Surging with all the highs and lows of Buenos Aires

THEY moon audiences and cuss out feckless politicians. They stick up for obscure indigenous cultures, regard George W. Bush as a threat to planetary survival and don’t lose much sleep over whether you, dear U.S. reader, have ever heard of them.

Which doesn’t mean that the members of Bersuit Vergarabat -- the most popular rock band in Argentina and possibly in all of South America -- aren’t dead serious about making music.

Sure, in concert they ricochet around the stage in pastel pajamas like escapees from a lunatic asylum. (Their outfits are, in fact, said to be a tribute to the Jose Tiburcio Borda psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires.) Their scathing lyrics, at times, can turn downright brutal, even when couched in lush, bel canto-like harmonies that suggest what the “Pet Sounds”-era Beach Boys might have sounded like if they’d ditched Surf City for Patagonia.

“The band still has an inner child,” says Gustavo Cordera, the bald, goateed, irrepressible lead vocalist and front man of Bersuit Vergarabat (pronounced bear-SWEET ver-GAHR-ah-baht). “This is an adolescent band, with grown-up people, but an adolescent band, an 18-year-old band.”

But on a recent summer afternoon, the perpetual bad boys of Argentine rock are in a mellow mood. Hanging out at the venerated El Cielito recording studio on the outskirts of the capital, these middle-age pranksters look peaceful and relaxed in their shorts, tank tops and flip-flops, a little paunchy and gray around the temples, practically respectable.

A nearby swimming pool beckons. Crepe myrtles heavy with bright pink blossoms herald the height of the South American summer. The dark, sweet smell of toke smoke drifts across the lawn. In an hour or two, Marta, the band’s housekeeper and de facto den mother, will start serving up steaming platters of grass-fed Argentine beef, to be washed down with countless bottles of native red wine.

What’s not to feel jazzed about?

“I believe that this is a good moment for us,” Cordera says in the melodious, Italian-accented Spanish unique to Argentines. “We are in a moment [of] a lot of passion, a lot of fire, a lot of abandon, a lot of promiscuity, a lot of craziness, a lot of parties, ... 170 concerts in two years.... It’s very beautiful.”

Judging by the critical consensus and its robust record sales, Bersuit is indeed near the pinnacle of its creative and commercial potency. In recent months the band has played to teeming crowds at venues large and small across South America as well as to a growing underground European audience, primarily in Spain. Its latest release, last year’s “Testosterona” (Testosterone), was a characteristic tour de force of rock-steady rhythms and smart-aleck lyricism, of aggression sweetened with self-mocking humor and a surprising tenderness, all of it backed by spot-on musicianship.

Yet even as Cordera speaks of the present good times, a thundercloud steals across his granite profile. Despite the band’s good fortunes, Cordera confesses, lately he has been haunted by something he read in an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist. Success, Garcia Marquez suggested, was like a parasite that gnaws away at your intestines. “This image stays with me very strongly,” says Cordera, his eyes suddenly brimming with anxiety, “that it eats you, it eats you from within.”

The next day, Jorge Pizarro, the band’s longtime publicity director, laughs as he relates a well-known expression about the national character.

“There is a saying that we Argentines go ‘from ecstasy to agony in an instant,’ ” Pizarro says. One day, Argentines are feeling flush with national pride, boasting about their great soccer teams, world-class writers, beautiful women and “European” architecture. The next day, they’re practically suicidal, watching the peso crash through the floor (as it did in fall 2001) and rushing off to their psychoanalysts to vent their neuroses. (Buenos Aires reportedly has one of the world’s highest per-capita concentrations of shrinks.)

Perhaps that explains why so many Argentines cling to Bersuit as a fixed constellation in the swirling cosmos of global culture.

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Ups and downs of survival

ONE of a slew of innovative rock and pop bands to emerge from the musical renaissance that followed the ouster of Argentina’s military junta in the early 1980s, Bersuit has outlived and/or outthought many of its contemporaries. These include the brilliant but now-defunct Soda Stereo and Babasonicos, which lately seems to have swapped its experimental, neo-psychedelic cult persona for a fizzier glam-rock identity.

Fourteen years after its 1992 recording debut, “Y Punto,” Bersuit has experienced the typical ups and downs of rock ‘n’ roll survival. Personnel have come and gone. Late nights and long road trips have taken their toll. A creative crisis arose between Bersuit’s second and third albums, when the band temporarily ran dry of material.

Through it all, somehow, Bersuit has found ways to prosper and mature, steadily incorporating new influences: a touch of country-western twang; a bandoneon wail, shot through with tango’s erotic melancholia; a ferocious candombe drum solo lifted from Uruguayan street carnival traditions. The band’s name is invented, meaning nothing specific because the members didn’t want to be restricted by preconceived notions from a name with real-world connotations.

Defying the pressures and petty rivalries that cause so many established rock groups to implode, Bersuit is bigger now than it was when its founders, former schoolmates, first united years ago. (Besides Cordera, its present core lineup includes drummer Carlos Martin, keyboard-accordion player Juan Subira, vocalists Carlos G. “Condor” Sbarbatti and Daniel Suarez; guitarists Oscar Humberto Righi and Alberto Verenzuela; and bassist-vocalist Rene Isel “Pepe” Cespedes.)

The heart of the band’s sound remains its savvy union of exuberant, mostly up-tempo melodies and lyrics laden with irony, political references and sexual double meanings. Argentine rock came of age in the mid-1960s under the influence of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other British Invasion bands, and to this day many Argentine rockers, including Bersuit, trace their roots more to the pop- and music hall-inspired British rock than its rougher, R&B-grounded; American cousin.

Though the band hasn’t lost its appetite for potty jokes, today, at its best, Bersuit merges the anarchic but sophisticated comic spirit of, say, the leftist Italian playwright Dario Fo, or perhaps Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with a biting critique of institutional power in all its forms and perversions. Yet its music also manifests a profound romantic streak; Caetano Veloso, the sui generis Brazilian pop legend, is one of the band’s heroes.

Put another way, Bersuit knows rock’s strength is that it can encompass a range of instruments, arrangements, moods and attitudes. The band understands that sounding macho doesn’t have to mean sounding stupid and humorless, that rock can be elegant as well as angry, sensuous rather than merely sullen.

Accordingly, the Bersuit oeuvre includes not only songs such as “El Tiempo No Para,” with its crunching guitar licks and withering social commentary, but the gentle, melodic “Mi Caramelo,” a solicitous monologue prompted by a reunion with a former lover. “Sencillamente” (Simply) has the stripped-down poignancy of a Latin standard such as “Besame Mucho,” with a great funky bass line to boot.

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A language barrier

LIKE other hard-to-classify Latin bands, notably L.A.-based Ozomatli and Mexico City’s Cafe Tacuba, Bersuit has acquired a loyal English-speaking underground following, including stateside. But the language barrier makes it tough to win over large numbers of Anglo listeners. In fact, four of the group’s albums released in the U.S. have logged combined sales here of barely 10,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

When Bersuit toured the U.S. a few years ago, 95% of its audience was Spanish-speaking or bilingual Latinos, band members reckon. Bersuit has been nominated only once for a Latin Grammy, in the category of “duo or group album with vocal” (it didn’t win). Rather than worrying about the North American market -- which is pretty much out of reach anyway -- Bersuit has concentrated on erasing the false dichotomy that arose in Argentine popular music in the 1960s when rock began to challenge tango’s supremacy.

“There was a dispute between tangueros and roqueros,” Cordera explains. The schism persisted, and when Bersuit entered the pop scene in 1990, Cordera says, mainstream Argentine rock “had become hermetic and fascistic with respect to other genres” and was in danger of losing its earlier eclectic spirit. Initially, some Argentine rock purists even rejected Bersuit for being too catholic in its tastes. Showing the stubborn independence that continues to sustain it, the band ignored the brickbats and plunged ahead.

Sprawled outside their rehearsal studio, shirtlessly soaking up the sun, smoking, chatting and reading newspapers, Bersuit’s members have the jocular camaraderie of a veteran rugby team.

“At times, it surprises you, so many years,” says Martin. “Already it’s been 18 years, more than with our wives.” Cordera, of course, has a saltier appraisal of the band’s long, productive chemistry. “The only one to whom I can’t be unfaithful is to Bersuit,” he says. “It’s the only one.”

It’s around 10:30 a.m. and the day is fast warming up, part of a recent heat wave that had many Argentines worrying about global warming. Cordera looks up from reading the Clarin newspaper and launches into an impassioned soliloquy about shifting ocean currents and the potential disasters ahead.

Like other Latin countries these days, Argentina is trying to forge a political identity midway between full-throttle capitalism and non-Marxist socialism. The peso crisis of 2001 had complex causes, but many Argentines now believe it was caused by opening up the economy too fast to outside competition and knuckling under to U.S. “neoliberal” economic theories.

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Issues-oriented

TO a large number of its fans, Bersuit serves as a kind of national cultural conscience. The band has long been outspoken in its support for such groups as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who continue to demand justice on behalf of the estimated 10,000 people killed during the Argentine dictatorship’s “dirty war,” and the indigenous Wichi community that has been fighting against government-backed land-privatization plans.

Lately, Bersuit’s activism has coalesced around environmental and globalization issues. As the children and grandchildren of war refugees from Italy and Spain, many Argentines learned to be thrifty, to hoard and save, Cordera says. But when prosperity came, they reacted with an orgy of consumption that ultimately has left the country anxious and unsatisfied, he believes.

“I’m tired of going shopping,” says keyboardist Subira. “It makes me feel bad.”

These days, although Bersuit routinely packs venues of 10,000-plus, it still enjoys smaller gigs of a few hundred people. In the old days, the band often found itself channeling its fans’ anger and frustration, which sometimes exploded in violence. “It was a movement that played with fire a lot, and with death too,” Cordera says. “We flirted with it a lot.”

But like Bersuit itself, the fans have found a measure of tranquillity over time. “We have to learn to celebrate, to learn to celebrate without damaging ourselves, to celebrate in a good way, to have a conscience, to know well who is our enemy,” says Cordera. After all, he and his comrades are now cultural icons, husbands, fathers, though they’re not necessarily going gently into that destiny. “To be a father is the most tiring work there is,” Cordera moans. Then he corrects himself. “Being a mother is more tiring.” His bandmates smile indulgently.

The group has rumbled in its Mercedes-Benz microbus across the Argentine pampas, which finally yields to the picturesque town of General Belgrano, population 16,000. Town officials came up with the idea of hosting a first-ever outdoor rock festival, and Bersuit is the headliner on a five-band bill.

By the time Bersuit finally hits the stage, around 10:45 p.m., the assembly has swelled to about 4,000, crammed into a small park that fronts a defunct train station. Some in the crowd wave Argentine flags. A few middle-age parents lift their toddlers onto their shoulders, while younger fans began the familiar chant, “Ber-SUIT! Ber-SUIT!”

Then the band launches into one of its new signature tunes, the jaunty “Me Duele Festejar,” whose title in English means “It hurts me to celebrate.” As the crowd surges into mosh-dance mode, a thought crosses your mind. The song is the perfect anthem for Bersuit, and perhaps for a still-youthful country now in the full throes of midlife craziness: from ecstasy to agony and back, all in a single summer’s day.