Luis Alberto Spinetta

The son of Austrian immigrants, Gubitsch was just eighteen years old, but that was enough to make him a guitar god. He possessed an almost unreal speed and cleanliness of execution, while still staying within the bounds of good taste thanks to his grounding in tango. A fusion of muscle and brain with very few rivals in the history of rock, not just Argentine rock. Spinetta was in love with his talent, and the sum of the parts produced what is perhaps the pinnacle of Argentine rock in the Seventies.

The protagonist of the lyrics is an ordinary man, a bus driver, who finds himself wandering through outer space in his vehicle, built on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and now converted into a makeshift space module ("With his fibreglass ship made in Haedo, yesterday a driver and today master among the masters of the air"). The story of Capitán Beto (short for Alberto) recalls, more than classic science fiction, the urban surrealism of Italo Calvino. There's a folkloric quality to the references to the customs and habits underpinning middle-class routine, and to the feelings of nostalgia and disorientation that arise from their absence. These are the building blocks of this everyday memorabilia: "A sad holy card", "the photo of Carlitos" (the tango actor and icon Carlos Gardel), the ritual of mate amargo (a bitter infused drink typical of Argentina and Uruguay), and the absent mother figure, whom the Milky Way doesn't seem able to make up for ("Where is that place everyone calls heaven? If no one comes all the way here to share a couple of amargos with me, like on the doorstep of the old house"). As so often happens in poetry, the science-fiction element is a pretext for questioning the meaning of existence, in this case with a melancholy intimacy that draws close to tango even on a philosophical and psychological level, not just a musical one.

Although it speaks of alcohol and liquor, it does so with romanticism ("Wine warms up dreams, panting from its mouth of greenish sweetness"), describing the drowsy, expectant state of the lover: "Red and green, the lights of love, work their magic beneath a halo of lipstick". A sort of traffic light of permissions and prohibitions in the game of seduction, which, in an erotic language indebted to tango, resolves into an oxymoronic image: "My voice will reach her, and so will my mouth. Perhaps I'll confess to her that you were the trace of the future".

Next comes the ethereal ballad "Doscientos años", with a voice padded with echo and a Gubitsch solo that shows how even speed can convey delicacy.

The line "Two hundred years, what was the point of swimming across the sea?" was probably inspired by the feat of the Argentine Antonio Abertondo, who in 1961 completed a round trip across the English Channel. Spinetta questions the futility of certain human endeavours, while at the same time acknowledging a personal epic rich with a collective symbolic dimension. As in a multi-layered construction, though, it's also likely that the phrase alludes to the bicentennial of the independence of the United States, the first republic of the New World, celebrated that very year, 1976, perhaps with a critical nod to the treatment of Native Americans.

The lyrics are so evocative that they are still mistakenly regarded today as an outcry against the dictatorship and a dedication to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were in fact founded only the following year. "The swallows of Plaza de Mayo leave in winter, return in summer, and if you watch them, you'll understand that they only fly in freedom".