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April 25, 2010
BY LAURA EMERICK Staff Reporter
It’s almost impossible to imagine Bob Dylan making a promotional appearance to hype his latest disc. After all, he’s reached legendary status, and icons don’t need to bother with meet and greets or rounds of media interviews.
Yet there was Spanish megastar Enrique Bunbury crossing the States last month in a series of promo stops, including a visit to an FYE outlet in North Riverside, of all places. His latest disc, “Las Consecuencias” (Capitol Latin/EMI), went straight to No. 1 in his strongholds of Spain and Mexico, and when it came out here a few weeks later, it bowed at No. 1 on Latin iTunes and No. 4 on Billboard’s Latin pop albums charts, his highest U.S. ranking ever in a career that stretches back to the ’80s.
Enrique Bunbury, making himself comfortable at Chicago’s Hotel Sax, is touring coast to coast and talking to press for the first time in five years.
(Oscar Lopez/For the Sun-Times)
Along with its popular acceptance, the somber, largely acoustic “Las Consecuencias” has received stellar reviews. “The familiar shadows of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Neil Young, and, as always, Bob Dylan, are never far away,” wrote the All Music Guide’s Mariano Prunes. “It shows the perennially wandering bohemian from Zaragoza at his most intimate and heartfelt, truly at the peak of his songwriting powers.”
Despite the positive landing of “Las Consecuencias,” Bunbury, 42, realizes he has lots of work ahead. Usually media-shy, he has consented to his first U.S. interviews in five years. When he arrives at the Hotel Sax, he looks like his American idol, but in his “Nashville Skyline” phase, with a halo of curly hair framing his face under a positively Fourth Street-like hat. In Spain, he would have been mobbed, but here he can blend into the background and escape from the spotlight.
He’s so serious about his campaign to conquer the States that he’s set up a command post in Los Angeles, which he regards as a “100 percent rock ’n’ roll city.” “That’s why I’m in L.A. for a while to help the album,” he said, settling into a lobby booth. “We want to do a long tour in the States for the first time. Previous tours that I did here, they were like five or six cities, and now I’m going to do a proper tour, traveling coast to coast and playing cities where I’ve never been.”
On whether his move to L.A. will be permanent, he gives a very Bunbury-esque reply: “Permanent? I think that’s a word I can’t spell. I don’t know what I’m going to do in the future. Now I’m here and tomorrow, who knows?”
Still the question remains: Why a promo tour? In the Latin music world, he’s a god, on the level with Juanes or Shakira, who he predates, or his older contemporaries Gustavo Cerati and Charly Garcia. Bunbury became a star with the pioneering rock group Heroes del Silencio and has become even more popular as a solo act.
“Not putting myself out there — that wasn’t my intention,” he said. “Sometimes when I wasn’t doing too much promotion [in the last five years], I was thinking, the last thing I want people to think is that I’m trying to be mysterious or I want to be away from the people, like a kind of Michael Jackson figure. No, not at all. It’s just my love of privacy, and besides, I’m bored with talking about myself. I hear myself talking, and I think, oh, this is so boring. And that’s the thing I really don’t want. But I’m doing this promotion [tour] because I don’t want people to think I like being unaccessible.”
In the run-up to his U.S. tour, which stops here Saturday and May 2 at V Live, Bunbury branched out with new ventures, including a concert directed by Spain’s acclaimed Paco Plaza and telecast in 3-D. “This is fantastic, because we are almost starting [from scratch] in the States. I’m pretty famous in Mexico and Spain and Argentina, Colombia and other countries. But for me in the States, everything [to build a larger fan base] has to be done. I think this could help.”
I’m pretty famous in Mexico and Spain ... Well, that’s quite the understatement. Bunbury plays stadium-size shows in most of the Latin world; last November, he attracted 90,000 fans to a Mexico City show at Estadio Azteca. For his last Chicago concert, he played the Aragon; this time, he chose a club venue, which he thinks better suits the intimate-sounding “Las Consecuencias.”
After the reunion tour of Heroes del Silencio and hard rock of “Hellville de Luxe” (2008), Bunbury wanted to create “a very intimate album and try to play these organic instruments instead of electric guitars on ‘Las Consecuencias.’ Even drums, they are not so present on this album. I told Ramon [Gacias] my drummer, my right hand, not to play too much on this album. It’s difficult to tell a drummer not to play. I think he has done an interesting job — not being a drummer.”
As for the constant comparisons to the Bard of Hibbing, Minn., “I love that kind of comparison. Bob Dylan with my name in the same phrase is always a good thing,” he said. “But all these years, I think I have my own place. It’s very easy to see my personal way of doing things, my way of singing, my way of writing, etc. I have a clear personality musically.”
And actually, speaking of comparisons, the cover of “Las Consecuencias,” which depicts Bunbury in a skull-emblazoned hat, with his eyes shrouded in shadows cast by the brim, seems to evoke Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler.”
“I love Mickey Rourke,” Bunbury said, laughing. “But don’t tell me that. Mickey Rourke has a very strange face right now.”
But Rourke would fit right into a video of “El Boxeador” (“The Boxer”), one of the best tracks on “Las Consecuencias”; it returns to the theme of the antihero, which runs through Bunbury’s works.
“For the album ‘Flamingos’ [2002, recorded with the band El Huracan Ambulante], I was on the cover dressed like a boxer. It was an album about falling down and coming back. In the case of ‘El Boxeador,’ this song was like an exercise. I was at home in Cadiz, and it was wintertime. I went to the beach with my pen and notebook, and I started to describe what I am seeing. I thought, let’s just do a song about what I see, not what I feel. I thought it was not very important but after listening to it, it’s a song that I really like. And behind those lines there is much more of myself in this song than I thought.
“I am I what I am because of what I did in the past professionally and obviously personally. I think an album like this, I couldn’t have done it before. I needed to pass through my Heroes del Silencio period and also my first solo period with El Huracan Ambulante. I can see this album is the consequence of all that music, all that time.”
Enrique Bunbury
When: 7 p.m. May 1; 9 p.m. May 2
Where: V Live, 2047 N. Milwaukee
Tickets: $45; discount for groups
Information: (773) 489-5483; www.ticketmaster.com
Fuente: CHICAGO Sun-Times
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