Break It All! Rocking Around the Americas

In the current months of semi-quarantined torpor I have, like millions of others, spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the tube. Often my tastes run to Scandi-Noir mysteries but, over the past week, we discovered a worthwhile alternative that takes me back to Buenos Aires and elsewhere in Latin America with Rompan Todo (Break It All), a six-part documentary on rock music south of the border (despite some notable omissions, to be detailed below).

Rompan Todo focuses primarily on Mexico (Mexico City, mostly) and Argentina (primarily Buenos Aires), and evokes nostalgia not just for the distant origins of that scene, but also for the city that I can’t visit for the foreseeable future. I’m of the generation for which rock music is a touchstone, and I touched on the Argentine scene myself in a National Geographic Traveler assignment a decade ago.

 

In the Beginning…

The series, though, starts with the California-born Richard Steven Valenzuela—better known as Richie Valens—who energized aspiring south-of-the-border musicians with his now standard “La Bamba,” adapted from a Mexican folk song. Not so many years later, though, the influence came from across the Atlantic with the Beatles. As the series’ Argentine producer Gustavo Santaolalla notes, the earliest Argentine bands often performed cover versions in English and were often derivative—Sandro, the “Argentine Elvis,” performed Spanish-language versions of songs like Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter.”

This tribute album to the late Sandro is a fine introduction to Mexican and South American bands.

From the first, governments and other institutions like the Catholic Church were skeptical and often hostile toward rock. In 1971, for instance, Mexico had its own Woodstock in the unexpectedly politicized Festival de Avándaro, and Mexican officials forced rock to go underground—almost literally—for years. Argentine musicians underwent a similar experience in the approach to and aftermath of the 1976 military coup that resulted in exile for many.

Billy Bond's fans trashed the interior of Luna Park.

One of those was Billy Bond, whose appearance in the film was a revelation–I’d never even heard of the Italian-born rocker (given name Giuliano Canterini) but, from the footage here, he seems a precursor of punk. In 1972, when he and his band La Pesada del Rock and Roll played the iconic Luna Park Stadium—an auditorium where Eva Duarte first charmed Juan Perón en route to becoming Argentina’s most powerful woman ever—Bond urged his cheap-seats fans to descend to the unsold vacancies closer to the stage, resulting in vandalism and a police round-up. Within two years, apprehensive of Argentina’s authoritarian trends, Bond left for Brazil, but continued to produce Argentine bands and, in the course of this series, he proves himself to be admirably articulate (The series, by the way, takes its name from an album by Uruguay’s Los Shakers, but “Break It All” might as well have been Bond’s motto in his youth).

 

Meanwhile, in Chile

Chile's coupmongers executed Víctor Jara in 1973.

Chile underwent a similar trauma with the 1973 coup that overthrew constitutional President Salvador Allende and essentially shut down the music scene—beginning with folksinger Víctor Jara, whom Augusto Pinochet’s forces tortured and killed in an especially gruesome manner. My experience there has been more limited, though I did have the good fortune to meet, in Santiago, Claudio Parra of Los Jaivas, a group that formed in 1963 (the band name, by the way, is an adaptation of their original English “High-bass,” though it can also mean a species of crab found in Chilean waters).

Los Jaivas backstage at the Teatro Universidad de Chile (Claudio Parra is second from left)

I had assumed the band left because of the coup, but Parra corrected me on that—as the film makes clear, they had already decided to head to Argentina for commercial reasons, and the coup merely delayed their departure. They then spent several years there and in Paris before returning to Chile, where they still tour every year. When I saw them in Santiago around the turn of the century, they struck me as a Pink Floyd comparable and, onscreen here, La Ley’s Beto Cuevas compares their Alturas de Machu Picchu (Heights of Machu Picchu, based on a poem by Pablo Neruda) to Floyd’s Live at Pompeii.

 

Rock Nacional, In the Post-War

My own experience with Argentina's rock nacional dates from the post-Falklands/Malvinas War period, when the dictatorship faltered (in a brief interview, the Dylanesque León Gieco ruefully admits that he and other musicians were complicit in supporting the war and, by extension, a regime they presumably loathed). After the conflict, though, they focused on songs with Spanish rather than English lyrics—Charly García, for instance, has recorded a Spanish-language version of the Byrds’ “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and once, in an under-the-railroad-tracks dive in Palermo, I heard him do “Soldado de Lata,” a similar adaptation of the Small Faces’ “Tin Soldier.”

A performance at Palermo's Roxy Live Bar (the bassist, second from right, is Charly García's bandmate Zorrito von Quintiero).

Fito Páez performs in El Calafate.

Other than García, the biggest names I’ve ever come close to are Soda Stereo, the first Argentine band to become a major international touring sensation, and Fito Páez, now a solo artist who also worked with García and others. I know little about Soda’s music, but I happened to be in the provincial capital of Tucumán when their publicists were passing out promotional packs of cigarettes in the central Plaza de la Independencia prior to a concert (I was not impressed). Páez I saw as part of El Calafate’s annual Festival del Lago in 2014, but the outdoor sound system was less than ideal.

 

Oversights and Omissions

One unspoken theme through most of the series is the scene’s overwhelmingly masculinity, but there are several prominent women, most notably Andrea Echeverri of Colombia’s Aterciopelados and Mexico’s California-born Julieta Venegas, who has worked with Santaolalla (who lives in Los Angeles). I’ll note that when I saw Charly García in Palermo, his lead guitarist was María Gabriela Epumer, who died at 39 due in part, apparently, to a medical misdiagnosis. Truly unique is Los Jaivas’ Juanita Parra (in the Chile section photo above), who replaced her father Gabriel as the group’s drummer after a fatal automobile accident. Santaolalla, though, says rock’s future is female—and, as a producer with pedigree, he’s in a position to contribute to that.

In summary, Break It All remains a worthy account of rock music south of the border (and the Equator), but with one other major omission—although it subtitles itself “The History of Rock in Latin America,” Brazil is conspicuous by its absence. I’ll confess to knowing little about its music beyond bossa nova, but a cursory glance at Wikipedia suggests that the region’s largest country has had a flourishing rock music scene ever since the mid-1950s. Perhaps Netflix should retitle the current series to represent its Spanish-language bias, and then underwrite a separate work on the history of rock em português.

Contradicting Condé Nast: My Top 5 South American Cities

Recently, Condé Nast Traveler used its Readers’ Choice Awards to produce a list of the Top 5 Cities in Central & South America. In principle, I’m averse to such listicles but, nevertheless, I can’t look away completely. Thus, I’ve decided to comment on the survey and, then, produce a list of my own that will, hopefully, provided a credible corrective or supplement. I subscribe to the magazine – at about US$12 per year, that’s no big sacrifice - but the survey itself appears online.

Condé Nast’s No. 1 city is Buenos Aires (pictured above) which, of course, I cover in my own city guide and in guides to Argentina and Patagonia (additional comments below). No. 2 is Cusco which, though I haven’t visited Peru for many years now, is certainly a credible choice for its Inka and colonial heritage, and as a historic gateway to Machu Picchu. I got to know it in my backpacker days and, though it’s certainly changed now, it’s hard to dismiss it from such a list.

No. 3 is Cartagena, Colombia (pictured above and below), for which I have a special affection as the first memorable city I ever saw in South America (flying from Costa Rica, I landed in the grubby Caribbean port of Barranquilla, which I’d sooner forget, but nearby colonial Cartagena’s walled city was unforgettable). Fortunately, I was able to return a few years ago, and it was better (though notably more expensive) than I remembered it from my backpacker days. I’m bewildered, though, that the magazine would even have to suggest visiting “the old part of the city, as well as the newer areas…” since the old part is the only part worth visiting. In the newer part, you might as well be in Miami.

No. 4 is Paraty, Brazil, a surprise choice that I really know nothing about. Personally, in my limited Brazilian experiences, I would choose Bahía (Salvador). No. 5 is Antigua Guatemala, the colonial capital ironically saved by an earthquake that forced the movement of the political capital 30 miles east to present-day Guatemala City. Antigua, which I covered in an early edition of Moon Handbooks Guatemala, has a remarkable critical mass of colonial architectural treasures, even if some of them are ruins or semi-ruins, and the presence of a rich Mayan culture in and around it.

My own Top 5 differs significantly from Condé Nast’s, but then it’s not crowd-sourced like theirs, which relies on polling based on vague standards of culture, friendliness, atmosphere, restaurants, lodging and shopping. I take a different approach which, though still subjective, has parallels with the standard I use to evaluate restaurants: “Would I go eat here again?” This reflects my own experience and, over the course of three decades experience, it covers the places I most look forward to returning to. The order that follows below is random.

BUENOS AIRES

In this I concur with Condé Nast readers, even if I detest the “Paris of the South” cliché – which needs to be retired sooner rather than later. Buenos Aires is not a European metropolis, but rather a New World immigrant city that’s more analogous to New York. For my part, it helps that I own property there, so I have all the benefits of travel while still being able to sleep in my own bed.

VALPARAÍSO

From my East Bay home, San Francisco is less than 20 minutes away by the Transbay Tube, but I rarely go there except en route to SFO for a flight to Argentina or Chile. I prefer to spend time in Valparaíso, the first major Pacific port on the Round-the-Horn route to the Gold Rush and, with its steep hills, cranky funiculars, brightly painted houses and cool summer fogs, “Valpo” is South America’s San Francisco. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it also has longstanding historical links with California, as Isabel Allende (now a California resident) showed so vividly in her historical novel Daughter of Fortune.

COLONIA DEL SACRAMENTO

Barely an hour from Buenos Aires by ferry, the walled city of Colonia del Sacramento was a buffer between Portugal and Spain, and then between Brazil and Argentina, until Uruguay became an independent country. Towns of its antiquity, with its cobbled streets and low-slung houses, are unusual in southernmost South America. It’s a walker’s delight.

MENDOZA

At the base of the Argentine Andes, Mendoza is a commercially driven world wine capital whose downtown street trees form, in the words of the late Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a “roof of leaves woven together like the fingers of a huge circle of inseparable lovers.” Its park and plazas are a delight, while its backcountry can boast the “Roof of the Americas” in Cerro Aconcagua, the Western Hemisphere’s highest summit.

PUNTA ARENAS

Stretching along the Strait of Magellan, Punta Arenas was Ground Zero for the “wool rush” that transformed the Patagonian steppes, in both Chile and Argentina, into massive sheep ranches that clothed Europe and made a handful of entrepreneurs rich and influential (more so in Argentina than in Chile, however). They left some memorable architecture, and the city’s also the gateway to the Fuegian fjords (pictured below).

A Coastal Road Trip, From Canada to Chile?

Often, on this blog and elsewhere, I’ve pointed out that the west coast of South America is a mirror image of its North American counterpart, with vast deserts comparable to those of Baja California, a Mediterranean heartland resembling California, and mid-latitude forests and fjords in higher latitudes.

One of the comparisons I make, in the course of writing and lecturing, is between British Columbia’s Vancouver Island and Chile’s Isla Grande de Chiloé. Superficially, the comparison is obvious – they’re two large islands slightly separated from the continent, by the Strait of Georgia and the Canal de Chacao, respectively (though Vancouver Island is three times larger).

Both are lush and forested, with temperate rain forests and extensive hiking trails, but they have one thing in common that I learned only recently. My Moon colleague David Stanley, who covers the South Pacific but also overlaps with me in covering Rapa Nui (Easter Island), informs me the village of Lund (pictured above) is (in the words of a local website) “the northern terminus of Highway 101, the Pacific Coastal Highway, a 15,200 km highway along the Pacific Coast extending from Canada to Chile” (photograph courtesy of David Stanley).

I have never been to Lund (named after the Swedish city), though I have been to more southerly parts of Vancouver Island. I have, however, been many times to the port of Quellón (pictured above), the route’s ostensible southern terminus, on the Isla Grande. I had, however, never heard of the “Pacific Coastal Route” as any sort of unified entity – in fact, US 101, which runs through Washington, Oregon and California, often heads inland while California’s State Highway 1 almost invariably sticks to the coast.

To the south, Mexico’s Carretera Federal No. 1 runs the length of the Baja California peninsula, but is not always coastal and, where it is coastal, it’s not always on the Pacific. In the rest of Mexico and Central America, the Pan-American Highway often approaches the coast but, in the words of journalist Jake Silverstein, it’s “a system so vast, so incomplete and so incomprehensible it is not so much a road as it is the idea of Pan-Americanism itself.”

There is, of course, no highway through Panama’s Darien Gap, and roads rarely follow the lush tropical lands along the Pacific coasts of Colombia and Ecuador, where most of the people live in the highlands. Peru and northern Chile are a different matter, but in Chile’s Mediterranean heartland and southern lakes region the main highways bypass the shoreline for the central valley.

I’ve never been to Lund and, though I’ll probably revisit Quellón later this year, I’ll still find it hard to think of it as the end point of any unified route – especially since there are several other ferry crossings I’ve not yet mentioned, including one that continues south to Chile’s own Carretera Austral, arguably the best road trip in all of South America.