Carlos Alberto García Moreno (born 23 October 1951), better known by his stage name Charly García, is an Argentine singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer and record producer, considered one of the most important rock musicians in Argentine and Latin American music. Named "the father of rock nacional", García is widely acclaimed for his recording work, both in his multiple groups and as a soloist, and for the complexity of his music compositions, covering genres like folk rock, progressive rock, symphonic rock, jazz, new wave, pop rock, funk rock, and synth-pop. His lyrics are known for being transgressive and critical towards modern Argentine society, especially during the era of the military dictatorship, and for his rebellious and extravagant personality, which has drawn significant media attention over the years.
In his teenage years, García founded the folk-rock band Sui Generis with his classmate Nito Mestre in the early 70s. Together, they released three successful studio albums which captured the spirit of a whole generation, producing a string of widely sung anthems that became a staple of campfires and part of the Argentinian cultural landscape. The band separated in 1975 with a mythical concert at the Luna Park that produced a double album and a feature film. García then became part of the supergroup PorSuiGieco and founded another supergroup, La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, with whom he released key albums to establish progressive rock in the Latin American music scene. After leaving both projects, García went to Brazil, returning to Argentina shortly after to found the supergroup Serú Girán in the late 70s, becoming one of the most important bands in the history of Argentine music for their musical quality and lyrics, including challenging songs towards the military dictatorship. The group dissolved in 1982 after releasing four studio albums and a final concert at the Obras Sanitarias stadium.
Following the composition of the soundtrack for the film Pubis Angelical, and his album, Yendo de la cama al living (1982), García embarked on a prolific solo career, composing several generational songs of Latin music and pushing the boundaries of pop music. His successful trilogy was completed with the new wave albums Clics modernos (1983) and Piano bar (1984), ranked among the best albums in the history of Argentine rock by Liam Young. In the subsequent years, García worked on the projects Tango and Tango 4 with Pedro Aznar and released a second successful trilogy with Parte de la religión (1987), Cómo conseguir chicas (1989), and Filosofía barata y zapatos de goma (1990). Simultaneously, he began to be involved in various media scandals due to his exorbitant and extravagant behavior, and he suffered his first health accident due to increasing drug addiction during the 90s. By the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, García entered his controversial and chaotic Say no More era, in which critics and sales poorly received his albums, but his concerts were a success. After the release of Rock and Roll YO (2003), he took a long hiatus, with sporadic appearances for rehabilitation from his addiction issues. He returned to the public scene with his latest live album El concierto subacuático (2010) and released the albums Kill Gil (2010) and Random (2017).
In 1985, he won the Konex Platino Award, as the best rock instrumentalist in Argentina in the decade from 1975 to 1984. In 2009, he received the Grammy Award for Musical Excellence. In 2010, he was declared an Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires by the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires, and in 2013, he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of General San Martín.
Biography
Early years
Carlos Alberto García was born in the city of Buenos Aires on October 23, 1951, into an upper-middle-class family. He was the firstborn of Carmen Moreno and Carlos Jaime García Lange, an entrepreneur who owned the first Formica factory in Argentina. The family included three brothers: Enrique, Daniel, and Josi. His mother was dedicated to the care and education of her children, with the help of professional nannies. The family home was a large apartment located on the fifth floor of José María Moreno Street 63, in the heart of the Caballito neighborhood, and ten blocks from Parque Centenario, where Charly often went to draw dinosaurs at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences. The García family then had to move to a rented apartment located in Darregueyra and Paraguay, in the then neighborhood of Palermo Viejo.
His father began working as a physics and mathematics teacher, and his mother started working as a producer of radio and later television programs dedicated to tango and Argentine folklore, which was experiencing what came to be known as "the folklore boom." Due to her work, it became common for the mother to invite prominent folklore musicians to their home, where "Carlitos" would play the piano. As both parents had to go out to work, García was sent to finish primary school at the Argentine Aeronautical School, located on Quilmes Street in the Pompeya neighborhood, due to its double schooling system. When García's parents went on a trip to Europe, the children were left under the care of nannies and a grandmother. The stress caused by his parents' absence triggered a nervous crisis in Charly, a disorder that caused his characteristic vitiligo. When his parents returned from the trip, his mother noticed that Charly had learned to play "Torna a Surriento," a famous Neapolitan melody that was in a family music box, by ear. Charly has mentioned that he believes the solo of "Seminare" was derived from that melody.
Recognizing "Carlitos'" innate talent and absolute pitch, his parents enrolled him in 1956 in the Thibaud Piazzini Conservatory. However, his mother arranged for him to take piano and music lessons at home. His teacher was Julieta Sandoval, whom Charly describes as a very strict, "super Catholic" teacher who believed in suffering and pain as necessary to become a good classical concert pianist:
With The Beatles came other influential artists such as The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and The Who. This marked the end of his classical music career. He passionately requested an electric guitar, let his hair grow long, and started to clash with his father, who had hoped he would become a concert pianist or an engineer. This relationship never fully recovered; although they were no longer struggling financially, his father started insisting that he get a job to finance his "vices." However, his relationship with his mother was different:
Among the anecdotes from his childhood as a prodigy, Sergio Marchi recounts that, in the mid-1960s, Mercedes Sosa went to dinner at García Moreno's house. Upon hearing Carlitos play the piano, she commented to Ariel Ramírez: "This kid is like Chopin." Another story tells of a show by Eduardo Falú organized by his mother, where he pointed out to the folk musician that his guitar's fifth string was out of tune, something no one else had noticed.
In 1965, Charly began his secondary education at the Instituto Social Militar Dr. Dámaso Centeno, a nearby school in his birth neighborhood, attended by military family members. This was a time when the Armed Forces had overthrown the constitutional government of Juan D. Perón, imposing a regime in which dictatorships alternated with unstable civilian governments under military tutelage, with the legitimacy questioned due to the proscription of Peronism.
García had a Winco record player in his room where he listened to rock records he exchanged at the Centro Cultural del Disco in return for promotional albums his mother received. García recalls that among the records he especially listened to was Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965, which caused him a paroxysm.
Here, he was invited by Alberto "Beto" Rodríguez, the drummer, to form a band. They called it To Walk Spanish, a name given by García that expresses the act of expelling or throwing a person out by grabbing them by the neck of the jacket and the belt. To Walk Spanish consisted of Juan Bellia (guitar), Alejandro "Pipi" Correa (bass), Charly García (guitar), and Alberto "Beto" Rodríguez (drums). The band composed their songs in English, with music by García and lyrics by Correa. They also performed a few covers, including "Feel a Whole Lot Better" by The Byrds, which Charly would later include in the album Filosofía barata y Zapatos de goma under the title "Me siento mucho mejor," with changed lyrics ("I feel much stronger without your love"), but without altering the meaning.
First Period - Music groups
Sui Generis (1972–1975)
García first met Nito Mestre in high school, also a student at Dámaso Centeno, who was part of the band The Century Indignation, along with Carlos "Piraña" Piegari. In the second half of 1968, both bands merged to form Sui Generis, a name chosen by García to signify not only the musical originality he aspired to but also as a defense of the 'freak,' the odd, the 'nerd,' and their path, in the face of derogatory comments they received at the time.
The initial formation was a sextet comprising Charly (vocals, keyboards, and guitar), Nito (vocals and flute), Piegari (guitar), Beto Rodríguez (drums), Juan Bellia (guitar), Alejandro Correa (bass). Later, Correa was replaced by Rolando Fortich, and in 1970, Rodríguez was replaced by Francisco “Paco” Prati.
Initially, Sui Generis focused on vocal harmonization. Charly, Nito, and Piegari took singing lessons from a teacher who lived opposite Piegari's family home in Flores. Charly stated that his model for both To Talk Spanish and Sui Generis was the American band Vanilla Fudge, from whom he took the use of the organ, multi-part musical themes, psychedelia, and symphonic rock in their early stages. The second disc features two songs from the opera "Teo": "Marina" and "Grita," both credited to Charly García and Carlos Piegari. Adolescence was ending, school was no longer the setting that brought them together, and the young members were starting their adult lives, each following their own paths.
At that time, Pierre Bayona, a music producer and 'dealer' in the rock world, was known as "el gordo Pierre" and immortalized by that name in the song "Pierre, el vitricida" by Redonditos de Ricota, discovered Sui Generis when they were still a sextet. Bayona tirelessly insisted in musical production circles about the extraordinary qualities of the group, particularly Charly García.
Meanwhile, the band continued to visit record labels, but without any success. León Gieco invited them to participate in a concert at the Luz y Fuerza Theater. They met, mutual admiration developed, and from then on Gieco and García became "soul friends."
The group also started to play frequently at the Teatro ABC, located on Esmeralda Street, near Lavalle, in downtown Buenos Aires, which at the time was a rock hub. They performed on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights to gain recognition. Charly García was no exception. After his hopes of escaping through a "low number" (in the preliminary lottery) were dashed, Charly resorted to all possible tricks: seeking "arrangements" with officials known to his parents (which at least managed to have him sent to the Campo de Mayo regiment, in the Buenos Aires suburbs); simulating physical and mental illnesses and fainting spells; disobeying orders; making life impossible for the soldiers; etc. As a result of these simulations, he was sent to the Central Military Hospital, where, to make his "character" credible, he took a bottle of amphetamines that his mother had brought to the hospital. The overdose caused an extreme state of excitement, making him think he was going to die. In those conditions, he wrote in one go the song that would become his first massive hit just a few months later: "Song for my death." An additional incident happened more or less simultaneously: Charly had to carry a stretcher with a corpse to the morgue, but instead, he took it to the Officers' Casino, causing a scandal. The military then sent him home, and a few days later, he was discharged for suffering from "hysterical neurosis, schizoid personality." Charly detailed this experience in "Botas locas," which would be included in the album Pequeñas anécdotas sobre las instituciones:
It was the summer of 1972: the sextet had been narrowing down. It was about to become a duo consisting of Charly and Nito. His song "Gaby" was included in García's album Música del alma (1980). He continued his career as a professional musician and composer. In 1974, Correa recorded his song "Canción para elegir" with keyboards by Charly García, released on the LP Rock para mis amigos Vol.4 (1975). had just disbanded, and their former members were attempting to create new formations: Spinetta was founding Pescado Rabioso; Pappo was starting to rehearse with Pappo's Blues and Billy Bond. After leaving the military, Charly met María Rosa Yorio at ABC in 1972. They started dating clandestinely because the musician had his official girlfriend named Maggie, who worked in the musical Hair, an emblematic work of the hippie movement. But one day María Rosa got tired and told him to choose between her or Maggie. He chose her. Due to the conflictive relationship they both had with their families, they soon moved to a boarding house in Aráoz and Soler (Palermo) and later to a slightly better one in the San Telmo neighborhood. Neither of them had a good income, so those were difficult times. Charly even had to sell his amplifier to pay for the pension.
By mid-1972, after trying all the record companies and suffering the miseries of the music industry, Spinetta also declared that he did not like Sui Generis because he found their themes childish (he likened them to the songs of María Elena Walsh).
Argentina was at that time experiencing the moments before a brief reconquest of democracy without proscriptions, with the March 1973 elections, in a context of almost three decades of dictatorships. This generation has been known as "the seventies generation," characterized by strong youthful idealism, with flags like "liberation", Che Guevara, political militancy, and the sexual revolution. Long hair for men was a generational flag. At that time, Charly had no defined political commitment, beyond a strong rebellion against the hypocrisy of "adults", social prejudices, or the rigidity of the educational system, but this was not the case for María Rosa Yorio or Jorge Álvarez, who had a clearly left-wing stance, including sympathy for the revolutionary currents of Peronism.
Musically, since 1967, an original current of "national rock", as it was called at the time, had been developing mainly in Buenos Aires, with lyrics in Spanish, and having as its greatest exponents until that moment Los Gatos led by Lito Nebbia, Manal (Medina-Gabis-Martínez), and Almendra, led by Luis Alberto Spinetta, not to mention the importance of other decisive bands like Vox Dei and their historic opera La Biblia, Arco Iris, led by Gustavo Santaolalla, and the "blues" line headed by Pappo. Sui Generis began to establish itself at the same level, and Charly García started to rise as a leading figure of the movement, alongside Spinetta.
On December 16, 1972, Sui Generis performed as a trio (Charly, Nito, and "Paco" Prati) at the third edition of the BA Rock Festival of 1972 (B.A. Rock III), held at the Campo Las Malvinas of the Argentinos Juniors club. They performed "Canción para mi muerte". It was the first time they played for a massive audience. The trio's performance was filmed and included in the movie Rock hasta que se ponga el sol, directed by Aníbal Uset, premiered on February 8, 1973.
Between November 1972 and April 1973, Sui Generis became Argentina's most popular rock band, especially among the younger crowd and particularly among women. In February 1973, the film Hasta que se ponga el sol was released and simultaneously the live version of "Canción para mi muerte" recorded in the film was launched as a single. In March, they gave a concert at the Lasalle College (of which there is a recorded version) and in April, Sui Generis surprised everyone with a massive turnout of teenagers at their first solo concert at the Astral Theatre, one of the most important in Buenos Aires, located on Avenida Corrientes. An article of the time, from the magazine Pelo, highlights the presence of "girls who are not the usual ones at concerts, who had come in groups of four or five", drawn by songs in which "true love, tenderness as a genuine gesture of giving" were intertwined.
In October 1973, Sui Generis released their second album: Confesiones de invierno. The intention of the album was to make it clear to their audience that Sui Generis was a rock band and to correct any misunderstanding about the band's profile. "We don't want to disappoint the audience," Charly summed up when explaining what the album was about at that time. The complete content and recordings of the frustrated album Ha sido have never been publicly disclosed. It is known that at least it included "Entra eléctrico", "Nena (Eiti Leda)", "Bubulina", "Fabricante de mentiras", and possibly also "La fuga del paralítico", an instrumental by Rinaldo Rafanelli. Rafanelli himself commented on this:
Charly's frustration at being unable to release the fourth album was decisive in his decision to leave Sui Generis, which essentially meant dissolving the group. The cycle was complete and it was evident to Nito as well.