1. ...Cojemos Todos
Buenos Aires 2013.
Leaving the show behind, I walk with a loud, raucous group of musicians. They laugh, joke in rapid-fire Spanish, blowing out thick mists of tobacco smoke.
A girl with short black hair moves excitedly as she waves a cigarette. “Si nos organizamos cojemos todos,” she says rhythmically, bobbing up and down. She laughs, then pauses to explain: “If we get organised; everyone can get laid.”
I try to play it cool. “Sounds good,” I say, smiling awkwardly. I am twenty-four, starstruck, and hopelessly out of my depth.
The musicians laugh at me. “Si nos organizamos,” she repeats, rhythmically, emphasising each word individually, and I realise she’s singing lyrics.
“Si nos organizamos” I repeat, sheepish.
“Cojemos todos.”
“Cojemos todos,” I say, carefully. The group cheers.
Leaving the show behind, I walk with a loud, raucous group of musicians. They laugh, joke in rapid-fire Spanish, blowing out thick mists of tobacco smoke.
A girl with short black hair moves excitedly as she waves a cigarette. “Si nos organizamos cojemos todos,” she says rhythmically, bobbing up and down. She laughs, then pauses to explain: “If we get organised; everyone can get laid.”
I try to play it cool. “Sounds good,” I say, smiling awkwardly. I am twenty-four, starstruck, and hopelessly out of my depth.
The musicians laugh at me. “Si nos organizamos,” she repeats, rhythmically, emphasising each word individually, and I realise she’s singing lyrics.
“Si nos organizamos” I repeat, sheepish.
“Cojemos todos.”
“Cojemos todos,” I say, carefully. The group cheers.
Maybe getting organised has helped the underground musicians of Buenos Aires get laid, but it hasn’t helped them get paid. At the gig this raucous group is walking away from, I’d met a tall, cheerful man in gothic attire. This was Alexis of the Di Giovannis, a band who had recently been chosen to open for The Cure at their Argentina show.
“What advice would you give somebody trying to find success in the Argentine underground music scene,” I asked him.
“It's very hard because we don't know that,” he said. “We don't succeed: we only play with The Cure.”
There’s no intentional irony or self-depreciating humour here; while in nearly any other country opening for a band as big as The Cure before returning to musical obscurity is unthinkable, in Argentina it’s expected. You could say that the scene here has a kind of curse, one that reaches back to New Year’s Eve 2004.
“What advice would you give somebody trying to find success in the Argentine underground music scene,” I asked him.
“It's very hard because we don't know that,” he said. “We don't succeed: we only play with The Cure.”
There’s no intentional irony or self-depreciating humour here; while in nearly any other country opening for a band as big as The Cure before returning to musical obscurity is unthinkable, in Argentina it’s expected. You could say that the scene here has a kind of curse, one that reaches back to New Year’s Eve 2004.
Omar Chaban sits on a bed, a pair of orange crocs on his feet. His usually sharp, accentuated features are softened by the dense white fuzz of a thick close-cut beard. His eyes are wrapped in layers of stress, and he wears an unstylish red and yellow jumper, with three quarter jeans. He looks unwell. He is dying.
By the time this image makes it to magazine stands on the cover of the Argentine December 2013 edition of Rolling Stone Magazine, Chaban is dead from Hodgkin lymphoma. Chaban and the infinite nightmare of Cromañón reads the headline.
In the 80s, Chaban cut a much different figure. His brown untamed hair defied gravity, and his eyes were framed by thick yellow glasses, perched atop his distinctive nose. Videos of him in this period show him animated, passionate. He speaks as much with his hands as with his mouth, sometimes explosively showering out rapid fire monologues with a theatrical air, an almost Jim Carrey like plasticity animating his face.
Chaban was an Impresario whose support of the music scene in Buenos Aires was well known. His first major club operation was that of Café Einstein in 1982. His co-founders were Sergio Aisenstein, whose name inspired the club's name, and Helmut Zeiguer. The club was painted bright pastel colours, and some of the electrical display was made by Pipo Cipolatti who played in the band Los Twistos. It was a wild place where anything could happen. One, a performer explained thay they intended to bring some objects and destroy them as part of his performance. What he didn't say, was that the objects were coffins, which he proceeded to smash into pieces with a six-foot axe. The chaos was contained in a small space, with the club only capable of seating around 80 people. The club’s candle burned short and fast, shutting up shop in 1984.
After Einstein, Chaban and his co-founders went their separate ways. Sergio Aisenstein moved on to another project, Nave Jungla, a club that took delight in the aesthetic of circuses and freakshows. The staff largely consisted of dwarves.
Chaban too, followed up with a new club called Cemento in 1985, with his then-wife Katja Alleman. The site was used for theatrical performances as well as rock concerts. Alleman opened the site dressed as a Valkyrie, driven in on a chariot driven by horses, while Chaban sat on the roof.
Cemento was crowded. It was perhaps unwholesome, and it attracted police attention. It was the site of several large conflicts, some involving neo-Nazis. It was dirty, covered in graffiti, and the sound quality was poor. This added to the charm of its grungy rock aesthetic, but ultimately left it vulnerable to competitors with better site and sound.
República Cromañón was a step up into commerciality; bigger and nicer than Cemento, it opened in April 2004. Things seemed to be looking up.
In 8 months, the whole of the Buenos Aires scene would be turned upside down.
By the time this image makes it to magazine stands on the cover of the Argentine December 2013 edition of Rolling Stone Magazine, Chaban is dead from Hodgkin lymphoma. Chaban and the infinite nightmare of Cromañón reads the headline.
In the 80s, Chaban cut a much different figure. His brown untamed hair defied gravity, and his eyes were framed by thick yellow glasses, perched atop his distinctive nose. Videos of him in this period show him animated, passionate. He speaks as much with his hands as with his mouth, sometimes explosively showering out rapid fire monologues with a theatrical air, an almost Jim Carrey like plasticity animating his face.
Chaban was an Impresario whose support of the music scene in Buenos Aires was well known. His first major club operation was that of Café Einstein in 1982. His co-founders were Sergio Aisenstein, whose name inspired the club's name, and Helmut Zeiguer. The club was painted bright pastel colours, and some of the electrical display was made by Pipo Cipolatti who played in the band Los Twistos. It was a wild place where anything could happen. One, a performer explained thay they intended to bring some objects and destroy them as part of his performance. What he didn't say, was that the objects were coffins, which he proceeded to smash into pieces with a six-foot axe. The chaos was contained in a small space, with the club only capable of seating around 80 people. The club’s candle burned short and fast, shutting up shop in 1984.
After Einstein, Chaban and his co-founders went their separate ways. Sergio Aisenstein moved on to another project, Nave Jungla, a club that took delight in the aesthetic of circuses and freakshows. The staff largely consisted of dwarves.
Chaban too, followed up with a new club called Cemento in 1985, with his then-wife Katja Alleman. The site was used for theatrical performances as well as rock concerts. Alleman opened the site dressed as a Valkyrie, driven in on a chariot driven by horses, while Chaban sat on the roof.
Cemento was crowded. It was perhaps unwholesome, and it attracted police attention. It was the site of several large conflicts, some involving neo-Nazis. It was dirty, covered in graffiti, and the sound quality was poor. This added to the charm of its grungy rock aesthetic, but ultimately left it vulnerable to competitors with better site and sound.
República Cromañón was a step up into commerciality; bigger and nicer than Cemento, it opened in April 2004. Things seemed to be looking up.
In 8 months, the whole of the Buenos Aires scene would be turned upside down.
A video of a much younger Chaban, interviewed by Luca Prodan.
Buenos Aires, New Year's Eve 2004.
There is a crisis, El Chavez is informed. Chavez is the lead singer of band Nuca, the entertainment for Cemento’s New Year’s show. The outside of the club is crowded with frantic, panicked parents demanding answers.
They think their children are dead. It is not yet clear exactly why. Soon it becomes so; it has been said that there was a fire at ‘the Chaban place’; and Cemento is run by Chaban.
But Cemento’s only tragedy tonight is its perpetually poor sound quality – the terror that is soon to truly reveal itself to the people of Buenos Aires is taking place at the other Chaban place – República Cromañón.
There, the kids are dying. They die trying to escape through emergency exits that have been locked shut, they die in the cramped confines of a club filled to three times its capacity, they die from the smoke that flows through a club that has never been properly fireproofed. They die because owner Omar Chaban failed to make the building safe, because the police failed to compel him to do so, because the government failed to ensure the police did their job.
The fire that tore through the club was lit by a flare shot into the roof. Many such flares had been fired at many such gigs, but this one set fire to its surrounds, and rapidly the overcrowded room flooded with the toxic smoke that the partiers now race outside to escape from. Once outside, the desperation of the situation is shockingly clear; there are no ambulances here yet – there is nobody to save them. The young people themselves run back into the building, saving anyone they can. It is they who perform mouth-to-mouth on those they drag out. In the clear air of the night, away from the toxic smoke, they kneel, bend over and suck deadly fumes straight out of the lungs of their peers.
One hundred and ninety-seven die. Some are only young children, mostly those of the staff. The flames that wreak havoc on the building have caught onto the first threads of 2005; this is the point at which everything changes - for the musicians of Argentina, this is a new world.
There is a crisis, El Chavez is informed. Chavez is the lead singer of band Nuca, the entertainment for Cemento’s New Year’s show. The outside of the club is crowded with frantic, panicked parents demanding answers.
They think their children are dead. It is not yet clear exactly why. Soon it becomes so; it has been said that there was a fire at ‘the Chaban place’; and Cemento is run by Chaban.
But Cemento’s only tragedy tonight is its perpetually poor sound quality – the terror that is soon to truly reveal itself to the people of Buenos Aires is taking place at the other Chaban place – República Cromañón.
There, the kids are dying. They die trying to escape through emergency exits that have been locked shut, they die in the cramped confines of a club filled to three times its capacity, they die from the smoke that flows through a club that has never been properly fireproofed. They die because owner Omar Chaban failed to make the building safe, because the police failed to compel him to do so, because the government failed to ensure the police did their job.
The fire that tore through the club was lit by a flare shot into the roof. Many such flares had been fired at many such gigs, but this one set fire to its surrounds, and rapidly the overcrowded room flooded with the toxic smoke that the partiers now race outside to escape from. Once outside, the desperation of the situation is shockingly clear; there are no ambulances here yet – there is nobody to save them. The young people themselves run back into the building, saving anyone they can. It is they who perform mouth-to-mouth on those they drag out. In the clear air of the night, away from the toxic smoke, they kneel, bend over and suck deadly fumes straight out of the lungs of their peers.
One hundred and ninety-seven die. Some are only young children, mostly those of the staff. The flames that wreak havoc on the building have caught onto the first threads of 2005; this is the point at which everything changes - for the musicians of Argentina, this is a new world.
Anger rushes through Buenos Aires; action is demanded, and the demands are met. Omar Chaban, the owner of the site and promoter of the event, members of the band Los Callajeros who played at the event and helped organise it, and government figures were all sentenced to sit behind bars between eighteen months and twenty years. In a dark irony, the band’s drummer Eduardo Vázquez, who lost his mother in the fire would be imprisoned for life nearly ten years later, for fatally setting his wife on fire. Mayor Aníbal Ibarra too would ultimately lose his position amid accusations of corruption, or at least incompetence.
Most importantly, the authorities acted quickly on existing venues, shutting them down en masse, only allowing them to reopen when they could be verified as safe. Many could not, and did not reopen. The opportunities for future performers of Buenos Aires dried up.
Music critic Norberto Cambiasso described this process in Spanish in the liner notes to the compilation ¡Salgan Al Sol!
The indiscriminate closure of places to play for not meeting the eligibility requirements, the disproportionate increase in the demands and pressures on publishers, and large media conglomerate concentration accelerated a process that was already underway, through which the rock business with all that that implies, was in the hands of a very few producers and entrepreneurs who, with the complicity of national governments, provincial and municipal, saturate the market with an offer of very limited bands… In other words, the underground after Cromañón became even more under.
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