There are albums with great songs and albums with hits, but there are also perfect works, from start to finish. Such is the case with high dirta job where Andrés Calamaro planted a flag and was at the pinnacle of the popularity of Argentine rock.

Not only has it had many radio broadcasts and video clip rotation on music channels (MTV, Much Music, Music21, Telehit, CM), but also the sale of the CDs was astronomical: it exceeded 700 thousand copies. In the historical ranking it was just below Love after loveanother perfect album.

high dirt it was released on 9 September 1997 and is now 25 years old. Silver weddings. Throughout this time she has revalidated her “classic” category over and over again and her songs continue to be true timeless hits.

In general, an album usually has a couple of memorable broadcast breaks, but that’s not the case high dirt. She was seven. That means: Crazy, skinny, dirty high, perfect crimes, average Veronica, it burns me Y where he sends the sailor.

The unusual thing about that list is that any other song on the album could have been a single as well, for example Everything else too, Elvis is alive, Chinese food, Who roasted the butter ?, The third of dreams, It’s never the same Y The boyfriend of oblivion.

There were 14 songs in total.even if some unsuspecting today can make mistakes and add the cover of Catalina Baywhich was actually a single that was added in later reissues.

A perfect plan

In putting together the plan to resume his solo career, after six years with Los Rodríguez, Calamaro began composing and evaluating possible steps to follow.

He could put it all together in his home studio, in the best style of his legendary Hornero Amable, which he had set up at his home in Palermo in the late 1980s. But it is true that he had already done it and it did not represent a new challenge.

Another possibility was to summon many of his famous friends and colleaguesalthough it was also something he had already accomplished in his first four solo albums, where he had Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta, León Gieco, Gustavo Cerati and Fito Páez.

The path chosen was to do everything in the United States, a more ambitious plan worthy of the Argentine 1 to 1 era, where one peso was equivalent to one dollar. Of course, first he had two stages of composition, award and after a final tour of Los Rodríguez with Joaquín Sabina. Also, in those days he got a long-awaited record deal that was almost a blank check.

A luxury recording

Calamaro quickly made sure he had his recording engineer and producer Joe BlaneyCharly García’s legendary coach ever since modern clicksand with whom Andrés had already worked on the last Los Rodríguez album, words more words less.

Looking for musicians, Joe and Andrés wrote names worthy of a dream team: session musicians who had fascinated them on records by John Lennon, Aretha Franklin, Steely Dan, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and Keith Richards.

The guitars on the album were responsible Hugh McCrackenwho has played with Steely Dan and in Double fantasy by Lennon. The solos came from Marc Ribotthe same as Rain dogs by Tom Waits e harpoon by Elvis Costello. The third is Eddie Martinezwho played with Lou Reed and Robert Palmer as well as Mick Jagger’s first solo album and the famous King of Rock by Run-DMC.

For the battery they called Steve Giordano, from X-Pensive Winos, Keith Richards’ band. And as Pappo would say, “with two bass players it sounds better”, so they called Charlie Dryton (also from the Winos) e Chuck Raineyformer Aretha Franklin musician.

According to Andrés himself“We brought these musicians because they are the masters who recorded on our favorite albums; not because we needed them but because we wanted them. Until the last moment I thought about using my home recordings, but in the end recording with session players was fantastic experience. I had done raw but fun demos with all the voices and instruments “.

The final touches of recording and mixing were done in Miami, where the participation of Celeste Carballo in choirs, and two cameos: Ortega stick Y Antonio Escohotadothe first whisper “You’re alone tonight” in Elvis is alive and the Spanish philosopher in a performance within reggae it is never the same.

As an anecdotal fact, names like The other side of the boyfriend of oblivion Y I decided to tellbut in the end it was high dirtLike the song that opens the album.

The wink at the porrito

Self-referential with elegance, Calamaro had the pleasure of quoting the phrase “I’m going for a walk alone, I sit in a park to smoke a joint”, recalling the legal problems he had given him in 1994 saying “What a beautiful evening for smoke a porrito “in an impressive and free show in La Plata. A crime apology case was initiated, although it was later filed.

The first of many great albums

Sometimes Andrés seems to deny it high dirtbut in reality what happens is that it bothers him that we talk a lot about that album and not so much about his other great works, for example the double brutal honesty and the quintuple The salmonwhich ended a phase of lack of compositional control and anxiety for others.

With the turn of the century, having overcome the fear of returning to the scene, Calamaro has continued to do an excellent job that is worth rediscovering. For example the covers (and the immortal Aztec stadium composed with Marcelo “Cuino” Scornik) of Singerthe union with Litto Nebbia in the palace of flowersthe success the popular language and the most recent load luck. And there’s more, of course.

In all his albums, Andrés Calamaro has always shown a unique talent in going from the specific to the general: it seems that he speaks only of himself, but achieve immediate identification and empathywhere the listener feels that he has expressed in words the same thing that he has heard.

Perhaps he is an artist capable of getting in tune with the collective unconscious and talking about the little big problems of today’s world. It is a quality of very few, the greatest, and high dirt is a perfect example of that unique talent.

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