First at the helm of some legendary bands, then as a solo artist, Charly García has established himself as the dean of Argentine rock: five decades of career spanning the most disparate genres (prog, jazz-rock, funk, new wave, alternative rock), marked by constant experimentation and searing inner conflicts. A giant of the musical landscape of the Global South
“Tenemos invitados especiales: el famoso Charly García y el papa Francisco” (Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones concert, La Plata, February 7, 2016)
The phenomenon
With over half a century separating his first album from his last, Charly García can be considered the dean of Argentine rock. Only Litto Nebbia boasts a longer career, but while no one denies his pioneering role for the local scene, his last song to generate any kind of impact, “Solo se trata de vivir”, dates back to 1982.
García, by contrast, has stayed consistently on the crest of the wave: many of his records from the early Seventies to the mid-Nineties topped the local charts. In the wake of that extraordinarily long golden period, later releases may have struggled to produce classics that stuck in the collective imagination, but they were still invariably hailed as events and showered with awards.
It isn't success itself that explains García, though, so much as the way it was achieved: running parallel to the other giant of Argentine rock, Luis Alberto Spinetta (1950-2012), García took the less obvious path, making extremely complex music, tackling uncomfortable subjects (which, in more precarious times for Argentine history, cost him censorship), ranging across the most disparate genres, and making his songs catchy and powerfully communicative despite structures that often fell well outside radio-friendly norms.
Yet even his superb music, taken out of context, risks not fully conveying the idea: García is indeed a top-tier multi-instrumentalist, a formidable keyboardist able to rival the giants of progressive rock, a singer whose voice has shifted over time from a delicate angelic tone to a hoarse, demonic whisper — but above all, he is a cultural phenomenon.
He is the icon with the white-streaked mustache on the right side, ever since he was young. He is the one who dives into a swimming pool from the ninth floor of a hotel under the horrified eyes of journalists. He is the one who, at the wrong moments, has attacked journalists. He is the one with such a track record of escapades and scandals that it would have destroyed the career of most musicians on the planet, yet it left him utterly unscathed. All these aspects, only superficially at odds with his artistic sensibility, and far from being mere gossip, are in fact closely tied — as we'll return to — to some of the topoi of local culture, which García has managed to embody like few others.
The first ten years of his career are taken up by his three legendary bands: Sui Generis from 1972 to 1975, La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros from 1975 to 1977, and Serú Girán from 1978 to 1982, reunions notwithstanding. 1982 marks the start of his solo adventure. The analysis that follows examines both his work as leader of the aforementioned bands and his solo output (which, incidentally, often saw him reuniting with his old bandmates).
Carlos Alberto García Moreno was born in Buenos Aires in 1951, into an upper-middle-class family. He showed an innate talent for music from the age of three: his mother recalled hearing him play “Torna a Surriento” on a small toy piano given to him by his grandmother.
He began taking piano lessons at the age of five, and shortly afterward applied for admission to the conservatory, impressing the examiners. His childhood was anything but easy: the boy was restless, both because of the rigid upbringing he was subjected to, between stiff tutors and professors, and because of his relationship with his parents. During a long trip to Europe with them, he suffered repeated nervous breakdowns, followed by the onset of vitiligo. A psychosomatic short-circuit that in some way foreshadowed García's entire life, both artistic and otherwise.
In 1959 his mother, Carmen Moreno, began working as a radio announcer, hosting the program “Folklorísimo”. This brought her into contact with major names in traditional Argentine song, some of whom began visiting the family home. Among them was “La Negra” herself, Mercedes Sosa, who happened to hear Charly playing the piano and called him a little Chopin.
His father's expectations swelled to such a degree that, when the boy a few years later discovered the Beatles and decided he wanted to become a rock star rather than a classical performer, the rift between the two became irreparable. To be fair, the credit for that shift doesn't belong to the Beatles alone: among his first purchases in the realm of popular music were in fact Rita Pavone's singles, hugely popular across much of South America at the time. Having helped trigger that teenager's spring of rebellion against the academic world may well be the Turinese Gian Burrasca's greatest contribution to music.
García and Nito Mestre were schoolmates when they decided to join forces and form an acoustic duo, somewhat in the vein of Simon & Garfunkel. The model had already been tested in Argentina, with Pedro y Pablo, and would spawn further incarnations shortly after (Pastoral and Vivencia). Mestre was an excellent singer, skilled on both guitar and flute, but he remained overshadowed by his partner's personality and would never contribute a song of his own.
Sui Generis quickly became genuine darlings of rock nacional, recording their first two albums under the protective wing of some of the best-known musicians on the local scene.
It was in fact Jorge Álvarez who oversaw the sessions for Vida (1972). Álvarez was the most important producer of the era: fresh off directing landmark records like Manal's self-titled debut, Vox Dei's “La Biblia”, and Moris's “Treinta minutos de vida”, not to mention what was still to come (Spinetta's “Artaud”, the debut by Invisible, and the two Crucis albums). Vida is a collection of anthems that would prove transgenerational, resonating with Argentine students right up to the dawn of the new millennium, in particular “Canción para mi muerte”, “Necesito”, and “Quizás porque”.
The first was written by García three years earlier, after narrowly surviving an overdose in an attempt to get himself exempted from military service. Convinced he had come face to face with death, he put the lyrics down on paper upon waking: “I'd like to know your name, your place, your address, and if you have a phone, your number too. Please let me know if you'll be coming to pick me up: it's not that I'm afraid of you, I'd just like to make a good impression. We'll meet one morning in my room and you'll make up the bed for two”.
At the time – we're in the midst of the 1966-1973 regime – on the covers of domestically produced records, next to the song titles, there appears in parentheses an indication of the musical style or rhythm of the song. A probable scholastic habit of the record industry, functional to a certain official bureaucracy, favourable to the use of labels and social limits.
“Canción para mi muerte” is the only track on the album to boast the label “folkrock” (all the others carry the more generic “canción”). A curious choice, for a song where Mestre's lead vocal – with García harmonizing – guides an airy folk sound, with the rhythm section entering and falling silent in well-measured alternations. The electric component is far more present in “Toma dos Blues” (an orthodox blues rock number, featuring the harmonica of Claudio Gabis of Manal) and “Dime quién me lo robó”, a long, building ballad led by electric organ, roughly equivalent to those of contemporary American southern rock.
There are also calmer tracks, underpinned by delicate love lyrics. In “Necesito” the only electric presence is the bass of Alejandro Medina, also of Manal, while “Quizás porque”, played with delicate guitar touches, is certainly the closest to Simon & Garfunkel.
Towards the end of the album comes the most melancholy moment, “Cuando comenzamos a nacer”, a disillusioned portrait of the social constraints of every age and place: ⟦Q1⟧.
Mestre's mysterious flute colours the vocal line, while the bass harmonizes and the piano enters with strong touches that dissolve into an echo. Built on an illusion of major key, but actually underpinned by a minor-key skeleton that tinges it with grey, the song is dense with modulations and boasts a chorus featuring two key changes: here we begin to glimpse the harmonic and melodic richness of García, who would go on to reach levels of sophistication alien to most songwriters worldwide.
If Vida is a folk rock album played and written with great skill, but with spare arrangements and a sound recorded "live" in the studio, Confesiones de invierno (1973) takes a practically opposite approach. Álvarez in fact enlists young pianist Gustavo Beytelman to handle the orchestral arrangements, whose inclusion lends the songs a baroque dress.
With greater resources deployed than on the debut, García decides to take risks right from the opening track: “Cuando ya me empiece a quedar solo” is a piano ballad, opened and closed by the bandoneón of Rodolfo Mederos (one of the leading minds of tango nuevo) and repeatedly caught off guard by orchestral explosions. The chorus is atypical: the first time it appears it comes with a sudden acceleration, which then fades out, while when it returns it does so with a slow, measured pace, leaving the listener, at least for a moment, without any points of reference.
These are the first steps towards the world of progressive rock, confirmed by “Tribulaciones, lamento y ocaso de un tonto rey imaginario, o no”, with its choral finale, reminiscent of Moody Blues, and by “Un hada, un cisne”, another piano-driven track that seems to want to cast the acoustic hard bop of masters like Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver into an expanded song form.
The album's great successes are the acoustic title track (sung solo by García, whereas the rest of the tracklist is dominated by Mestre's crystalline voice), “Rasguña las piedras”, and “Aprendizaje”. The latter, a little westcoast gem, is a new, gentle protest song about the various forms of oppression faced by young people, both institutionally and in everyday relationships. Of course, back in 1973 – the year of Perón's triumph and the transition towards democracy – neither the artists nor their audience could have imagined what would happen just a few years later. Perhaps, had they known, they wouldn't have closed the lyrics on such an optimistic note about the future: “It will be our child who brings new answers…”.
“Rasguña las piedras”, meanwhile, can be read simultaneously as a love song and as a manifesto of popular vindication, its nineteenth-century libertarian epic fragmented into a collage of postmodern symbols (consider the rock bands, likened to the vanguard of an army): ⟦Q2⟧.
Such intense imagery is well matched by the instrumental backing, which – apart from the intro and bridge, which lean towards Cat Stevens – resolves into a sweeping brass rock sound with ringing tones. On electric guitars appears David Lebón, member of Spinetta's Pescado Rabioso and future right-hand man to García in Serú Girán.
Using the proceeds from his first two albums, over the course of 1974 García travelled to the United States and bought a set of electronic keyboards. Just a year later, due to the economic crash known as “el Rodrigazo” (named after the Peronist economy minister, Celestino Rodrigo), such a purchase would have proven far more difficult.
Pequeñas anécdotas sobre las instituciones came out in December '74. The music has turned shadowy and, more than ever, intricate: it's no coincidence that this is an album beloved by progressive rock devotees, yet little remembered by the general public. The comparison that springs to mind is with Lucio Battisti's “Anima latina”, to which it can be considered a complement: on one side a European musician seeking inspiration in South America, on the other a South American diving into European music.
The lyrics display an even more explicit political and social character, and the bitterness that pervades them can be glimpsed in the cover artwork, which depicts the songs' themes in a stark black and white: Cassandra, Mr Scissors, the show of the dead, and so on.
The democratic interlude is in fact proving to be a pandemonium, with violence every day and clashes between left-wing students (sometimes backed by the outlawed Revolutionary Workers' Party) and ultra-right paramilitary groups. Peronist deputies are handed a .22 Colt to enter parliament, while the institutions remain as ready as ever to silence and censor.
It's in this climate that a dedicated committee decides to drop two songs from the album (“Botas locas” and “Juan represión”), which will only see the light of day as bonus tracks on the 1995 CD reissue. Four other tracks are instead spared, following the purging of certain lines.
In the meantime the lineup has become a quartet, with the addition of a full-fledged rhythm section: Rinaldo Rafanelli (bass, already a member of Color Humano) and Juan Rodríguez (drums).
As mentioned, this is Sui Generis's prog record, and García makes full use of his new keyboards: electric piano, clavinet, but above all the Minimoog and two string synths (a Yamaha and an Arp). Electronic textures swamp everything right from the start, with the ballad “Instituciones” and the unsettling “Tango en segunda”, which marks García's second foray into the world of tango.
In “Pequeñas delicias de la vida conyugal” a plausible influence of Premiata Forneria Marconi emerges: both the drum fills and the keyboard flourishes recall “Generale”, from “Per un amico” (1972). On the instrumental “Tema de Natalio” the band lets loose, in a collage of contrasting landscapes: from a hard-prog charge to pastoral avant-folk pauses, all the way to a symphonic finale. On organ is Carlos Cutaia, fresh off his stint with Pescado Rabioso.
“El tuerto y los ciegos” is a short folk interlude, complete with violin (played by the much sought-after session player Jorge Pinchevsky), interesting in how it draws a parallel between the Greek myth of Cassandra, gifted with the power to foresee the future yet believed by no one, and the fate of the artist and the avant-garde man. The title is not by chance a nod to the proverb “En el pais de los ciegos el tuerto es rey” (“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”).
The real bone of contention, however, is “La increíble aventura del Señor Tijeras”, from which an entire verse is cut: “I despise people who have the power to say what is good and what is bad. Only the people, my friend, are capable of understanding. The censors of ideas will tremble with horror before the free man with his body in full sun”.
Señor Tijeras (Mr. Scissors) is the popular nickname of Miguel Paulino Tato, the head of the national film classification board at the time. The censor's revenge is not long in coming: right after the band's breakup, he bans the film/concert “Adios Sui Generis” for anyone under eighteen, young people evidently being the film's main target audience.
1975 is the band's final year of activity: the ballad “Alto en la torre” comes out as a single but fails to make much of an impact, and over the summer tensions within the band grow. García has a handful of songs in the drawer, but expresses a wish to record an entirely instrumental album, without winning over the other members. Given the recent run-ins with censorship and the interpersonal friction, the quartet decides to call it quits. A farewell concert is planned at Buenos Aires's indoor stadium, the Luna Park, which sells twice the available tickets, forcing the band to play twice in the same day.
Alongside the big hits, a considerable number of unreleased tracks are performed. “La fuga del paralítico”, “Zapando con la gente” and “Blues del levante” are three zapadas (literally, “hoeings”), meaning improvisations, in the slang of Argentine rock. There are also five proper new songs: “La niña juega en el gran jardín” (written by Rafanelli, the only Sui Generis track not penned by García), “Fabricante de mentiras” (recorded in studio a couple of years later by Mestre), “Nena”, “Bubulina”, and “El fantasma de Canterville” (the latter two would go on to join the repertoire of García's later projects).
Some of the tracks end up in the aforementioned film/concert, as well as on vinyl: by the end of the year Adiós Sui Géneris Parte 1ra and Adiós Sui Géneris Parte 2da are released. The missing tracks would see the light of day in 1996, on the CD Adiós Sui Géneris Vol. III.
A syncrasis of the names of its various participants, this is probably the least significant project of García's career. The sole, self-titled album comes out in March 1976, a couple of weeks before the coup, but was recorded the previous summer, when Sui Generis were still a going concern. The lineup features García, Mestre, their singer-songwriter friends Raúl Porchetto and León Gieco, and singer María Rosa Yorio, who had already provided backing vocals on the other participants' records. The arrangements regress toward a somewhat monotonous folk sound, with the occasional mild rock break: sonically, it almost sounds like it predates Vida. Sui Generis's harmonic and melodic imagination has been dampened, likely due to Gieco's rigidity. The best song is the tender “Fusia”, the first track ever credited to Mestre. “El fantasma de Canterville” gets its first studio recording here, sung by Gieco, but is almost immediately censored, given certain lines about police violence.
With Sui Generis archived, and with PorSuiGieco best read as more of a divertissement, García is already thinking about a new band. He recalls a conversation with drummer Oscar Moro, formerly of Los Gatos and Color Humano, who had expressed a wish to collaborate. Currently available, Moro jumps at the invitation and the deal is sealed.
After a few interim lineups, the group settles with the arrival of keyboardist Carlos Cutaia (who, as already mentioned, had been circling around García since the Sui Generis days) and two young talents: guitarist Gustavo Bazterrica and bassist José Luis Fernández, met through Porchetto and Gieco respectively.
Between the oldest member (Cutaia) and the youngest (Fernández, still a minor) there's a gap of a full eighteen years, but with García firmly at the helm – for the first time also as lead vocalist – the chemistry comes together perfectly.
The debut album, simply titled La máquina de hacer pájaros, came out towards the end of 1976. From the opening ballad, "Bubulina", it's clear where things are heading: had it been sung in English, it could easily have fit on Genesis's "Wind & Wuthering", which incidentally would come out a month later.
What unfolds is a journey into the world of progressive rock, even sharper in focus than Sui Generis's third album. "Boletos, pases y abonos", which explores the jazz-funk end of the spectrum, takes its title from the phrase conductors used to ask passengers to show proof they'd paid their fare. Here, though, the tickets in question are for rock concerts, since the lyrics address the role and condition of the famous musician, likening the figure of the singer to a messiah – at once worshipped and torn apart by audiences, media and the show business machine. After a sung first half, the track lets loose into a wild digression built on a riff "gifted" to the band by their friend Pino Marrone, guitarist of Crucis (themselves legends of the local prog scene).
"No puedo verme más" is a fine example of the new complexity García was after: a guitar riff that echoes Genesis's "The Return Of The Giant Hogweed", followed by a syncopated, aggressive jazz-rock passage, a veritable showcase of compound time signatures. The verse keeps alternating between 4/4 and 6/8, then at 1'30" a bass riff in 7/8 takes over, later doubled by the Minimoog. All of it seasoned with brutal shifts in tempo.
"Ah, te vi entre las luces" is the track most beloved by prog diehards, eleven minutes of symphonic romanticism marked by polyphony and polymetre. The interplay between Cutaia's and García's keyboards reaches its peak here, in a constant back-and-forth of solos and textures.
The songs with the most significant lyrics are the ones built around a traditional song structure. "Por probar el vino y el agua salada", while never naming names, is a merciless caricature of María Estela Martínez, Perón's widow and Argentina's president from July 1974 until the coup: "How can you laugh so beautifully, when you have confined my mind? How can you laugh so beautifully, when you have killed my people?"
"Como mata el viento norte" is a folk song in the style of early Sui Generis, albeit enriched with small digressions, and it speaks to that year's collapse of the state: "Don't talk to me of anything but clouds and salt, I don't want to know anything about the misery in today's world. [...] While we die here, eyes closed, we can't see past our own noses".
If lyrics like these made it past the authorities' scissors, while similar ones had previously been blocked, it's perhaps because the fledgling regime read them more as criticism of the Peronist state than of the new order led by General Jorge Rafael Videla.
The following album, Peliculas, comes out in 1977, just as the regime begins to tighten its grip, and features more cryptic lyrics, dense with cinematic references. In that Buenos Aires, which since the 1950s had prided itself on having welcomed Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa even before Paris and New York did, taking refuge in an art-house cinema and discussing it with friends at home or in bars was a way of staying informed, of keeping the muscle of awareness active. Much like in Manuel Puig's famous novel, "Kiss of the Spider Woman", published that very same year.
"Qué se puede hacer salvo ver películas" lays out the situation right from its title ("What else can you do but watch films"), and that title also signals the record's sonic mood, colder than its predecessor: where symphonic prog had dominated before, with jazz carving out a space in opposition, here the proportions are reversed. It's no coincidence that the track quotes the piano part from Horace Silver's "Song For My Father" (also famously reused, among others, by Steely Dan in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number").
The ballad "Marilyn, la cenicienta y las mujeres", which opens on the notes of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", boasts a children's choir with film-noir overtones and a closing jam with a key modulation, built around a hard-blues riff in 7/4.
"Hipercandombe", nomen omen, is an excursion into the traditional Afro-Uruguayan dance known as candombe, rendered as hyperkinetic progressive funk, with bass and synth in unison, relentless syncopation, streams of electric organ and guitar running at Yes-like speed. The choir's intonation at 1'28" recalls the murgas (song-and-theatre troupes that have performed since the early twentieth century during carnival on the eastern bank of the Rio de la Plata, to the rhythm of candombe, in a style blending political satire, naïf charm, the grotesque and vaudeville).
The lyrics of the aforementioned "Hipercandombe" at first glance seem to describe a classic psychological-thriller scenario: "When the night makes you suspicious walking alongside the river, paranoia is perhaps our worst enemy. Cover your face and even your hair as if you were cold, but really you want to escape some kind of trouble". Yet these lines can also be read as a coded description of the mood of Argentina's Dirty War years (the second half of the Seventies), seasoned with state-of-siege laws and bans on public gatherings.
In the lunfardo slang, spoken mainly in the big cities along the Río de la Plata and heavily influenced by Italian and its dialects, there's a word that describes the oppressive feeling mentioned above: persecuta. The term originally alludes to an obsessive state of nervousness, touchiness and intolerance, at times amplified by the use of alcohol or drugs. Coined in Buenos Aires during the pre-war demographic and immigration boom, it could refer either to the real persecution of criminals at the hands of the law, or to that of debtors at the hands of loan sharks. So in both senses, the psychological and the social, it expressed a fear brought on by demons from the past or by premonitions of what was yet to come. In the years of the dictatorship, this double meaning took on an even more dramatic edge, tied to political persecution, unlawful deprivation of freedom, torture, extermination and so on.
Feeling the need to be more cautious — not least because María Rosa Yorio gave him a son in 1977 — García sought out a less confrontational language than in the recent past, without giving up on social critique altogether. This made him a target of Videla's propaganda machine, and it's a stance that still earns him the gratitude of many Argentines today, and which probably spared him from being held accountable for all his excesses.
Even before the coup, he had never shied away from taking a stand: during the democratic interlude he declared himself a supporter of the Socialist Workers' Party, which took 1.5% of the vote in the September 1973 elections. The more militant left was, in practice, a marginal presence in Argentina, an elite affair, despite its principles of social equality and class struggle. It did have a certain foothold in the arts and culture, but little traction among the middle and lower-middle classes, who were drawn above all to Peronism. A completely different picture from that of Mediterranean European nations, Italy chief among them. None of this stopped García from nurturing his own Marxist-Trotskyist convictions, devouring books on history and politics. Bubulina, for instance — besides being the title of the song already mentioned — is the nickname the artist gave Yorio, borrowed from Laskarina Bouboulina, the 18th-century Greek revolutionary.
By 1978 Máquina de Hacer Pájaros had already split up, perhaps partly out of García's frustration with the lukewarm audience response. Not long after, he flew off to Brazil together with guitarist and friend David Lebón, to join the exiled Billy Bond. Bond was one of Argentina's most politically outspoken singers, and after the 1976 coup, even without receiving any official threats, he found the climate so intimidating that he decided to leave the country.
Ready to launch a new project, with Bond on board as producer, the two pulled Moro back from Máquina and remembered a promising young musician who was still little known: bassist Pedro Aznar, who had impressed them live on the Buenos Aires club circuit. Reunited in São Paulo, they decided the new band would be called Serú Girán: two meaningless words, drawn from a made-up language García had been sketching out around that time and then left unfinished. Besides "Serú Girán", this is also how song titles like "Eiti Leda" and "Seminare" came about (the latter actually means something in Italian, though not in Spanish).
Before even finishing the recording, they went back to Argentina to perform some of the songs live, only to be torn apart by the press. The newspaper "La Opinión", conservative-Catholic in outlook and notably close to Videla, accused the band of having "homosexual voices", referring to their use of falsetto. The quartet wasn't discouraged, and flew to Los Angeles for the final touches and the addition of the orchestral parts. The album, self-titled after the band, hit stores in late 1978, putting García back on top.
"Eiti Leda", the opening track, is an evolution of "Nena", one of the songs performed during Sui Generis's farewell tour but never recorded in the studio by that lineup. Running seven minutes, it's a mini-suite alternating two ballad-like sections with two faster-paced ones, dense with instrumental virtuosity (among them a jazzy fretless bass solo in which Aznar makes Jaco Pastorius break out in a cold sweat).
García sings lead, with a delicate falsetto that carries the lyrics through their gradual shift from a love song ("I have no one to go with me to watch the morning come, and bring me my shot in time, before my heart rots away, or to warm these cold bones, baby") into a bleak portrait of urban routine and existential crisis ("This winter went badly and I think I left my shadow behind on the subway. And your legs, longer every time, know I can't turn back. The city is pissing on itself from mocking us, baby").
"Eiti Leda" became an anthem of Argentine rock, as did "Seminare", a gentle ballad for piano and acoustic guitar sung by Lebón, closing with Moog and string synth. Once again, the first comparison that comes to mind is Genesis, this time the slower numbers on "And Then There Were Three": it's striking to see how their career and García's seem to have run in parallel for almost the whole of the Seventies (and maybe even a little beyond), setting aside the Argentine's much stronger jazz leanings.
Having been recorded in Brazil, the album also bears the imprint of local music, as in "Autos, jets, aviones, barcos", a sort of hyperkinetic jazz-funk with the swing of a samba and monster performances from every player involved. Lebón sings, without quite spelling out the reasons, about the exodus of political activists and committed artists during those years: "Everyone's running away, see how the Southern Cross is changing course? The equator, the tropics and the sun are greeting new wanderers, because no one's left on land anymore".
Overall, the band still sounds tied to progressive rock, but more immediate and modern than Máquina, more determined to bring those innovations and that complexity to a wider audience without diluting them. It's an undertaking that comes off almost flawlessly, with only a handful of shaky moments (brief interludes like "Separata" and "Cosmigonón", or the orchestral coda of "Serú Girán", perhaps a touch overblown).
Those same sessions also yielded the album Billy Bond And The Jets (1979), sung by Bond over backing tracks discarded by Serú Girán, which sank into obscurity almost immediately.
The quartet then returned to Argentina to record Grasa de las capitales, released already in the summer of '79. This time it was García calling the shots in the control room, for a record made with virtually no outside input beyond sound engineer Amílcar Gilabert.
The title, literally "The Grease of the Capitals", is an unvarnished critique of the most deplorable aspects of big cities: urban dehumanization, environmental pollution, cultural decay ("grasa", in the local slang, also refers to the vulgarity of the newly-rich commoner who, through the acquisition of material goods and attendance at prestigious events, tries to buy himself a new cultural identity). The critique is aimed mainly at Argentina, but not only: García had come back disillusioned from his travels in Europe. Having imagined it as a hub of innovation, he found that there too, artistic avant-gardes actually occupied a small niche, squeezed in between tabloids and lowbrow mainstream culture. The cover itself is a parody of those glossy gossip magazines.
The title track packs an impressive array of elements into just four and a half minutes. A two-part introduction (a long one, with a cappella harmonized vocals, and a shorter, instrumental one) is followed by a sung section in which one can count at least four mini-verses, each marked by different harmonic progressions (major, minor, ascending, descending by semitones) and sudden rhythmic shifts, both in BPM and in time signature (the 12/8 that accompanies the chorus "No se banca mas", appearing around 1'30'', breaks up the surrounding 4/4). The third mini-verse is the most unexpected, with García, propelled by a space disco backing, letting loose in a kind of proto-rap, his voice altered by a slowed-down tape. At the song's center there's room for a jazz-fusion jam, with a polyrhythmic pulse in which the bass plays in triplets against the 4/4 rhythm of the hi-hat, before the final sung chorus. The track is also notable as the first example of García's self-referencing mania: at 2'10'' the piano picks up, albeit disguised, the theme of Sui Generis's "Tango en segunda". From here on, the artist's career would be marked by this kind of ongoing treasure hunt.
The jazz-funk of “Frecuencia modulada,” with Moro indulging in a Jeff Porcaro-style groove while Aznar and Lebón duel between fretless bass and acoustic guitar, makes even clearer the accusation the band had taken upon itself to voice: “If the music you listen to has lost its edge, if the lyrics have lost their spark, if turning up the volume no longer brings any force, it's because the times themselves have been drained of emotion.” Today it would be easy to mistake these lines for the grumbling of a conservative old man, but to understand them you have to place them in the context of 1979, under a regime that, while not banning rock music outright, demonized it through propaganda and suppressed it through abuse of power (including physical abuse, with the police only too happy to oblige): seen that way, they become the cry for freedom of an entire generation.
The lyrics grow more despairing as the tracklist unfolds. The turning point from satire to introspection comes above all with “Paranoia y soledad,” recorded by Aznar and Moro alone, with Aznar singing and playing every instrument except drums (which appear, in fact, for just a minute and a half out of the track's 6'47" running time). The song is a shapeless drift through slow jazz harmonies, over a bed of piano, acoustic guitar and fretless bass, with the faint, melancholy voice of an Aznar not yet twenty singing lyrics that sum up all the anguish of that historical moment: “How much longer, this paranoia and loneliness. Waking up here is like dying along with your own destruction. What do you have to do to keep from going mad?” On this, Aznar would later say: “Those were the days when we thought jazz would change the world.” Not hippie counterculture, not stadium rock, not punk nihilism, but rather an intimate, ecumenical art form, steeped in a long tradition yet always open to crossovers, innovation and multiethnic encounters.
If the first side of the vinyl closes with Aznar's masterpiece, the second opens with Lebón's, and if one seems to anticipate the Stevie Wonder of “The Secret Life Of Plants,” the other actually predates the Pink Floyd of “Hey You.” “Noche de perros” is in fact a dramatic ballad introduced by fretless bass and building to a majestic crescendo of layered keyboards and distorted guitars, riffs and solos. Without ever stating it outright, the ghosts of the earliest desaparecidos surface: “This darkness, this night of dogs, this loneliness that will soon kill you. […] Sometimes I think of your laugh. It's already too late and I'm tired of crying.”
It's García, however, who writes and sings the song that enraged the authorities so much it was banned from radio and television – which, in a twist of poetic justice, only guaranteed its huge success with the public: “Viernes 3 AM.” Named by Spinetta as his colleague's finest song, it's an ode to suicide as a form of protest in a society that leaves no room to breathe for voices out of step with the chorus. It opens with a first verse hailing a cold, sad “Fever of a blue Saturday,” set against the hedonistic “Saturday Night Fever” that dominated the era's imagination. What follows is a string of failed attempts to find an identity and a place to belong: “You've changed times and loves and music and ideas. You've changed sex and God, color and borders, but in yourself, nothing more will ever change.” And then the final solution: “Bang bang bang, dead leaves falling. Always the same, those who can't take it anymore just leave.” The title, “Friday, Three in the Morning,” is never mentioned in the lyrics: yet it's clear that's the moment the protagonist carries out the extreme act, the deepest point of the night, equidistant from both the echoes of the bars where the evening was spent and the first lights of dawn. It creates a certain contrast that such a black hole should take the shape of a gentle piano ballad scented with música popular brasileira (perhaps with a nod to Milton Nascimento).
García, however, also has a song for those who manage to find the strength to carry on despite everything, “Los sobrevivientes,” where he sings of the hope of someday seeing light at the end of the regime's tunnel: “We will never have roots, we will never have a home, and yet, as you can see, this is our place. We vibrate like bells, like churches drawing near from the south, like black garments wanting to be shed.” It's also the track on which the artist plays the most instruments: in the introduction – which quotes Astor Piazzolla's bachiana “Fuga y misterio” – two pianos (one electric, one grand) and a string synth, while in the final jam he plays acoustic guitar and a Moog bass synth, momentarily stepping in for Aznar.
The record also polishes up what little still needed fixing from the first album, delivering an unbeatable run of songs and a deluxe production, achieved using a 24-track recorder (a rarity in Argentina at the time). Notable is the choice to foreground the rhythm section, mixing Aznar's bass to sound like an upright double bass and pushing Moro's toms into saturation.
In 1980 came the double live album Música del alma, recorded on November 11, 1977 during the “Festival del amor,” where García assembled every musician he had worked with up to that point. It's considered his first solo album, but the sound quality is dismal, and it's recommended only to collectors.
The return of Serú Girán certainly deserves more attention. Bicicleta (1980) is their most celebrated album among progressive-rock fans, especially for the opener “A los jóvenes de ayer”: nine and a half minutes that condense much of García's ambition, moving from ballad to jazz-rock by way of tango. The lyrics are in fact aimed at the tango die-hards of yesteryear, with their nostalgia wielded as an ideological weapon, often sneering at Argentine rock: “They dress well, wear toupees, kiss each other on both cheeks and pine for the past like an old lady at a matinée.”
But it's two shorter songs, aching with melancholy, that won over audiences, continuing García's lament over the death of freedom. One is “Desarma y sangra,” for voice and keyboards alone, where he can be heard singing: “The guardian angel spots the thief, cuts off his hands, takes away his voice. People hide, or barely exist, they forget about man, they forget about God.” The other, more rhythmic and with guitar melodies tinged with the Far East, is “Canción de Alicia en el país.” “Don't tell what you saw in the gardens, the dream is over. There are no more walruses or turtles. A river of heads crushed under the same foot that plays cricket beneath the moon. […] The innocent are the guilty ones, says his lordship, the king of swords. […] Light the lanterns, for the sorcerers mean to cloud our path once more.”
It's without doubt one of his boldest lyrics, given the force of the accusations it contains: “turtles,” that is “tortugas,” is disguised through a slurred pronunciation that ends up sounding like “torturas” (tortures), while “walrus” in Spanish is “morsa,” a word that can also denote the vice-like tool of the same name (whose implied use isn't hard to guess). As if that weren't enough, two of the most ruthless figures ever to hold power in Argentina are held up to ridicule: the “king of swords” depicts Ramón Camps, chief of police and loyal follower of Videla, responsible for hundreds of abductions and at least thirty murders, openly accused by García during concerts held in support of the album. “The sorcerer,” meanwhile, was the nickname of José López Rega, a Peronist minister with far-right leanings, who during the brief democratic interlude had sent militants from the left wing of his own movement to the slaughter, under assault from the paramilitary group known as the Triple A. Once Videla rose to power, Rega was deposed and the Triple A disbanded, so as to paint the dictator with a false aura of peacemaker and bringer of order: many of the Triple A's militants, however, were simply absorbed into the new assault squads used to silence dissent. Both Rega and Videla, even starting from different premises (one pushing proletarian fascism, the other a dictatorship built on a neoliberal economic model), exploited the wretched economic conditions of those young people, many of them unemployed, rescuing them from hunger on the condition that they form their own armed force. Though well aware that the dictatorship was the worst possible outcome, García still felt it right to point out certain unsettling continuities between it and the preceding democratic phase.
The rest of the album isn't quite as intense, and perhaps overindulges in quotation, downright blatant in the case of Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Sweet Home Alabama” in “Encuentro con el diablo” and Dire Straits' “Sultans Of Swing” in “Mientras miro las nuevas olas.” Then again, it could be read as an attempt to stay tethered to the civilized world while everything back home was collapsing.
The adventure continues with Peperina (1981), an album drastically more pop than its three predecessors: progressive rock remains one of its influences but recedes sharply, as shown by a tracklist full of songs under three minutes, with only one running past five.
Even though it hasn't yet drifted into the new wave sounds that would arrive shortly after, it could be seen as a preview of García's solo career, which would be built – at least for its first decade or so – on short, radio-ready songs, albeit delivered with extreme refinement.
The title track is a choral ballad for electric piano, its central melody growing out of a phrase first heard at the start of “Canción de Alicia en el país,” now fitted with accelerating hard-rock breaks and Mini Moog solos. The subject, though never named, is Patricia Perea, a rock journalist recently absorbed into the jet set, guilty of having criticized the band. García skewers her: “Typically provincial mind, she didn't have the guts for an office job, that underground den of routine ideology. Romantic, she'd recite the most inspired poems, whispering into the ears of a thousand managers: I love you, I hate you, give me more.” Two anecdotes tied to the song fuel its legend: the accusations of sexism leveled at the lyrics by Perea herself, and the beep – imposed by the censorship boards – covering the word “balls” (“huevos”), stamped directly onto the master and thus impossible to remove even during the album's digital restorations. It's worth noting, though, that this is the only García song to address a woman in such contemptuous terms: his preferred target has always been the male world, the holder of power and the main perpetrator of abuse.
The album's masterpiece is “Cinema verité,” played by García alone (electric piano) and Aznar (synthesizer): a track built entirely out of harmony – woven polyphonic keyboards and falsetto choruses – and stereo trickery. As the voice bounces from one speaker to the other, it moves forward, low and nostalgic, over lyrics likely inspired by Julio Cortázar's short story “Las babas del diablo” (as Michelangelo Antonioni's “Blow-Up” had already been). “He knows how to make an impression, walking like Tarzan, he is Eve and she is Adam. […] I have the feeling something's about to happen, the peacock's feathers outshine even the sun, and he feels like the king of the jungle. […] In solitary settings, people open up a little more, and even two poor millionaires can draw close.” On an isolated beach, an earthly paradise violated by a couple caught up in a by-now unoriginal sin, the narrator plays the part of the unseen observer. Compared to Cortázar, though, the noir element has evaporated, giving way instead to a subtle irony about the characters' banal little rituals.
The album's most interesting piece of social commentary comes courtesy of Lebón, with "José Mercado," a deranged piece of electronic funk pierced by grotesque little voices, as well as a merciless cartoon of the period of financial speculation that gripped the Argentine middle class around 1980. It was a brief period in which official culture took a nationalist slant, at times xenophobic and at times liberal-leaning (a discursive schizophrenia typical of several South American regimes). The military and their civilian spokesmen wanted to position the country as a kind of moral reservoir for the West against the atheist-subversive threat of extremists, yet at the same time they fed a mirage of well-being achieved through the consumption of imported goods, often bought abroad in tax havens or in the US mecca of Miami.
This practice of traveling solely to buy status-symbol goods (the Telefunken TV set, the Dupont lighter, the Rolex watch, the Chivas whisky, in an aspirational whirlwind of vox populi) was nicknamed "deme dos" ("Give me two"), after the request Argentine consumers would make to foreign shop clerks, buying two identical items, one for the house and one for any eventuality (as a spare, to give to a relative, to resell once back home, and so on). "José Mercado," which might translate as "Joe Market," is the most obvious nickname for an improvised international speculator working on that tiny scale.
Among other things, Lebón followed the meditation teachings of the Indian guru MaharaJi, and judging by the lyrics, he himself had probably encountered some infiltrators in the ashram: not dangerous military spies, but opportunistic followers of the guru hoping to score discounted tickets to travel to coveted shopping destinations. "José Mercado, to save on the ticket, took one of guru MaharaJi's charter flights. He came back loaded with stuff for the office, and not a word about the Divine Light." The guru's name is, incidentally, mispronounced, with an aspirated "h" instead of the soft "g," as if to underline the idea of an unscrupulous ignoramus who couldn't even be bothered to learn his spiritual master's name properly.
The tracklist also includes instrumental pieces, such as Lebón's "Cara de velocidad," a wild hybrid of funk and boogie rock driven by distorted guitars and Clavinet, or "Lo que dice la lluvia," performed by Aznar alone, overdubbing piano, acoustic guitar, synthesizer and fretless bass, conjuring hints of melody that swirl around one another in an arrhythmic, pastoral-tinged universe, akin to ECM-style jazz.
The album's famous cover is the work of photographer Andy Cherniavsky and depicts a girl from the provinces, in a rather rural setting, drinking peperina tea, an infusion typical of the hills of Córdoba. Years later, Cherniavsky herself revealed an alternative cover, used during the sessions, showing a shot of a sea horizon violently slashed through the middle. While the background recalled the placidity of the ECM covers mentioned earlier, the central gash reflected a spirit closer to Lucio Fontana's Spatialism.
At the start of 1982, Aznar is summoned to the United States by Pat Metheny, who wants him in his band as a singer (he had been enchanted by his vocal style after stumbling across him at a jazz festival in Brazil a couple of years earlier). Aznar accepts and announces his decision to his bandmates, who, while saddened, encourage his initiative and his search for his own path.
The band lasts only another couple of months, during which it records No llores por mí, Argentina (1982), the first live album by a García band to boast excellent recording quality (some consider the version of "Eiti Leda" superior to the original). It opens with the title track, a previously unreleased song recorded in the studio (albeit with fake applause dubbed on in post-production) and a hybrid of every radio trend of the moment: power pop (the hymn-like chorus, the frantic rhythm), hard rock (Lebón's virulent solos, the screams in the middle section), new wave (the opening riff drenched in reverb, the handclapping on the chorus), and yacht rock (the funky bass, the electric piano in the vein of post-Supertramp). The lyrics reflect the crisis of the military junta, whose popularity was plummeting, unleashing a series of direct accusations, no longer fearing the authorities' scissors: "Don't cry for me, Argentina, I love you, more every day. You're sick with frustration and in your madness there's no agreement to be found. A hyena that laughs, yet dines with the pigs. If the stars of the cabaret mock your moves, there's no need to hide the darkness of your thoughts."
García and Lebón, with the band effectively disbanded, take part in the "Latin American Solidarity Festival," held on May 16, in the midst of the Falklands War and organized by Argentine record labels to capitalize on the surge in popularity of the local scene. The military junta, hoping to stir up a sense of defiance that would rally the people, had in fact banned the broadcast of English-language records: radio stations had no choice but to up their dose of homegrown folk and rock, music that in recent years, deemed inconvenient, had found little favor with state channels.
Finding themselves thrust into the spotlight overnight, Argentine musicians decide to take part in the festival, which had in any case positioned itself as neutral on the war, hoping for a peaceful resolution. Not everyone was convinced, of course: Virus — within a few years one of the most important bands in Latin America — turned down the booking, arguing that the spirit of the event was ambiguous, in some way pandering to the military junta's nationalist demands.
With his third consecutive band failing to last even five years, García decides to launch his solo career. He does so with great momentum: 1982 isn't even over yet when the double LP Pubis angelical/Yendo de la cama al living comes out.
The first record contains the soundtrack to the film of the same name, directed by Raúl de la Torre and based on a novel by Manuel Puig. It's an entirely instrumental work (the rare vocal parts sing abstract lines), built from fifteen sketches ranging from ambient watercolors to folk, from piano jazz to tango canción (somewhat in the style of the old master Mariano Mores), with a lavish array of electronic arrangements that lean more than a little toward Vangelis, John Carpenter, or the soundtrack work of Tangerine Dream, had they ever come into contact with the music and spirit of the Río de la Plata's Belle Époque. It is, however, Yendo de la cama al living that captures the public's attention, so much so that it is also sold as a standalone release.
The famous title track is symptomatic of a turning point in the artist's life and soon becomes a manifesto of his creative path as well. Recorded immediately after Argentina's defeat in the Falklands War, which for the regime marked the definitive collapse of both popular and international support, it is performed entirely by García, making extensive use of the latest technological gadgets, including the Yamaha CP-80 electroacoustic piano, the Moog Opus 3 synthesizer, and a drum machine. Because of its icy sound, it feels as though years, rather than just a few months, have passed since the dissolution of Serú Girán. A monotonous electronic midtempo (the power of the drum machine is impressive, at a time when it wasn't easy to coax a satisfying dynamic out of one), an angular slapped bass, a minor-key melody set against melancholy reflections of effects-laden guitars and keyboards, and lyrics that begin to reflect on the dark side of fame: "You can jump off a diving board, you can break a skating record, you can score a goal, and you can carry your moon up to the sky, you can be a great champion, play for the national team, and not have even a drop of love to give."
The other big hit is "Yo no quiero volverme tan loco," one last foray into the territory of that vigorous, keyboard-driven yacht rock that was playing out its final hand that very year (the fourth album by Toto, Michael McDonald's solo debut).
"Canción de dos por tres" suggests conflicting feelings of nostalgia and the need to break away from a brutal past: "I don't want to live like this anymore, repeating the agonies of the past, with the brothers of childhood. Although time has made us suspicious, we still have something to say." To bring this across, García crafts an elegant, boozy tango phrasing in the style of Osvaldo Fresedo, before shifting toward an evocative pop melody and culminating in a chorus that blends blues with Debussy-esque harmonies. The icing on the cake is the synthesized guitar solo, played by Luis Alberto Spinetta through a Roland GR-300 pedal. Spinetta also appears, alongside Pedro Aznar, on the jazzy funk of "Peluca telefónica": it's a little-known track, but a historic one, as it's the only one featuring lead vocal lines from all three artists involved, in a kind of all-star portrait of the local scene.
Still within funk territory, though with a greater electronic presence, is “No bombardeen Buenos Aires,” a sarcastic plea addressed to Great Britain: in asking them not to bomb the Argentine capital, García was really mocking the regime's impotence and its arrogance in challenging one of the most powerful nations in the world.
With no more hangers-on to manage (aside from the couple of deluxe guest spots already mentioned), García falls back on his own personality, which overflows. The break is so sharp that among the artist's fans there are those who mentally split his career in two: the band years, preferred by older listeners, and the solo years, tailored for younger ones. It's upon going solo that García turns into the archetype of the rock star, his behavior growing excessive and flamboyant: his body becomes an embodied metaphor for a nation that, after years of hardship, was discovering democracy (the military government was gradually weakening and censorship had by then loosened its grip: suffice it to say that in February 1982 Mercedes Sosa had returned after three years of exile, welcomed back as a hero).
The artist then flies to New York to reunite with Aznar, who had by then settled there. With his support he records Clics modernos, released in November 1983, a week after the free elections, and it can be considered the first album of democratic Argentina. The public's response made it the equivalent of what “His Master's Voice” by Franco Battiato represented for Italian culture.
“Nos siguen pegando abajo (Pecado mortal)” is perhaps the emblem of a whole career, proving how García had taken up the challenge of new wave sounds, towards which he'd been rather critical in previous years, before the Clash's “Sandinista” won him over. His entry into this new universe (partly anticipated by “Yendo de la cama al living”) nonetheless happens on his own terms: the intro is layered and polymetric, with a funky guitar in 7/4 riding the even beat of a Roland TR-808, later joined respectively by Aznar's fretless bass and the Simmons-brand electronic drums, played by Casey Scheuerell, an American session musician with a jazz background.
The vocal melody ranges between major and minor changes with an ease that is by now his trademark, driven by a hysterical energy, as García sings about a young man beaten up in a club because of his relationship with a minor. It's made clear that the age gap between the two is minimal: the song is thus a j'accuse against Argentina's strict, Catholic-rooted morality, which, once the dictatorship fell, in turn needed loosening (it's no coincidence that sex would soon become the central theme of the hits of acts like Virus and Soda Stereo, who were about to emerge). The event is narrated using the technique of “Rashomon” (yet another testament to the author's love of cinema), that is, telling it multiple times, each from a different point of view: here, during the verses an omniscient narrator and an eyewitness to the assault speak, while in the bridge it's the victim's turn: “I'm walking far away, I'm like a light going out, from the floor I could see them, drawing away, reveling like madmen”.
“No soy un extraño” is sophisticated synth-pop, landing somewhere between Pat Metheny's most atmospheric tracks (Aznar, incidentally, was contributing heavily to shaping that very sound) and the Donald Fagen of “The Nightfly”, with which it shares its guitarist: the interweaving of jazz fusion and blues running alongside the melody is courtesy of renowned session player Larry Carlton. “Nuevos trapos” travels along similar lines, but this time it's a slapped bass, piano trills and a sax solo that stir things up.
Acoustic drums make their first appearance on “Bancate ese defecto,” though run through gated reverb and accompanied by a drum machine. It's one of the album's most irregular tracks: the first part is taken up by a vibrant song full of stops and restarts, marked by the usual acrobatic fretless bass, a latin jazz piano and synthesizers mimicking the horn section of a salsa orchestra; the coda, meanwhile, is a gorgeous pile-up of ambient keyboards drifting through the night.
“No me dejan salir” is a wild funk track built around a series of vocal samples lifted from various James Brown songs: fragments so brief that it's effectively impossible to recognize the godfather of soul in them, yet they give the track an adrenaline rush. It's one of the earliest songs in history in which the Fairlight CMI is used to sample other people's music, and it was accompanied by a surreal video featuring a vast cast of bizarre characters, directed by Charly's brother, Daniel García Moreno.
“Los dinosaurios,” a generational anthem, is a piano ballad that's striking for its harmonic complexity and for the ease with which, starting from an incipit in C mixolydian, it arrives at two verses in B minor, only to suddenly snap back to the starting key. It's curious to note its resemblance to the melody of Guns N' Roses' “Sweet Child O' Mine,” which is essentially a simplified version of it. It's a moving elegy for the thirty thousand desaparecidos who fell victim to the regime (although at the time the figure was not yet known): “The friends from the neighborhood may disappear, the singers on the radio may disappear, the ones who appear in the papers may disappear, the person you love might disappear. Quelli che stanno in aria possono scomparire in aria, quelli che sono in strada possono scomparire in strada”. This last verse refers, in its first part, to the death flights, through which the regime's enforcers disposed of bodies by dropping them from planes into the Río de la Plata or the sea, while in the second part it points a finger at the frequent police and paramilitary raids, which bred abuse and arrests. The dinosaurs named in the title obviously represent the regime's top brass: later in the song García also depicts them as “the heavy ones,” a deliberate nod to “la pesada” (an expression that, depending on context, refers to thugs, the mafia, and more broadly the powerful who resort to violence).
The first twenty seconds of “Plateado sobre plateado (Huellas en el mar),” with its hazy keyboards and reverb-soaked jazz guitar, essentially invent the theme from Twin Peaks, no offense to Badalamenti, though the song then moves along different lines, carried by piano-led sophisti-pop as it sings of the exile chosen by many during the regime: “Ho visto la luna sgocciolare senza sosta, la sua luce da cattedrale, e una vecchia barca, attraversando il mare dal Sud America verso l'Europa, su uno specchio pieno di sale”. The “footprints on the sea” mentioned in the subtitle seem to relate to the idea of a long journey across the waters, like the Jews in the Book of Exodus, or like Antonio Machado's famous poem on exile, later set to music by Joan Manuel Serrat in “Cantares”: “Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar”.
The scars left by the regime also mark “Ojos de Video Tape.” Lines such as “L'esame del bene e del male è in arrivo” likely refer to the various interrogations García was subjected to over the daring metaphors in his lyrics (or maybe just over his hairstyle: there are documented cases where that alone was enough), while later on a nauseated rejection of that reality surfaces: “Questo mondo esclamerà per sempre il film che ho visto tempo fa, e questo mondo ti dirà per sempre che è meglio guardare il muro”. It's a ballad introduced by piano and driven by a programmed beat, flowing into a finale where ethereal, echo-filtered vocal layers, chorus-laden guitars and waves of synthesizer all pile up together: the fusion of the electronic arrangement, the dreamlike atmosphere, the weightlessness of the voice and the slow tempo creates the illusion of listening to a vaporwave track almost thirty years ahead of its time. To close the circle, as everything begins to fade out, the guitar drops in a hint of the melody from “Peperina”.
Back in Buenos Aires, García gets in touch with G.I.T. (a trio of seasoned musicians who had made a name for themselves, among other things, on Raúl Porchetto's records), forming a brief but intense partnership with them: he hires them for the Clics modernos tour, produces their self-titled debut album (a big success in Argentina and Chile) and then decides to keep them on as his backing band to record Terapia intensiva and Piano bar, released in 1984, just a few months apart.
The first is an EP that serves as the soundtrack for a show by actor Antonio Gasalla: six short fragments of funk rock laced with electronic touches, for a total running time of a quarter of an hour. Fragments of the title track would later be reworked, years on, into “Rap de las hormigas” (1987) and “Zocacola” (1989).
Piano bar, on the other hand, is the new album of songs, showing a sudden shift in approach: no more layers of overdubs and obsessive studio work, but tracks recorded live with the full band, with only minor touch-ups added afterward. Alongside G.I.T., he's joined on keyboards by a young Fito Páez, who had recently released his debut album and would go on to become one of the biggest stars of South American music.
While still staying within new wave territory, the sound is radically different from that of Clics modernos: rougher and more muscular on the up-tempo tracks, more organic and compact on the ballads. The drum machine has been almost entirely dropped: G.I.T.'s Willy Iturri plays drums on every track.
"Demoliendo hoteles" inaugurates this new vein with a choral punk rock sound, colored by small keyboard breaks in the middle and at the end. García embodies the figure of the isolated, self-destructive rock star, whose dysfunctional behavior is presented as the consequence of the contradictory messages received since childhood from the dominant culture of his generation: "I who was born with Videla, I who was born powerless, I who fought for freedom and couldn't get it. I who lived among fascists, I who died on the altar, I who grew up with people who were doing fine, but at night everything turned bad. Oggi passo il tempo demolendo alberghi, mentre i tecnici smontano il palco e prendono ostaggi".
“Promesas sobre el bidet” enchants with its brushstrokes of soul, tango, blues and vaguely Oriental synth-pop (think of the marimba reproduced on Yamaha keyboards), laying bare the author's emotional fragility: “Por favor, sigue la sombra de mi nene, por favor, no bebas más. Por favor no llores, por favor, prometo escribirte si deja de llover. ¿Por qué me tratás tan bien, me tratás tan mal? Sabés que no aprendí a vivir”.
“Raros peinados nuevos” rests on a kind of twist rhythm played in slow motion, which García also tries to reproduce with his voice, enunciating each syllable, while describing — with a detachment that is at once good-natured and wary — the flashy MTV hairstyles that were taking over Argentine culture at the time: “Si lo que te gusta es gritar, desconectá el cable del parlante. El silencio es acción, el más sabio es el más delirante. Me gustaban las canciones de amor, me gustaban esos nuevos y raros peinados. De chico fui aviador, pero ahora soy enfermero”.
"Search de la revolución" already has one foot in the nascent alternative rock scene, with its guitar interplay between the dominant riff (which somewhat recalls the electric organ riff in Shocking Blue's "Venus"), the effects-laden jangle guitars swirling around it, and the final solo, which seems to challenge the raw cowpunk of the Meat Puppets (whose celebrated second album came out that very same year). The keyboards remain in the background, but with great timbral variety: tinkling idiophones, piano phrasings, background pads, and so on. The lyrics warn of the need to keep the muscle of newly regained democracy in training, in order to avoid future crises of the rule of law: "Prossimi alla rivoluzione, la gente chiede sangue. On the verge of revolution, I'm singing this song, which was once hunger, I'm singing this song. And if tomorrow is like yesterday again, what was beautiful will afterwards be horrible. It's not just a matter of elections".
The four tracks mentioned above hypnotize the masses, but hidden within the folds of the album are other gems, such as the ballad "No te animás a despegar", with its funereal piano, electronic flows, relentless, echoing drum hits, and its few verses whispered like a prayer against depression ("Perché rimani in un vicolo cieco? I don't know why you'll go to that place, where everyone has gone off the rails. Perché non osi decollare, io ti chiedo perché"), before an epic blues guitar solo that takes up the entire second half of the track.
That eclecticism is confirmed by the polymorphous title track (an introduction on dissonant toy pianos, post-punk bursts with funky guitars, a heartland rock finale), as well as by short sketches such as "No se va a llamar mi amor", a sparkling hybrid of rhythm and blues and jangle pop, and the danceable "Rap del exilio", García's first official encounter with hip hop.
A new meeting with Spinetta finally gives birth to "Total interferencia", a cybernetic tango that pits a cold, mechanical pace against melancholy lines of synthesized bandoneón. In it, García portrays a young musician and the erosion inflicted on him by outside pressures, turning him into a metaphor for the human condition, bent by inhibitions and individualism: "He has holes you can't see, scorpion stings hidden beneath a mask of innocence. Everything you see or that exists, like imagination, merges in total interference. E alla radio suona un violino, suona un violino. Noi siamo come lui, amore che se ne va in fumo, violando tutto ciò che amiamo per sopravvivere". What stands out is the ambiguity of the word "violín", which in local prison slang refers to rapists: in this case, the violence being exerted is obviously directed at oneself, stemming from the impossibility of showing one's true face to others.
A digression is therefore needed on the artist's tango-infused side, which comes through not only in the harmonies and phrasings, but also in a certain porteño spleen, a kind of state of the soul that flows seamlessly between hope, sarcasm and nostalgia. That sense of afternoon intoxication harking back to the lost paradise of childhood, to time spent with neighborhood friends in a bond that is both brotherly and brutal, is quintessentially porteño and tanguero. So too is the idea of a night that offers reparation from the day's frustrations, with its often unfulfilled promise of sexual gratification, or its sublimation through the physical-aesthetic experience of dance. Even as a lyricist, with his frequent use of the slang of the intellectual set, he revives in a contemporary key the tango tradition of a sociolect restricted to a circle of initiates, namely lunfardo.
1985 is notable mainly for a failed attempt to record an album together with Spinetta. The experience was sealed first by a fire that destroyed most of the tapes, then by a series of disagreements between the two. A single did nonetheless emerge, “Rezo por vos”, a pop anthem built on Byrds-like guitar and drum machine, which remains one of the best-known songs for both singers. It was later re-recorded separately by both García and Spinetta, while the original duet version was included on García's compilation Grandes éxitos, released in 1986 on vinyl and cassette, but never on CD: to this day it is officially available only on Spinetta's YouTube channel.
Meanwhile Aznar briefly returns to Argentina, and García takes the opportunity to record Tango (1986) with him, a 23-minute EP, for the first time evenly split both compositionally and vocally, so much so that both their names appear on the cover. Aznar's tracks ("Culpable eternamente", "La gente es la misma") feature puzzle-like harmonies and elusive structures, but it's García's songs that strike the audience most. "Pasajera en trance" and "Hablando a tu corazón" dive headlong into synth-pop, unfurling melodies so angelic – one with an India-scented chorus, the other a sequencer-driven ride over which to scream at the top of one's lungs – that one can't help but regret the artist never pursued that direction further.
The golden period continues with Parte de la religión (1987), for which session player Fernando Samalea (drums) and two members of Twist (the Argentine new wave band launched a few years earlier by García himself) were recruited: Fabiana Cantillo on backing vocals and Daniel Melingo on sax.
"Buscando un símbolo de paz", a dancefloor-filling funky number propelled by a drum track with the snare pushed to the front, seems to move in the direction of the new jack swing that was being born at that very moment and would soon change the face of black music: it's no coincidence that the album was mixed by New Yorker Joe Blaney, Prince's sound engineer in 1987-88.
The title track is a vignette of electronic art pop, where the keyboards mimic Japanese flutes, harp, and sitar. The spiritual atmosphere thus created clashes brilliantly with the lyrics, which rail against organized religion: “No camina por los barrios de las afueras, es un hombre decente. Nunca toca a la gente con las manos, es tan independiente. Forma parte de la religión. Se siente culpable, vive torturado, no es tan inteligente. Nunca avanza, camina lateralmente, le tiene miedo a su mente. Forma parte de la religión”.
The frenetic, percussive "Rap de las hormigas" features guest appearances by Paralamas do Sucesso, one of the most celebrated Brazilian bands to emerge in the 1980s (at the height of their fame, they managed to build up a decent following in Argentina too). "Adela en el carrousell" is a solemn ballad, rich with harmonic delicacies. Above all, the shift of a fifth between verse and chorus, set up during the bridge: an unusual device in pop music, which is more accustomed to abrupt jumps of a semitone or a tone. It's marked by a bass riff occasionally doubled by digital piano, with descending keyboard trickles that mimic the spell the protagonist believes himself trapped in: "Adela on the carousel and the mirrors are smiles, the ring a device of love. Adela on the carousel and the wooden horses that rock her and wet her skin. Have mercy, don't do this, don't kick the madmen. Have mercy, don't do this, I'm fading away without your love".
Equally ethereal, "El karma de vivir al sur" is dedicated to his son Migue and moves between synth-pop and smooth jazz, with falsetto vocal harmonies thick with echo. The best-known track, however, is "No voy en tren", another piece of technological funk worthy of Prince, in which García once again places himself at the center, in a ritual that is on one hand self-celebration, and on the other an unveiling of the isolation – plausibly only imagined – into which his life sinks because of success: "I don't go by train, I go by plane, I don't need anyone, anyone around. […] I come from the Southern Cross, I'm the one who closes up and the one who turns off the light".
The democratic era transformed the singer, and the lines between fiction and reality were fast dissolving: the excesses that would recur in series throughout the Nineties were already starting to surface, but this did nothing to stop the character from continuing to win people's hearts.
In 1988 the film “Lo que vendrá” was released, written and directed by independent filmmaker Gustavo Mosquera R., with García as co-star and composer of the soundtrack. The music, evenly split between robotic funk and mysterious blankets of keyboard, perfectly captures the dystopia being staged, a metaphor for the regime that had oppressed Argentina. It's a lost gem of Eighties cinema that deserves wide rediscovery.
On October 15 of that same year, García and León Gieco were called upon to represent their country during the Argentine leg of "Human Rights Now!", the world tour organized by Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman, and Youssou N'Dour, in support of Amnesty International. The festival remains known locally for an alleged friction between García and Springsteen: the former was unhappy with his own performance, due to the scant rehearsal time he was given, and it seems there were tense moments backstage. In particular, over one of the most famous lines attributed to García: "Here, I'm the boss." Fact or legend, the footage of the event clearly shows that, during the final bows, García and Springsteen pull away from each other rather abruptly, while his farewell with Gabriel is warm, complete with a bow.
In the days that followed, the local media expressed displeasure at Springsteen's attitude and at the fact that, in the grand finale with all the musicians gathered on stage for Bob Marley's “Get Up Stand Up,” García and Gieco were left with very little room (so much so that García had to grab the microphone just to be able to sing). It was, in effect, an attitude of scant respect toward the Argentine musicians, one that, seen today, carries a faint imperialistic aftertaste: paradoxical, given the setting in which the whole affair took place.
In February 1989 came Como conseguir chicas, which, despite its Don Giovanni-style title (“How to Win Girls”), contains some of the artist's most fragile lyrics. “Zocacola,” part Spanish, part Portuguese, is a ballad for synth bass, acoustic guitar and orchestral keyboards, sung with Herbert Vianna of Paralamas do Sucesso. The title is a dedication to Marisa “Zoca” Pederneiras, a Brazilian model who had been García's partner for over a decade at the time (though the relationship was wearing thin, and the two would split up just a year later).
"No me verás en el subte" is another epic slow number, led by Indian violinist L. Shankar (who had already worked alongside John McLaughlin in Shakti and was, at the time, collaborating with Peter Gabriel). The arrangement thus takes on Eastern hues, while the lyrics depict a painful separation that then seems to morph into an endemic psychological condition (that of Buenos Aires?): “You won't see me on the subway, you won't see me, you won't see me. The key I have can only open the hearts of strangers. Anime che non hanno un posto dove andare si incontrano di nuovo, sottoterra”. The same happens in "Anhedonia", a hybrid of tango and ambient pop that takes its title from anhedonia, one of the most common symptoms of depression, translating as the inability to feel pleasure. Within the song it's framed as a geographical place, and by extension as a shared state of mind: “Time passes again, but there is no spring in Anedonia. Time weeps again, but there is no spring in Anedonia. And even though the lights are soft and the cinema is here, there's nothing to be done. Non succede nulla di notte, null'altro che il passare di un treno”. Even the brief hard-rock break that surfaces at 3'27'' feels anhedonic: an energy curve that rises for just a moment before sinking back into the languid pace that preceded it.
Even in a wild punk-rock number like “No toquen,” loneliness and distrust reach levels of absolute social rejection, as if the singer were the sole survivor of a zombie epidemic: “Andatevene da qui, andatevene, morti! Don't touch my records, don't touch my trousseau, don't touch my hands, don't touch me anymore, no”.
By contrast, while finishing the album's recording sessions in New York, he decided to shoot a music video on the city streets, surrounded by kids playing music and dancing. It would accompany the lead single, “Fanky,” one of the definitive tracks of Eighties synth-funk, boasting at least three memorable riffs: the bass line, the organ line (later picked up by a synthesized horn section), and the one shaping the verse's vocal melody, also later taken up by the horns.
The shift in mood on the chorus is striking, as it suddenly moves from the dancefloor into introspection via dreamy vocal harmonies, before culminating in the bridge: “Pleasure is so similar to love, pleasure is so different from killing. When I think about the end, when I think about all I've given, when I look at the end, when I dream that it will all end. Pleasure is so necessary, my love, pleasure is so different from pain”.
Filosofía barata y zapatos de goma (1990) is a transitional album: the 1980s are over, and the typical new wave timbres give way to uncharted territory. The artist's universe seems to shift into a parallel dimension: whereas up to the previous album each of his creations could be placed within some movement of its era (symphonic prog, jazz-rock, new wave, synth-funk, etc.), however brilliantly reinterpreted and more than once ahead of its English-speaking counterparts, from here on it becomes impossible to tie him to his own time and the fashions surrounding it. Critics begin to speak generically of "art rock", a sort of timeless label denoting a rather generic, decontextualized approach to the material.
The title track is one of the masterpieces of García's entire body of work: it opens like a cocktail lounge ballad, with seductive programmed percussion, synthesized bass, romantic piano chords, and scattered jazzy drum digressions, seasoned with a micro-quote from the verse of “Don't You Want Me” by Human League (from 0'38'' to 0'43''). In the background unfolds a love story set in a seaside town on the Atlantic coast, an obligatory destination for young people and middle-class families from Buenos Aires. But this is a bond that — and here the bittersweet fatalism of the tango resurfaces — comes with an expiry date fixed by the return ticket: “Sono scalzo e ti aspetto, l'autobus se n'è andato, l'amore è scaduto. Volevo restare, ma me ne sono andato. Filosofia spicciola e scarpe di gomma, forse è tutto ciò che ti ho dato”. As soon as this last line is sung, the mood shifts completely: the drums grow restless, the piano starts to wander, the guitars gradually harden into something martial, while over everything rises a weave of abstract female vocals, overdubbed and dripping with echo, with an aftertaste that's at once gothic, operatic, exotic and menacing. The voice belongs to Lolita Torres, queen of Argentine easy-listening song in the 1950s, who here finds herself transformed into a rival of Lisa Gerrard.
The experimental streak continues on “No te mueras en mi casa”, with Aznar on bass and superstar Gustavo Cerati on guitar (the first time his path crosses García's): an avant-rock derailment with spoken word and a fractured, distortion-riddled rhythm, staging a sarcastic thriller about a character in a manic state (overdose or withdrawal crisis), set in a house in the old neighborhood of San Telmo, an aristocratic area of Buenos Aires until the mid-19th century, later a porteño slum, and today a favorite district of visual artists, filmmakers, and antique fairs. Also worth noting are “De mí”, an acoustic ballad harking back to the innocence of Sui Generis' hits, and “Curitas”, an atmospheric rock track complete with sampled castanets, mambo touches, and jazz-funk bass virtuosity.
For the first time in a long while, however, not everything comes off perfectly: the English lyrics of “Solo un poquito no más” are simplistic, and the chorus sounds like a parody of Berlin's “Take My Breath Away,” just as the closing reinterpretation of the Argentine national anthem comes across as somewhat crude (and stirred up bitter controversy at the time). Even the era's big hit, “Me siento mucho mejor,” is a by-the-numbers cover of the Byrds' “I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better” (though today, across various streaming services, it clearly outstrips the original in popularity).
García wouldn't return as a solo artist until 1994, but in the meantime he was far from idle, kicking off a series of projects ranging from collector's rarities to high-profile events.
In the first category now belongs the EP Radio Pinti (1991), credited to Pinti-García-Aznar, on which, together with his trusty bassist, he builds a series of backing tracks spanning hard rock, electronic pop and new jack swing, to accompany the comic-political monologues of veteran actor Enrique Pinti.
Towards the end of that same year came another album co-credited to Aznar, Tango 4, whose recording had been delayed after García was hospitalized for nervous exhaustion brought on by excessive drinking and drug use. The album produced two classics: the romantic ballad "Tu amor" and the breezy radio-friendly pop-rock of "Mientes", sung solely by Aznar and featuring one of his most iconic bass lines. Unfortunately the record doesn't offer much else, aside from the postmodern audacity of featuring figures from Argentine culture who were considered outdated at the time, such as singer Sandro de América (on a cover of "Rompan todo" by the Shakers, an old Uruguayan band), stage actor Alfredo Alcón (on "30 denarios"), and comedian Jorge Luz (on "Cucamonga Dance").
Serú Girán 92 is the band's reunion album, arriving exactly ten years after their split. Despite being a big success, it's essentially a flat pop record, on which García gives his bandmates plenty of room, writing only two of the eleven songs himself. The two main singles, "Mundo agradable" and "Nos veremos otra vez", are both sung by Lebón.
The shows that follow, across Argentina and Uruguay, remain etched in the local collective memory, particularly the two at Buenos Aires' Estadio Monumental, which draw 80,000 people each. The double live album En vivo I & II (1993) is drawn from these performances.
While the tabloids and entertainment TV feasted on his aggressive behavior and ill-timed outbursts, often made while under the influence, García vented his inner chaos by releasing La hija de la lágrima (1994), whose artistic production, on the back cover, is credited directly to God.
The record sounds like an attempt to put up guardrails within a stream of consciousness. The tracklist runs to 23 tracks over 68 minutes, a good half of it taken up by instrumental interludes, obtained through studio improvisation and later cut up and layered together. The result is funky bass grooves with and without drum backing, ambient-electronic stews, acoustic arpeggios dissolving into空void, and passages of dissonant orchestration. Some of these episodes are striking (the cosmic-symphony scale of “Overture” is breathtaking), but overall there's a sense of an overabundance of abstract sketches, without direction, poorly blended with the actual songs, which remain the record's true highlights.
The tender Latin rhythm and blues of “Chipi Chipi” is the last track penned by the artist to become a classic of Argentine music, but a certain cult following has also grown around the electro-acoustic funk of “La sal no sala” (which sums up the author's existential dissatisfaction right from the title) and “Kurosawa”, a shape-shifting ballad for piano and acoustic guitar that pairs natural landscapes with romantic relationships, its second half bringing in kabuki theatre flute and Mellotron choirs.
The longest and most jagged track is “Fax U”, a post-blues derailment with an instantly catchy, fervently sung melody, pitting saturated tones (bass, keyboards) against violent acoustic-guitar strumming, with slow-motion interludes halfway between ambient and roots rock, and above all a final collapse of drums, interference and found voices. The title obviously plays on the assonance between “fax” and “fuck”, as well as on the contrast between wanting to reach the other person and the urge to seal off yet another relationship corroded by the inability to communicate: "I love teleportation, I'm much faster than you'd think. Non sei completamente inventata*, ti manca qualcosa, ti manca l'amore. Ti manca l'essere come i soldati che muoiono insieme al fronte, amore” (*To be understood as: in inventing you, something was left incomplete).
Finally there's room for "Locomotion", a cover of the classic by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, here transformed into a piece of sonic debris mangled by a band-pass filter and sudden interruptions, as if it were a shaky radio intercept from a post-apocalyptic world.
1995 proved particularly prolific: within just a few months came both Estaba en llamas cuando me acosté (an admittedly forgettable album of English-language covers, released under the name Casandra Lange, the band backing the artist at the time) and Hello! Mtv Unplugged (from the celebrated format enthusiastically embraced by Latin American rock artists), while the new album of original material, Say No More, was being finished, released in January of the following year.
This is García's last great record, an expressionist whirlpool in which late-20th-century music is ground up and spat back out in the form of collapsing android bodies, where flesh and technology violently interpenetrate, in what amounts to both an exorcism and a palingenesis of capitalist civilization and its intrusions into the private lives of those caught up in it.
The approach attempted on La hija de la lágrima finds greater systematic form here: no longer fully realized songs alternating with abstract sketches, but the overlapping of the two forms. The bulk of Say No More's tracklist is indeed made up of songs, but they are songs that keep collapsing in on themselves, clogging up with layers of distortion, sampling, out-of-tune instruments, and flashes of electronics. In some cases it's even hard to make out the structure of the lyrics, composed as they are of a conglomerate of sung parts and fake found voices, with collages of phone conversations and radio announcements almost entirely invented for the occasion and narrated by García himself (or by others present in the recording studio): as if trying to create a new form of acoustic pollution, an overabundance of information inspired by the real thing, but closer to the artist's own personal universe.
The album opens with “Estaba en llamas cuando me acosté” (a title borrowed from his recent covers album, though the track itself is previously unreleased): a minute of electronic hisses and effects, with a news report on a fire explosion, then a brief industrial march in which the artist sings the refrain (“Era in fiamme quando mi addormentai”), a calm, intimate verse with love lyrics, atmospheric interludes with symphonic keyboards, fretless bass and electric guitar sustain, more foreign, filtered and unsettling voices, bursts of struck aluminum sheets, breakbeats, chamber strings, all these elements piled together in a disorienting sensory tangle, over which García rises up shouting “Say no more!”. Underlining the sense of an uncontrolled stream of thought are samples from several Beatles songs, scattered here and there in the background, barely perceptible, evidence of a subconscious pounding its fists to surface, taking advantage of the conscious mind's disorientation.
What follows are atmospheric pop gems (“Canciones de jirafas”), reimagined jazz fusion (“Constant Concept”, like an organic deterioration of the Ecm sound), slow numbers built on post-minimalist string scores (the title track, with its heartfelt crescendo), a tango for the new millennium (“Cuchillos”, brushed drums mixed up front, subtle avant piano digressions, sax and bandoneón solos), an instrumental for digital organ and kora (“A1”, a brief but intense glimpse into African music), acid jazz built on breakbeat and sample (“Plan 9”), rock assaults that gradually crumble apart until they turn into ambient music (“Casa vacía”), and a collage-making festival (“Podrías entender”, essentially a reshuffling of “Estaba en llamas cuando me acosté”).
Among the guests is Andrés Calamaro, one of the stars of Argentine rock, launched by García in the early Eighties. The two write and sing together the heartland rock ride “Necesito un gol”.
Despite the commercial potential of many of the melodies, the constant sonic sabotage they're subjected to blunts their appeal, and for the first time since the days of Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, a García album fails to produce songs capable of sticking with a wide audience. The closest it comes is the choral folk-rock of “Alguien en el mundo piensa en mí”, one of the rare moments not excessively warped by the creative process.
Still, the overall impression is of a work of rupture, an act of courage from a musician at the height of his fame, and an important step in building the late García's menacing aesthetic — starting with the artwork: his silhouette hunched in an unnatural pose, and the famous symbol overlapping the initials of the phrase “Say No More”, which would become his motto from that point on. An invitation to add nothing further, to let his actions and his creations be enough, in contemplative silence: a demand to be worshipped like a deity, and feared as one.
The filtered vocal fragments scattered throughout the songs amount, in effect, to a catalogue of menacing lines (“Entry is free, we'll see about the climb”, “Maybe your flight will go down over the next meridian, and maybe your car crashed yesterday morning”) and self-celebrations (“The avant-garde is here”, “I'd like to speak with the most important voice Argentina has today […] Is Charly García there?”), seasoned with the odd existential question (“Do you remember the day you were born? Do you remember the day you first remembered something?”).
This is how a disturbing, subtly diabolical figure is definitively forged — one that had already begun to emerge years earlier: think of the opening of the video for “Filosofía barata y zapatos de goma”, in which the artist quoted — with a few changes — Jeff Goldblum's monologue on insect politics from David Cronenberg's “The Fly”, closing it with a warning to the viewer: “I'm telling you: go, before I hurt you”. With Say No More that terrifying insect-man is fully honed: no longer Kafkaesque, nor even Cronenbergian, but García-esque, with everything that implies (in all likelihood, a mask behind which to shield his own fragility, following the principle that attack is the best defence).
Perhaps seeking shelter from the toxic media storm, García takes refuge with the one figure among his acquaintances toward whom he has ever shown anything like reverence: Mercedes Sosa. A kind of great, affectionate spiritual mother to every musician of the generation after her, Sosa happily agrees to the collaboration. Mercedes Sosa canta Charly García: Alta fidelidad (1997) is explained by its very title: twelve García classics, reinterpreted by the veteran of Argentine song. The album is well received, but listening back today, Sosa's grand, stately delivery, while moving, doesn't quite mesh with the dynamism of García's style.
In terms of major creative breakthroughs on album, García's career is arguably over after Say No More: subsequent records, while still attempting a personal art-rock vision, come across as more subdued, and although they never lose their coherence or dignity, they give the impression of a warrior no longer much interested in venturing out of his own castle. Great songs scattered here and there will, of course, keep appearing.
From El aguante (1998), worth noting is “Kill My Mother”, sung in English: an epic in the vein of the most torrential Bob Dylan, about the clash García had with parental authority as a young man. In the closing section, packed with strings and saxophone, a self-quotation of “Transatlántico art déco”, from Pubis angelical (1982), surfaces.
In 2000 he briefly reunites with Nito Mestre for an album under the Sui Generis name: Sinfonias para adolescentes. In the spirited rock of the lead single, “El día que apagaron la luz”, the melody of “Transatlántico art déco” resurfaces once again.
For some reason obsessed with that little tune composed so long before, he slips it in once more during the keyboard solo at the heart of “Influencia”, a cover of Todd Rundgren's “Influenza” and the title track of the 2002 album. It's the only post-1995 song with which he manages to match the reach and staying power of his old classics. It hardly matters that it's a cover, given how original the reworking is: from the original's radio-friendly new wave to a futurist tango built on an electronic backing.
The best version, however, isn't the one on record but the one in the music video, which has been put through what can by now fairly be called the “Say No More process”: the instrumental backing is the same, but García sings over it ex novo, also adding distorted guitar noise, sounds captured during filming (a microphone falling, a chair being smashed, hand claps) and several spoken parts, his voice filtered as if coming through a phone.
Rundgren's original lyrics told of how his life was shaped by some outside force, left deliberately vague (a loved one, fate, the authorities?), while García pushes it further: in the sung part he embodies the one being influenced, while in the spoken part he stages the influencer — a terrifying, inescapable figure, a kind of primordial being crowning itself master of all that exists. “The avant-garde is here. My whim is law. Entry is free, we'll see about the climb. I am the emperor of the universe, I pull the strings” (note how some of these lines are lifted straight from the collages scattered across Say No More).
The video itself is memorable, with García thrusting toward the viewer his own hands, painted black and by now deformed by arthritis, miming the gesture of a puppeteer working his marionette. Toward the end, the emperor of the universe dissolves into shadow, his eyes blazing with a demonic red. The inner conflict that has fuelled the artist's inspiration for decades could hardly have been staged more knowingly.
“Asesíname”, on the other hand, is the standout track of Rock And Roll yo (2003), a baroque ballad driven by piano and electric organ. In the pre-chorus García sings: “Ho lasciato la tua immagine nel cassetto, ho mantenuto la tua anima nel Mellotron, voglio solo che tu mi dia il tuo amore col contagocce”. The choice of the Mellotron is particularly inspired: it is, after all, an electromechanical keyboard that simulates the sounds of other instruments using tapes stored inside it. Placing the soul of the loved one inside it is a symbolic representation of the desire to reproduce her, in order to stay in contact despite physical distance.
It takes seven years for the next record, during which the artist's health collapses: his voice, already in a precarious state, deteriorates completely, and circulatory and mobility problems emerge. From 2008 he tries to clean himself up and treat his body with care, but much of the damage has already been done. This doesn't stop him from continuing to play concerts, during which he starts performing seated, rather than moving around the stage as he once did. Finally, in 2010 Kill gil comes out (a mix of English and lunfardo that translates roughly as “Kill the Idiots”), which yields “King Kong” (electropop with a hint of the Far East) and little else.
Things go better with what is currently his latest effort, Random (2017), on which the artist finally seems to have found balance and peace. Reassuring, therapeutic ballads like “La máquina de ser feliz” and “Lluvia” unfold here, seasoned with the vocal embroidery of porteña singer-songwriter Rosario Ortega. In the first, García declares: “The machine for being happy is kept by the pope, I keep it”. After all, for someone who over the course of his career has crowned himself God and emperor of the universe, claiming to be pope sounds almost modest.
A fairly common belief among García's fans, so much so that it has become a cliché, is that García can't stand himself. It's one of the main arguments used, over time, to excuse every excess of his. The other two, as already mentioned, are the credit he earned during the dictatorship and the difficulty of managing his own genius – this last one all too apologetic.
It's nonetheless plausible that the artist's inner fragility lies at the root of much of his behavior. One of the most powerful symbols García uses to express his suffering is belonging to the Global South, experienced as a crystal trap and probably tied to an inferiority complex toward the culture of Europe and North America (after all, it's often said of him that if he'd been English he would be regarded as highly as the Beatles, much as Lucio Battisti is spoken of in Italy). As proof of this, his career is full of references to the ocean (which separates him from Europe), to the Southern Cross constellation, and by extension, through metonymy, to the cross of Christ (which carries with it the idea of the colonization and evangelization of the local natives): they can be found in “Boletos pases” by Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, in “Autos, jets, aviones, barcos” and “Los sobrevivientes” by Serú Girán, in “El karma de vivir al sur” and “No voy en tren”, to name just a few of the most obvious examples.
Argentine tabloids followed García's exploits for decades, to their own benefit and often with a moralizing tone. The list below covers some of the most curious and widely discussed events involving the artist, though it should be stressed that they are reported here purely for documentary purposes. The countless scuffles with paparazzi are excluded.
1987 – At the end of a concert in Mendoza, a tip-off informs the police of drug use backstage. García hears a violent knock at his dressing room door. “Who is it?” – “The police.” – “And is it my fault you didn't study?”;
1992 – During one of the Serú Girán reunion concerts, as the audience cheers Aznar's virtuoso playing, García has a jealous outburst. He announces into the microphone: “I'll leave you with him, he's good, he studied music at Berklee”, and walks off stage, only returning several minutes later. Aznar doesn't hold it against him: his affection for García is too great, and García, gruff as he is, has always returned it (he's the musician he sought out most often throughout his career);
1994 – On June 25th, Diego Armando Maradona is sent home from the World Cup after testing positive in a doping test. García calls the footballer to console him, and a great friendship is born from it (Maradona was, after all, a fan of his). A few months later García even records a song in his honor, together with blues guitarist Claudio Gabis (a former member of Manal). The song is titled “Maradona Blues” and is released in 1997 on Gabis's album, “Convocatoria II”;
1995 – During the recording of Say No More, García grows close to Monica, Andrés Calamaro's wife. It's her voice that provides the female narration heard in several parts of the record. Calamaro will later accuse the two of having slept together during those sessions, while García will categorically deny it and publicly insult him on several occasions. That's how the friendship between the two musicians comes to an end;
1999 – On June 30th he plays a short concert in the drawing room of the presidential residence. In power at the time is Carlos Saúl Menem, a centre-right Peronist, then under investigation for arms trafficking and responsible for the latest economic collapse. Many will ask García why he agreed to the proposal, and the artist will defend himself by saying that playing for someone doesn't mean endorsing their political choices;
2000 – On March 3rd, in what remains the most famous of his crazy stunts, García dives into a swimming pool, jumping from the ninth floor of the Hotel Aconcagua in Mendoza. He doesn't come away with so much as a bruise. Over the years he's offered various explanations for the stunt: “I was bored”, “I've done it many times, I like jumping”, “There was police outside the door” (wanting to question him about a bar fight the night before). The jump was caught on camera, since the cameras happened to be outside the hotel ahead of a minister's press conference due to be held there shortly after;
2007 – While Björk is in Argentina for some concerts, García tries to contact her to ask if she'd be interested in collaborating. A meeting is arranged between their respective managers, but it falls through. García then shows up at the restaurant of the hotel where she's staying, to try to convince her in person. Faced with the singer's indifference — she barely even greets him — he flies into a rage and smashes a glass of champagne on her. His manager drags him away before security arrives;
2010 – After the disappointing reception of the album Kill gil, García would defend himself by saying that audience tastes had changed and that at the time rock was being represented by bands of little worth, like Babasónicos. Babasónicos were actually the most vital and creative band in Argentine rock of the early 2000s, and they responded politely to García, saying they respected his music but did not appreciate his image as a capricious star who believes everything is permitted.
García's influence on the Argentine artistic scene is obviously enormous. Both indirectly (artists who drew on his style, from Fito Páez to Babasónicos themselves) and directly as a producer and talent scout: besides the musicians he brought into his bands (most notably Pedro Aznar, discovered in Buenos Aires clubs while still unknown), he produced the early albums of Crucis, Abuelos de la Nada, Twist, G.I.T., Andrés Calamaro, and Fabiana Cantilo. In short, some of the most important names on the local scene, across genres.
He is naturally one of the most critically acclaimed artists, having won the Gardel de Oro, the top honor for Argentine musicians, three times (2002, 2003, 2018). In 2009 he received a Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement. It's worth noting that both awards came during the final phase of his career.
Finally, as proof of the familiarity with which Argentines regard him, here is a list of nicknames he's picked up over the years: El flaco (the skinny one), used especially by fellow musicians, less so by the general public (also to avoid confusion with the other great Argentine known by that nickname: Luis Alberto Spinetta); El loco (the madman), for obvious reasons; García, by surname alone (used especially in the 1980s, and despite being one of the most common surnames among Spanish speakers, it was immediately clear who was meant and no one else); El bicolor (the two-tone one), because of the pigmentation of his mustache, caused by the vitiligo he had as a child, mentioned earlier.
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
