The boys on the cover of Clube da Esquina were strangers by the roadside

01The album

Milton Nascimento wanted to share his next album with Lô Borges, a 20 year old from Belo Horizonte whom almost nobody knew. Milton told Rolling Stone Brasil in 2008 that the label, EMI-Odeon, refused at first and that Odeon executive Adail Lessa finally convinced the company. Lô told CartaCapital in 2012 that Milton was ready to take the project to another label.

Most of the songs were written in a house that Milton, Lô and Beto Guedes rented at Mar Azul, a quiet beach in Niterói. The album came out in 1972 as a double LP with 21 tracks.

02The photo

The cover photo was taken in 1971 by Cafi, a photographer from Pernambuco, by the side of a dirt road near Nova Friburgo, in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro state. Cafi told the newspaper Estado de Minas that he and lyricist Ronaldo Bastos used to drive around those roads in Bastos's Volkswagen Beetle, photographing clouds, when he saw the two boys and took the picture.

According to the same newspaper, many people long believed the boys were Milton and Lô as children. The two musicians always denied it.

03The search

In March 2012, forty years after the album came out, Estado de Minas went looking for the boys. Reporter Ana Clara Brant had little more than Cafi's rough directions to go on. A journalist in Nova Friburgo, Wanderson Nogueira, announced the search on local radio, and the paper found them.

They were José Antônio Rimes, known as Tonho, then 47 and working at a supermarket in Nova Friburgo, and Antônio Carlos Rosa de Oliveira, known as Cacau, then 48, a gardener and painter in Rio das Ostras. Both grew up in the countryside around Nova Friburgo.

04What they remember

Cacau told the paper that he once recognised himself on the cover and ended up buying the CD. Tonho remembered that when the photo was taken he was eating a piece of bread someone had given him, because he was hungry. He said he never knew he was on an album cover.

05The lawsuit

In December 2012 the two men sued Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges, Ronaldo Bastos, the record company EMI (now part of Universal) and the publisher Editora Abril, asking for R$ 500,000 in damages for the use of their image. In 2020 Tonho said, as reported by Bahia Notícias citing Folha de S.Paulo, that they could at least have told his father or his mother.

In a ruling made public in early September 2023, a court in Nova Friburgo closed the case because the time limit for bringing it had passed. The men's lawyer said they would appeal. B-Side Story found no public report of the outcome.

06The album's legacy

In 2022, the album's 50th anniversary year, a poll of 162 music specialists run by the podcast Discoteca Básica voted Clube da Esquina the greatest Brazilian album of all time. Lô Borges died in Belo Horizonte on 2 November 2025, aged 73.