Death of a Friend
Subang, Selangor, malaysia, April 28, 2013
Salaroche

May the loss that we all naturally suffer when facing the death of our loved ones serve as a salutary reminder of the ephemeral nature of our existence and the imperative need to conscientiously ready ourselves for our own eventual departure.

My friend Alex Bella departed this world on Saturday, April 27, after suffering for some time from esophageal cancer. According to a mutual friend, Alex died in his house by the lake Coatepeque, in the province of Santa Ana, in the country of El Salvador.

The friendship that joined Alex and me together was something special. I first met him back in November of 1969, when I was playing rock at a nightclub called "The UFO", in the San Benito district of San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador. That district later became known as “La Zona Rosa”. "The UFO" was owned by my friend Miriam Interiano, who a couple of years ago also departed from this earth because of pancreatic cancer.

I clearly remember the moment Miriam, Alex and I got together for the first time at "The UFO". It was a Sunday evening. Miriam had invited Alex to come meet me with the clear intention of having us play music together. He arrived in his red Mustang, dressed in worn-out jeans and a white T-shirt, carrying a small Mexican serape folded over his right shoulder.

The first thing I thought of him was "this guy is crazy." And indeed he was, although not in a clinical way, but a cool one. The latter I discovered when he sat at the piano and began to play a piece of his that was in a measure that I found rather odd. I asked him about that beat and he replied it was an 11/4. I sat at the drums and joined him in the jam, but as I had never played any 11/4 rhythm before, I started playing one measure of 6/4 followed by one of 5/4.

The result was something I would now call "coordinated chaos", as the two of us were improvising a lot, but we always got together at the end of each 11/4 measure. After playing for a while, he was happy with the musical experiment and I was a bit impressed by the endless musical possibilities that the experiment represented.

The second time I met Alex was about three months later, in the city of San Francisco, California. I had driven there all the way up from San Salvador with the intention of buying some amps to form a rock band, and the only contact I had in that city was Alex, whose phone number Miriam had given me.

Walking through the streets of San Francisco with Alex as my tour guide, I began to assimilate bits and pieces pertaining to the Age of Aquarius, the Haight-Ashbury mood, and the whole psychedelic trend of the moment. At the time those things were a real novelty for me and they produced a considerable opening of consciousness on me. As a result, about a couple of months later, Alex and I decided to return to San Salvador to see what we could do over there.

I took a train across Mexico from the US border-town of Mexicali all the way down to Tapachula, by the border with Guatemala, and from there to San Salvador, also by train (or at least most of the way by train). Alex had first to go to New Orleans to see his dad who was in a hospital there, and then he flew down to San Salvador.

In the opinion of some people, our arrival in San Salvador back in May of 1970 marked the beginning of a small peaceful revolution in El Salvador. Some people even say that Alex and I were some sort of precursors of the “hippie” movement” in that country, but that’s all a matter of personal opinion.

Over the years, Alex and I had many pleasant encounters, but we also had some serious disagreements. In these past two or three years we had some contact through the Internet, and we exchanged some recordings. From the musical standpoint, he always kept his fundamental style, although some of his latest compositions show a significant influence from Mexican folklore, country where Alex lived on and off for some time.

Something I found particularly special during that short musical exchange was an arrangement Alex did to a piece of mine called "Simple Songs". In my view, Alex’s arrangement sounds rather like a piece of his own, but inspired on a piece of mine, although he considered it as a shared composition. The latter did not bother me in the least; on the contrary, I was pleased to know that he recalled my music to the point of drawing inspiration from it.

You may listen to Alex's arragement by clicking here.
You may listen to my original piece by clicking here.

Alex was a very complex person who, because of his personality and the way he reacted to the different events, often proved to be severely affected by some deep wounds that afflicted him since childhood. In the long run, his social dislocation prevented him from living a “normal” gregarious life and eventually led him to become some sort of a hermit.

If someone were to ask me what's the general impression I hold of him, I would respond that Alex was a person who often shone with brilliant sparks of genius, who had a keen and varied sense of humor, a rather broad intellect, and a remarkable capacity for cordiality.

Dear friend Alex, I wish you the best possible voyage into the afterlife. Please forget all this and do not cling to anything you had or did on this earth. As of now, none of that has any value to you. Please detach yourself from everything. Do not wish to go back to having or doing any of the things you had or did in this world and guide your soul with all your intention toward the light of the Eternal Consciousness. Go Alex, go in peace and never come back.

May you all be well.

Salaroche