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Ricardo -> RE: Rafael Riqueni (Oct. 14 2024 16:18:17)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: devilhand
quote:
you can see hes fragile , looks like 82 not 62
Sometimes it's hard to watch. Do you know what happened to him?
He went to jail after domestic violence due to substance abuse. That is the official public info.
I have anecdotal info which is grain of salt.
His son died tragically and this affected the guy horribly, mental health mainly. He went on benders of drug and alcohol abuse. At some point he disappeared and finally his friends found him isolated in his apartment alone, scribbling stacks and stacks of music (he was a rare flamenco that learned to read and write standard music notation). But he was wearing a powdered wig and thought that he was Mozart! [:D]. He might have been committed to a drug rehab or mental health facility after that, not sure. Much later the domestic abuse scandal came out and obviously going to jail is a forced detox of whatever substances. A lot of people can't survive that physically, hence his advanced aging is understandable. After some time they were releasing him from jail to do concerts after which he would return to prison, until time served.
So even if the bulk of that is exaggerated, the bottom line is he had mental health issues that he might still be dealing with, but at least is enjoying concertizing now. A similar sad tale surrounds Niño Miguel, and probably other maestros we never hear about.
in the 2000s the "culto" (evangelic church of Filadelfia in Spain), started taken en mass members of the Gitano community, targeting those with substance abuse issues. The idea being "forget about Flamenco life style, sing for God and give up the drugs and alcohol etc.". We aficionados had a fear that this type of thing might consume the entire artistic genre. However, many artists found a way to do both the spiritual thing and the professional flamenco thing at the same time. It is just that in order to pull people out of the drug world, it seemed necessary to cut off the source, which was the music culture of Flamenco. My personal feeling is that this is replacing one bad habit with another, and those in the cults such as Scientology prey upon people that have substance abuse issues and mental heath issues related to that. But at least the physical dependance is fixed (lesser of two evils?). and of course these "churches" get to divert the drug money to their own cause. [;)]
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