How to think about Argentine rock without the passage of Miguel Grandfather in its founding years? It is impossible. That rebellious, mischievous, deep and sensitive little man would turn 78 today.
Miguel Abuelo was born in Buenos Aires on March 21, 1946. His name was, until he was 20, Miguel Ángel Peralta. His childhood was difficult. Virginia Peralta, his mother, was a single mother to him and his sister Norma, 9 years older than him. In the first years of his life, Miguel had to live in an orphanage because his mother fell ill with tuberculosis and she could not take care of him.
In the years that followed his rebellion was unleashed in the school classrooms, from where he was expelled. It is known that after going to the management so much, the director of one of those schools sponsored him, because Miguel was a restless, but brilliant boy.
In his fight to avoid going to school, he worked as a milkman’s helper, delivering drums and also as a watermelon seller. After several attempts by his mother to keep him from leaving school, at 13 he left school permanently and got a job at the post office. Shortly after, they fired him because he opened the telegrams and chose, according to his criteria, the most important ones to deliver them.
Miguel’s following years were spent in various jobs, all related to the street, where he consolidated a challenging personality. At some point in his adolescence he also took up boxing, but he did not prosper in the sport.
“He was not a diamond in the rough. He was a diamond, the others were brutes. It was the mud that revolts”, Andrés Calamaro defined it in his testimony for the film Buen día, día by Sergio “Cucho” Costantino and Eduardo Pintos. The definition seems perfect for a being who twisted his destiny to intensely and artistically inhabit the world.
The encounter with music
The sophisticated thinking of Miguel, a passionate and fanatic reader of Hegel and Nietzsche, was mixed with the mischief of a homeless survivor.
At 20 years old, Miguel meets Moris, Pajarito Zaguri, and Los Beatniks. Along with them he also meets his lifelong brother: the writer and journalist Pipo Lernoud. Then he became involved in the La Cueva scene, a bar located on Pueyrredón and Rivadavia, in the city of Buenos Aires, where Javier Martínez, Claudio Gabis, Tanguito and later, Litto Nebbia were also present. All of them remember him reciting or writing poems, singing bagualas or talking about philosophical topics.
In 1967, Miguel received the offer to release an album through the CBS label. The label’s director, Ben Molar, asked him for the name of his band, which until then did not exist. Miguel quickly remembered the phrase he had read in the novel The banquet of Severus Arcangelo, by Leopoldo Marechal: “Father of lice, grandfather of nothing.” He himself said that to save the situation he said “Grandfathers of Nothing.” They gave him a schedule to record immediately and they went out with Pipo Lernoud to “hunt” musicians in Plaza Francia.
The first formation of Los Abuelos de la Nada was composed of Eduardo “Mayoneso” Fanacoa, Claudio Gabis – later Pappo entered in his place -, Miguel “Miky” Lara, Alberto “Abuelo” Lara and Héctor Pomo Lorenzo. “We started rehearsing in the living room of Pipo’s house. To record we called Claudio Gabis, a little kid who was playing blues with Javier Martínez. We recorded, without any experience, ‘Diana Divaga’ and ‘Tema en flu sobre el planeta’, which were the ones that came out on the single. Several more songs were recorded for a future long play. To complete the group we brought in a kid from Plaza Francia who had incredible speed on the guitar: Pappo Napolitano,” Miguel recalled that moment in a report in the magazine Expreso Imaginario (April, 1981), which is reproduced on the Rock.com website. ar
Two years later, Miguel Abuelo leaves the group due to aesthetic differences (Pappo remains in charge). Thanks to Mandioca, Jorge Álvarez’s label, Miguel managed to record “Mariposas de Madera” and “Oye Niño,” two solo songs that are happily part of the national rock discography. He recorded two beautiful solo songs that definitively mark his lyrics.
After some setbacks, Pipo Lernoud’s mother, a fairy godmother to Miguel, helped him travel to Europe. There, Miguel Abuelo felt complete freedom. It was also there where he reunited with Krisha, a dancer with whom he had his only child, Gato Azul.
The return and the definitive Grandparents
At the end of the 70s, Miguel, after separating from Krisha and being detained in Ibiza, returned to Argentina and resumed the idea of re-establishing Los Abuelos de la Nada.
“I have a lot of new songs and a very dynamic concept of what it is like to be on stage. I use everything I learned from theater, mime, folklore, funk, and I make a new mix that has my stamp. The group is almost assembled, although I don’t want to say names until it’s time to leave. After spending almost ten years abroad, I have all the strength it takes to unleash the flight of my music in front of the public in my country,” said Miguel about the return of Los Abuelos de la Nada.
Cachorro López, Gustavo Bazterrica, Daniel Melingo, Polo Corbella and Andrés Calamaro were summoned for this new stage of Los Abuelos, with which they recorded five albums, between 1982 and 1986. The first of them was produced by Charly García. At the same time, he recorded Good morning, day (1984), a compilation of his latest solo works. At that stage, Los Abuelos de la Nada crossed the country’s borders and established itself strongly throughout Latin America.
With the return of Miguel, which coincides with a new era of Argentine rock, the colors return to the stages. His curlers, his necklaces, his bright and colorful leggings, but also his rebellious spirit.
In February 1988, Miguel was hospitalized due to an infection after gallbladder surgery. He was HIV positive and that exacerbated the infection situation. On March 26, 1988 he died when he had barely turned 42 years old.
No one else could have written “on the palm of my tongue lives the anthem of my heart”, one of the most beautiful phrases that Argentine music gave us. Miguel was immortalized in his deep voice, with that hippie glamor of the 60s, with a sophisticated mischief and a lyric that marked the poetic quality of Argentine rock from its beginnings to the present day.