The unique life of Greater Wyoming enough for several biographies, although the presenter of The Intermediate (La Sexta) has not waited for others to write them. In On your knees, Monzón! talks about his childhood and adolescence, in The fury and the colors guts his delirious youth and there is still a third or fourth installment missing, until now published in Planeta, where he recounts his forays into cinema and his television stardom, driven by Whoever Falls Fall.
These are some of the most curious and bizarre anecdotes of José Miguel Monzón (Madrid, 1955), confessed by himself in his memoirs, compiled by Kike Babas and Kike Turrón in the comic Greater Wyoming. A thousand sticks and none in the water or told in book presentations and interviews, like this one in which the showman reveals what he thinks about the working class that votes for the PP and Vox.
Wyoming’s mother: a pharmacist from Prospe
Born in Madrid when “children were neither desired nor programmed, but inevitable”, he also lived in La Puebla del Salvador (Cuenca), where he spent time with his grandparents. A rural childhood of slingshots and rulanchos.
His mother had a pharmacy in Prosperidad, the Madrid neighborhood that spread the new wave. Four children and an abortion in five years. She suffers from terrible toothaches and suffers from depression, which leads her to be admitted to the hospital several times. Chechulacking affection, develops “a protective emotional shield.”
“Between raising children and sleepless nights, she fell into a deep depression,” she says in On your knees, Monzón! “My mother’s absence marked the life of the family. The situation was strange because she had not died, nor had she left, she was absent without having left, she had a ghostly presence.”
Pepa Buenoin the presentation of the aforementioned book, analyzed how this situation marked the character of Greater Wyoming: “It is difficult for him to express his feelings because he lacked hugs,” which is why he has used irony as an “escape route.”
Priest schools and the shadow of Opus Dei
He had to put up with the rules of a priest professor that imposed “a state of continuous terror.” He took communion dressed as a sailor or, as José Miguel Monzón himself would say, “more like Village People.”
He went from La Fuencisla school to the Ramiro de Maeztu institute. Then, to the posh and repressive San Agustín school, also religious, until he studied COU at the CEU.
Beyond the stumbles with the cassocks, the Opus Dei tries to catch it through Club Jara, where he shares games with other kids. They pass on him when his grades get worse, but they end up catching his father, who had gone to visit on Saturdays and ended up in the Work’s nets. A Justice and Atlético de Madrid official.
From eleven to fourteen years old, they join the Spanish Youth Organization (OJE), linked to the Phalanx and dependent on the General Secretariat of the Movement, to play table football and take walks in the mountains. It didn’t leave a mark on him “because I was very little and I didn’t know anything,” he commented in an interview with Public. “I mean, they didn’t make me a custom coconut.”
hippie youth
At the age of seventeen, when “going abroad was a goal,” a long-haired Chechu travels by interrail to Amsterdam, where he is “stunned” by observing the beautiful fauna of the “Doñana de los hippies“. Joints and trips. Get to know Christiania, in Copenhagen. Also Helsinki.
Get in touch with him underground Madrid: La Bobia, El Retiro, El Rastro… Censorship, repression and raids. Squat and concerts in London. The police beat him up for hippie the day of the attack White Carrero. “They only hit me once, because then people ran a lot.”
The grays, the same color as Francoism: “The repressors are fully aware of living on the wrong side, and in their frustration they want to impose their miseries on the rest,” he writes in The fury and the colors. “Spain was an immense concentration camp, a city under siege.”
Memories of long hair: “It closed many doors for me [y] He provided me with the coordinates of the direction I should follow, he cleared the path for me […]. Because of my hair, I was condemned to a glorious marginalization where I could access everything worth living. I became part of a tribe. “I lived in a space where I could be myself one hundred percent.”
Wyoming and sex
In the Rastro, “a meeting center for progress and local hippieism”, he discovers the condom sellers: “The kids caught a lot of attention. It was the closest we got to something that we didn’t know what it was. […]. Condoms were a strange thing, something sinister since they combined the forbidden, sin and orthopedics,” he recalls in The fury and the colors.
Your first sexual experience? “A disaster, a failure.” During his trip to Amsterdam, he meets a girl who works in the psychiatric hospital in Leiden, a city near the capital of the Netherlands. They do it in a hospital room and the next morning, when he is about to leave the facilities, the guards mistake him for a mentally ill person. He is saved by a nun whom he manages to convince that he was not a patient.
Recruit and doctor
At the age of 27, he completed his military training in Cáceres and was then assigned to the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Madrid, where his task was to manage the Army’s blood bank. At night he performs with him Reverend Master in La Aurora, where some time later he would do it daily.
During his military service, he volunteers to work in a field hospital in the rear of the war in Lebanon, but the mission is cancelled. Curiously, a decade later he will co-write the film’s script Stories of the fucking milibased on the comic by Ivá.
Before dedicating himself fully to music, he worked as a substitute doctor in outpatient clinics and worked as a substitute in Buitrago de Lozoya.
Music and verbiage
A telegraphic musical biography. He grows up with a record player and a radio, music and counterculture: The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Animals; he is amazed by a concert by Teddy Bautista’s Los Canarios; He begins to play the guitar on his own to cover The Beatles; At the age of fifteen he played the banjo in the folk group Calcetín, which performed in senior schools; At the Complutense University he gets into trouble so he can travel and get a meal at the BBC and in the restaurants in the Plaza Mayor.
They nickname him Wyoming because he only sings in English.
your brother Seju rides Desmadre 75 and hits it with Take out the güisky cheli. The Reverend begins to play the piano with them. Then he would do it with Wyoming and, together, in 1978 they won the Rock Villa de Madrid Award at the head of Paracelsus. The following year, he changed the name of the group to El Gran Wyoming y su Banda… and was once again proclaimed the winner.
His verbose performances with the Reverend Master, with whom he would found, together with Moncho Alpuentethe group Three Sad Tigers. In La Aurora, where he triumphed with his improvisations, he met Joaquín Sabina, Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio or Javier Krahe, the last prophet.
This is how he sarcastically describes that he accompanied the Reverend, not the other way around. “He always felt like the protagonist of any project in which he participated,” he writes in The fury and the colors. “I remember that once they made us an offer that didn’t seem interesting and he responded: With that I don’t even have to pay the singer“.
Founder of the record company 18 Pimps Together with Pepín Tre, Santiago Segura, Pablo Carbonell, Faemino and Javier Krahe, his latest band is called Los Insolventes, where he covers Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Los Bravos or Siniestro Total.
“He was born with the flower in his ass and found the ability to swim in all types of waters. An impressive thing. He wasn’t a great singer or songwriter, but he went to any club and acquitted himself wonderfully. “These types of characters are not very common in the world of Spanish music, where what matters is becoming a star and disappearing from circulation,” commented the critic Diego Manrique.
Wyoming himself explained it this way in his memoirs: “I understood that the mistake is to try to be a star, to enter that competitive world where you have to sacrifice your life to prevent someone else from taking first place on the podium.” […]. “My lack of ambition allowed me to be happy.”
In the book there are beautiful phrases: “If you get into music, you never leave childhood.”
A hard-working lazy man
His “true self” tends toward “inaction, horizontality and the law of least effort.” However, he has not stopped working, he does several things at the same time and his work is prolific. Beyond his musical, television and film career, he has written eight books. One is an essay on laziness: One bum, two bums, three bums.
The roller coaster of television
In the eighties, in parallel with music, he began to participate and present television programs, with forays into cinema. His debut: First filmof Fernando Trueba. He also worked under the orders of Carlos Saura, Vicente Aranda, Jaime Chávarri, Gonzalo Suárez, Fernando Colomo and Santiago Segura.
A “prolific career” as an actor and, to a lesser extent, as a screenwriter “that was interrupted by television, where I was lucky enough to enter projects that extended in time longer than expected, being trapped between cathode rays,” writes Greater Wyoming.
Since 2006, it presents The Intermediatealthough fame came to him in 1996 with Whoever falls falls (Telecinco), canceled for messing with Ana Botella, the wife of former Prime Minister José María Aznar, and with Silvio Berlusconi himself, owner of the network where the men in black program was broadcast.
Before, in 1994, they had The worst program of the week for refusing to censor the writer Quim Monzó. Since then, he was banned from TVE, until he returned to public television in 2005 with The Wyoming Rooftopwhich barely lasted two months due to lack of audience. In The Sixth He is about to turn twenty years old.
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