Porteño blues

Latin Beat Magazine, May, 1997 by D. Thomas Moon

Like no other music, the blues laughs and cries all at once. It expresses both hope and faith in the face of social horror, and this alluring mixture of joy and sorrow, faith and despair, bas proved irresistible to audiences around the world.

Most are familiar with its Anglicized forms. In fact, many fans gained their initial knowledge of the blues secondhand via the recordings of North American groups like the Butterfield Blues Band or English bands such as Fleetwood Mac or John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Few, however, are aware of the unsung blues bands that have sprung up since the late sixties in the Southern Hemisphere, where the blues is more often than not a way of life as opposed to a hipster pose.

Like the inglorious context in which African-American blues originated, Latin American blues has its beginnings in the intensely repressive political climate of Buenos Aires, Argentina. As military dictatorships thrived in the late sixties and seventies, disaffected young musicians were honing their blues chops and composing poignant songs to express their angst and discontent.

"The first blues in Castellano [Spanish] was Avellaneda Blues, recorded by the group Manal," recalls Argentine singer/ composer Gustavo Santaolalla, who is now a record producer in Los Angeles. Featuring the bull-froggish voice of Javier Martínez and the stinging, jazz-inflected guitar lines of Claudio Gabis, the melancholy song lyrically tells the tale of a tortured musician's soul, a stream of consciousness account of the grim realities at hand.

Similar themes of depression, desolation and defiance abound in other examples of early Argentine blues. One project, La Pesada's double LP Buenos Aires Blues, included an inner sleeve graphic of Buenos Aires in ruins. "Even though the people don't want to understand [the destruction], we're doing it to ourselves day by day," said the album's producer Javier Martínez at the time the album was released.

"The lyrics are the synthesis of what the city is, from the point of view of the blues." In Pedro and Pablo's anthemic March de la Bronca (Riot March), an antiestablishment rallying cry taunts, 'Riot when they smile, satisfied because they've bought your rights; when they become moralists and make the artists flee... [They] mark the cards and receive the best: With the ace of spades they rule us and with the ace of clubs they hit and beat us.' Such was the price paid by musicians and fans alike at concerts, where attendance was perceived by authorities to be an act of insurrection. The enigmatic guitarist Luis Alberto Spinetta, who penned such blues classics as Cementario club and Blues de cris, was even known to perform with a gyrating signal light strapped to his back in simulation of the police vehicles that would regularly cart off those in attendance at the shows.

"It really, really got bad from '74 on," recalls Santaolalla. "Back then, they would put people in jail at every single concert -- take 50, 100 people out. Some people got beat up, stuff like that. They really wanted to make your life miserable." But like the blues in its original historical context, there is also a celebratory and often comic side to these early experiments in Latin blues. In an almost tasteless bit of hokum/double entendre entitled Me gusta este tajo, Pescado Rabioso's [Rabid Fish's] vocalist reveals how his lover's beautiful legs inspire him to "purge the big city of all of its shit," while Sui Generis' Mr. Jones, o Pequeña semblanza de una familia tipo americana [Mr. Jones, or a Short Profile of a Model American Family] tells a detailed, tongue-in-cheek tale of a mass-murdering couple who feed their children dogs and cats from the neighborhood. At the conclusion of the latter (a rock-a-blues complete with a James Burton-esque guitar break and shouts and howls from the band), the police come to take the family away, to Mr. Jones' surprise. "I don't know why the sergeant's taking us away," Mr. Jones says in a first-person plea that is repeated in the final eight bars. "After all, we're just a normal family." Proof that social commentary was never far from the surface in even the most lighthearted blues compositions.

While the lyrical content of early Argie blues was an absolute expression of the lives of the people who were performing it, there were some who were more heavily focused on the music itself. Multi-instrumentalist David Lebon was one who would frequently bounce from band to band, beginning with his affiliations with Cactus member Carmine Appice in the United States. He was the Nicky Hopkins of Buenos Aires. His was the perpetual search for the right sound, which culminated in a successful career as a pop solo artist.

Perhaps the most talented blues musician of all was Pappo, founding member of the popular group Pappo's Blues. "I think he really knew the blues language, even though he played metal too," notes Santaolalla. "He could play one note and you could feel the content of that note. That's what makes great blues musicians. The bending and vibrato says a lot." His instrumental Stratocaster Boogie, to give but one example, is a tour de force that reminds one of a youthful Eric Clapton. Like Clapton, Pappo was driven by a muse of malcontent, criticized by his co-patriots for his unwavering desire to leave Argentina in pursuit of the authentic item. "I don't listen to the music here, and I'm not interested," Pappo would often say, as if to intentionally outrage loyalist fans. While he never followed through on his threat to "leave Buenos Aires, never to return," he did succeed in gaining at least momentary musical bliss while playing at B.B. King's side.