When Los Tres, la última canción came off the presses in February 2002, I was back in Argentina. The controversy unleashed close to the end of the research phase and deepened during the editing process dampened the release.

During the time of the book’s undertaking, I saw the bullets fly, after a point of no return when the differences between Enrique Symns and the band became irreconcilable. Although it seemed to me that Álvaro Henríquez had his own considerable reasons, I remained loyal to Symns because he was the person who had chosen me as coauthor. To choose or to be chosen. Is that a determining factor?

Some of the chapters in the book had taken an uncomfortable turn for Los Tres and didn’t represent the story they wanted to tell. That’s why they decided to deauthorize the biography, which was a good choice in terms of getting past the conflict. But it put me in a foul mood because the controversy obscured the work we had done, which was rigorous and devoted.

Before the fallout, in the golden months, I enjoyed the research. I interviewed musicians, actresses, singers, theater and film directors, cultural journalists, owners of rock bars, music producers, artistic producers, sound engineers, poets, writers, family members, ex-girlfriends, friends. I really had a good time, all interesting people from the other side of the Andes rooted in artistic worlds that seemed to me parallel to the ones I had formed a part of in Buenos Aires. Despite the isolation resulting from the dictatorships, we had a lot in common, and the generational understanding flowed. I connected perfectly with the artistic environment that surrounded Los Tres and I tried to reconstruct part of the Penquista underworld of the eighties. I was enveloped in a perfume of adventure. I wasn’t familiar with the music of Los Tres beforehand and I was fortunate to have liked the lyrics, the melodies, the instrumentation, and the sound. I read newspaper and magazine clippings that furnished me with information about the beginnings of the band and I milked the album booklets for all the data they were worth. I was fascinated by Álvaro Henríquez’s intelligence and sensibility and the entire ambitious project of creating Chilean rock. They weren’t the only ones, because the Electrodomésticos, Los Prisioneros, Colombiana Parra, and others, male and female, also went on a search for identities, but they were the most far-reaching due to their revindication of cueca music and their reaching into the recesses of what it means to be Chilean with Roberto and Lalo Parra, creators of guachaca jazz.

The announcement of the breakup had placed the band in the central focus of dramatic expectation for its followers, and of a lot of coverage in the press. Álvaro, Titae, and Pancho had been together since they were fourteen years old. They needed new tunes, to walk down other paths, have other experiences. Were they separating just to have some breathing room? Was Álvaro’s leadership in question? Was it a way of capturing, once again, the attention of cultural society? Typical conjectures surrounding the problems of rock bands over time. Of all their reasons for separating, Ángel Parra was not one of them. For him, the band was good enough the way it had been functioning. The nucleus of the crisis occurred among its founders.

Translated by Luis Guzmán Valerio

Photo: Argentine writer Vera Land, by Beth Benítez.

Bands belonging to the Latin American rock explosion of the nineties, with roots in the eighties underground, broken up in the early 2000s, and whose legacies are currently expanding.

Rosario Bléfari was an Argentine composer, singer, actress, and poet, a fundamental member of the cult band Súarez, of great inspiration for the thriving indie rock, experimental pop, and alternative rock scenes. Born December 24, 1965, she belongs to the golden generation that renewed Argentine rock and forms part of the sad list of artists who died in the dreadful year of 2020, in her case, after a long illness. Both Suárez’s discography as well as the development of Rosario’s repertoire as a soloist, with seven studio albums, have attained growing recognition. Her work came to fruition with the books Poemas en prosa (2001), La música equivocada (2009), Antes del río (2016), and Diario del dinero (2020), among others.

Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota is an Argentine rock band about which biographies, essays, memoirs, and articles have been written. Prohibited from playing live in the city of Buenos Aires, they had an audience willing to travel to any part of the country in order to see them (or their songwriter and leader, Indio Solari, after their break-up), generating a positive economic impact in provincial or southern towns invaded all of a sudden by hundreds of thousands of followers, families, groups of friends; a multitude stigmatized by the conservative mass media, which, however, was capable of creating “the biggest mosh pit in the world” without anyone getting hurt. Indio Solari started singing for a limited college audience in the city of La Plata, with an artistic avant-garde audience, and in the mid-nineties he reached the popular masses, with their dispossessed youth. Currently unable to give concerts because of his advanced Parkinson’s, he still writes songs and leads his second band, Los Fundamentalistas del Aire Acondicionado, who play the songs in a way that is superior to the original. At concerts, Solari’s participation is limited to a hologram and over-dubbings of a selected song.

At first, Los Tres was a rock & roll, rockabilly, American folk, and jazz band. However, meeting Roberto Parra endowed songwriter Álvaro Henríquez with the influence of cuecas choras and guachaca jazz, which resulted in a new creative territory. After breaking up, the projects begun by each one of the band’s members, and their reunion with a different arrangement, demonstrated that the sound of Los Tres can only be achieved with the original members. Currently reunited once again, they are the interpreters of their own legacy, and they rock new generations; innovative and controversial, they’ve become unrefuted classics.

Translated by Luis Guzmán Valerio

Photo: Ana Grave, Unsplash.