Miguel Abuelo: the journey by hand that changed his life, prison in Europe and consecration in the 80s

Today he would be 76 years old. But it becomes very difficult to imagine him as an old man. Not just because he died almost a quarter of a century ago. His vital, defiant, angry, at times irresponsible, always unpredictable attitude does not allow us to imagine how he would have aged. Miguel Abuelo was one of the members of the founding group of national rock and, more than fifteen years later, one of the main animators of the pop explosion of democratic dawn.

He was born Miguel Ángel Peralta on March 21, 1946 in Buenos Aires. His mother was ill with tuberculosis. For this reason, and because he was a natural son, a kind of ignominy for the time, he was taken to the Preventorio Roca. He never knew his father; that's why he had his mother's surname. He was cared for by some nuns who, as soon as he grew up, didn't quite know what to do with him. He didn't respect the rules, he crossed all boundaries. But he always did it with a sympathy that gave him a certain indulgence. One afternoon, the director of the orphanage took him home. He spent a few years there. When it was not long before his childhood was over, he returned to his mother. In schools it was short-lived. He went through many. I wasn't studying, disciplinary problems, customary escapes. At thirteen he started working as a postman. He thought it was the ideal job for him: spending all day on the street. But they threw him out quickly; he chose which letters to leave, opened envelopes and discarded telegrams he didn't think were important. From that moment on he went through dozens of fleeting jobs that he always did badly. He voraciously read the books that the young people of the sixties considered almost obligatory: Hesse, Arlt, Cortázar, Marechal. His readings were so intense that it seemed that every paragraph was fixed in it.

He spent most of his time on the street, took drugs and lived with linyeras, addicts and thugs. In his teens he tried boxing. It didn't seem like a bad decision. Or, at least, it was one that followed the common sense of the time. Boxing in those years was a sordid place, as it always was, but also one where those who had nothing to look for a way, a hope, went to. To box, you had to have courage, many needs and a fury that, like an army of tireless soldiers, ran through the candidate inside. Miguel had all that left over. He won the first two fights as an amateur but in the third, an experienced boxer, gave him an extraordinary beating that made him quit boxing. However, this antecedent explains Andrés Calamaro's verse in his tribute theme: “And Miguel had good pineapple”.

One summer she decided to visit Mar del Plata. While hitchhiking on Route 2, he was picked up by a car. They offered to take him to Las Armas because then they would continue to Villa Gessell, Miguel accepted. That journey of a few hundred kilometers changed his life. One of the passengers was Pipo Lernoud who was fascinated by this young man with curls, indefinable, something wild, cultured, a little eccentric and violent. Miguel was dazzled by Pipo's knowledge of music and poetry and his serene and articulate speech. When they returned from the coast they got together and Lernoud introduced him to the incipient scene of what was not yet called national rock.

In the founding times, Miguel, without being a rocker, was in each of the places where national rock was created: La Cueva, La Perla, Plaza Francia. Pipo introduced them to the others. Legend has it that since Miguel Ángel didn't know anything about rock, he sang, in front of the other pioneers of the genre, a baguala.

Miguel was living in a crappy pension until Mabel, Pipo's mother, invited him to stay at her house. She gave him money, cooked and advised him.

First it was the Beatniks and then Los Gatos. With its success and especially with that of La Balsa and Ayer, the situation changed. Pipo was one of the authors of the second theme. He met with Ben Molar, an important producer of the time. He was accompanied by his friend Miguel. Enthusiastic about this new phenomenon of young musicians, long-haired, native hippies, Molar asked Miguel if he also had a group. Miguel thought and after his improvisation, that answer was the last one he gave as Miguel Ángel Peralta in his life. Everything happened in a second: he knew he had to say yes and give the name of a group that did not yet exist; he remembered a quote from The Banquet of Severo Arcangelo de Marechal: “Father of lice, grandfather of nowhere” and, without knowing why, he chose the second part of the appointment. “Yes, I have a band: we are called Los Abuelos de la Nada.” Ben Molar liked the name so much that he told them that they were preparing that in a few weeks they would start recording. The next day Miguel told Pipo that they were in trouble. They had no musicians, no songs. His friend told him not to worry that that night they would tour Plaza Francia and find the members of the band among their friends. And so it was. In that first training of the Grandparents that he recorded some singles were Pomo and Claudio Gabis. Then Pappo joined. Diana Divaga and Tema came out in Flu sobre el planeta. The topics passed without major impact. Miguel, as always, had trouble meeting his commitments and not fighting with half the world. They kicked him out of his own gang; a kind of coup d'etat at the hands of Pappo. Grandparents went on to play the blues and Miguel continued to wander and fight around. In Manioca, Jorge Álvarez's label recorded two beautiful solo songs that definitively mark his lyrics: Mariposas de Madera and Oye Niño.

Pipo Lernoud got tired of the oppressive climate of Buenos Aires, of the police doing razzias and went to Europe. Miguel was left alone. Amphetamines, violence, lack of discipline to finish their projects made their condition worse and worse. Mabel, Lernoud's mother, once again helped him. He invited him to travel to Europe. When Miguel arrived in the Old Continent, he believed that this was his place in the world. He felt free and everything seemed possible. He reunited with Krisha, a dancer he had seen in Buenos Aires. They fell in love and she became pregnant with Gato Azul, Miguel's only child. He gave up music. They lived in France, in Spain, in Holland and in Belgium. They were after fleeting jobs. A vintage, a car wash, a restaurant. In 1974 Moshe Naim, a producer and patron offered him to record an album in French. Miguel with his charm and insistence managed to make the language Spanish. He got José Sbarra as a guitarist. In addition to the poetics and climates of Miguel, Sbarra's heavy guitar was added. For decades Miguel Abuelo et Nada, his French album, was a mythical recording in Argentina. It was circulating on poorly recorded cassettes and getting a vinyl copy was impossible. During the eighties, music lovers who went to France rummaged through the bins of used and balances trying to find a copy. The local edition came only in 1999.

Naim had plans for promotion and touring. But Miguel, once again, did not fulfill his commitments, he preferred to escape. And the album went unnoticed in France.

He separated from his wife and son and continued to roam in Europe. She starred in Hair, in a role she had already landed in Buenos Aires. From time to time he met with Argentine musicians (Kubero Díaz, Miguel Cantilo, Miguel Zavaleta) and made big plans that he never realized. In Ibiza he met a young bass player. They talked about rearming the Grandparents of Nothing. They didn't know whether to stay in Europe or return to Argentina (Miguel missed his son). But they were just projects, far away. The bass player, Cachorro Lopez, went to London and joined a reggae band.

Miguel, through various letters (which are transcribed in Miguel Abuelo. The Paladín de la Libertad, the very good biography written by Juanjo Carmona that recently reissued Planeta), asked Pipo to send him his albums from the late 1960s and newspaper articles about him so that he could show them to Spanish producers, or to try to have the French album released in Argentina, to officiate as his agent. In 1979, the Spanish police arrested him together with another compatriot. They were accused of stealing some expensive jewels from the home of a millionaire. They were detained for a while, but the lack of hard evidence against them led to their release. But since they were undocumented, they were expelled from Spain. They tried to continue the journey in Italy but they were also kicked out of there. When they returned to Spain, the police discovered them once again. Back to jail. But the penalty in Ibiza was typical of the island: not rigid, strange, even funny. The Catalan prison was the most famous prison in his country and the months he spent there were difficult. When he managed to leave, he remembered the talks with Cachorro López and asked him to help him return to Argentina. There were also Krisha and Blue Cat, another reason to return.

The bass player was asking for funds from the old friends but no one put a weight on it. It took him several months to raise the airfare money. In the aforementioned biography, Cachorro López tells that the day he went to look for Ezeiza and saw him go down the ladder he thought that Miguel looked like Calculín. His disappointment was great. Cachorro remembered him as a gypsy king, lush, loud, charming. And this one looked like a vanquished man.

But it wasn't like that. In Buenos Aires, Miguel was reborn. They recruited musicians while working on the songs. That band was one of the great castings of modern Argentinian music. Daniel Melingo, Polo Corbella, Gustavo Bazterrica. They lacked a keyboardist. Alejandro Lerner was launching his career and gave up. He recommended them to a friend: Andrés Calamaro.

There was one more piece missing. The producer of the first album, the one with the black and white photo of them, which was still on the back cover of the vinyl, with the letters in colors: Charly García (one would have to write about those years of Charly post Seru and the twilight of the Dictatorship and the first alfonsinism focusing not on his invincible trilogy but on his quality as an agglutinator of the local scene and producer: Los Abuelos, los Twists, Fabi Cantilo; and his band played GIT, Calamaro, Fito and many more).

Charly got them manager, performances and led them as his opening act. The rest was done by the songs and magnetism of Miguel Abuelo. Don't fall in love with that Bengali sailor and Sin Gamulan, written by Calamaro, were the first hits in a time of furious pop hits.

Miguel was the leader of the group. The colored leggings, the curlers, the tambourine, the voice, the inflections, the stage domain, the sensual attitude. The one who could receive a projectile in the middle of the Rock & Pop Festival and continue singing with a bloody face, as a challenge to the violent, showing what it was made of. It could be with Chilli Ardiente, with American Tuning or with any of the others, but always what Miguel Abuelo proposed had never been seen on the Argentinean stages. In addition there were the songs of the others. His solo album Buen día, día came out although it did not have much impact. The second of the band was Vasos y Besos, pushed by Mil Horas (on Spotify it has already exceeded 170 million listens), the definitive breakthrough of King Andrés. Success, excesses, jealousy and temptations — of all kinds: commercial, substance, sexual and personal figuration — gradually cracked the band. There was still time for a successful season at Luna Park, for Anthem of my Heart and the great live album. Then the Grandparents were atomized. Each one tried to follow his own path. Miguel kept the name and a new formation. Cosas mías was the last album: uneven and without much success although the title song reached the courts.

He disarmed the Grandparents. He understood that for people, despite their presence and leadership, without Calamaro, Melingo and Cachorro was not the same group. But he kept moving with Miguel Abuelo in Banda, a play on words after the defections.

He began to look impoverished. Many thought it was an addiction problem. But Miguel knew he was HIV positive. Health problems happened. He lost weight, had several relapses, had to have gallbladder surgery. A localized infection spread through his body without defenses. Three months after Luca and six months before Federico Moura, Miguel Abuelo died on March 26, 1988. He was 42 years old.

Those three consecutive losses ended a glorious stage of national rock.

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