Dread, His Old Friend

Juanes awoke Sept. 11 thinking it would be his big day. The shaggy-haired, 29-year-old Colombian had emerged from relative obscurity to become the international musician of the moment. His debut album, a brooding and edgy work called “Fijate Bien,” had surprised the music industry in July by garnering seven nominations for the second annual Latin Grammy Awards, more than any other artist.

To crown the achievement, he had been selected to perform the title cut during the awards show, scheduled to be televised nationally that night from the Forum. All eyes were set to turn to this polite, tattooed rocker who had suddenly earned a spot next to big names such as Marc Anthony and Christina Aguilera.

Juanes had worked for three years on his uncompromising work of almost nihilistic disillusion and social outrage. But the urgency in his soulful voice had taken a lifetime to cultivate in the crucible of Colombia’s long civil war and his personal losses.

Back home, kidnappers had executed his cousin, even though his uncle paid a ransom. Gunmen killed a close friend when they shot up a nightclub. And cancer had claimed his father.

Juanes would never be more ready to sing his song of dread on the Grammys’ night of glamour.

This also promised to be a big night for Latin music, so saturated with sappy romance and packaged sexuality. Finally, the spotlight was to focus on a singer-songwriter who cared more about saying something meaningful than looking good and selling millions.

But then, that opportunity vanished as unexpectedly as it had appeared. The Latin Grammy show was canceled in the wake of the attacks on the East Coast, eclipsing what could have been the defining moment of Juanes’ blossoming career.

Two days later, the singer was still deeply troubled by the terrorism, although he seemed resigned to his lost career opportunity. Seated in the somber dining room of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, headquarters for stranded Latin Grammy nominees, he revealed that he had written a song about the tragedy. Just snippets so far, fragments of a melody. But the theme is sadly familiar in his work.

“The most important thing, brother, is to appreciate what you have,” he says in Spanish, picking at a ham sandwich and French fries, which he preferred to fancier items on the dinner menu. “You can wake up tomorrow and it’s gone.”

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had underscored what Juanes had been telling people all along. His songs of foreboding are not just about Colombia, a country where entire institutions, not just buildings, had collapsed from endemic violence.

“Fijate Bien,” nominated for best song and best record, was inspired by the dangers of land mines in his native country. But more than ever, the haunting song applied to what the whole world was now facing--the fragility of life and an uncertain future.

The title is a warning to watch your step, which U.S. newspapers had awkwardly translated as “Pay close attention,” or even “Check it out.” The Spanish is more intimate, like a whispered word of caution to a friend.

The next night, Juanes delivered a riveting performance of the number at an impromptu benefit concert for disaster victims. There were no television cameras, no flashy stage sets, no worldwide audience. Instead, Juanes played to a small group of industry insiders and fellow artists in the hotel’s undecorated ballroom.

Within days, the singer returned to his troubled nation, wrestling with his fear of flying like never before. One week after the benefit in Beverly Hills, Juanes would have to venture with his band into one of Colombia’s most dangerous regions, disputed by paramilitary and guerrilla groups.

He was scheduled to play at a soccer field in Pamplona, in the music-loving province of Santander. There was talk of a military escort if he went by highway. But that might make him a target, feared Fernan Martinez, his Miami-based manager. So Juanes took a plane to a nearby city.

That night, his hotel came under attack, not by guerrillas, but by a mob of angry fans. They were furious that Juanes had failed to do the show because of disputes with the promoter, who went into hiding. Unaware of the business problems, the fans threw rocks and broke windows, trapping Juanes in a hotel room with the mayor and police. Before dawn, he was escorted out of town in a police car.

“Naturally, the people had good reason to get riled up,” Juanes said by phone after returning safely to his home in Bogota, at times chuckling about his narrow escape. “I couldn’t go out to tell them it wasn’t my fault, because they would have killed me.”

Everybody had told him he was crazy to go in the first place. But Juanes wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I really like Colombia,” he explains. “I really need it. Disconnect me from all this, my brother, and then I won’t know what to write.”

His odd name sounds as if it’s the plural of Juan, but it’s actually a fusion of his first and middle names, Juan Esteban. He was the youngest of six siblings born to Javier and Alicia Aristizabal, well-to-do farmers in the pastoral town of Carolina del Principe, a three-hour drive from Medellin.

His older brothers gave him his nickname and started teaching him to play guitar when he was 6. From the beginning, the budding musician felt out of tune with the pop fads of the day.

While his schoolmates went crazy over Menudo and Luis Miguel, Juanes practiced the traditional tangos of Carlos Gardel and the vallenatos of Diomedes Diaz.

The musical gap with his own generation accentuated his excruciating shyness.

“I was completely out of it,” Juanes recalls. “I felt very strange. Like rejected.”

As a teenager, Juanes discovered heavy metal. The gates of his cloistered life were blown open by such groups as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Megadeth, a cultural awakening that put his parents on edge.

At 16, he founded a rock quartet, named Ekhymosis by picking the weirdest term out of a medical dictionary. (It means a bruise.) The band practiced relentlessly, holed up in a garage while bombs exploded around the city. Ekhymosis’ only mission was to reproduce Metallica note for note.

“I thought that what we had to do was sound like them,” Juanes recalls. “It took time for me to understand that I am Colombian, that I had a different musical past, and that I had to find what was mine. I felt something was missing--like my essence.”

By this time, his family had moved to Medellin, a town known for its drug cartels and its rich cultural history. Juanes’ search for his roots and his own sound would create strains within the group, which finally disbanded in 1998 after 11 years and five albums.

Juanes was branded a sellout by some rock purists in Colombia’s burgeoning rock en espanol scene. But he says he was just being true to himself. After all, he admired Cuba’s musical poet Silvio Rodriguez as much as Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.

Rock was not just a style of music, he argued. It was a lifestyle, a commitment.

“Rock isn’t about wearing an earring, having the longest and dirtiest hair in the neighborhood, and making the most strident noise,” he told journalist Jorge Hernan Gomez for a recent profile in Colombia’s Diners magazine. “Rock is an attitude which involves freedom and the constant search for identity. I am looking for that fusion of sounds which define who I am.”

Paradoxically, Juanes would have to come to Los Angeles to find that identity. Two years ago, he sold his computer and stereo, and headed here with his guitar, his ambition and a homemade demo tape of his new songs.

“If you heard that Juanes demo, you’d faint,” says Marusa Reyes, his former manager who took the fledgling artist under her wing. “It had so much feeling and swing, it’s like dancing down the streets of Colombia. I don’t know how to explain it. It was just magical.”

In L.A., Juanes became somewhat of a recluse who had to be encouraged to go out to a movie, Reyes recalls. He’d spend time in the local library learning how to conjugate the verb “to be.” Or he’d jog to shake his fear of failure.

Short on cash and self-confidence, Juanes was often tempted to give up. But he knew he couldn’t return to Colombia empty-handed.

Eventually, his demo found its way into the hands of Gustavo Santaolalla, the L.A.-based Argentine producer acclaimed for his work with rock en espanol groups such as Molotov and Cafe Tacuba. He shared it with Zach Horowitz, president of Universal Music Group, which distributes Santaolalla’s Surco label.

They all heard something special in this young man’s unvarnished artistry.

“It was wonderful,” recalls Horowitz, who couldn’t even understand the Spanish lyrics. “I didn’t respond to the words, but to the feel of the music, to the textures and the flavors. I think great music like this has the power to transport you.”

Juanes never dreamed his work would get any recognition from the recording academy-it was so noncommercial outside of Colombia. His themes are complex and relentlessly pessimistic, hardly made for upbeat pop radio formats.

He sings of embittered romance and aching emptiness. With a smoldering anger, as in “ Ficcion,” he unmasks the greed and arrogance of those who sacrifice society for their own wealth and power: “They forget about the sublime and hallucinate about being God.”

Despite the grim lyrics, Juanes insists his work is positive because it defines human problems without flinching. That’s the first stage of hope.

Musically, there’s also optimism in the incongruous way Juanes couches his frightening social vision in irresistible Caribbean rhythms with touches of festive vallenato , the jaunty folk genre of his native country. The juxtaposition of bad news and joyful music seems to say: Horror and happiness can coexist.

“In a country with problems like mine, people must be clever to enjoy life,” explains Juanes, who moved back to Colombia after the album was completed. “They must invent ways to live happily, and that is something quite lovely.”

It has been a long “process to get Juanes seen and heard,” said Horowitz, interviewed before the Latin Grammys were canceled, a time when expectations still ran high.

All the hard work would pay off, he predicted, when millions tuned in to see “this incredibly charismatic performer.”

On Aug. 11, just a month before history changed all that, Juanes performed a free concert before 60,000 fans in the streets of Bogota. He was there, along with fellow Colombian rockers Aterciopelados, for the long-delayed dedication of the city’s National Museum.

The ceremony was 53 years late. The original inauguration in 1948 had been aborted by the outbreak of civil war, sparked by the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a leftist liberal presidential candidate.

That marked the beginning of Colombia’s cycle of modern political violence. Although the museum had opened, it had not been formally dedicated until now. Juanes’ appearance was meant to attract young people to the arts and show that popular music can be culture too.

“Art is not in a museum,” says Juanes, who plans to go back to the studio with Santaolalla later this year. “It’s not hanging on a wall. Art is inside each one of us.

“And it’s something that they will never be able to take away.”