Soda Stereo: Argentine drink made with British cane
By Gerardo Guarache Ocque // @gagueando
Approaching Cerati is to enter Soda Stereo, and vice versa. Like so many musicians of his generation, the leader of the most representative band of Latin American rock, author of the songs, voice, frontman and guitar, grew musically under the omnipresent umbrella of The Beatles . He used to remember, like a black and white snapshot, that three school friends and he, brooms in hand, played John , Paul , Ringo and George playing " Twist and Shout " in front of an invisible audience.
Beyond sowing in his head the image of a successful band, an idea that crystallized like no one in this Spanish-speaking corner of the planet, The Beatles sneaked through their songs like the branches of an invasive tree. We can see its aroma in certain recesses of the work of Soda Stereo , sometimes in an almost imperceptible way, in others of notorious form. Perhaps it will be more evident in the final stage, in songs like " Planta " of Sueño Stereo (1995), with only one to the Harrison ; Or " Superstar, " with a melody close to " She said she said " by Lennon , or suddenly in the version of " She used my head like a revolver " of Comfort and music to fly (1996) with I Am the walrus "?
Plant (Sueño Stereo, Soda Stereo, 1995)
When we speak of influences in art, we do not necessarily refer to winks. Those signs are just clues to solve the riddle. Coordinates to locate in the mapping of a cluster. We do not speak of a phrase of Cortazar here and another of Borges over there, that there are. It is not the simple fact that Soda ever released a fragment of "I want you (she's so heavy)" or that when she finished "Fall the Sun", in the last River of September 1997, she dropped a Riff of "Here comes the sun ". No. It is rather an essence that impregnates consciously or unconsciously the work, in its concept, in its harmonies, in its way of facing the office.
" There are many possible ways," said Cerati on television in the middle of the last decade, " the same musicians and artists of all kinds are dedicated to investigate a little what has happened there, and take back some way of those. No one is actually inventing anything zero. And above, it's pop music; I am not pretending to carry the banner of the vanguard, much less. I leave that to those who really do. I have a lot of respect for them because they are people that expand the limits of what can be done . "
It is not crazy to say, saving distances, separating the times and respecting the disparate dimensions of both phenomena: the story of Soda Stereo was quite similar to that of The Beatles .
Both were groups that transcended, became internationalized and, once they achieved a major peak of fame, opted for a risky shortcut, their path and not that dictated by the label, the market or the public. Perhaps it would have been easier to continue writing songs with the cut of the first stage and to repeat a formula of sticky choirs that had borne fruit. But no. The Beatles were not like that. Soda Stereo either. They preferred to open the doors to another route and invite their followers, it was up to them whether they accompanied them or not. They deprived themselves of the desire to always make the best possible album based on what they had learned. They opted to open the stereo dream, create the dimension ...
Out of context
The adolescence of Cerati , Zeta Bosio and Charly Alberti took place in the 70's, the years of Charly Garcia with Sui Generis , La Máquina de Pájaros and Serú Girán , a powerful presence in the environment. However, the first, the composer, he said many times, was always closer to Luis Alberto Spinetta , perhaps the most direct influence, in his sound, his lyrics, his search as an artist.
Curiously, the effects of that influence of the national rock became more palpable from Animal song (1990), with a decade of average. In the (un) plugged MTV took advantage of paying tribute. Inside a revamped and electrified "Tea for three" , they inserted a fragment of "Cementerio Club" of the disc Artaud of Spinetta with Pescado Rabioso (1973) - by the way, Cerati had taken " Bajan " of that same album to versionarla in Amor yellow (1993), his first work as a soloist.
Cemetery Club (Artaud, Rabcado Fish, 1973)
In the show broadcast on television and eventually sold as a DVD they also rescued " Genesis " from The Bible (1971) by Vox Dei . A true moment of worship for Argentine rockers.
Genesis (The Bible, Vox Dei, 1971)
As they retrace their steps, all Soda roads lead to England. The Ritchie Blackmore ( Deep Purple ) and David Gilmour ( Pink Floyd ) guitars kept the young Cerati busy. He also paid attention to The Who , King Crimson and Yes , to what Led Zeppelin did and to what Hendrix had left, one of the few Americans who belonged to his personal Olympus. It consumed the psychedelia that would so much exhale in the future. He shaped his ideas like playing with plasticine, formed small groups to play at parties of friends, musicalized school events, played blues in a bar and another teamed up with girls to make disco and funk. He tried everything.
Purple Haze (Are You Experienced ?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, 1967)
Cerati , Bosio and Alberti entered the 1980s gobbling up The Police . The albums Outlandos d'Amour , Reggatta de Blanc and Zenyatta Mondatta were produced between November 1978 and October 1980, two months after the three performances of the British trio in Buenos Aires.
Roxanne (Outlandos D'Amour, The Police, 1978)
" Seeing them live was an awakening, " Cerat said. He considered one of the milestones in his career to be reunited with drummer Vinnie Colaiuta , a member of the Sting band in a long time, and guitarist Andy Summers , a Protagonist of this police story, to do the Spanish version of " Bring on the night ".
The debut album by Soda Stereo , released in 1984, just after the fall of the military dictatorship and when the wounds of Las Malvinas were still open, is a consequence of all the learning of that moment. They absorbed the sound of Sting , Copeland and Summers, producing songs like " A missile in my closet ", " My girlfriend has biceps " or " Tele-Ka ". Nevertheless, they were connected with ska , two-tone move and groupings like The Specials . That explains the crazy sound of "You need vitamins" and satires like "Why can not I be a jet-set?" And "Dietetic." They placed themselves in the counterculture, criticizing perfumed agendas and skimmed minds .
From The Dog (BBC In Concert: Live At Paris Theater, The Specials, 1979)
I'd rather follow in your footsteps
David Bowie , admired by the three musicians, floated over them all the way, not so much in the concrete, but in that eagerness - also very beatle - to always do something different. Soda played ska but did not want to be a ska band. He wore a suit, liked it, used it for a couple of nights, and by the following weekend he was throwing it away and baking a new one. In her shows as a soloist, Cerati used to greet the man behind Ziggy Stardust with little " Changes " pills, which she released on the tour of Here We Go (2006), or " Rebel Rebel ", embedded in "The Exception " in The days of Fuerza natural (2010). This he did in the last show he gave in his life, in Caracas, minutes before the misfortune.
Ashes to Ashes (Scary Monsters, David Bowie, 1980)
The Soda Stereo of Nothing Personal (1985) was more located in the global context of new wave proposals like Siouxsie And The Banshees or Talking Heads , and showed the effects of post-punk that U2 cultivated in albums like Boy (1980) and October 1981). " Echoes ", for example, is the result of songs like " Out of Control " or " Fire ". That band was not so much like the one that recorded " Overdose of TV " a year before, and the latter already looked like adolescents with acne crisis in front of those who made the third album.
Signos , from 1986, comes after a trio vacation in France, Spain and, of course, England, the womb. What did they produce when they returned? " Persiana americana ", " En camino ", " Final black box " ... The band was growing fast and Cerati already had the luxury of starting a song saying: And yet ...
En camino (Signos, Soda Stereo, 1986)
The first stage, since the debut and especially in Nothing personal , Signos and the tour that ended in White noise , is marked in the sound and, similarly, in the image, by The Cure , also British band, just in case. Robert Smith's third album and his group of makeup artists, Pornography (1982), captivated them like millions of restless young people of the moment, artists and not artists. Also the sixth, The Head On The Door (1985), which contains " In between days " and " Close to me ", and the seventh one, Kiss me kiss me kiss (1987), were reference works for a lot of people . And the Argentine trio voluntarily went up to that nice and dark wave at the same time.
One Hundred Years (Pornography, The Cure, 1982)
Fate brought them to Bowie's guitarist Carlos Alomar , and in 1988 the musicians traveled to New York to work on Double Life , produced by the Puerto Rican who worked with Mick Jagger , Iggy Pop and Paul McCartney . Pure unknown. As the music became more sophisticated and introspective, and its most exquisite references - " Corazón delator " unequivocally refers to the writer Edgar Allen Poe -, the fame grew, went from the million sold albums and did a national tour of 30 shows, Followed by a strenuous Latin American tour.
A profaner
Amateur blogs and ghostly Youtube channels, mostly unable to distinguish between plagiarism and winking, copy and veiled homage, theft and intention to continue a route already initiated, often doubt the authenticity and creativity of Soda Stereo . It's kind of suspicious of Michael Jordan's ability to play basketball. Art is, to a large extent, recycling. And the artist, to convey an idea, feeling, message or impulse, reuses. Warhol did not design the Campbell Soup Tin. Simply change the site.
The trigger of the questionings is the sequence of chords that Cerati plays on his acoustic guitar in the version of " A missile in my wardrobe ", presented in the show for MTV that became in the album Comfort and music to fly . The ska , rescued from its self-titled debut album of 1984, was put together in a kind of mash-up with the chords of " Chrome Waves " by British band Ride and thus became another song.
It was a sort of sample , like the one made for the " Zoom " base, which comes from " New York Groove " by Hello , another English grouping. As writers do with works they cherish, he extracted fragments of their original context that acquired new meanings in their own stories.
The sampling and experimentation with electronics was another source of ideas for Cerati , especially after working with Colores santos with Daniel Melero , an album that had an effect on Dynamo (1992), the album with the most poisoned guitars of the whole Soda discography . The synthetic remained important in the artist's toolbox. Sueño Stereo - verbigracia, songs like " X Playo " and " Moiré " reflect it - and much of his solo work.
Moirè (Sueño Stereo, Soda Stereo, 1995)
Cerati's antenna was always very wide and over time became more sensitive, especially to capture resources unrelated to the music he made with Bosio and Alberti . The three engaged to such an extent that, although they wanted to be a quartet, they always had to remain as a trio. At the point of creativity and good taste, they built a reference catalog for millions of young people who, from basements and garages in Latin America, dreamed and dreamed of rock and roll . Now they are the pillars, The Beatles , Pink Floyd , The Police of many.
