In 1982, tickets to see the concerts of Serú Girán In the works They said “RECORDERS OR CAMERAS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ENTER”, so in all caps. Thankfully some didn’t pay attention, and thanks to that we can now enjoy unedited images and audio in the documentary 40 years after “Don’t cry for me, Argentina”, recently released on the band’s official channel on YouTube.
The first part of the story is more or less known: at the end of 1981, Pedro Aznar announced that he was leaving the band he was part of with Charly García, David Lebón and Oscar Moro, to study at Berklee College, the largest music school important in the world.
After closing the year at the Teatro Coliseo, playing at the La Falda Festival and touring the coast, decided to schedule four shows at Obras Stadium to fire the bassiston 5, 6 (two performances) and 7 March 1982.
The band, at its best, intended to stop for eight months until Pedro’s return. Another alternative was to replace him with the great Uruguayan bass player Beto Satragni, but -as Charly always said- to cover Aznar you needed a bass player, a keyboard player and a singer.
A) Yes, what would have been eight months of impasse for the band ended up being 10 years, and that farewell to Pedro was farewell to Serú Girán.
The record of the shows of 82
The record of these recitals has been included in Do not Cry for Me Argentina, Serú’s first “live” album, and the quotes are not whimsical, because the recording has been retouched so much that little is left of the original. So, one of the questions fans have been asking for four decades has been, “What did the band really sound like at their farewell?”
And only now has the answer come, thanks to the almost archaeological work of Lautaro Guido Pavia and Gustavo Garcia.
“I always look for difficult figures and one of the challenges was to answer this question, to understand why they composed the album so much in the studio,” says Pavía, journalist, director and, for 23 years, collector of unreleased recordings.
The latter passion united him to Gustavo Garcíawho with a portable recorder had recorded with surprising quality the four functions of the farewell.
In addition to classic and little-played songs, from these recordings comes audio proof of one of the most repeated anecdotes of Argentine rock: when Charly saw a policewoman and a plainclothes officer take someone from the audience, he told them to leave the stadium and leave people alone or they would stop playing. Something that in full dictatorship had incalculable consequences.
“Seven years ago I could have uploaded that audio to YouTube, but it wouldn’t have had the true value it has,” notes Pavía, who collects unedited material for Serú’s official networks.
Other pearls and unpublished images
Another of the many pearls that can be heard 40 years after “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” It’s Charly yelling “Long live the virus!” in Support for the Moura Brothers gangthat she had been insulted a week earlier when she was playing on that same stage.
The images that could be saved from the farewell are eight minutes in Super-8 format contribution by Jorge Gallo, a film student who went to the recital invited by a friend, without having the slightest idea of what Serú Girán was.
The documentary has the testimony of the journalist Alfred Red, and with three glories “on the other side” of rock, who accompanied Serú in those days.
I am: the illuminator Juan José Quaranta (“To my Forty I gave my love, turn off the lights ’cause it’s so hot,” Charly sings in straws), sound engineer Amilcar Gilabertand the sound engineer Gustav Gauvrywho also provided some unreleased recordings rescued from the shows.
Among them we can count Eiti Leda Y Do not Cry for Me Argentinaplus a demo of Charly and David in English from Go from bed to living rooma song that would later be part of García’s first solo album.
While in other countries hours and hours of concerts were kept, which today allows you to see old bands with a simple search on YouTube, in Argentina the archive was despised and almost everything was lost, except -obviously- for those who were encouraged to disobey the legend printed on the tickets.
“With the immediacy of now, everyone expects something to be uploaded in HD, on consoles and with four cameras, but recovering these things is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Pavía, who, despite everything, promises much more needles .
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Source: Clarin
