Tanguito

José Alberto Iglesias, better known as Tango or Tanguito, was an Argentine rock composer and singer. His short career was pivotal in the first years of Argentine rock nacional, the earliest incarnation of rock en Español.

Biography

Early days

José Alberto Iglesias was born September 16, 1945 in the industrial town of San Martín Buenos Aires province. His family lived in a modest house in the town of Caseros, close to the city of Buenos Aires. His sister Carmen was five years his junior.

He showed no interest in school, and after flunking out at age 13 he tried different apprenticeships, including gardening school, but did not persevere. The only issue that held his interest was rock and roll. At age 17, José was a fixture of social ballrooms in the Mataderos and Flores neighborhoods, singing mostly rock and roll covers. He also gained local fame as a rock and roll dancer, while most people in the suburbs were tango dancers. To highlight this contrast, his friends started calling him "Tango" or "Tanguito" (the diminutive of "tango").

With his first band, Los Dukes, he recorded a few covers and one original song in 1963. Commercial success did not arrive, his songs were not taken seriously, and Tanguito began looking for a new outlet for his creative energy.

La Cueva

In 1965, Tanguito and his friend Horacio Martínez became regulars of a night club named "La Cueva" ("The Cave" or "The Cavern") in the Recoleta district. The club was to become the cradle of Argentine rock, with celebrities-to-be such as Moris, Sandro, and Litto Nebbia sharing the limelight, as well as other figures such as Pipo Lernoud, Miguel Grinberg and Miguel Abuelo. Many of them were struggling with writing rock lyrics in Spanish, and Tanguito was perceived as a novelty act, who could sing energetic Elvis Presley covers in broken English.

The musicians would end the night by walking up Pueyrredón avenue together to have late supper or breakfast in café "La Perla del Once" in the Balvanera district. When Tanguito once ranted in the café's washroom about being alone and sad in the world, Nebbia encouraged him to write a song based on his refrain. Tanguito obliged, and Nebbia added a choir with a vaguely bossa nova air. That song would become the first mega-hit of Spanish language rock and roll: "La Balsa" ("The raft"). Nebbia's band, Los Gatos Salvajes, recorded it on June 19, 1967, and got a significant amount of radio play that helped the single sell over 250,000 copies.

Tanguito's own rendition was not immediately recorded, but was broadcast on national television a few months later (in a segment about the Buenos Aires version of the hippie phenomenon). The success of "Los Gatos" and Tanguito's status as co-composer of "La Balsa" hinted that a career break was around the corner. Yet his first single, recorded January 18, 1968, was not marketed effectively by RCA and sales floundered.

During 1968, several songs by Tanguito, notably "Amor de Primavera" ("Spring Love"), were being covered or borrowed by emerging artists in the Argentine rock and roll scene. He also took credit for other people's songs: most notably he would claim authorship of the ribald song "Errol Flynn" which was popular in the summer of 1968.

All of Tanguito songs are credited to "Ramsés VII", one of his many pseudonyms, after the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses and Tango's affectation for seventh chords. Other pseudonyms he used from time to time include Susano Valdez and "Drago" (after a then-popular seltzer machine).

When Tanguito broke with RCA he found a new home in Mandioca, a label dedicated exclusively to rock. But he had trouble motivating himself to complete an album; he would come into the studio and record one or two song sketches alone with his guitar, or with available musicians, and disappear for days. By that time he had switched from alcohol and casual marijuana use to hard drugs, and was injecting amphetamines whenever he could afford them.

In those years, Argentine's police used hard-line tactics against drug addicts and had very little education about how to deal with them effectively. Tanguito would get arrested repeatedly for vagrancy or inebration and be thrown into a detention cell, unattended, where delirium tremens would kick in. One such episode in late 1970 was so damaging to his mental health that he could not recognize his friends anymore; his mother took him in for home-based detox.

Later days

In February 1971, Tanguito was arraigned and charged with heading a drug trafficking cartel. Tanguito was diagnosed as mentally insane and committed to the José T. Borda neuropsychiatric hospital, where he was submitted to insulin shock treatment and other therapies designed to wane him off the amphetamines. Instead of recovering, his mental health deteriorated to the point that in 1972 he was committed to the hospital's long-term care facility.

Tanguito escaped from the hospital on the dawn of May 19, 1972. He managed to reach the Pacífico train station, where he apparently waited for a train to his parents' home in Caseros. At 10:50 AM, he fell on the tracks and was fatally hit by the oncoming train.

Influence and Legacy

Argentine rock was to become a seminal influence in rock en español; Tanguito provided the first real hit of that movement as well as many sketches that were freely used by others. His brief but brilliant trajectory is recalled by many elder statesmen of Argentine rock as a main force in the early days, and as a sad remainder of the damage drugs can wreak. Miguel Grinberg has said [http://www.dospotencias.com.ar/rebelde/aldia/16.htm] that Tanguito influenced the transition from English to Spanish more than anybody else.

In 1973, Tanguito's Mandioca recordings were published in an LP album named "Tango". This album was released again in 1982 and 1993. This record's version of "La Balsa" has a spoken introduction by Manal's Javier Martínez in which he repeats: "you composed "La Balsa" in the washroom of La Perla del Once". It was not added in retrospective: Martínez actually was in the studio and said the words before Tanguito began singing. The added emphasis created some friction with Nebbia, who was uneasy with what he perceived as Tanguito (with Mandioca's encouragement) claiming to the sole author. The rift with Mandioca subsided over time, but Nebbia remained a jealous custodian of his own rights.

Luis Alberto Spinetta covered Tanguito's "Amor de Primavera" ("Spring Love") and made that song a highlight of his concerts during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Director Marcelo Piñeyro directed his first feature film "Tango Feroz" ("Fierce Tango") in 1993, with great box-office success. The movie dramatized the life of a rock singer, obviously based on Tanguito, with constant references to the political and social climate of Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s. Piñeyro did not obtain permission to use Tanguito's songs (he used his contemporaries' hits instead) and was rebuffed by many of Tanguito's friends (including Nebbia) when researching Tanguito's life. He took great artistic license in the plot of the movie: the real-life Tanguito was not active politically and did not comment on the events that shook Argentina such as the 1969 "Cordobazo" (even though his "hippy" fame might have influenced his ordeals with the police). His turbulent private life and drug-related issues were also sanitized in the script.

External links

* [http://www.dospotencias.com.ar/rebelde/aldia/16.htm Remembering the early days of Argentine rock (Spanish)]