Serú Girán

Charly García is one of the legends of Spanish-language rock. A national idol in Argentina, he played in several bands throughout the Seventies before launching his solo career at the start of the following decade.

Serú Girán was his third band (fourth if you count the one-off PorSuiGieco project): for background on what came before their formation, we refer you to the monograph already on OndaRock. Suffice it to say here that Serú Girán were born in 1978 from the ashes of Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, one of the cult bands of local progressive rock. After that band split, García flew off to Brazil with his friend and guitarist David Lebón (former member of Pescado Rabioso), to join the exiled Billy Bond (a politically committed singer who, after the 1976 coup, found the atmosphere so intimidating that he wanted to leave the country).

The two enlisted Bond as producer and brought back drummer Oscar Moro from the Máquina lineup. They then remembered a promising young musician, still little known: bassist Pedro Aznar, who had impressed them live on the Buenos Aires club circuit. Reunited in São Paulo, the quartet decided to call themselves Serú Girán: two meaningless words, plucked from a made-up language García had been sketching out at the time and never finished.

After a self-titled debut released in 1978 under Bond's wing, the band returned to Argentina and recorded "Grasa de las capitales", released in the summer of '79. This time it was García in the producer's chair, for a record made with virtually no outside input beyond sound engineer Amílcar Gilabert.

The title, literally "The Fat of the Capitals", is an unvarnished critique of the most deplorable aspects of big cities: urban dehumanization, ecological pollution, cultural decay ("grasa", in local slang, also refers to the vulgarity of the newly enriched 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 trips to Europe. Having imagined it as a hub of innovation, he found that even there the artistic avant-garde occupied a small niche, squeezed between tabloids and lowbrow mainstream culture. The cover itself is a parody of those glossy magazines.

The title track packs an impressive number of ideas into just four and a half minutes. A two-part introduction (a long one with a cappella harmonized vocals, followed by a shorter instrumental section) leads into a sung section containing at least four mini-verses, each marked by different chord progressions (major, minor, ascending, descending in semitones) and sudden rhythmic shifts, both in tempo and time signature (the 12/8 under the "No se banca mas" refrain, which appears around 1'30", breaks up the 4/4 on either side of it). The third mini-verse is the most unexpected, with García - riding a space-disco backing track - launching into an outright rap (note that the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" wouldn't come out for a few more months), 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 of the hi-hat, before the closing group vocal. The track is also notable as the first example of García's self-quoting habit: at 2'10" the piano reprises, albeit in disguised form, the theme from Sui Generis's "Tango en segunda" (García's first band). 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 laying down a Jeff Porcaro-style groove while Aznar and Lebón duel between fretless bass and acoustic guitar, spells out the band's message even more clearly: "If there's no more edge in the music you listen to, if the lyrics have lost their spark, if turning up the volume no longer brings any force, it's the times that 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 1979 of a regime that, without officially banning rock music, demonized it through propaganda and stifled it through abuse of power (including physical abuse, with the police's complicity): seen that way, they become a generation's cry for freedom.

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 the former singing and playing every instrument except drums (which appear, in fact, for only 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 a not-yet-twenty-year-old Aznar 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 must one do to keep from going mad?" Aznar would later say of it: "Those were the days when we thought jazz would change the world." Not hippie counterculture, not stadium rock, not punk nihilism, but an intimate, ecumenical art form, steeped in a long tradition yet always open to crossovers, innovation and multi-ethnic 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 indeed a dramatic ballad opened by fretless bass and building to a majestic crescendo of layered keyboards, distorted guitars, riffs and solos. Without ever spelling it out, it conjures the ghosts of the first desaparecidos: "This darkness, this dog's night, this loneliness that will soon kill you. [...] Sometimes I think of your laughter. It's already too late and I'm tired of crying."

It is García, however, who wrote and sang the song that infuriated the authorities to the point of banning it from radio and television - which, in a fitting twist, only fueled its enormous popularity with the public: "Viernes 3 AM". Called by Spinetta 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. From the very first verse, it opens by 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 lovers and music and ideas. You've changed sex and God, color and border, but in yourself, nothing more will 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 this is the moment the protagonist carries out the extreme act, the deepest point of the night, equidistant from both the echo of the clubs where the evening was spent and the first light of dawn. There's a certain dissonance in the fact that such a black hole should take the shape of a gentle piano ballad steeped in 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 regardless: "Los sobrevivientes". Here he sings of the hope of one day seeing light at the end of the regime's tunnel: "We'll never have roots, we'll never have a home, and yet, as you can see, this is our place. We vibrate like bells, like churches drawing closer from the south, like black clothes 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, and in the closing jam, acoustic guitar and a Moog bass synth, briefly standing in for Aznar.

The album thus also polishes off what little was left to fix from the first one, establishing itself among the masterpieces of progressive rock bordering on jazz-rock, thanks partly to a run of untouchable songs and partly to a deluxe production achieved with 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 bass and saturating Moro's toms.

Serú Girán would last another three albums (two studio, one live) before splitting up in 1982. A one-off reunion in 1992, though a great commercial success, failed to recapture their creative glory days: García was by then too focused on his solo career, saving his best material for his own records.

Note – The album is listed in many catalogs (as well as on some streaming services) as "La grasa de las capitales", but on closer inspection the initial article never actually appeared on the cover, either during the vinyl era or in the CD reissues.

The article does, however, appear from the very start within the tracklist, in the title of the opening song: an admittedly trivial difference, for what is, to all intents and purposes, the album's title track.

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04/10/2020