“My dad hurt me a lot,” Alejandro Fernández declared a long time ago, in 2015, in conversation with the journalist Adela Micha.
Later, speaking with the same interviewer, his father, Vicente Fernández himself, recounted: “At 18 I took him on tour, and he didn’t want to. He stood on stage, hunched over and I told him ‘Turn around, stupid, smile at people!’ I brought it made of talc”.
The father, “El Charro de Huentitán”, had noticed the potential that the third of his sons had, for which he strove to include him in music, and possibly exceeded himself: “You might see how ugly I felt when one day he told me ‘Hey Daddy, I don’t want to come sing with you’”, he admitted.
What’s more, when he left school, at the age of 18, he started studying to become an architect. However, eventually his blood pulled harder: he got into rancheras, released his first album and competed with his father’s sales.
Already with a dozen records dedicated to this genre, in 2004, “Potrillo” took a turn, and turned towards pop, a decision that at first did not go down well with his father: “I got so angry that I told him: ‘You and I represent Mexico, we are like tunas, nopales, like magueyes. And you want to sing pop? But following thinking regarding it, and despite “failing the genre,” he admitted, the patriarch gave him the go-ahead.
The alcohol
A couple of weeks ago, a video of a presentation by Alejandro Fernández in Mexico went viral, in which he looked drunk on stage. In fact, prior to his presentation at Festival Viña, at the conference he commented that “it was my first presentation of the year, I was very happy.”
“I had been to Colorado with my whole family for Christmas and New Years for regarding two or three months, and I had not tasted a drop of alcohol, not even a glass of red wine for dinner,” he recounted.
About his habit of resorting to alcohol in his concerts, he assured that it is something he gets used to before or following his concerts: “I was very embarrassing (shameful), too embarrassing, and my dad wanted to get my nerves down when He was going to introduce me, he told me: ‘Fuck a little cognac’ and I liked it,” he relieved in a podcast.
“Chente” died in December 2021 and his son has remarked on various occasions that there were no grudges between him and his father; in fact, he sang a little song in tribute for his presentation at Quinta Vergara.
“My father had his mistakes and today I respect him and I know that he did it with the sole purpose of seeing us well,” he declared.
What’s more, in the conference prior to his Viñamarino contest, he confessed: “He is missed a lot, really, I never thought it would be so much.” In his eyes, “it is difficult to know that before you had a person who had all the experience and that whatever problem you had, you might turn around and tell him to help you,” he said in closing. “He was worried himself and he helps us solve it. And know that that person is not there, because he weighs ”.
