Ronnie Von turns 80, says he feels 25 and criticizes the current direction of the music industry: ‘Too much payola’

Ronnie Von turns 80 this Wednesday (17), but says he feels like a kid. He lives his life as if he were 25. The musician and presenter is preparing to debut, in August, a new talk show on RedeTV!, just the way he wanted: nightly and weekly.

“I couldn’t stand waking up at 5 a.m. anymore,” he jokes, having been dissatisfied with the old time slot assigned to him by the station, in the morning slot. The real problem, he explains, was an inconsistency between the audience and the topics. “I think the morning audience isn’t my audience. I’m a sommelier and bartender. Can you imagine not being able to talk about wine?” he protests.

In the new show, Ronnie promises to “follow the same line as always: to bring out humanity in people and to bring information and entertainment,” he says. “You’ll see everyone from big names in music, who are my personal friends, to those who have monumental talent and don’t have the opportunity to be seen. In my other show, I brought about ten street bands that I saw playing on Paulista Avenue,” he says.

With over 50 years of experience in TV, Ronnie considers the small screen a powerful means of information and education. “Today, television is the greatest school in our country. We are a poor, uninformed, uneducated country. I think I have an obligation to bring, at the very least, information and culture. And of course, entertainment. It’s TV: there has to be laughter and tears,” he says.

Golden years

Born — and very well born — Ronaldo Nogueira, into a family of financial market entrepreneurs, in Niterói, in 1944, Ronnie got into a “serious fight” at home when he decided to become an artist. “I was in my last year of college, preparing to be the successor of the family business, and the next thing they knew, I was on television with long hair singing the Beatles. It was terrible,” he laughs.

“‘Where did we go wrong? We created a snake to bite us. It’s going to drag the family name through the mud’. I heard everything,” he recalls. The musical genre he chose led to disappointment not only with his parents, but also with his friends. “They turned their backs because I didn’t make committed music, I made English rock with a big mouth,” he says.

But he stuck to what he believed in and, with the help of his heartthrob looks, enjoyed his golden years. Between the 1960s and 1990s, he recorded 18 albums and toured in Brazil and abroad. His psychedelic phase, rejected at the time, became a cult icon and today tops lists of the genre’s greatest works.

“It was the biggest commercial failure of my life, but it was considered, some time later, the best psychedelic rock album in the world. Here I am, a poor little Brazilian, in my little corner, I am nothing and nobody, but I am very grateful to the people who understood and liked my music,” he says.

Now dressed in a tie on TV, Ronnie reveals why he abandoned rock: “I stopped singing because I rebelled against what was established as the norm in the record companies”, he says. “Things started to take a direction that I don’t agree with, which is payola”.

According to him, the current music industry is bought and “everything that is successful is paid for”, he says. “It is a total inversion of values. Today, there are only these two musical styles in Brazil: sertanejo, which, by the way, is not sertanejo, and funk, which is also not funk”, he criticizes, evoking something of the rocker who still lives there.

Two universes

Married for 39 years to Maria Cristina Rangel, known as Kika Von, Ronnie dismisses the reporter’s congratulations: “It’s not congratulations because we can’t rationalize what emotion is. Emotion doesn’t deserve congratulations, it’s something so intrinsic that it shouldn’t be described,” he says philosophically. The secret to such a long-lasting relationship, he says, is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. “A couple is two different universes.”

And it’s not just the marriage that lasts. Ronnie says he learned from his father the formula for feeling eternally young. He recalls that once, the patriarch, businessman José Maria Nogueira, at 88 years old, dismissed his two gardeners and climbed up a ladder to prune a plant.

“He fell and broke everything,” recalls Ronnie, who, when he reprimanded his father, heard the response: “The human mind will never live past 25 years of age. The body just doesn’t want to understand,” he recalls. Today, he feels first-hand what his father meant. “I’m not 80. I’m 25, it’s just that the body doesn’t want to understand.”