When the painter Ocaña died, dressed in the sun, Jesús Melgar (Estación de San Roque, 1952-Seville, 2024) recorded for El Loco de la Colina the sounds of his burial and the ceremonial voice of the priest’s response, with which he overlapped some of the phrases that the deceased recounted in a recent interview with Jesús Quintero, abhorring the Church and its hypocrisy. Perhaps for this reason, there will be no incense today in the farewell of this all-terrain Andalusian communicator, who was a producer on the Loco Hill, compadre and traveling companion of Carlos Herrera and hosted warm but always groundbreaking programs on the SER network, on Radio Nacional , on Canal Sur, on Cope or on Onda Cero. His cremation will take place in the Botafuegos cemetery, in Algeciras, the city that he made his own and that proclaimed him as an adopted son in 2020, although the ceremony had to be delayed for two years due to Covid-19.
“I feel like Ulysses on his long journey back to Ithaca. Behind each journey the nostalgia of returning home persists. One is always looking for a way to return to one’s port, one’s home… What a piece of Oedipus complex I have now, I feel with two mothers, mine from La Estación de San Roque and now, the one I always had, Algeciras Mare. I have always felt Algecirasian above this procedure. I have proclaimed it in all the media I have been to. My experiences have come to me since I was one year old in this blessed city. That’s why I love Algeciras, that’s why I liked it and I like it so much the smell of the Honey River. In the bar Los Pulpos I smelled its stench but for me it was a perfume. I had a passion for Los Ladrillos beach and its smell of tar and I wanted to repeat those nights at the summer cinemas, like the one on Sevilla Street, with its smell of orange blossom and its horchata in the ambigu, the flavor of the prickly pears, the sound of the conch carrying the Virgen del Carmen, the taste of the fish on Munition Street, or rather of sin. And those nights in the Pasaje Andaluz and the Rey Chico”, he evoked in his institutional speech, with those last allusions to Algeciras lupanares.
His biography not only includes his role as producer and, for a time, deputy director of Quintero’s memorable radio program during his time at Radio Sevilla, with that legendary interview with Rafael Escobedo in El Dueso prison, but he had already made a long career in radio, since he left his job in one of the nascent industries in the Bay Area and climbed onto the back of a microphone never to abandon it. He interviewed Paco de Lucia and Camarón, fraternized with Serrat, played cards with Carlos Cano, invented the lie that Cuenca does not exist and shared rice dishes with his compadre Carlos Herrera, with whom he also had a long professional relationship.
From a baking family
His childhood smelled of bread, so he was always attentive to everything that was baked. Born in San Roque Station, 72 years ago, Jesús Melgar Gómez, along with his brother Dori and his sister Luisa, grew up in Algeciras, from a baking family, in a bakery run by his parents, Salvador and María. In the mid-70s he was a hippie with long hair in the local peaks of Pelayo, where he worked as a merchant in Moroccan clothes although, at that time, he did not smoke hashish. He also collaborated in the press, in the newspaper Areain the magazine Algeciras or in Extra-Ceutaand was part of the founding team of Diario16 Andalusiathen directed by Santiago Sánchez Traver.
He contracted a first marriage, from which he had a mathematical son, a discipline, like that of business, that was never among his own strengths. Two other children would later arrive after his union with Lourdes Novella, with whom he lived in the Sevillian municipality of Valencina, where he finally handed over the spoon.
In his youth, he was a DJ when they were called DJs, and he ran, of course, an alternative beach bar on Getares beach, in Algeciras, where Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio even performed a poem by Dante before a perplexed audience: “My memories The most touching and profound memories of my childhood are on Sevilla Street, in the Estrella bakery, in my neighborhood of San Isidro under the famous Medinaceli, where I was an altar boy, in the playground of Los Salesianos, on the beach of Los Ladrillos, in the María Cristina park, where I fell in love, in La Escalinata, in the early fish market… In the end, Algeciras Mare is that, my mother, my land, the one that revived the bodies of my dead and the one that will welcome my people brimming with life.”
Two books and a project
He directed several of his own programs, such as rear windowon Cadena SER nights. That’s when he disguised himself as the group’s manager. Today I feel Italian and musicalfrom Getafe, to travel to Baghdad and try to cover the bombings of January 1991, during Operation Desert Storm: “We Spanish journalists had to take shelter in the hotel’s atomic shelter and we left the next day for the Jordanian border in a bus that TVE had bought on the black market and which also ended up being bombed, even though we had the red cross and the red crescent painted on the roof.”
During the last years of his life, he bought a large displacement motorcycle and had a dog of the same caliber. He published two books, Cooking tricks for homely castaways and The Foolhis own memoirs with Quintero. The passage of time hit him in the throat but never his indomitable and humorous spirit: his latest project was to embark on a series that would be titled From Algeciras to Istanbula gastronomic and scenic tour of the Mediterranean, aboard a caravan. His friends today prefer to think that, in reality, he has simply gone on a trip.
#Jesús #Melgar #traveling
