the Beatles didn’t exist. At the same time, he began a career as a composer of themes that later triumphed in the voice of Massiel, Dyango, Los Pasos or Aguaviva. He instigated in 1965 the creation of Los Bravos. He did it from the backstage (not as a member), next to the great producer Alain Milhaud. The two propelled the group to worldwide success. with black is black. Díaz composed songs for Los Bravos such as The motorcycle either The boys with the girls. And produced records for Double hemstitch and Aguaviva.

In order not to disappoint his father, he studied as a Public Works engineer. He experienced striking incidents: he worked with 20 years as a topographer in Liberia (“there I heard the Beatles for the first time and saw the horror of how girls could be bought for a fistful of dollars”) and attended the famous August 1963 rally in Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his speech with that already legendary “I have a dream”. “I was one of the few white people there. That shocked me a lot. I went to my hotel and wrote the song Yesterday I had a dream [luego interpretada por Los Pasos]”.

Later he launched himself as a protest singer-songwriter, always with elegance and avoiding militancy. Even so, one of his two solo albums was censored, A Divided Family, where he ironized about the political leaders: Kennedy, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Churchill… “He had a left-wing social conscience, but he spread it subtly. My style differed, for example, from that of Paco Ibáñez. I didn’t make hymns.” He appeared on television singing the hard Postwar with a neat appearance: sweaters, tergal pants, high belt… “The truth is that I didn’t like being an artist. I preferred the backstage, being behind, composing, planning projects…”, he points out. In the late 1970s he begins his fast-paced career as a record executive. “I stopped writing songs at that time. I couldn’t compete with my artists who were composing and say that mine were better”, he assumes. Those were times that today seem from another life. Singles and LPs were sold on vinyl, they fought with all possible weapons so that the songs would sound on the radio, they made finery and he made a lot of money.

He tells tasty stories. One day he pretended to be Julio Iglesias. “Julio recorded an album in Italian, but the people at CBS Italia didn’t want to support it: they preferred rock and disco artists. I called the RAI prime time program, asked to speak to the presenter, who was very popular, and pretended to be Julio so that the call would impact him. The presenter told me: ‘Julio, do you want to come to my program to sing?’ And I: ‘Yes, of course, when?’ In the end he performed there and sold a million copies in Italy”.

the story with daddy yankee it is trache just edited Gasoline, the beginning of reggaeton, and Yankee was recording for a local record company in Puerto Rico. Díaz made an appointment with the singer in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to sign him. He was accompanied by Emi’s boss in England. “After the long trip we went to the hotel where the appointment was. After waiting two hours, Yankee’s wife arrived and she told us that the singer was not going to receive us. And she left. Without further explanation. Imagine how I stayed after convincing the English chief to travel to Puerto Rico. Yankee was already a star before he was even a star,” she laughs.

During his long career, Díaz has experienced sour relations: “I have had clashes with artists in which the only thing missing was the punch or the revolver. They are very insecure, because they have to always be good, handsome, brilliant, they can’t screw up. I sympathize with them and what they have and don’t have. Most successful singers don’t know where the C is on the piano. They don’t know music, but they are sensational communicators.” He gets serious when he talks about the detachment with which Julio Iglesias is perceived in some sectors of Spain, where his success is questioned. “If he had been born in France or the United States in those countries they would have supported him to death. I think that in Spain they don’t do it out of envy, which is the national sport. Now it’s the same with C. Tangana and Rosalía, who seem to me to be fantastic artists. In other countries people don’t dislike what they don’t like, like in Spain. In Spain, if you don’t like something, it’s crap. Those who like classic rock hate Rosalía. I say: ‘Long live Pink Floyd and long live Rosalía’.

He talks about the day he gave a Spanish cape to Michael Jackson, when the artist performed at the Vicente Calderón, in 1988. “He just repeated over and over again ‘thank you very much’ with that girl’s voice he had. She didn’t say anything else.” has passion when he went to Rome in 1970 to visit Rafael Alberti to listen to the adaptation he made Living Water from his Ballad poem for Andalusian poets and request authorization for it to be launched in stores. “At first he was only going to receive me for half an hour, but he liked the song so much and we connected so well that I spent the next 24 hours with him: attending a meeting of the Italian Communist Party, walking through the streets of Rome, drinking, chatting…” . Alberti, of course, gave his permission. He was with Leonard Cohen, whom he convinced to participate in the disc Poets in New York. “Cohen was very funny, he spoke very softly, he smoked a lot and he drank cognac.”

Manolo Díaz left the multinationals in the first decade of the 2000s because “they were living with their backs to the digital phenomenon” and because they forced him to “do botched jobs” to balance the annual accounts, “instead of working five years ahead.” He says he gave up a salary of half a million dollars a year, plus double that if he hit the targets. From then on he presided over the Latin Recording Academy until his retirement a few years ago. On November 16 they will give him an Honorary Latin Grammy, the culmination of his career.

a little over a year ago He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Talk about it with integrity and naturalness. He says that his partner, Rose, forces him to play the piano every day. “Do you know what happens with this disease? That the brain sends an order, but it does not reach the hands well. But I can play. Doctors have told me that practicing the piano is very good to delay the effects of the disease. I have composed sonatas for Rose and my three children,” he says proudly. “The first month of the disease, stability is lost a lot. I fell about ten times. I only hurt myself once, because I know how to fall, huh? ”, He comments with humor. They operated on his lumbar and he was annoyed for two months. Julio Iglesias called him twice a day. One day, Díaz says that he asked him: “Julio, they say in the media that you are in poor health, is it true? And Julio Iglesias, who is a joker, replied: ‘Manolito, I’m fucking three times a day…’.