Fito Páez and I: the stories of the fans who went to visit him in Vélez

Fito Páez once again blew up the Vélez Stadium with El amor después del amor, three decades later. In a movement that began through the networks and with a taste for the epic. His fans had asked the singer-songwriter to return to the place where the best-selling album in the history of national rock vibrated like never before.

The idea seemed as impossible as it was inevitable. The eight recitals at the Movistar Arena dedicated to the record had been too few. Those huge 14 songs that a 30-year-old Fito Páez inspired by his love for Cecilia Roth, stayed with us for life, and we had to celebrate them in the same place at that time.

That’s why what seemed like a fantasy came true on April 1 and 2, 2023. Those unforgettable days of April 24 and 25, 1993 had marked a generation with fire.

Those were tough times, both political and social. A society that has stumbled upon the splinters of hyperinflation and has turned to the inequalities of the market economy. At the moment, Fito Páez has become a flag by others who dreamed of a different reality, another way of feeling things.

The return to Velez

Today, that the century after those years has passed by almost a quarter, Fito and his followers have returned to the same place, to shout the same things. Many who had left with their parents returned with their children.. Maybe a little pogo will hurt more the next day, but that doesn’t matter. The essential thing is to keep demonstrating that there is always love after love.

clarion She chatted with Daniel, Ariela, Eugenia and Walter, who were there in 1993 and 2023, to see how life and their lives lead them back to where it all began. As a foundation of principles, as an unbreakable dogma, they wave their shirts once again to roll my life or enlighten the Amalfitans inside Brilliant on the mic.

And is that although it is always late in the city, someone had to remind us that “No one can and no one should live without love.”

Daniel Morales (35): “I dream of that Fito be a meeting place with my son, as it was with my father”.

That April of ’93, Daniel was only five years old. He went with his father, a doctor from Rosario, and his mother, a housewife, from Buenos Aires. They had met when he came to reside in the city. She fell in love with both him and the music he carried in his purse. So much so that that day in Vélez he was on crutches for having broken his leg a few days ago.

Daniel smiles when he remembers that craziness with his parents. Laughter breaks out of his voice. that play it symbolizes for him an emblem of his childhood and it shows. “I was just a boy full of illusions, with so much magic to discover and ready to meet a Fito who always played at home. He and El Negro Roberto Fontanarrosa have been with us all day.”

After laughter, emotion accompanies the memory. She immediately mentions the lack of her father, who died in 2020 due to Covid “We have always gone with him and this time he wasn’t there”.

Even if the absences hurt, he says he had an “unforgettable” night. That it was with his son and his sister, because his mother wasn’t in town and his wife had a fever even though she “saw it on stream.” This time he went to the audience and was very moved by the song selection and the guest artists (mainly David Lebón).

Even when the artist has hushed up the whole stadium to be made I come to offer my heart, a cappella. “It was a silence that brought us all together.” Daniel is a lawyer from Lomas de Zamora. He also works in the judiciary and as a university professor. He was a father a year ago and dreams of passing the love on to Fito for another generation.

“Fito is my life, it’s my story. When I first went I was a boy and today I’m a father who dreams of being able to share that wonderful music with his son like my old man did with me. Life has changed a lot, but deep down I think I’m looking for the same thing that every father looks for, a place of encounter and love. And that is what Fito transmits”.

The man who understands women

“No one has understood me all these years like Fito”, says Ariela Dominguez (46). Ariela was 16 years old in 1993. She was accompanied by “Monsi” who is her “lifelong friend”. She remembers the joy of that day, the beginning with the drums, the dimming lights and the illuminated crosses tombs of glory; but above all to be able to see live who was for her “her flag and her model”.

Ariela points out that her fanaticism for Páez comes from “her whole life”. “Ever since my grandmother accompanied me to see it inside Badia and Co.; and will continue for the rest of her life,” she points out. Among the memories that come to her mind is one in which the recital was broadcast live on Channel 13 and her boyfriend had recorded it for her, but that she he never got to see because he didn’t have a VCR and “was ashamed to tell him.”

Now he says he reevaluates those songs and finds new meaning in them.

Today he is employed in a cell phone company. She is married and is the mother of a boy who recently “moved in with her girlfriend”. This time she was alone. “My husband is already tired, he doesn’t want to see him anymore,” she says.

For Eugenia Sastre (46), “Fito Páez was The soundtrack of my life”. He discovered it in the late 80s and early 90s. The fanaticism was transmitted to her sister who was the one who accompanied her to Vélez. “She has always been my adventure partner,” she says. I was just in my second year of high school at the time.

“In ’93 Fito was a 30-year-old, long-haired, rocker, transgressor, shitting on social mandates. That was what made me fall in love with it”, says Eugenia who now works in an accountancy firm, but also likes to sing and she dreams that one day Fito will listen to her.

“Fito was present in the most difficult moments of my life. He made me happier than any other person, as an artist, as a person, as everything, “says the person who met him in 2004 while recording the video Bello Abril.

The Rosary that was always near

Walter Jaime Torres (45) says the artist “touched me in the same spot as he did 30 years ago”. Walter went solo to the April concerts in 1993. He took up the stall at the top south and at just 15 traveled from Temperley to Liniers. He is remembered as a restless boy and national rock fan (and says it stays the same). He focuses on how happy he was that day even though he was robbed on his one and only time out.

“Fito was always with me. He’s the soundtrack of my life, how could he not be there?”, he explains excitedly. It’s amazing to relive it. And realizing that I’m still passionate, that mobilizes me. That we are present and continue to dream as we have been for a long time and that as he says “Life as it comes goes” (Piluso themedi Fito, dedicated to Alberto Olmedo).

The years have transformed him into a chef (another of his passions). This time he was accompanied by his best friend, whom he met a year after those events in Vélez. Among the moments that moved him the most on April 1st, he highlighted the new cross-ins tombs of glory.

In the early 1990s, crosses with fireworks at the ends were lit, but today (post-Cro-Magnon) it would be unthinkable to see fire on a stage, which is why they were digitally made.

In any case, for Walter it was “a bridge in time that is very moving”. In the end, he tells us that it took him so long to get the tickets, that when he did, fate had prepared an incredible surprise for him: “The only thing left was the upper south stalls. I saw 30 years later, same concert, same place.

A respite from oblivion

Both our respondents and the rest of the nearly 100,000 people who passed through the two dates experienced a respite from oblivion. A trap to the irremediable linearity of destiny. They have returned to continue being what they never wanted to stop being.

“The truth is, if you ask me if I miss those times, I’d say no. Why you can’t miss what lives in us”, Fito assured, a second before doing brilliant on the micwith the entire stadium lit only with cellphones, once with cigarette lighters.

the end with give joy to my heart (in the 90s it was dedicated to Maradona but now it’s perfect for Messi), with the voice of a boy who at 60 no longer runs on stage with the shirt as a flag, but is capable of muting an entire field to make a song a cappella, will mark us forever.

The stadium emptied with that version of Happiness… that fans have been doing since the last century. Some may have started off a little slower than before, but we all started out convinced of all that we owe to that man from Rosario in our history. And it is that his love for him changed our lives, like a bolt of lightning forever. For what has been and will be. What was and will be.