Viejas Locas

Viejas Locas
Background information
Origin	Buenos Aires, Argentina
Genre(s)	Rock Stone Blues Reggae
Years active	1989 – 2000
Label(s)	Universal Records
Associated acts	Intoxicados Motor Loco
Website	www.viejas-locas.com.ar
Former members
Cristian "Pity" Alvarez "Pollo Toloza" "Fachi" Crea Abel Meyer "Burbujas" Perez "Peri" Rodriguez Juancho Carbone

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Viejas Locas (formed 1993) were a late 1990s Argentine rock group, in the suburban sub-genre. Them and pioneers Los Ratones Paranoicos dominated the "Rolinga", or "stone" sub-style of suburban rock, a form of rock highly influenced by the sound of the Rolling Stones. The band's frontman was Christian "Pity" Álvarez. After a commercially solid half-decade run the band disbanded in 2000, with "Pity" Álvarez founding Intoxicados.

History

Viejas Locas story begins on a break at a school in Villa Lugano, where three boys started with the idea to form a "band" as a hobby. "We always said that when if we ever had a band we were going to call it Viejas Locas because, at the end, my nickname was funny" said Mauro Bonome, the first singer of the band.

The first line up of the band consisted in Mauro Bonome as the lead singer, "Bachi" as bassist and Diego Cantoni in guitar. Every one of them belonged to the neighborhood of PiedraBuena, located between Mataderos and Lugano. With this lineup they began playing cover songs of bands such as The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, meanwhile they were looking for a drummer.

That's how they stumbled across Christian Pity Álvarez, whom had been learning how to play guitar for six months and he was looking for a band to play. Just at the time Pity joined the band, Gastón Mansilla did as well as the drummer.

Viejas Locas performed live for the first time on Nov 3, 1990 at Acatraz; at that date, and thanks to mouth-to-mouth, they could gather 60 people and that was when everybody started noticing Pity's charismatic performance. Besides the cover songs, they also played two original songs that had been written by the band: "Descansar en Paz" and "Buey".

The three founders of the band started losing interest in the project and almost causing the disband, despite that, Pity kept going and he was able to make new people join the band.

After a few complicated castings to get a lead singer, Álvarez himself became the vocalist. Later on, "Peri" joined on harmonica, "Juancho" on saxophone and "Burbujas" on piano.

About writing songs Pity once said: "It's a natural talent in me to write lyrics. It's a flash-like experience because you can't make a song with a goal; it's just something that pops out. Sometimes, I'm sleeping and I think about a great song, however, since I don't want to wake up yet, when I finally do, the song is gone. These are just some simple metaphors, they're Straight-forward stories that we get pretty much quickly"

By 1993, after a few live performances at the missing pub "La Cueva", the owners called Viejas Locas, along with some other bands, for them to record a mix album titled "A Night At La Cueva". The songs by Viejas Locas in that album are: "Eva" and "Tirado en la estación". This ended up as a bad move because they signed a contract and they had to fight for a lot of time to revoke it.

After so many live performances the band gave at Capital Federal, a manager of the popular record label "Polygram" (the same one that brought La Renga to mainstream) spotted them. He was really impressed and offered a contract they signed. Their first album was released on 1996 and it was self titled as "Viejas Locas" It included songs like "Intoxicado", "Lo artesanal" and "Nena, me gustás así"

By 1997, they went back to record studios to give shape of what would be "Hermanos de Sangre", the second studio album by Viejas Locas. For this album, they wanted to have Andrew Oldhman as a producer, but that finally didn't happen. The most popular songs in this record were "El chico de la Oculta", "Psicodélica mujer", "Difícil de entender" y "Perra" the last one being a single.

The growth of the band was undeniable. It was then when the Rolling Stones came back to Argentina and "Los Ratones Paranoicos", after some economic difficulties, disagreed to be their support band.

Discography

• "Viejas Locas", 1996
• "Hermanos de sangre", 1997
• "Especial", 1999
• "Sigue pegando - grandes éxitos", 2002

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