Anecdotes of Niño Ricardo
“A ‘shitty set of nails’… but well ‘arricardaas’.”
Niño Ricardo had curved fingernails on his right hand, something that did not go unnoticed when he rested his hand on the bar or held a glass. He himself would say, with his usual sincerity: “They’re shitty nails!”, referring to how fragile they were and how quickly they broke. However, those same nails contributed to that unique sound, so unique, so much his own, so… arricardao. He remembered, laughing, that one day Ramón Montoya, admired by all, told him with astonishment: “I don’t know how you can play the guitar so well with those hands you have”. And Ricardo, true to his self-confidence, replied: “Neither do I”.
“The voice that was left… pa’ cagarse en todo”.
After a throat operation that left him with a hoarse and strained voice, Niño Ricardo did not lose his sense of humor (or his chutzpah). Whenever someone, more or less jokingly, asked him if it was true that he had “lost his voice,” he would answer without hesitation: “Yes, but I have enough left to shit on all your dead!”
Mussels!
There were moments when his black humor shone brighter than his guitar. He laughingly recounted how, when boiling mussels in a pot, he imagined the poor mollusks shouting: “Ricardo, you faggot! I shit on your dead, you fucker! The audience laughed out loud at the way he narrated it.
“The cruel joke on Melchor de Marchena”.
Esteban de Sanlúcar told an anecdote from his youth that he shared with Niño Ricardo. They both used to play pranks on poor Melchor de Marchena, and one night, after a monumental binge, they came up with a particularly cruel joke: to cut off the nail of Melchor’s right thumb… flush! The drama came the next day, when the three of them were to perform in a theater. Poor Melchior, when trying to play, could only make a ‘pzot, pzot’ sound with his guitar. Meanwhile, Ricardo and Esteban, between Melchor’s angry looks, almost fell to the floor of the stage from laughing so hard.
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