Gustavo Cerati

Gustavo Adrián Cerati (Barracas, Buenos Aires, August 11, 1959-Núñez, Buenos Aires, September 4, 2014), known as Gustavo Cerati, was an Argentine musician, singer-songwriter, and record producer who gained international recognition for being the frontman, vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist for the rock band Soda Stereo. Part of the specialized press and musicians consider him one of the most influential artists of Latin American rock.

Influenced by the British bands The Beatles and The Police, Cerati was a member of various groups since his teens and in 1982 he founded the Latin rock band Soda Stereo. Leader and main composer of the ensemble, from Signos (1986) his way of making songs began to mature, and his consolidation reached it at the beginning of the 1990s with Canción animal, in which he returned to the roots of Argentine rock of the 1970s. Parallel to his career with the group, in 1992 he published the album Colores santos as a duet with Daniel Melero, considered one of the first in South America to include electronic music, and the following year his first as a soloist, Amor amarillo. His taste for electronics led him to incorporate it into his latest work with Soda Stereo. After the separation of the band, he released Bocanada (1999) and Siempre es hoy (2002), where he showed more of his interest in the genre, which he manifested freely in his projects. alternates Plan V and Ocio, with the release of albums and presentations that gave this type of music greater diffusion.

In 2006, he returned to the rock style with his fourth album Ahí vamos, which received acclaim from the public and critics. exception", "Goodbye", "Lake in the sky" and "I'm staying here". In 2007, he reunited with Soda Stereo after ten years apart on a tour that drew more than a million viewers. In 2010, he was left in a coma after suffering a stroke, after finishing a concert promoting his latest album, Natural Force (2009). He passed away at the age of 55 due to respiratory arrest in 2014.

Cerati was a prolific session player, he was a guest guitarist on songs by Caifanes, Babasónicos and Los Brujos, and he collaborated on songs with Charly García, Andrés Calamaro, Shakira, Andy Summers, Roger Waters and Mercedes Sosa, among others. Throughout his solo career, he has sold more than seven million records and won numerous awards, including the Latin Grammy, MTV, Konex, and Gardel awards. In 2012, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Cerati in seventh place among the hundred best Argentine rock guitarists.

Early Years

Gustavo Adrián Cerati was born on August 11, 1959 in the Barracas neighborhood of Buenos Aires (Argentina); the first-born son of Juan José Cerati and Lilian Clarke, who met working as an accountant and shorthand printer at Esso. Italian on his father's side and Irish on his mother's side. His sisters are Estela and Laura. At the age of six he was enrolled in a state school and, as he learned to read, he discovered comics and consequently his first great passion: comics. drawing. Lilian recalled that every time Juan José returned from work, she bought him a Superman, Tarzan or Flash comic, and from these he took the base to create stories, such as Supercerebro, similar to Superman, or the winged man Argos, a simile to Batman that flew over cities at night. At the age of nine, his parents gave him a Creole guitar, at which point his interest in music would grow. Two weeks after that, he took guitar lessons with a teacher and then After moving to the Villa Ortúzar neighborhood, he continued them with another teacher.

He studied most of primary school and completed secondary school at the San Roque de Villa Urquiza parochial school. At the age of twelve he created a band with two friends from another neighborhood, and in 1976, at the age of sixteen, he formed the Koala group that made Afro-American music and in which he took over as rhythm guitarist, later he joined Manuela Bravo's band. In the mid-seventies, Juan José on his business trips to Miami, brought him rock difficult to find in Argentina and in one of them he gave him his first electric guitar, a brown Gibson SG. He was part of his school choir, but they withdrew him for indiscipline; In the parish of the establishment he composed his first songs, such as the religious "Desértico" that he played at mass, and a Christmas one based on progressive rock with which he obtained second place with Koala in a musical contest that had León Gieco on the jury and Carlos Cutaia, organized and broadcast on Channel 9. Despite being congratulated by one of the priests, they did not reinstate him to the choir.

Cerati said that music saved his life; in 1978 he had to comply with compulsory military service, and he managed to get out thanks to a folkloric contest he entered. The following year, he enrolled at the Universidad del Salvador to study advertising. In the early eighties, parallel to his studies, participated in two different ensembles: Existencia Terrenal (ET) of rock and roll and rhythm and blues, with whom he discovered bands like the Sex Pistols and The Police, and Vozarrón of fusion that mixed jazz i>, rock and folklore, in which he was the guitarist, but not the composer. Together with two English singers he created Savage, who played soul and disco music in cabaret and Jewish holidays. Of these presentations, Cerati recalled that he improvised slow songs on the spot and made "invented versions", but people were only concerned with dancing. At the same time, he composed songs and was part of a trio called Triciclo, with he recorded a reggae titled «Oh, baby, how are you going to do?» broadcast in a Radio Rivadavia program, the first one he registered in the Argentine Society of Authors and Composers (SADAIC).

Career

1981-1997: Soda Stereo

1981-1991: start and success of Soda Stereo

In 1981, Cerati joined The Morgan at the proposal of Zeta Bosio, his partner in advertising, with whom he forged a strong bond of friendship after living with him in Punta del Este (Uruguay). They were a couple of weeks in the band and then they tried two other short-lived groups: Proyecto Erekto and Stress. At the same time, they had an advertising agency together with Alfredo Lois and Ernesto Savaglio called Hergus & Herlois. They did newsletters and commissions to brands to raise money; the texts were made by Bosio while Cerati was in charge of the drawings and finishing along with Lois. However, they soon discovered that the agency was not paying enough and dissolved the association, since the three of them were more motivated by music.

Cerati proposed to Bosio to form a band with his own songs sung in Spanish: the first took over as singer and guitarist and the second bassist and backing vocalist. In March 1982, thanks to the intervention of Laura Cerati, the lineup was completed. with the entry of drummer Charly Alberti. In 1983, already as Soda Stereo, they were invited to the television program Música total on Channel 9; Cerati at that time was working as a medical visitor at the Boehringer Laboratory in Buenos Aires, and since the program coincided with her working hours, she requested a day off due to illness in order to attend. His bosses discovered his appearance on television, which meant his dismissal and the decision to dedicate himself completely to the band.

Although Cerati admitted that the group's first album, released in 1984, Soda Stereo, brought him popularity, he hated the result and called it "crap". The following year, the wear and tear of forming the band, preparing and recording the songs from the debut to present them later, made him feel the need to want to experience something different before recording the second album, and for that he could not do it with Soda Stereo; he called Richard Coleman, with whom later, along with Christian Basso and Fernando Samalea, they formed Friction, which according to Coleman was "an alternative group for Gustavo". They played at the Stud Free Pub, and both the press and the public experienced the established itself as an underground band. He soon had to leave the group due to scheduling conflicts with Soda Stereo, but he continued as a collaborator and approved Roly Ureta as his replacement.

Cerati in a photo shoot in 1986

Soda Stereo released Signos in 1986 to fulfill their contract with CBS, the album had to be successful if they wanted to renew; Cerati composed almost all of the material in his apartment alone. He finished the lyrics for the songs one day before singing on the recording, he defined the process of the album as "suffering" in an interview for Rolling Stone magazine in 2006, while writing the lyrics. he felt "a very particular excitement" under the influence of the cocaine he was ingesting, and he confessed that he ended up in a hospital "desperate, thinking it was the end", because that experience also caused him torture. On the other hand, Signs sparked the first disputes within the band due to copyright, Bosio and Alberti wanted to sign the songs as well, to which Cerati replied that the songs were made by him. Later he explained to Rolling Stone that it seemed "valid" if the effort was "shared", but that it did not seem fair when he was "doing practically everything".

In February 1987, Soda Stereo performed at the XXVIII Viña del Mar International Song Festival, where a crowd of fans greeted them with shouts, following them everywhere from their arrival at the airport, even entering the hotel that hosted them, a fact that consolidated the Sodamania equivalent to a Beatlemania, and from that moment they maintained a successful rise internationally. The following work, Double Life (1988), allowed the band to succeed in the US market, the first in Latin America to achieve it. However, during the previous rehearsals tensions arose within the group, Cerati exercised creative control to the point of indicating how to play to his companions; Although they came to feel like "soloist musicians", Bosio would later mention: "Today I understand that he was projecting himself as the true artist he would soon become".

On December 3, in the middle of the military uprising, Soda Stereo performed their scheduled concert at the Obras Sanitarias Stadium; In one part of the recital, Cerati spoke of the event that was taking place and his words comforted the public. Belauza of Tiempo Argentino , wrote: «Cerati opened the party on time, making a speech in defense of democracy; and that was enough for many to understand that with more or less political and social commitment, for the new generations democracy was non-negotiable". With the publication of the EP Languis (1989), in the words of Diego Giordano, Cerati had become a "sort of Latino Julio Iglesias"; To break away from that image, he decided to return to the sound of the Argentine rock bands of the 1970s that he used to listen to in his adolescence. In this way, in solitude he began to compose the songs for Canción animal (1990), cataloged as the best album by Soda Stereo and one of the most emblematic of rock in Spanish., consecrated them again before the public and the press. After several achievements such as filling the Gran Rex Theater several times, the Vélez Stadium and gathering 250,000 people on Avenida 9 de Julio, precisely at their best moment they began to doubt Her future. Cerati would say: «One possibility would be to dedicate ourselves over and over again to breaking our own marks, as if it were a sport. But how far can you do that without killing the music we love?"

1992-1997: Parallel to Soda Stereo, solo album, and split

Towards the end of the Animal tour in January 1992, the band took a break to dedicate themselves to personal projects. In March Cerati released the album Colores santos, in a duet with Daniel Melero, little valued by critics and the public. The singles "Vuelta por el Universo" and "Hoy ya no soy yo" were not more successful. It was the first time that Cerati moved away from "guitar pop", and in his Instead he was more into dream pop. Cerati recalled people saying to him, "What is this? Hang up your guitar, kid!”, and he also thought that he played the rock part and Melero the techno, but many times it was the other way around. Over time they valued it, Vice magazine called Colores santos "a cult work of South American electronica". They never presented the album live due to an agreement they had not to play those songs. Dynamo, the next album by Soda Stereo, had many problems: diffusion due to the change of record company to BMG, moderate reception from the public who did not understand the new sound and internal discrepancies in the trio. In 1993, Cerati wanted to return to Buenos Aires while on tour, as a consequence they suspended the rest of the promotion, which included the United States and Spain; later, he explained: «I lived it as an artistic and labor prison. There is nothing worse than not feeling."

Cover Yellow. Art by Gabriela Malerba and Alejandro Ros

The rest days of the group extended to a recess that was about to dissolve them. Cerati moved to Santiago de Chile to stay for a while with his girlfriend, the Chilean Cecilia Amenábar, and extended his stay when she became pregnant to marry the two later. While living in an apartment in Providencia, Cerati set up the Ámbar rehearsal room to make his first solo album, which took shape in Soda Stereo's Supersónico studio in Argentina. He composed almost all the songs and played all the instruments on most of the Zeta Bosio —co-producer— and Aménabar participated in some of the themes. He released Amor amarillo on November 1, which reflected the good moment of their relationship, while going between the acoustic, the electronic, the psychedelic and the experiential; 25 days later, the couple's first child, Benito, would be born. EMOL said that hand in hand with singles like "Te llevo para que me llevas" or "Pulsar", "it helped Cerati to be impregnated with that trail of &# 34;avant-garde" that haunted him until the end of the 2000s".

According to Amenábar, "[Amor amarillo] is one of his least sold and understood albums" because it was made outside of Soda Stereo, and because "a lot of people didn't like that he left a Chile", in addition, he barely promoted it because he conceived it as something intimate, not intended to play live. However, he made an exception in April 1994; accompanied by Bosio on bass and Flavio Etcheto on guitar, on FM 100 radio he did the only official live concert, the station set up two screens in the streets so more people could see it. In various interviews he clarified that he would not start a solo career, and that this album was only a solo work. In mid-1994 Soda Stereo met again in their rehearsal room, weeks before a tragedy struck them after one of Soda's sons died in a traffic accident. Bosio. The following year, they released the band's last album: Sueño Stereo.

In March 1996, Soda Stereo performed on MTV Unplugged highlighted by the strong presence of Cerati, who after rejecting the invitation several times, proposed to the network to make the songs more intimate and relaxed, without so many decibels or volume, much more lounge, considering that the sound of the group did not fit into an acoustic format, so he called it: "Un Plugged" ("un plugged"), emphasized on the cover of Comfort and music to fly. In May, after the birth of Lisa, the second daughter of his marriage, Cerati published the debut album of his first parallel electronic music project Plan V, which consisted of a band formed with the Chileans Andrés Bucci, Guillermo Ugarte and Christian Powditch. With the title of the same name, also known as Individual Habitat, it was successful in Argentina as it was the best-selling genre up to then Powditch mentioned that "people couldn't believe they saw Gustavo without a guitar and without singing".

After the official announcement of the separation of Soda Stereo in May 1997, Cerati published in the supplement Sí of the newspaper Clarín "The goodbye letter". He accepted. going on a farewell tour after refusing the idea in the first place; later, he explained: "I was against [doing a tour], since I had never thought of a farewell to Soda [...] but I started checking in other groups and went back to Soda, and I realized that that it could be a very important musical moment, to play the songs for the last time. [...] "an era ends"". totals" without anyone present probably imagining that it would remain in the collective unconscious. Andrea Álvarez confessed that she thought it was "silly". In 1998, when asked about his absurdities that have become famous phrases, Cerati replied: " I have said many boludeces that did not make any sense, and yet have later served as titles, epigraphs [...] The “total thanks” thing arose as a way of saying “This is what bigger", because Soda Stereo had had a happy ending despite the fact that it was a divorce"., reflected on the band's breakup:

Terminating the group was my decision. I felt a great relief when I stopped playing at River. The closure was the maximum we could give. If we did anything else, the result and the relationship between us and outside would begin to be compromised. Especially the artistic result, because it is very vicious and could not be given more. For me, he stretched out more of the account after having made in May the decision to separate us, and to make concerts [at the end of August and] in September it was not tortuous, but I took it quietly to not go crazy. In short, maybe it did us well because it could have been abrupt, and so there was time to reflect.

1998-2010: soloist

1998-2005: early success, side projects and other forays

In 1998, Plan V released a joint album with English group The Black Dog, Plan Black V Dog. With Cerati living in Argentina, another in Germany and the rest in Chile, it would be his last work. In October Cerati appeared as a guest musician at the Los 7 Delfines concert at the Teatro Regio. On November 20 he made his solo debut at the Inrockuptibles Festival of the Recoleta Cultural Center, initially without a company, but later added Flavio Etcheto and Leo García as support in samplers; later it was the turn of Plan V, in its final appearance. For the last part, Cerati presented his new electronic project, made up of Etcheto: Ocio. In 1999, the duo released the album Medida universal under the Ámbar sub-label created by Cerati, from BMG.

Cerati came from a way of working in which for years he had to seek the approval of his bandmates and limit himself to what they could say. Now he had absolute creative freedom, while he was having a good family moment with his children in his new home, where he set up his Casa Submarina studio to record his second solo album, which he called the first "without the protection" of Soda Stereo, since his predecessor did so while he was still a member. Faced with an unprecedented expectation due to the formal presentation of Cerati as a soloist by the Argentine press in the local rock, he published Bocanada the June 28 with an initial lukewarm reception from the public and almost indifferent from critics, who highlighted his level of production as in "Verbo Carne", recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. On the other hand, critics and the public in Mexico and Chile received it with more enthusiasm.

The album was “a harbinger of what would come after Latin rock”, according to the online newspaper El Mostrador: “More of a digital vibration and electronic, and less of the traditional rock and roll loaded with guitars", which led to the initial rejection that changed over time, until it was considered an icon of Argentine and Latin rock ; the critic of rock David Cortés Arce mentioned: "Bocanada is a fundamental album in the history of Ibero-American rock, and in general, of all Spanish-speaking countries". In August MTV chose Cerati as the artist of the month, and, at the end of the year, the supplement NO of Página/12 named him the best artist of the decade, along with Charly García. At the 2000 Gardel Awards, he won for best rock artist and best cover design. The song "Puente" became his first solo hit, nominated for a Latin Grammy as best rock song and considered one of the best rock Argentine >rock on MTV and Rolling Stone. "includes foreign fragments" through sampling.

After he did Bocanada most of it alone, with time without playing live, Cerati was excited to present it thanks to the band he formed for it made up of Flavio Etcheto (keyboards and samplers), Leo García (sequences, keyboards and choirs), Fernando Nalé (bass) and Martín Carrizo (drums). The Bocanada tour began on September 25, 1999 in Mexico; the Teatro Gran Rex in October, before an audience that was cold with his new work and that asked him for songs from Soda Stereo, but he did not agree. In June 2000, with the Mexican band Café Tacvba he did a series of concerts in Mexico and Argentina under the Bocanada al revés tour (in fusion with Revés/Yo soy); Cerati opened for locals in Mexico, while in his country he closed, joining the group's performance to sing "Juego de seducción". That year, Ocio released the EP Insular, which brought the duo be part of the Sónar festival in Barcelona (Spain).

In 2001, Cerati starred in and composed the music for the film +bien, which had a weak reception in the press and the public, while the album was well received and had a nomination for best pop instrumental album at the Latin Grammys. Subsequently, he published the live album 11 symphonic episodes, where, accompanied by a symphony orchestra of 40 instrumentalists, he performed songs from all his stages in the key of violins, clarinets, harps and oboes. Seven of the eleven songs were Soda Stereo versions, Cerati clarified to disgruntled fans that they were not competing with the originals, but rather new readings. The album, recorded at the Teatro Avenida In August, it had great sales in Mexico, a country where it was shown to a full audience at the National Auditorium, then it was officially presented at the Teatro Colón and continued through theaters in Venezuela, Chile and Argentina accompanied by local orchestras.

On November 26, 2002, he released his third solo album Siempre es hoy, produced by Sacha Truijeque and Toy Hernández, and with the participation of Charly García, Domingo Cura, Camilo Castaldi «Tea- Time", and Deborah de Corral. Marked by his separation with Aménabar and his new relationship with de Corral, he combined his devotion to electronic music with the return of his guitar-filled rock side, while dabbling in other genres such as hip hop and rap. It was among the five best-selling albums in Argentina in December and earned him his only Grammy Award nomination for best Latin/alternative rock album, the singles "Cosas imposibles", "Karaoke" and "Artifacto" were widely aired, while critics judged the dispersion of the album. With the release of the remixes Reversiones: Siempre es hoy (2003), the journalist Pablo Strozza said that Cerati "redeemed himself" after having given a "false step".

The Siempre es Hoy tour opened in Quito (Ecuador) and covered America and Spain between the end of 2002 and the end of 2004, with 48 concerts. He was accompanied by his new band made up of Flavio Etcheto (samplers), Fernando Nalé (bass) —as the only members of the former—, Leandro Fresco (keyboards and choirs), Pedro Moscuzza (drums) and DJ Zucker (scratches and loops). In October 2003 he attended the second edition of the MTV Video Music Awards Latin America with four nominations, he performed "Artefacto" live at the event. At the end of the same year, while on tour, he formed together with Etcheto and Fresco, the laptop trio Roken; they performed at parties, especially in the United States, but formalized the project at the Mutek festival in Chile. Roken recorded their performances throughout Latin America with the idea of releasing a live album., never specified.

In 2004, Cerati released the compilation album Select Songs 93-04 on CD+DVD; suggested for release in Spain, he also released it in Latin America and the United States, but with a different track list, including "Tu locura" which he did for the television series Locas de amor, nominated for original musical theme at the 2005 Martín Fierro Awards. In April 2005, he appeared as a surprise guest of Los Pericos at the sixth edition of the Vive Latino festival.

2006-2010: consecration, Soda Stereo reunion, and last years

Cerati playing as part of the tour There we go in New York (up) and Madrid (low)in 2006

On April 4, 2006, he released his fourth album Ahí vamos. Co-produced with Tweety González, mixed by Venezuelan engineer and musician Héctor Castillo and mastered by Howie Weinberg at Masterdisk studio in New York The guitar this time leads completely with the rock approach, Roque Casciero from Páginas1/2 said that Cerati in Siempre es hoy had shown a "somewhat blurred image of a central artist for the history of Argentine rock”, as if he had “lost focus for a while”, unlike Ahí vamos, who did not hesitate to call it his best work soloist: "A vibrant rock record, classic and modern at the same time"; the first cut, "Crime", breaks this mold with a power ballad that includes a piano, debuted at number one on Argentine radio stations. Ahí vamos and " Crimen» won Best Vocal Album and Best Rock Song at the 2006 Latin Grammy Awards. Cerati closed the year by establishing himself as a soloist with the public's acceptance. Gardel de Oro, achieving a record that would be repeated later by David Lebón in 2020 and Wos in 2022. In the 2008 edition Ahí vamos he added the trophy for best DVD. The other singles "La excepción", "Goodbye", "Lake in the Sky" and "I'm Staying Here" also stood out.

Cerati in 2007 presenting at the Festival de Viña (up) and Soda Stereo in Ecuador (low)

The Ahí Vamos tour began on June 1, 2006 in Mexico City and continued through Latin America, the United States, Spain and London, where Cerati played for the first time on October 12 at The Forum, with 76 concerts in total He was accompanied by his new band made up of Richard Coleman (guitar), Fernando Samalea (drums), Fernando Nalé (bass) and Leandro Fresco (keyboards and choirs). On February 23, 2007, he performed at the Quinta Vergara amphitheater to participate in the XLVIII Viña del Mar International Song Festival, the same contest in which he was twenty years earlier with Soda Stereo. The Monster rewarded him with two torches and the silver seagull. to the Monument to Güemes. In June the tour ended, after the announcement of the return of Soda Stereo. A month later, Cerati joined Shakira to perform the song "Día especial" together at Live Earth in Hamburg (Germany) and later in a concert in Istanbul (Turkey).

Soda Stereo on their reunion tour, You will see me go back, did six concerts again at the Antonio Vespucio Liberti Stadium, the first Latin American rock band to do that amount in a single tour, surpassing the record of The Rolling Stones with five. With twenty-two dates in total in nine countries between October and December, it grossed over a million viewers, In April 2008 they received the Musical Personality of the Year award from CAPIF, Cerati said that they summed up the period as "a bubble in time" because "it was something incredible", but they would not feed expectations: "from now on each one follows his separate path". At the ceremony he played for the last time with Soda Stereo, Andrea Álvarez replaced Charly Alberti. In 2008 he made several appearances as a guest, including in the performances of Fito Páez and Shakira in the concert organized by the Fundación América Latina en Acción Solidaria (ALAS) in the old Boca Juniors Sports City, in May; jan The Emmanuel Horvilleur concert at the Teatro Gran Rex, in August; and in the presentation of Bajofondo at the Creamfields festival, in November.

Cerati playing in Monterrey, at the start of the natural force tour. When the performance was ten years old, it was screened in Latin American, United States and Spain cinemas, and they edited a double+DVD CD titled Natural Tour Force, live in Monterrey, MX, 2009That the magazine Billboard He chose as one of the 50 best Latin albums of the decade and won the Gardel 2020 Award for the best live album.

In July 2009 he returned as a soloist with the single "Déjà vu", on September 1 he released the album Fuerza natural, more closely linked to the sound of acoustic guitars folk and country . It achieved a gold record for advance sales, and later a platinum record. In addition to Argentina, it also ranked first in sales in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile, as well as the best seller in the Latin iTunes store in the first week. Cerati considered it the most satisfying of his career, and that if it were the last he would leave happy. Coleman revealed: "He himself said that after this album I can die peacefully. In perspective it sounds horrible, but it reflects what he thought about this record. All the musicians close to him share that idea, that he is the best". Several analysts agree that it is his best work, the Spanish magazine Zona de Obras said: "it is about, that nobody dude, one of his best works. Perhaps because the curve of the fifties has passed and the experience added aplomb to his idea of pop-rock, which includes flaming guitars, a privileged voice and elaborate songs that in their complexity never resign freshness. Other critics were less enthusiastic, describing him as "off", "undeble", "lean and petty", these last words annoyed Cerati and he called the journalist responsible, Marcelo Contreras, an "imbecile".

Cerati defined the album as "set towards the cinema", in that sense, he intended to release all the songs in "a single and great video clip" in the form of a film or road movie. Fuerza natural and "Déjà vu" received various awards and positions on lists, among the best albums of 2009 by Rolling Stone (position 5), Top 5 national clips (position 1) and the 100 best songs of the year (position 12); they led the polls for the supplement S! of Clarín, and Cerati as the best solo artist; won seven categories at the 2010 Gardel Awards, including his second gold Gardel; he went on to win three Latin Grammys for Best Rock Album, Best Cover Design, and Best Rock Song >. His band was the same as Ahí vamos, he added Anita Álvarez de Toledo on choirs and Gonzalo Córdoba on guitar. The Fuerza Natural tour began on November 19, 2009 at the Estadio de Monterrey Baseball, and closed its second leg on May 15, 2010 at the Simón Bolívar University football stadium in Caracas (Venezuela).

Stroke and death

On May 16, 2010, around 2:00 a.m. m., rumors circulated that Cerati had fainted, which his sound engineer Adrián Taverna would later deny. Cerati's Twitter account reported that he had "a decompensation", but was "recovering favorably". After the concert In Caracas they took him to the La Trinidad clinic for tests, he was conscious, but unable to speak or move his right side, on the 17th he entered a coma. That day they explained that he had had a "stress picture", but it was soon discovered that he had to undergo surgery. On May 18, they confirmed in an official statement that he suffered "an ischemic vascular event with aphasia of expression", the product of a cerebrovascular accident (CVA). The media immediately recalled the thrombosis that afflicted to Cerati four years earlier. In June he was repatriated to transfer him to the FLENI institute in Buenos Aires, he stayed until October to later move to the ALCLA clinic without significant changes. Since what happened, his fa naticos held vigils and received various tributes from Luis Alberto Spinetta, Charly García, Fito Páez, Andrés Calamaro, Shakira, Bono, Joaquín Sabina, Alejandro Sanz, Maná, among others. In 2013, Pope Francis wrote him a letter of prayer, at the request of the plastic artist Gustavo Masó; in a fragment he mentioned: "He helped me to reconnect with Gustavo [Cerati]."

Álvaro Elizalde writing in the book of condolences

On September 4, 2014, Cerati died without any kind of suffering due to respiratory arrest, around 9:00 a.m. local time (12:00 GMT). He had turned 55 the previous month. His family confirmed the news. through his Facebook account, after local media such as Radio Mitre anticipated. In the Buenos Aires Legislature, First Vice President Cristian Ritondo released the news, after the Minister of Culture Hernán Lombardi confirmed him. Legislator Susana Rinaldi expressed his regret, and the entire legislature observed a minute of silence. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner decreed two days of national mourning with the Argentine flag hoisted at half-mast in all public buildings. Chilean minister spokesman Álvaro Elizalde expressed his condolences not only on behalf of the Chilean government, but also as an "admirer." After leaving his message in the book of condolences provided at the Argentine Consulate in Santiago, he declared to the press: "His life was an expression of the brotherhood between our peoples." More artists expressed their regret, including Indio Solari, Francisco Bochatón, Diego Frenkel, Juanes, Ricky Martin, Residente, Julieta Venegas and Molotov, among others.

Row to enter the wake

The day of his death coincided with the 2014 Gardel Awards, he was paid multiple tributes during the awards ceremonies at the Teatro Gran Rex. Andrés Calamaro said: «I cried like a boy and it is the third time that I was so my life. The last time they gave me an award, I was sitting next to Gustavo and he was the first to get up and congratulate me." Thousands of people attended his wake at the Buenos Aires City Legislature that lasted fourteen hours, including Zeta Bosio, Charly García, Miguel Mateos, Pedro Aznar, Fena Della Maggiora, Dante Spinetta, María Carámbula and Martín Palermo. His fans formed a line in more than fifteen blocks of the place to pay tribute to him. On September 5, a funeral procession toured in various areas within the main avenues of Buenos Aires, while hundreds of supporters threw flowers at the hearse; It ended with a private ceremony in the chapels of the Chacarita Cemetery, with a crowd outside, Cerati's remains were placed in a tomb next to his father Juan José Cerati's.

Musicality

John Lennon (left) and David Bowie (right)Two influences of Cerati

Influences

Cerati's first musical memory was The Beatles, in various interviews he recounted how he played singing and playing "Twist and Shout" with a broom, and that his favorite member was John Lennon, whom in 2005 he praised as a "unique composer" and assured: "If I have to name an artist among all of them, I choose him." To compose "Crime" he looked for inspiration in "Jealous Guy", which he called "the quintessential love song". "Beatlesque" songs, one of the most obvious being "I've Seen Lucy". were the songs "Purple Haze" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience and "Pictures of Lily" by The Who, which he listened to daily. David Bowie was another icon like Lennon for Cerati, he came to work with two of his musicians: Carlos Alomar who produced Doble vida and Sterling Campbell who played some songs from Fuerza natural.

Cerati lived close to Luis Alberto Spinetta when he released Artaud (1973), which had an impact on him as a teenager; With references such as The Beatles, Roxy Music and King Crimson, discovering that prompted him in one of his first bands and he expressed that "he did nothing but imitate, try to reproduce the climate that he achieved on that record"; he used to play "Bajan" that he rediscovered on his move to Santiago, and decided to make a version of it in Amor amarillo. He performed it with Spinetta in Summer 07, together with "Té para tres", which Cerati called the "Best show of my life" for the collaboration, among other things, and two years later, when they repeated the experience at the Spinetta and the Eternal Bands concert, before retiring he said: "Yes there is a dream come true is this". she sang at the 2010 El Abrazo Festival, and would include her in her presentations.

Cerati would rediscover the energy emanated by The Beatles in The Police, which would later define the music of Soda Stereo due to its way of mixing rock, punk, jazz and reggae. He saw them play when they visited Argentina in 1980, and met them the next day. In an interview for MTV in 2006, he mentioned as an influence within the punk to The Clash, although he was much more drawn to what followed. the Bunnymen, Elvis Costello to The Police. From The Cure he took the harmonies, singing, attitude, aesthetics, and composition, reflected in Signs, as well as including Depeche Mode, The Psychedelic Furs, Cocteau Twins and U2.

By the late eighties Cerati had already rediscovered the Argentine rock bands of the previous decade: Pescado Rabioso, Vox Dei, and Color Humano, and according to Jalil in Rolling Stone, « Animal Song is [...] the first record in which Gustavo Cerati begins to see himself as an heir to the Argentine rock of the seventies." Cerati went so far as to say that Animal Song is The Bible (1971), he later covered "Genesis" with Soda Stereo on MTV Unplugged. He also influenced contemporary bands such as The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. With Daniel Melero he listened to albums such as Joy 1967-1990 (by Ultra Vivid Scene), Screamadelica (by Primal Scream), Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (from The Orb) and Loveless (from My Bloody Valentine). In Yellow Love I had been listening to records by Galaxie 500, Spiritualized and Eyes in the Sky by The Alan Parsons Project. He was also influenced by Screa ming Trees, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Ride, Nine Inch Nails and Fatboy Slim.

In an interview in 1996, he named among the artists that Stereolab liked, who aroused a lot of interest. "It is a kind of experimental group that combines rock with many aspects that are not more commercially accepted". disco. He acquired sound elements from German electronic artists such as Mike Ink, GAS, Kreidler, Jörg Follert "Wunder" and Basic Channel; the German compilation Elektronische Musik aus Buenos Aires (1999) included Ocio. Among the referents of Bocanada he named Massive Attack, Alturas de Machu Picchu (1981), DJ Shadow, The Beach Boys, and Jorge Luis Borges. Rudie Martínez was on the recording, there Cerati confessed that he was greatly influenced by his band San Martín Vampire. There were people who, without being musicians, like his children and friends influenced the conceptual development of Bocanada.

For the production part of Ahí vamos he credited Queen and Led Zeppelin, he also named Talking Heads and Television as influences on the album. In modern bands he was identified with LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and The Strokes. For Natural Force he relied on Traveling Wilburys, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Electric Light Orchestra, Charly García, David Lebón, Devo, Todd Rundgren, Fleetwood Mac, Of Montreal, Hot Chip, TV on the Radio, The Pretty Things, the album Raising Sand (2007) by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Ney Matogrosso, Pink Floyd and Yes. in his mind some works by the artists José María Madrid and William Blake, and by the filmmaker Kenneth Anger, although he did not believe that the lyrics were directly a product of that, he did believe that "they are a contractual point of all this".

Musical styles and genres

Cerati encompassed different styles, he tried not to be pigeonholed into just one, and he was able to leave his stamp on all of them. The journalist Sergio Marchi commented that he made his style freer, as a soloist "he differentiated himself, but he did not look for a radically opposite style because he knew that it was going to be unnatural and was not going to favor his music»; it was closer to that of Luis Alberto Spinetta, "whose he was his best student", and who, unlike Charly García, did not make social or protest songs. In his guitar classes he first learned folklore, but he only recently incorporated it into music. his music in a fusion of carnavalito and reggae in "Cuando pasa el tremolo". In an interview in 2009, Cerati elucidated that folklore, like blues, "is a genre that has remained more or less visible" on his records; in another of the same year, he said: "You will not find more than one song that has folkloric reminiscences" like "Raíz" on Bocanada; "Sulky", emerged from a mosaic made by computers; "Cactús", which clarified that it was not a chacarera, but had something to do with it. Pablo Schanton of Clarín said that "Té for three" has "a cracked vocalization" and "combines a baguala cadence and a spinettian cadence".

Cerati in Colombia, 2006

Soda Stereo began as punk rock, reggae and ska, for the second album the style of the trio changed remarkably. Friction and Nothing personal gave Cerati influence post-punk and dark that would allow him to make Signs, moving away definitively of the initial ska. In the early 1990s, he was interested in the sonic movement gestated in Madchester and included it in the maxi Rex Mix, the first within the ska >rock in Spanish. "Radio pop" still predominated when Cerati brought shoegaze to America with Dynamo, a decade later the genre caused a sensation. At the same time, on his trips to Chile he forged a great friendship with Christian Powditch, who provided him with a wide variety of albums with sounds of beats and computers, which coincided with Cerati's interest in the synthetic sounds that materialized in Rex Mix and "Pulsar". About the song Página/12 states that it is "a declaration of principles of Cerati on the appropriation of electronic music in his proposal from then on." The time he spent in Santiago introduced him to acid house and ambient , which embodied in Sueño Stereo. The press cataloged Plan V as a mixture of ambient and house, Powditch denied that they cultivated house, although they tried. "I simply define [Plan V's music] as electronic music that was already there, far beyond a style."

His interest in electronics dates back to the 1980s, influenced by the British new wave; in Nothing personal the use of the synthesizer is evident, and it continued in Signs, with its climax in the live album Ruido blanco (1987) with reversions full of synthetic sounds, electronic drums and sequences. At the same time, in the remixes of "Sobredosis de TV" and "Nothing personal" in 1985, and those included in the EP's Languis and Rex Mix, demonstrated his curiosity in the genre. The critics of the time cataloged Colores santos "one of the first massive electronic manifestations in Argentina". However, Cerati and Melero said that "it was a contemporary rock record, which absorbed other styles from what was happening in other places, like a sponge". Fernando Herrera of the newspaper Tiempo described that there is an "ambience that oscillated naturally between electronic pop and art rock", a mixture that they developed later in their solo careers. In Iván Adaime's review in AllMusic a Bocanada, said that “it marked his return to pop, and in fact he combined his devotion to electronic music with the pop songs that made him famous. A song like “Río Babel” demonstrates that mix, and also the mid-tempo cadence that dominates the record.” Nicolás Vallejo-Cano in Vice said that Bocanada is a eclectic work "in which Gus displayed all his magic in hybrids of very high poetic height and hyper-sophisticated production, from the symphonic epic "Verbo Carne" to the trip hop "Bocanada"".

This is where he took on a crooner style; in his words, in "Bocanada" he took "a Scott Walker-type attitude", while in "Verbo Carne" he has "an air of a bolero crooner from the fifties with symphonic music from the seventies" The website Silencio said that he played a "neoclassical crooner", in 11 symphonic episodes "he became on this live album a crooner refined". Clarín said he took a style like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, approaching that of Robbie Williams in his last work at the time, Swing When You're Winning (2001). In an interview with La Nación, Cerati commented that he was on the side of Tony Bennett, he did not refer to any rock band, nor he wanted to make a mixture between both genres, instead they looked at Tim Burton and the music from his films, giving "a mixture of childish and gothic" reinforced in the clothing he wore on the occasion. In It's always today left behind the aesthetic of crooner, he returned to the guitar c As the most constant main axis, but not always in a leading role, and included many elements such as hip hop; for La Nación , the "negative" point of him is that he "does not have a guiding guide. On the long journey, one can easily get lost." With the remix album of Siempre es hoy, the Argentine newspaper compared it to Jessico Dancemix (2002), which served as "an example for last year's rock-electronic communion", while "Reversiones is the record grimace that in 2003 points to the relationship between genres".

According to Infobae in Ahí vamos: «he returned to the rock from which he had never completely left, but which perhaps had become more mixed with other styles in his previous works". In Fuerza Natural the journalist María de los Ángeles Cerda from Rockaxis said that "Cerati had never sounded so varied in a single album", from folklore with Argentine roots, glam rock, to its pop side, as well as American folk and country pop. Other experimentations he carried out included "Agua", a song that he played live, but which he never officially recorded, combined rock with oriental music; his interpretation of "Los libros de la buena memoria", delved into jazz; "El mareo" with the tango, where Indie Hoy says that «it can be seen as the summary of the journey that Cerati had taken from Colores santos to Siempre es hoy, including 11 symphonic episodes".

Guitar work

Cerati was left-handed, but learned to play the guitar right-handed for "a matter of practice", although he could not find a special model either. He practiced with Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Commodores, Earth Wind & Fire, and Parliament. The musician Javier Barría highlighted that Cerati's left hand had more strength and that was noticeable in his treatment with the strings. Analysts and those close to him agree that as a guitarist he stood out for the rhythm of his right hand. "His long fingers allowed him to play the strings with wide intervals". He had a "funky" way of playing, and according to him, a "very mobile" right hand. Colombian rock Eduardo Arias, Cerati's musical impact on the continent is above all as a guitarist, since he brought new techniques to play, inspired by The Specials, The Police or The Cure. He was frequently looking for new sounds when experimenting through effects or ways of playing the guitar, as he had extensive knowledge of the instrument. He mastered the delay with which he made repetitive echoes, influenced by Andy Summers and David Gilmour. Sergio Marchi mentioned an occasion when he saw Cerati looking for a particular sound and "he was shaking the pachera hard » in order to achieve this. Fernando Cárdenas from Radio Nacional highlighted his arrangements of the songs by Los 7 Delfines when he played with the band live, in «Ni una vez más» he contributed with his guitar a «surround sound quite similar to a synthesizer".

Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore are the two guitarists who influenced him the most. Other notable ones are Mick Ronson, Ace Frehley, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King and Carlos Santana. Richard Coleman revealed to Rolling Stone that when he saw Cerati play for the first time he was struck by "his very personal rhythmic guitar style" with "a mix of funk with reggae, which marked the groove of the songs", and his use of simple chords with which he "made many first position chords played with a precision that made them sound much bigger". In 1985, Cerati worked on guitars with Coleman For Nothing personal, according to the journalist Carlos Iogna Prat of Todo Noticias, in "Estoy Azulado" he presented an "interesting" result when using two compressors and a mixer "before plug it into the amplifier that divided the sound into four signals» and in «Observándos (Satellites)» «he inverted a part of the tape with the guitar and had a particular effect. ct". Jalil in Rolling Stone states that Signos includes some of his best riffs such as "El rito", "Final Caja Negra" and "On the way". Cerati always composed his songs with an acoustic or Creole guitar, "but the sound concept of Soda's first two albums left no room for that kind of instrument", Giordano explained. "In Signos, on the other hand, acoustics acquire a fundamental role as a consequence of wanting to reformulate the trio's proposal based on a more classic and organic sound criterion." In the song "Signos" the guitar Acoustic takes center stage, highlighting the introduction, with a style defined by Pink Floyd, according to Cerati. On the promotional tour he used a guitar with nylon strings to interpret only that song. Later he did acoustic songs like "Té para tres", «I take you so you can take me», «A merced» and a large part of the pieces of Fuerza natural, in which he also played dobros, mandolin and charango.

In 1990, Cerati left behind the synthesizers that he used in the last works with the group, and took on Canción animal a more rigorous style with noisy guitars «pre-grunge i>». For Carolina Taffoni from La Capital, that album «could go from the epic riff of “A million light years” to the distorted darkness of “Sueles dejame solo”, passing by the Spinettean “Té para tres”". Coleman commented that until Canción animal the sound of the guitar "evolves with a coherence" and that Cerati experimented until Dynamo, in which the distortion grew. Roque Casciero of Página/12 pointed out that Ahí vamos is at similar heights with Canción animal and Dynamo, and in turn mentioned the guitar as the "weapon of mass destruction" on the album. He opined that "La excepción" has that "distorted magic" of Canción animal with two guitars that take the direction of the band.

One of Cerati's most acclaimed performances as a guitarist is the interpretation of "Génesis" on MTV Unplugged, he performed a solo widely praised by analysts and fans. The musician and journalist Iván Nieblas said it was "a a clean performer with great taste in choosing the right notes and explosions", and that for many this was his great moment as a guitarist. He was also highlighted at the closing of his final presentation in Caracas with the song "Un lago en heaven", ended with a "lysergic" guitar solo that lasted almost two minutes, which "crowned" the concert.

Guitars

Cerati with his PRS Multifoil

In the beginnings of Soda Stereo, Cerati had a cream-colored Fender Stratocaster that he later painted gray. In January 1986 he bought a series of instruments with Bosio in New York, after two months earlier they were robbed from the band the previous ones; he acquired a blue-finish Jackson Soloist SL 1 guitar and a black Schecter. The Jackson, considered the most emblematic of the first stage, recovered it for the Me veras vuelver tour after years without using it thanks to his assistant who found and restored it, although later he had to design a protector for it because it went out of tune alone due to Cerati resting his hand on the microfiners when he did the rhythmics. In 2008, he used it for the last time in the Emmanuel Horvilleur concert; before performing the riff of "Nothing Personal", he joked: "This guitar only plays one song, it plays itself!" New York to Buenos Aires a Pensa-Suhr, one of his favorite guitars. The following year he bought a limited edition PRS Multifoil Special Model, his main guitar from Animal Song to The Last Concert, while in He alternated his solo stage with other brands. On the Me veras volver tour, he used a PRS Custom 24 that he was trying to break in the solo of "Sueles deja me solo", he asked for another for the final concert in which he managed to destroy it. On the day As Cerati turned 56, PRS Guitars released a limited edition of fifteen units of the 2015 Multi-foil LTD model as a tribute with the legend "thank you all" on the guitar's back cover.

He had a Fender Electric XII that he used in the "In the City of Fury" and "Of Light Music" video clips, a Kramer Baretta, a Parker Fly, a Davoli Polyphon, and a Gibson ES-355 that he played on ballads or blues like the version of “Té para tres” in Comfort y música para volar. As for amplifiers, he used the Vox AC30 and Roland JC 120 more often. In his solo stage he used a Fender Telecaster, Gibson Les Paul and G&L ASAT Classic and Legacy HB. In 2010, in the middle of the Fuerza Natural tour, he decided to buy a Mosrite double-neck (twelve-string and six-string double neck) used to perform "Treat Me Gently", in his last concert he revealed to the public: "I had this guitar made just to play this song". Among acoustic guitars he had a Gibson Chet Atkins, a Guild F4ce, an Alvarez Yairi twelve strings, and a Taylor T5. He used a Yamaha APX 5 that Spinetta lent him for the recording of Amor amarillo and the live performance.

Samples

Cerati used samples in several of his compositions, taking fragments of songs from a wide range of artists that he modified to use in his own. In some cases he did not technically sample, but he executed them himself. All this led his detractors to directly accuse him of committing "plagiarism" or "copying", although nothing came out in court. Cerati denied these accusations and replied: "The sound appropriation is as valid as the creation from scratch. This is how all the music of recent years was built, based on samples". i>Animal Song, they consolidated it into Holy Colors that would lay the foundations of Dynamo. Through the sampler they also incorporated sounds like the heartbeat of his son in "Pulsar". He self-sampled from his work, he composed the instrumental "+Bien" based on the solo from "Entre caníbales". In Ahí vamos he made samples at first to define basic rhythms, but at the time of recording he replaced them with guitars.

His interest in using the sampler grew with his electronic projects Plan V and Ocio; Universal Measurement served as the genesis for the conception of Bocanada, composed largely with an MPC3000. According to Rolling Stone, Bocanada is one of the few albums on the Argentine >rock that has so many samples and is so recognizable, from Elvis Presley, Claude Debussy, The Spencer Davis Group, Focus, John Barry, Electric Light Orchestra, Gary Glitter, The Verve, to Los Jaivas, all credited on the album. Cerati told Zona de Obras in 2000, that the album contains a lot of "sampleadelia" and stated that he had pointed out the samples used that could generate some kind of problem like Focus, of whom he could not exercise contact for the rights of «Eruption» by Moving Waves (1971). «The field of samples is still not very clear. Now the MP3 issue is being discussed. My feeling is that, in the case of the sample [of "Eruption"] by Focus, it's a fundamental part of the composition [of "Bocanada"]. On the instrumental theme I made a new song ». He also stated: «When you sample something and it works, you have to use it. I don't care if they do it to me either. I think the important thing is to transform the sample into a song, to give it a different value”.

Technology

Cerati is considered one of the forerunners in the use of new technologies applied to music. In his words, this made him more "artisan". When computers appeared, he bought a Commodore 64, but at that time he did not there were music apps; it was not until the late 1980s that the first software appeared and the instruments that Soda Stereo played were already electronic. Cerati did not work with a computer until Yellow Love. In 2003 he said to be impressed by his ability to manipulate time. Along with Roken, he is the first Latin American exponent who brought "a new European electronic wave, but with a Latin flavor", which they called a "laptop jam" with digital sounds by means of recordings, equalization and added effects made live through a computer. Cerati expressed that composing and playing on computers and samplers was so normal for him like doing a "traditional" song on guitar, and called his laptop his "mobile recording studio". Once without a guitar in a hotel, he grabbed the laptop > and took pieces of various songs with different tones, thus began to create "Crime" and "I'm Staying Here". He used the Ableton Live application to compose Here we go , the same one he used in Natural Force without using a guitar.

Voice

Cerati was a dramatic baritone with a wide register and vocal command of treble and bass. Chilean journalist Claudio Vergara said that he had a way of singing with many twists and timbre changes in a "super attractive" way that demonstrated her "vocal richness". Jalil in Rolling Stone recalled that she had a "confident and warm" tone and at times her voice color changed for "a more imperative register". Ecuadorian singer Mariela Espinosa he highlighted his performance in 11 symphonic episodes; without playing instruments, her voice fulfilled that function, taking advantage of the fact that it had many effects. and vitality", allowing himself to "play with phrasing and inflections" as the performance of a beatboxing that he improvised before singing "Man Overboard".

Cerati pointed out to Bocanada an interpretation album where he highlights the voice as a large part of his essence, compared to his previous albums that made it difficult for him, due to the rush he had when singing or due to the scarcity of recording systems such as Pro Tools, but when recording it from home he took it more calmly, which was reflected in his more expressive voice. For Rockaxis magazine, his way of singing in Siempre es hoy was at a maturity, "this may be the album where he is at his point vocally", and he highlighted his play with the falsetto in "Especie". Espinosa highlighted his interpretation of this album in "Vivo" for "his ability to sing in subtle, short moments and then explode letting his voice get bigger, he knew how to show his dynamics".

Other instruments

Cerati, in an interview for Rolling Stone magazine in 2006, said that he really liked playing the bass and that he had "a good feeling to play it". Dynamo reversed roles with Zeta Bosio on "Camaleón" and replicated it in live performances. He previously performed it on the "Hombre al agua" demo, on the album Conga i> (1991) by Daniel Melero, and on Colores santos, where he used Bosio's Fender Precision Bass. On his solo albums he continued with the bass, several tracks from Natural Force played them himself, on "I've Seen Lucy" he played a Höfner 500/1, in other cases he substituted a keyboard because it had a deep sound compared to a traditional bass. He played keyboard, mostly in Holy Colors, and synthesizer, although he didn't know much. In Soda Stereo he did the programming of the drums both in the studio and live, which he did on all the tracks of Amor amarillo, where he also played the rest of the The instruments in most of the songs, he also played them all in «Raíz», he came to use the harmonica.

Compositions and lyrics

Cerati is considered one of the most influential lyricists of Latin rock. Critic Juan Carlos Garay said: "He is one of the few artists who manages to make us learn certain lyrics by the simple charm of their sound, without ever understanding them." Vergara in his analysis of "En la ciudad de la furia" He mentioned that he had that ability from his origins as a publicist, “to install certain words, certain phrases in the collective unconscious. And "the city of fury" was installed as one of the best-known nicknames of Buenos Aires and of any city that is relatively tumultuous". Carlos Schilling of La Voz del Interior highlighted "the ability to condense situations and feelings into almost advertising formulas, tremendously effective and mysterious at the same time" such as "Signs". For the Ecuadorian writer Eduardo Varas, one of the best verses written in Spanish is in "Ángel Eléctrico": "I still have the sun to kiss your shadow".

Most of his songs are about flow, the here and now, spirituality, love, heartbreak, evolution, lies, imagination, and fables, although he assured that not all of them were about his experiences In 2003, Cerati said that his lyrics pursue a "poetic beauty", although they also "fulfill the function of putting content" to what he wanted to sing as a melody; he did not make the most romantic ones out of love "but because he yearned for or prophesied an ideal state", and he cited as an example "En remolinos" of hope, written at a difficult moment in his life. He always started first with the music, he said he had "the ghost-shaped melodies” linked, among other things, with words “that have to do with the music itself. And then I start listening to what I sang, but in a low tone so that it doesn't become a prison for me, and that's where the lyrics come from".; sometimes it remained as the final name. According to Zeta Bosio, Cerati had an "obsession" for them to sound similar to English that he expressed a lot with short monosyllable words. "Then, he found in the Spanish esprújulas to divide them into three syllables and begin to make melodies with that, and that's how "Prófugos" came along... and a lot of Gustavo's lyrics that are made that way".

Accused of not relating to the social environment because his "songs are written in the first person", with things that have to do with him "or are too metaphorical", in response he said that it was "impossible" that he did not influence. In his defense, Adrián Taverna said: "You don't do politics just talking about rifles and revolution. The song "Dietético", seems like a trivial and frivolous subject, but it says "the regime is over", it should have been understood thirty years before". Schilling said that the lyrics of Soda Stereo "are from an anticipatory irony of neoliberalism much more lucid than any of the songs by Sumo or Los Redonditos of that decade." Cerati had the ability to portray themes of the time such as the cult of the body ("Dietético"), the cold war (" A missile in my closet") or the growing addiction to television ("TV Overdose"), with its acid humor through ambiguous letters so as not to confuse irony with complaints and anger. In Nothing personal continued addressing the sarcastic criticism of consumerism and capitalism, all of this made omens for Argentina in the nineties, but once fulfilled «Cerati's poetry lost some of that initial edge and became less immediate, no longer oriented to decipher the signs of the times, but engrossed in her own images that they were still flirting with you."

She began to write about him, although "cold" and "distant" in Nothing Personal, she understood this "tool" to "fill those melodic spaces with words". to be more noticeable, and he made a more evident evolutionary leap in Signs. According to Diego Giordano, he abandoned the traditional scheme in a song and replaced it with a dynamic, formal and more elaborate concept. In Signos appears “the synthesis of heroism and melancholy” that Cerati used to compose Soda Stereo's greatest hits such as “En la ciudad de la furia” and “De música ligera”; For the writer Eduardo Berti, Signos is the first album with "autobiography" themes. Cerati considered that he had his limits as a lyricist, so he sometimes asked other people for help. The journalist Claudio Kleiman He said that two of the most moving songs on Fuerza Natural are "Tracción a sangre" and "Cactus", which he wrote alone.

Collaborations

From left to right: Aznar, Páez, Valladares and Cerati, in 1989

Since 1984, Cerati collaborated with other musicians; Soda Stereo's debut album featured Richard Coleman and Daniel Melero, with whom he co-wrote songs for later projects. He also co-wrote with Isabel de Sebastián, Jorge Daffunchio, Flavio Etcheto, Francisco Bochatón, Pablo Schanton, his son Benito, and Adrián Paoletti. In a meeting with the group Virus, he made a guitar arrangement for their song "Imágenes paganas" (1986). He collaborated with Fricción on their two albums: in Consumación o consumo (1986) contributed guitar, synthesizers and backing vocals on some songs, and produced Para terminar (1988), in which he played a guitar solo.

Between 1988 and 1991 he made several collaborations; he played rhythm guitar on the song "La bestia humana" by the Mexican band Caifanes. He previously collaborated with Daniel Melero on "Música lenta." He gave voice to three songs on the album Grito en el cielo vol. 2 by Leda Valladares: "The drop digs the stone", "Of vice you have to hate me", and "In another power". He participated in "Vietnam" of No one leaves here alive by Andrés Calamaro. Together with Charly García and Pedro Aznar he tried to form a trio called Tango 3, from those sessions "No te mueras en mi casa" was included in Filosofía bara y zapatos de goma by García. Later, Cerati participated in the song "Vampiro" from Tango 4 by García y Aznar. He played in "Arcos" from Algo mejor by Fabiana Cantilo.

Cerati played for the emerging bands Los Brujos and Babasónicos on their debut albums. In 1992 he produced L7D of Los 7 Delfines and played on Aguirre's "Terror de mi vida", with Zeta Bosio as a producer. During his stay in Chile he associated with local artists: he helped in the recording of the song "Óleo" (1994) by Sien and produced Sueños en transito (1997) by Nicole. In 1997, Soda Stereo as the last studio recording made a version of "Some Day One Day" for Tribute to Queen: Los grandes del rock en español, Cerati adapted it into Spanish under the title "Algún day", not being like the original, he received co-writing credit with Brian May. In 1998, along with Andy Summers and Vinnie Colaiuta, he recorded a Spanish version of "Bring On the Night" ("Bring me the night") by The Police for the tribute album Outlandos D'Americas, on which he sang, played bass and acoustic guitar.

He collaborated with and/or produced artists such as Francisco Bochatón, Altocamet, Antonio Birabent, Leo García, among others. paredes by Sui Generis, and in "Part of the rules" by the band Pr3ssion. He worked for Leandro Fresco on three songs on his album Luz sin calor (2005) and on " Midnight Sun” that appeared in El reino invisible (2015). He collaborated for Shakira as producer and/or composer on “No” and “Día especial” from Fijación oral vol. 1 (2005), and "Devoción" and "Tu boca" from Sale el sol (2010). He participated in three songs from Easy (2006) by German DJ Jörg Follert "Wechsel Garland". He played the guitar solo for Richard Coleman's "Normal", published in Siberia Country Club (2011).

Other collaborations between 2005 and 2009 added later to his second posthumous compilation album, Satélite Cerati (2018), included with Leo García, Telefunka, D-mente, 202, Emmanuel Horvilleur and No lo Soporto; the versions "Eiti Leda" with Fabiana Cantilo, "I'm Losing You" with Los Durabeat, "Los libros de la buena memoria" with Lito Vitale, and "Zona de promesas" with Mercedes Sosa; and the Latin Grammy nominee for best alternative song "El mareo" with Bajofondo.

Other activities

Fashion

Cerati (center) at the time of Soda Stereo with parades and exotic dresses

Cerati is also considered a style icon, he set fashion that was analyzed and recognized over time by experts. He reinvented his image and style on each new album. With Soda Stereo he is the pioneering Latin American band in styling, the first to have someone in charge of looking at their hair, makeup, and clothing. Cerati wore Little Prince-like attire for the art and performance of 11 Symphonic Episodes. His designer, Pablo Ramírez, highlighted: "Dior once said that the only queen he had dressed was Evita, on the other hand, I once dressed a prince."

In 2009, Cerati launched in Chile his pop rock style men's clothing line called GC for the Basement brand of Falabella stores, it included jeans, shirts, jackets, black, white and gray suits, ties and accessories, influenced by designs by Heidi Slimane, former creative director of Dior Homme. He modeled at the closing of the show. Falabella reported a large percentage of clothing sales in its first weekend. Valeria Mazza said that Cerati managed to "perfectly capture his personality" in the collection he made.

Humanitarian work

In July 1992, Cerati and Zeta Bosio appeared on stage with Fito Páez to perform together with Luis Alberto Spinetta their song «Seguir viviendo sin tu amor», within the framework of the Solidarity Hearts Rock Festival as the closing of ExpreSida, the first International Exhibition of HIV/AIDS Prevention Campaigns. Cerati wrote "Luna roja" in relation to that disease and allocated the royalties to the Fundación Huésped, an organization that he once again helped as a face in its 2006 calendar to raise funds. For the return of Soda Stereo, the band offered its help to Red Solidaria de Juan Carr, which, in addition to contributing donations to Caritas and the Garrahan Hospital with the profits obtained in Argentina from sales of merchandise online, encouraged its followers to sign up on their website to do community work for one day in 2008. Cerati exchanged one of his guitars for a painting by Marta Minujín for the solidarity segment "Cadena de favores" of the program C whoever falls in 2007, for the benefit of a school in San Isidro de Iruya (Salta). The following year, this time for the Chilean version, in support of a school in Chiloé, he exchanged another of his guitars for the Real Madrid shirt belonging to ex-soccer player Iván Zamorano.

The only Argentine musician present at Live Earth. The ALAS Foundation invited him to record the charity song "The Child Will Fly" together with Roger Waters and be part of the concert they gave in Argentina. Cerati expressed his shock After the 2010 earthquake in Chile, he supported the Chile Ayuda a Chile campaign and participated in the Argentina Embraces Chile concert, for which a year later the governments of Chile and Argentina awarded him the Binational Award for Arts and Culture to the Solidarity Commitment. During 2011, through Cerati's Twitter account, his family spread some Juan Carr campaigns, and his fans together with the Argentine Cultural Secretariat created a charity festival in his honor called CeraXti; In its third edition held in 2013, the Buenos Aires Legislature declared it an event of cultural and social interest.

Other media appearances

In November 1993, Cerati briefly hosted an MTV space as a VJ to present various video clips, including those of which he was a part: «En la ciudad de la furia» (with Soda Stereo) and «Hoy ya no It's me" (with Daniel Melero), and premiered "Te voy para que me llevas". In 1998, he posed as Che Guevara for the cover of D'Mode magazine. he appeared in a sketch of the humorous program Todo por dos pesos on Canal 7, in which he performed a parody of “De música ligera” with the band Los Tres Chiflados entitled “ Call Moe". In 2001, he appeared in a commercial for Cerveza Quilmes, for which he composed the theme of the advertising campaign "Salí para ver". Two years later, he would appear for a commercial for CTI Móvil. separators of the commercial breaks of the program Fútbol de Primera, he recorded them playing the guitar on the day of the Cacerolazo product of the Argentine crisis. In 2006 he was in a speci dedicated to reviewing all of his solo videography at MuchMusic's Video Library.

Personal life

Relationships and Marriages

Saint Jean, Chomyszyn and Balfour

While he was studying advertising and working as a medical representative, he had a relationship with Ana Saint Jean, for whom he recorded a song called "Hablando de vos", which remained unreleased until 2018. The relationship began to deteriorate when Cerati began to dedicate himself to Soda Stereo, Saint Jean came to see some presentations of the group, but very distant. When they appeared on Música total, the relationship had already ended.

During a concert in 1984, Cerati met fifteen-year-old Anastasia "Tashi" Chomyszyn, who was returning to Buenos Aires after five years in England and Belgium. Her appearance, inspired by European bands such as The Cure, impressed him when he saw her for the first time, and they began a relationship. Cerati wrote "Seduction Game" for her, which already had the music, but not the lyrics, based on the games they had: she the "good lady" and he as a butler, nicknamed "Oliver". When Soda Stereo decided to change their aesthetics, Chomyszyn helped them: they cut old clothes, increased the volume of the hair and put on makeup, after Cerati feared that he would be called gay. In an interview in 2009, he mentioned about Chomyszyn that "she was a kind of vase walking, and I tried to imitate her in many ways."

After two years ended, while Chomyszyn accompanied him on a tour, Cerati met the model Nöelle Balfour, with whom he began another relationship. Only a month passed and they had plans to get married, together they rented an apartment in the Recoleta neighborhood, but they soon separated; Balfour summed it all up as "a brief but withering love".

Edwards and Antonucci

Cerati began a relationship with the model Belén Edwards, who at that time had another, but unstable, relationship with Julio Moura. In March 1987 they got married after the end of the first leg of the Signos tour. The following year they separated at the height of sodamania and the success of Double Life, a time when Cerati met the model Cecilia Amenábar and later began an affair with Charly Alberti's partner, Paola Antonucci; they moved in 1989 to an apartment on Avenida Figueroa Alcorta, where Cerati composed the songs for Canción animal, some inspired by Antonucci, while they were taking LSD. For the eponymous song, he asked Melero to write the lyrics describing their relationship; the result surprised the couple with its sheer accuracy. He also symbolized his connection to Antonucci by redesigning the album cover art together with a pair of copulating lions. In Andrea Álvarez's vision, "Animal Song is the record of his relationship with Paola Antonucci", while Dynamo "had to do with that breakup".

Both Edwards and Antonucci were costume designers for Soda Stereo.

Cecilia Amenabar

Cecilia Amenábar in 2015

In August 1988, he met the Chilean model Cecilia Amenábar at a Soda Stereo press conference in Santiago de Chile; Cerati returned to see her when he could, until the Doble Vida tour began. In 1991 he sent her a gift manuscript by mail, later turned into the song "I don't need to see you (to know it)". In 1992 he traveled to Chile determined to have a stable relationship with Amenábar, with whom he spent two weeks, a period in which he thought about his life outside of Soda Stereo. In December he took her to Buenos Aires to meet his family and a month later on the Dynamo tour, there he confessed that he was tired of the routine with the band and that he wanted to start a family. They had two children born in Santiago, Benito and Lisa.

The two collaborated on Amor amarillo, Amenábar is the co-author of "Ahora es nunca" and contributed vocals on "Te llevo para que me llevas" and "A merced", in the latter she also performed the Regarding her inclusion, Cerati pointed out that she was already dedicated to music: "one of the things that has united us is her musical sensibility [...] it was not superficial to put her on the album, because she was the one that was close while I was doing it. Regarding her musical ability, he explained: "She already played the bass, I just gave her some simple lines and pushed her to play." In another interview, he commented that he intended to make music with her, whom he considered to have "good conditions." » and that brought them together a lot. "Maybe we'll make a video together, even if it's at home."

The couple settled with their children in the Vicente López neighborhood of Buenos Aires, after the end of Soda Stereo, they remained together until May 2001, when the relationship became unsustainable. Despite their separation that took place in February 2002, shortly after they met at a Mouse on Mars concert and danced spontaneously. Amenábar said: "Music has enormous healing power."

Deborah de Corral

In 2001, Cerati began a relationship with model Deborah de Corral, Charly Alberti's former partner. In an interview for Rolling Stone in 2003, when asked about Corral's influence In Siempre es hoy, Cerati responded: «I don't know if she had more influence on the album than my separation, but my relationship with her was positive energy, she sustained me. In addition, she was a witness to the entire moment of creation of the album and also participated". In addition to giving backing vocals to "House" and "Ivory Tower", and a whistle on "Altar", it appeared partially on the back cover. They were together until July 2005.

Medrano, Balcarce and Bello

In 2005 Cerati began a relationship with Sofía Medrano, who would be his costume designer on the Ahí vamos tour. They ended after the conclusion of the return of Soda Stereo, at the end of 2007. In January 2008 he began dating the actress Leonora Balcarce, with whom he was until the end of 2009. In 2010 he started another with the model Chloé Bello, they had plans to get married in Morocco in the second half of the year; Bello accompanied him on the second leg of the Fuerza Natural tour, but could not continue near the last dates due to work in Europe. The two adopted a Border Collie dog they named Jack.

Relationship with Chile

His first visit to Chile was with Soda Stereo in May 1986, to appear in the star show Tuesday the 13th. EMOL said that from that moment Cerati became an idol. “He Appeared With Comic Book Hair And A Sparkly Baggy Shirt. His fake stereophonic voice wreaked havoc among the girls on the set ».. On his return in November Sodamania exploded for the first time; Cerati in a concert they gave at the Chile Stadium, exclaimed: "the regime is over"; Later, he would clarify to the press in his country that he did not agree with the political situation in Chile, after they were criticized for participating in the Viña del Mar Festival while protesters were being reprimanded outside the venue. The success they had in Chile was due to this situation. «They made us headlines in all the newspapers. The shows, in that aspect, perhaps occupied a place that, in other circumstances, would not be so much. But people immediately adopted us." On the tour to southern Chile that Soda Stereo undertook after triumphing in Viña del Mar, Cerati was impressed by the lake and snow-capped volcano of Frutillar.

Cerati playing in Chile on the tour You will see me back, October 2007

While he lived in Santiago, he was able to lead a quiet life away from Sodamania. respectful" in its inhabitants, which he loved. He returned to Santiago at the end of 1995, due to Amenábar's second pregnancy. Encouraged by his wife, he frequented underground places of electronic music, which would give rise to later to Plan V, and alternative rock, where he met bands like Sien and Solar. In the letter explaining the dissolution of Soda Stereo, Cerati denied that his constant trips to Chile had any determining factor in the decision, He pointed out that he still lived in Argentina and that he would continue his career in his native country, as it always was. Within the framework of The Last Concert in Chile, after finishing "Té para tres" he confided to the public: "You know that this it's my house". On the Bocanada press tour "I played more s local" in Santiago than in Buenos Aires, he did a listening session in the Bellavista neighborhood. With his family formed in Chile, he traveled to Zapallar beach and Vichuquén Lake, even after separating from Amenábar, although less frequently. He also toured other sites in northern Chile, such as San Pedro de Atacama.

Football

In 2006 he confessed that when he had to decide on a club in 1966, he chose Racing Club de Avellaneda, since at that time it was champion. Later in 2010, Cerati expressed his lack of interest in soccer in an interview. in 2001 he commented the same thing, and declared a publication claiming to be a fan false. much disappointment for a long time. Maybe now I'll get it back, we're doing well". At a Soda Stereo concert in 1995, while singing "Primavera 0", Cerati celebrated Racing's victory against Club Atlético Lanús. In December 2014, a few months after After passing away, Racing won the championship after thirteen years, and the fans celebrated the title with the song "De música ligera".

Legacy

Actuation of Leandro Fresco in the homage to Cerati made by Public TV, two months after his death

Historians at Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture said that Soda Stereo was "among the pioneers of modern Spanish-language rock", they emerged "with a distinct sound that catapulted them among the great legends" and became considers it an innovative band. Belauza in the newspaper Tiempo Argentino noted that Cerati's solo stage established him "definitely as the missing link between the two founding fathers of Argentine rock : Spinetta and Garcia»; He continued: «Ten years after his last album [Fuerza natural], the feeling remains that Cerati would have accompanied the evolution of youthful tastes for hip hop in an original way. and the trap". Always following new trends and emerging artists, he sponsored the "sonic movement" with exponents —Babasónicos, Juana La Loca, Tía Newton and Martes Menta— who acted as opening acts for Soda Stereo; In his solo career, he gave greater notoriety to musicians that he had in his support band, such as Leandro Fresco, Leo García, Flavio Etcheto, Fernando Nalé, Pedro Moscuzza, Capri, Javier Zuker, Loló Gasparini; he influenced new generations such as Lisandro Aristimuño, Paco Amoroso and Lucy Patané. Juan Morris explained that by exploiting Sodamania he became "an artist who defined Latin rock for many generations", an international success that none of his Argentine peers had reached it, which made him "unique." All the artists that came after Soda Stereo, such as Shakira, Juanes, Julieta Venegas or Café Tacvba, had Cerati among their main influences, as if he were for them "the founding father of Latin rock". The Colombian newspaper La República assured that with Soda Stereo he managed to make rock in Spanish an international business, although at the end of the sixties Los Gatos sold thousands of copies, the Radionica radio station director Álvaro González added that Cerati found how to make it "self-sustaining".

Cerati was part as one more in the birth of the electronic scene in Chile, while in Argentina he managed to remove it from anonymity by giving it greater diffusion, since the local media went to his presentations with Plan V and Ocio, which massified the underground scene. "It may be that many people have been involved in electronics since Cerati", said author Gito Minore, although he does not believe that he was responsible, "he collaborated for that". Host Olivia Luna commented: "Cerati contributed and The music scene changed a lot, he gave a guideline so that many other musicians could also be inspired by the lyrics of his songs and Gustavo was also ahead of his time, because later he went for a more electronic side, making different productions, that were not just bass, guitar, drums, he began to experiment with other sounds and set the tone for other musicians to see him, as an advance of the time that went beyond rock". Chilean journalist Paula Molina stated: "It was his commitment to the techniques and experimentation of other genres, which he later fused and incorporated into his music, made him so popular. [...] what stands out is his ability to make music transcend genres and cross borders —music for all Latin Americans― ».

Achievements and recognitions

Before and after his death, Cerati was already considered by the press, musicians and critics as an icon of Latin American rock. Along with Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Andrés Calamaro and Fito Páez were part of the quintet considered in Argentina to be the greatest soloists in the rock world. Latin America. At the 2015 Grammy Awards they paid tribute in the "In memoriam" segment to artists who died the previous year, Cerati came out with a photo of himself under the title "Latin Rock Legend" (in Spanish: Leyenda del rock Latino). Throughout his solo career he sold more than seven million records, won six Latin Grammys, two Gardel de Oro, three Konex Awards, and one MTV Latino.

Received various distinctions as best national soloist for Rock & Pop Awards (2006), two torches and a seagull at the Viña del Mar Festival 2007, Outstanding Personality of Culture by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (2007) and Personality of the Year by CAPIF (2008). In 2012, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Cerati in seventh place among the hundred best Argentine rock guitarists. On December 5, 2013, he was named an illustrious citizen by the Legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. On August 8, 2015, the Deliberative Council of Paraná (Entre Ríos) named a city street after him. Three days later, Google through a doodle honored him with an animation along with the phrase "thank you totals”, which appeared in twelve Latin American countries plus Bulgaria and South Korea. In 2018, National Geographic released a documentary called Bios: Gustavo Cerati, which covers from his childhood to his professional life, the beginning and separation of Soda Stereo, and his solo stage. In 202 0, Rolling Stone published a guide to Cerati's career, which covers his life and work as a musician, and includes never-before-seen photos, interviews, testimonials, and a list of the best songs by he.

Fortune

In the mid-1980s, Juan José Cerati began to take charge of the financial affairs of Soda Stereo, and created the publishing house "J.J.C." to protect the catalog of songs signed by his son, work that would later pass into the hands of Laura Cerati. In 2002, Cerati revealed that the corralito withheld his money so that it was not an easy economic time. He had properties in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, a studio in the United States with audio equipment valued at 1.7 million dollars, and the royalties for his songs amounted to 66 million dollars until 2011, but after his death the figure increased considerably to 142,840 dollars. He receives amounts for copyright and related rights as an interpreter, producer and musician. In 2012, the Argentine magazine Forbes estimated that his fortune was around 50 million pesos. Local musician who posthumously generated the most income, despite not yet having figures for the musical Sép7imo Día by Cirque du Soleil, pointed out that they estimated a collection of close to 30 million dollars. the expectation a.

Discography

Filmography

Music tours

• 1999-2001: Tour Bocanada
• 2002-2004: Tour is always today
• 2006-2007: Tour There we go
• 2009-2010: Natural Force Tour

Further reading