Buenos Aires, Argentina. Christmas ’85 was hours away, when an ascendant Fito Páez (who a week earlier had filled his first Luna Park with his debut album, from 63) receives terrible news in the house of Estomba y la Pampa, which he shared with Fabiana Cantilo in the Villa Urquiza neighborhood: the death of Rodolfo Páez, Sr.
His mother had died of cancer when he was only 8 months old, and this new tragedy found him completely orphaned before he was 25.
In the midst of that desolation and sadness, Fito Páez makes art with his dagger. Imagine a new encounter beyond their parents’ earthly plane, where they end up flying free, away from all evil and pain (Here they are, part of the air, alone in freedom). A love story crossed over time, which defeats death to live in eternity.
That love story that for Rodolfo was never tangible (obviously he had no memories of them together) first became poetry and then song, until it became track 3 of the second album by La la la, the double album with which he recorded Louis Alberto Spinetta in 1986.
“Through the milky way they will meet, on some planet somewhere, where people and their hearts go, where the years and this pain go and where I go, I don’t care I already come from two rivers bordering the sea “, He says. masterfully the ballad with folk tunes at its peak.
Located in an iconic national rock album, in which melodies as experimental as fantastic coexist, with Arlitian and bourgeois lyrics, this song appears as a breath of clean and clear air.
The piece has a marked style inherited from the Argentine coast, which begins with a beautiful piano by Fito and a string arrangement that immediately takes you to the shores of the Paraná, contrasting with a record that takes you from Prince to Piazzolla without stopping.
Two rivers flowing into the sea
His parents are a key part of Fito Páez’s worldview and creative development. His mother, Margarita Ávalos, had been a teacher and pianist.. That piano which after his first death has become not only a symbol of absence, but also an artistic impetus and a link with that maternal love that had been interrupted.
Don Rodolfo Páez was a municipal administrative employee, music lover and cinema lover. The author recounts that his approach to the visual and auditory arts began thanks to his father.
Besides, he says so too he learned to read by listening to the Beatles, Goyeneche and Yupanquias they leafed through routine stories that appeared in the folders he brought from work (He left me some records in the closet, a silver watch and a samurai, all detailed in a filesays the letter).
This union between routine, pianos, death, absence, cinema and silences found a very receptive child who, with music as part of the air, was forming from the poetic and the human.
There was another boy friend of Fito who accompanied him during those years. Fabián Gallardo, great musician and nodal part of “La Trova Rosarina”, remembers for clarion the emotion he felt when he first heard the song, even the moment he played it live.
“I remember playing it in the few concerts we did with la la la. The lyrics moved me a lot. She touched me very closely, as I knew the story very well ”.
He adds: “Also, musically it’s a work of art with beautiful arrangements. I played live that keyboard with which I started, something absolutely unique and, as if that weren’t enough, with Flaco Spinetta on my right, these are things that will remain in my memory forever”, recalls Gallardo.
That house of muses and dreams
Those were troubled years, not only in Fito’s life, but also in a country that had rediscovered democracy only a couple of years earlier and was struggling between ghosts of the past and the future.
In this context, that old English house located in a corner almost on the border with Belgrano, served as a refuge (metaphorical and real) for many of the artists who came (mainly from Rosario) to Buenos Aires; and songs like this, they were direct daughters of that environment of literary and musical factories.
Paul Dourge, Fito’s key bassist on his first two albums and a resident of that house for a while, recalls those days as “a celebration of music and happiness”.
When asked about the genesis of that song, he hesitates and apologizes saying that “it’s been many years”, but adds: “I remember that many times he borrowed a small keyboard with which he composed many of those songs from bed. In fact we got together to play part of what would later be the album in that house”.
“We were very young and with an inexhaustible creative capacity. I remember the study we did in the living room with Titti Gonzalez’s father and other musicians. A lot of those songs were born there, with musicians coming and going all the time, was a branch of Rosario in Buenos Aires”.
In various interviews, Fito recounts that in that same house “El Flaco” heard that song and that it moved him to tears, it was also recorded by Mercedes Sosa who performed it live and recognized it as “one of his favourites”. Another artist who recorded it was a great friend of Fito, Liliana Herrero.
Although Fito does not usually do it in his concerts, since it is a piece that needs a large orchestra (and is much more friends with the pause that gives nostalgia than with the strength that punctuates a concert), it is in the hearts of the fans, who occasionally they are lucky enough to relive that love story that not even death could defeat.
The years after la la la have not been easy for the author of circus beat. The murder of his grandmother and great aunt (together with the woman who worked in his house, 7 months pregnant), would find him again in the dark a short time later, at that moment the city of poor hearts Another extraordinary Fito was beginning to take shape, bleeding poetry everywhere, but that’s another story.
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Source: Clarin
