Spinetta and his poetic legacy, 10 years after his death

A decade after the departure of “Flaco”, some reasons that turned the great Argentine musician into a figure that transcended rock

“Only the difficult is stimulating.” The phrase is a verse by the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima . And if there is a musician who is cut by that yardstick on the Argentine rock map, he is the one always remembered –and very difficult to imitate– Luis Alberto Spinetta . Ten years of absence imply a decade where we missed the opportunity to continue surprising ourselves by that ease and happiness with which he invited us to discover planets, that gift of stretching the opportunities that the song shelters in a rock format. Because Spinetta allowed himself to push the limits , trying to find new forms and materials if it was a question of making the possibilities of composing rock in Spanish more complex and carving.

Laughing Echo . Does it happen to you that when you listen to a song like “The Book of Good Memory” by Invisible , the laughing echo of Peter Capusotto ‘s Luis Almirante Brown resonates; and that all that poetic outburst in “Well, I’ll write to you/ I’ll make you cry/ My mouth will kiss/ All the tenderness of your aquarium” is besieged by the kitsch with which our last great capocomic bogged down that gesture of Spinetta’s? If something distinguishes Spinetta from all his emulators – the degree of incidence in the work of many under 30/40 between rock and rap, from Catriel , Luca Boccci and El Príncipe Idiota to Acru , Emanero and Mir Nicolás is striking.– is that there is something in his staging that overlaps between the possibilities of language and musical language; a procedure that curdles in the other, forming and deforming it, giving rise to something else, to another horizon. Something inseparable, unheard of. “I use words as music”, he told Eduardo Berti in Chronicle and illuminations (Editora AC, 1988). The lyrics and the music in a whole impossible to separate. The words tied to an invisible thread. As if it were a stone without time. And the voice, the twists and turns, the chattering, the temperance of that voice. Because Spinetta is not only an imaginary, a search and a strategy, but also the voice, the summumof a voice That sigh that moved between cottons and glyptodonts, that trail of light that swayed stealthily.

Life attitude . “Via Spinetta I agree to read poetry: Artaud , Baudelaire and Rimbaud came hand in hand with rock. At that time, rock linked you with other things. I mean, rock culture existed much more. Rock was not only a music but it was also an attitude of life”, says Daniel Melero in Now, before and after. For a possible biography (Derivas, 2012), a book of my authorship. Spinetta was the bridge to poetry for many. This does not mean that El Flaco, for those who shied away from his music (without ignoring their respect or misunderstanding of him), was a tangled and far-fetched lyricist.

1995 . This year saw the light of the first reissue of his only book of poems, Black Guitar , launched by Ediciones Tres Tiempos in March 1978. In other words, it took seventeen years for a label to take over. The Brand, editorial of Guido IndijHe was the one who took the step. This humble servant, who collaborated in those days with that publishing house, was the one with the idea. These days, I went back to the book and noticed something that I had completely forgotten: El Flaco totally changed the “warning”, the introduction of the text. If the original came with an enigmatic signature (GP) and told us what we were going to run into (“In this book no verse resembles the other, they all have a different form, each one of them carries out its own cosmogony; it transmits with particular eloquence their images”), in the new edition the author himself (underlined the word in bold and italics) emphasizes in lowercase and without a period: “Since no one is aware of the ‘control’ of the manuscripts and even if such awareness existed, it would not intervene in my work, but as a symbolic reference to the legality of the theme, I propose that each word be forgotten as it is read”. A machine to forget.

Borges polenta . I don’t remember where Spinetta said –I don’t want to fall prey to Google– that he didn’t want to be the Borges of rock. But I take the audacity to contradict him because he was just that, the guy who embodied the tension between the street and the library, between the suburbs and intellectual nonsense. Almendra may be torn to pieces by his wild love for Pappo and his distorted vision of rock. El Flaco added that pinch of Carpo’s Firestone polenta to Almendra’s poetics to generate Rabid Fish . Polenta with fine fish. I would leave the little birds for Jade .

Guitar maybe . Spinetta played the guitar very Spinettian . Both his naturalness for working with diminished chords, ninths and elevenths, and that vitality when soloing –without flaunting solipsism–, although they have not gone unnoticed, I think they have not been taken with the stature they deserve. I do not resort to that worthless value that is “the best guitarist” or the “great guitarist”, but to assume that the guy played the guitar so uniquely that we still cannot measure whether he was – now the capitalist machinery of value – or not a great guitar player Luckily he was never a guitar hero .

Weak points . It annoys a bit when you look for Flaco’s weak points: the infumable album he recorded in the United States, the (incomprehensible) admiration for Gino Vannelli , the machismo of “Nena boba” or “I like that cut”; the fascination with jazz rock; the non-academic reading of Michel Foucault ; the discography from Los Socios del Desierto onwards… At one point I share such criticism. However, and I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be criticized – I had the “toupee” to do it in my only interview with Spinetta in Los Inrockuptibles magazine–, but those gestures often end up reaffirming more the (petardista) search of those of us who were not him than the restless desire of Skinny: we cannot bear that someone who is closest to freedom has slipped up.

Every day he sings better . That afternoon when we found out about Spinetta’s death, a lifelong friend – as shocked as I was – told me on Skype: “Maybe it’s the sadness that our grandparents had in the 30s when he died, I don’t know, Gardel ”. At night, another lifelong friend calls me and we spent more than an hour talking. It was the way we found to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling that was knowing that someone who had been our school friend since we were ten years old was no longer there. A voice that had accompanied us with no other need than to make our lives more intense, more interesting, more relaxed. A lifelong friend.

Helplessness . In a documentary film made at the time of Privé , which rescues images of the recording of the album, at one point El Flaco confesses to Pablo Perel –the director of Spinetta, el video (1986)– that he is saddened by the death of John Lennon . The director asks him if he is afraid of ending up the same way. Spinetta takes the question elsewhere: “Helplessness more than fear. Abandonment of his energy in this life. I live from him. The helplessness that was felt in the world A very noble force. The nobility is not condemned to that end. Now we are condemned to that same helplessness. Again.