When finally, after months of searching and failed tests, the publisher-financier, the lawyer Alberto Ohanian, appeared, it was already summer. 1976 came upon us, and with it the military coup by Videla and his henchmen. We come together and ask ourselves: What to do?
The decision was to go ahead, see how the hand came, not talk about stinging topics: politics, religion, drugs. Saying things through others, with literary and artistic metaphors. “There is a whole world outside of what is prohibited, and we are going to explore it so as not to suffocate. Let's look like a music magazine in the dull eyes of the censors.”
The editorial meetings, crazy and creative, were what today would be called brain storming, except that the ideas and storms were very extreme, driven by Jorge's brilliant imagination and the corrosive humor of Negro Fontova. The newsroom was like a strange island of freedom in the middle of a silent and frightened city.
It is already known that the covers of the Expreso were an indelible mark of the magazine, and a touch of color and madness in the monochrome and censored kiosks of the Process. The idea was that each cover was different, and told a story of its own. The famous tomato shot at Travolta, a symbol of the pasatista culture that the dictatorship wanted to impose, is an example
SOME NOTABLE NOTES
The Punk Note
Punk was emerging against everything in England and the USA, and Alfredo brought every day the news that he was eagerly looking for in the foreign media, in times when there was no internet or computers, oddly enough today. We didn't know if reflecting the countercultural violence of English punk with its defiant lyrics and gory stories would be acceptable to the process mentality. But we didn't think too much either. We started from the assumption that almost anything could be said if it was in the words of foreign authors who belonged to the Western and Christian world, and, after all, Johnny Rotten was a foreigner.
It occurred to me from the second issue to make a section called "Practical guide to inhabit the planet Earth", to speak for the first time of "applied ecology".
Although read today the section seems naive, over the years I have met many people who became interested in food and natural medicine from those few pages, and the organic farming movement in Argentina arose from the readers of the Guide and the meticulous notes of José Luis Damato.
Actually, I think we have to thank Damato for accustoming us to serious research and reliable information on "alternative" issues such as climate change (in 1978!!), renewable energy, genetic manipulation, criticism of nuclear power etc. In the nuclear field, José Luis made a devastating note from the movie China Syndrome, and for a moment we thought we were getting into trouble, since nuclear energy was always a private and secret business of the military, and at that time more than ever.
Basabru's notes on jazz and avant-garde music and Claudio's on North American rock and folk also had serious research and detailed information. The idea of saying EVERYTHING about an artist resulted in pages and pages of typography that we called “gouging out your eyes” because no author wanted to cut off what they had worked so hard to figure out.
It always seemed to us that as a good rock magazine, we had to talk about the greats of tango, folklore, Brazilian music or salsa. That is, it is not about musical genres, but about people who show new paths. It was so that on the sixth cover of the Expreso, before any rock musician, we put Piazzolla, with an extensive report.
The brilliant Egberto Gismonti and Hermeto Paschoal from Brazil and Opa, a group of the Fatorrusso brothers from Uruguay, graced the cover of a popular magazine anywhere in the world for the first time. Egberto, with the history of his sound searches among the Amazonian Xingu tribes, mixed with his high-level classical and jazz training, caused surprise and a legion of followers. Hermeto showed Argentines for the first time that great technology was not needed -the central concern of the rockers of the time- to invent amazing music, and he kept Alfredo, Claudio, Fernando and me stunned with a one-hour recital with two soda bottles.
Damato made a meticulous, many-page note on Jung's theory of the Collective Unconscious, picturing it with similar images from all cultures and times. From there came Charly's inspiration to compose the song, which speaks of "the eaves of the mind."
Diana Bellessi, today an Argentine poet laureate, made a series of reports on aboriginal poetry and the singers of the ravines, working under the guidance of Leda Valladares. He also covered the various aboriginal cultures of the Americas, told as living and inspiring experiences.
From the first issues, at the request of Pistocchi, we searched for creative cartoonists who would generate fun and direct stories. Rolando Rojo, Gustavo Dall'Occhio, Diego Vegezzi, Spring Hornos, Rubén Vásquez (Nebur) and others produced a series of highly satirical and delusional cartoon stories. Jorge got the rights to "Little Nemo in the Land of
dreams”, one of the first comics. Jorge also had the idea of making fotonovelas, and with the help of exceptional photographers such as Eduardo Martí and Uberto Sagramoso, that territory became a new world in which, once again, things could be said without saying them.
The list of journalists today who made their debut at El Expreso is very long: For example, the editorial secretaries of the different stages: Ralph Rotschild – today editor of La Mano, Sandra Russo, Gloria Guerrero. Adriana Franco today writing about rock in La Nación, began with some chronicles in the early 80s.
Roberto Pettinatto came to the magazine through a letter from readers, hidden behind the pseudonym Laura Ponte, and he stayed forever. With his obsession with the “New Journalism” of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Hunter Thomson, and his constant bouts of satire and sarcasm, he contributed to renewing the language. When little by little we all started leaving, Pettinatto was left to direct the last year of the magazine, already with a clearly musical tone.
In the second issue we put a letter from the Scottish group Incredible String Band as an editorial, which is a statement of the magazine's principles, and the opposite of the intolerant thinking of the dictatorship at that time, and which I like to close these memories:
“His head is so wide that everything life says has room to live and breathe and be, and even more…”
Pipo Lernoud
The beginning of the bloodiest dictatorship in Latin American history – which is already saying a lot – is not a good opportunity to start a magazine based on freedom and exploration.
Actually, the idea already had its shooting time. It had emerged from the eternally creative head of Jorge Pistocchi, former patron of Almendra, former director of the magazine Mordisco, specialized in rock. Jorge contacted me in the middle of 1975 with a folder with drawings and notes, a logo and the first cover already designed.
We began to look for financing for the project, and to think about putting together a team. The first one that occurred to us was Horacio Fontova, the “Renaissance Negro”, actor, cartoonist, musician, writer and old friend from shipwreck nights with Miguel Abuelo and Tanguito. Horacio would put the aesthetic stamp on the Express, a personality that stands out among the magazines of Argentina and probably the world. Jorge brought Alfredo Rosso, who was finishing the colimba and writing for his previous magazine, Mordisco. The 20-something Rosso brought two friends, Claudio Kleiman –companion of the colimba- and Fernando Basabru.
Dr. Hornos, for the Springe friends and for the law, Eduardo Sanz (*) accompanied Jorge with his illustrations, making the cartoons for the magazine and giving him, along with Fontova and many others, the graphics that made it distinctive.
(*) A great companion at the police stations to which they used to take us after each recital in between and where they didn't know him as Springe...
"The Imaginary Express": journalism and counterculture
The publication directed by Jorge Pistocchi and Pipo Lernoud put readers' mail, ecology, oriental philosophy and native peoples at the center of its interests. Alfredo Rosso tells of his beginnings as a chronicler in the mythical magazine.
By Mariano Nieva -Paco Urondo Agency
Alfredo Rosso:What you say, I learned in those years from colleagues like Claudio Kleiman, for example, who is the one who brought Brazilian music to the Express, and that's how we found out more than 40 years ago about the existence of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Hermeto Pascoal and Ney Matogrosso. Pipo Lernoud, for his part, introduced folklore at a time when we were a bit afraid of this style, along with tango, because there was a kind of friction with the tangueros who had felt in the '60s that rock he had removed scenery and figuration, and somehow they were right. Some of that had happened at that time.
UPA:And at what point do you feel that this mixture of sounds and styles began to be heard more clearly among our artists?
AR:Everything began to integrate, like when Negra Sosa returned to the country after exile and, after the dictatorship was over, León Gieco and Charly García were on the stage where she performed. Or Daniel Sbarra, a musician from Virus, who was playing with Jaime Torres at the time. Then began a wonderful period that today is a constant and nobody is scared anymore, and that is that rock merges with folklore, for example. Of course, we must never stop honoring pioneers like Gustavo Santaolalla who already did this crossbreeding in the '70s with his group Arco Iris. If, for example, you listen to his song “I want to arrive”, you will find "piazzoleano" tango, folklore and also jazz.
UPA:What did it mean to you to have been part of the Imaginary Express, taking into account that you had just left the colimba, the context in which the publication appeared and the stature of myth that it later reached?
AR:The Express was an apprenticeship for me. Imagine that I was 21 years old and had just finished my military service with Claudio Kleiman, whom I met there, in the barracks. Fifteen days after being discharged, I began to do a section called “La hora de los inéditos” on the radio program “Viento a favor”, in collaboration with Fernando Basabru, who had been my classmate in high school and that today accompanies us and looks at us from somewhere in the cosmos. In addition, I worked in a record company editing records and when I entered the Expreso, which was just beginning, I met a generation that had between five and ten years of experience with me, and that also had a humanistic view of life and a desire for freedom through all price.
UPA:People with a lot of lucidity and vision of the future.
AR:Absolutely, Jorge Pistochi and Pipo Lernoud were there as its directors; Black Horacio Fontova, whom everyone knows as a musician and comedian but who is a great diagrammer and cartoonist and who did an enormous job in the magazine. José Luis Damato, who was in charge of all the notes on ecology, and many other people who joined, like Gloria Guerrero, Sandra Russo and Roberto Petinatto, who as we all know was a Sumo saxophonist and who became director in the last stage of the magazine to which many people do not give due ball.
UPA:It is true what you say regarding the period in which Petinatto was in charge of the magazine, very few remember and recognize it.AR: I think the interesting thing about Petti's work is that he tried to insert the magazine in the '80s, in a very different context from the beginning. Although I accept that perhaps the first stage that goes from 76 to 79 has been the most fruitful of the publication. A tomato for Travolta.
By 1978 the main groups on the local scene had dissolved. The news of the separations of La máquina de hacer pájaros, Invisible, Crucis, Polifemo, Soluna and Pastoral, among others, were known through the pages of the Imaginary Express. This situation, added to a context of suffocation resulting from the military dictatorship and the exile of great figures such as León Gieco, Lito Nebbia, Gustavo Santaolalla, Pino Marrone and Edelmiro Molinari, caused both the publication of new record materials and the the number of live shows. On the other hand, the film Saturday night fever released a year earlier, directed by John Badham, and the culture of disco music in our country were other factors that aggravated the situation. Artists like the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Kool & The Gang were the main stars of a phenomenon that proposed disco and dance as an alternative to the communion of the recital.The Imaginary Express, in its own way, did not remain oblivious to this new circumstance and picking up the gauntlet in issue No. 26 of September 1978, put a tomato smack on the face of John Travolta, icon of disco music, on the cover. The cover was accompanied by a sarcastic centerpiece headlined "The Feverish Robots of Saturday Night."
UPA:Another of the things that was rescued from the Express was that it had been a kind of advance journalism. They talked about what many were silent.
AR:Pipo and José Luis Damato were pioneers in addressing what was coming, the environmental issue, the contamination of the seas and pollution in cities. We talked about all this in 1977 and 1978, in the section "The manual for inhabiting planet Earth", for example, something really "incorrect" for the time, because it was to address these issues in an ideal country where everything was fine and we were rights and human So with all those people we made a magazine that talked about cinema, theater, ecology and communities at a time when you couldn't talk about all that freely. For this reason, I believe that Expreso Imaginario was a place of cultural resistance in a terrible time. On the other hand, my contribution was in the musical part with Kleiman, Basabru and the unforgettable Edy “La Foca” Rodríguez, who also played with El Negro in the duo they formed and who named him Fontova y la Foca.
UPA:Many do not know that El Expreso Imaginario had a fleeting step as a radio program. How did that experience come about?
AR:After many years, there was an attempt in 2001 to revive the experience, but it did not go beyond a broadcast on La Tribu radio, which was fun and was hosted by Rubén de León, the singer and leader of La banda del paraíso, but he did not give to continue it. Later, Jorge Pistochi made some productions for single numbers, and nothing more.
UPA:Today you are working on a book that has to do with rescuing your notes from the Express. Tell us a little more about this project
AR:Indeed, we are making a book with Pipo and Kleiman of our notes on the Express. Of course we have to be selective, because it is a work that is going to have about 400 pages and we cannot put everything. Also, it's just our notes, to which we own the rights and we're very happy to do so. And since we are prolonging the interviews we did in those days, it also mobilized us a lot.
UPA:Beyond the lots of memories you have from that time, what happened to you when you got back in touch with that material?
AR:Imagine remembering again, for example, the report I did to Spinetta at the time of his album Kamikaze at his home in Florida, and everything that was happening around it, because the meeting with El Flaco happened in the middle of the Malvinas war. . Or the note to the Television group, which I remember I did a few blocks from where I worked at the Music Hall label and that I wrote it in a Chinese restaurant, where I would have lunch every day, so there are even humorous elements. In summary, it is a very strong exercise to remember those notes again and realize in most cases how current they are, how they are so current not only because of the musicians we are talking about, but also because of the vibe that the writings have. .
UPA:Seeing a bit of current events in the media. Do you feel that they left some kind of legacy in the way of doing written journalism?
AR:As for the inheritance, I think we did something very dignified in the time of The Hand, and in this sense I want to send a big hug to Ralph Rothschild who made it possible for the magazine to come out at another difficult time for written material, such as the years 2003. and 2004, after the 2001 disaster, and he gambled for the project and invested. We did this publication with Pipo Lernoud, Marcelo Fernández Bitar and Martín Pérez, "El Gavilán", today editor of Radar, the cultural supplement of Página/12, who was very important; and of course Roberto Petinatto, the guy who gave the publication much more than its name. And a lot of collaborators like Fernando García, who at the time of the final closing left a great phrase, when he said: “I am very glad to have worked in a magazine that is not a franchise”. La Mano lasted 6 years, maintaining, it seems to me, the spirit of the Imaginary Express.
When talking about countercultural journalism in our country, the experience that took place between 1976 and 1983 and that was called El Expreso Imaginario, one of the most rebellious magazines that the vernacular written press had, immediately appears as a reference. Alfredo Rosso, one of the most prominent specialized rock journalists, tells in this interview for Agencia Paco Urondo his beginnings as a chronicler in the mythical publication, the unpublished topics for the time that were covered in its pages and the history of La Mano at the beginning of the new millennium which, according to Alfredo himself, preserved that rebellious and original spirit of the Express.
Paco Urondo Agency:Today there is much talk of miscegenation in rock and perhaps no one will be surprised, for better or worse, by the fusion of styles that can be found. And it seems to me that El Expreso in this, as in so many other things, was avant-garde. Rock, folklore and tropicalism could coexist in its pages.
by Humphrey Inzillo
March 24, 2019
This song is for the old men, for Rosso, for Kleiman", says Indio Solari before singing "That lonely Cuban cow" in a memorable concert in Cemento, in 1987, where Luca Prodan shared the stage with Los Redondos and sang "Criminal mambo".
Claudio Kleiman laughs when he remembers that dedication, immortalized on a pirated cassette. "By that time we were already the geezers," he says. Ten years earlier, he had been the first to write about that delirious group that would become one of the most popular in the history of vernacular rock. That's just one of the milestones in Kleiman's four decades as a rock journalist. In that course, he went from being a benchmark to becoming a legend. Founder of the Imaginary Express and a pillar of the Argentine edition of Rolling Stone since its first edition, in 1998, his firm is one of the most prestigious on the continent. In all these years of ink and music, he earned the admiration of Charly García (who eagerly awaited each of his criticisms) and Gustavo Santaolalla (who considers him one of the best journalists in the world), participated in memorable jams in the rehearsal rooms of La Renga and Divididos, and interviewed giants like Iggy Pop and Carlos Santana, among many others. However, and although he does not plan to abandon the profession of writing, his great motivation today is on stage.
"Music is the closest human beings have to a transcendental experience, it is beyond words and concepts, it is air in motion," he says, inspired by his new main métier. "Music and journalism have always been like parallel paths, and for music to have a more visible place now is something I've been waiting for a long time."
It is no coincidence that hisdebut album, It Was Time, he will arrive at a critical moment for his lifelong profession. "Journalism is in a transition that nobody knows very well where it is going. The one we met, with which we were trained, with long notes, research, opinion, now it is only found in drops, it has no place on the internet," reflect.
Neither is the impressive list of guests who selflessly joined the album by chance (see box). Kleiman never had conflicts when it came to erasing the border between the musician and the journalist, and from the respect that each of his articles generated, he earned the friendship of several generations of Argentine musicians. Era hora is not a journalist's foray into the realm of musical practice, but the result of a lifelong passion: alongside his journalistic career, he played with Skay Beilinson in a line-up parallel to the Redondos (earlier from the 80s), he recorded a demo with a Latin American touch - which included a version by the Brazilian composer Alceu Valença - and led several projects essentially linked to blues.
under the white album
The first three volumes of the Kleiman disco seem like part of a manual for the perfect rocker: the White Album, by the Beatles; Almond and Manal. "They were the ones that had come out at that time, and I didn't imagine that they were going to be the best that I was going to listen to in my life," he says and evokes his adolescence, those years in which he went to concerts, bought vinyl records and wanted to know everything. . "Growing up in the 60s and 70s was a very rich breeding ground. My first recitals were BA Rock, but I also went to Luna Park to see Viglietti or Quilapayún, and to listen to Piazzolla with Gerry Mulligan at the Belgrano Auditorium. All of this, long before even thinking about the possibility of writing."
It was during those years, too, that in addition to devouring record reviews in La Pelo and Cronopios, he began to write poetry and short stories, with a fleeting participation in an anthology of young poets by Miguel Grinberg, the priest of writers. with some pretense beatnik whom Kleiman followed with admiration in the newspaper La Opinión. "And that was before the Express, which was my approach to journalism and rock from within."
When he finished high school, he began to study psychology without much conviction. Until his military service (in the Military Police Regiment, in Palermo) forced him to interrupt his studies. And, incredible as it may seem, it changed his life (for the better).
Strictly speaking, it wasn't exactly the colimba that changed his life but a meeting with a colleague, Alfredo Rosso, who over the years would become another of the pillars of vernacular rock journalism. Together they formed an unbeatable tandem. "In the colimba I was with the radar attentive to see if any soul related to rock appeared within that confinement. And one day, in a guard that they called "imaginary" because it was without weapons, I came across a Mordisco magazine, which It was before the Expreso. It was owned by a kid who didn't look like he was a Mordisco reader. So I say to him: "Hey, is that magazine yours?" And then he tells me that a certain Rosso, from the First Sergeant's office. So I started looking for the owner of the magazine. And it turns out that he was not only a reader, but also wrote there. That's how I met him, and we immediately became new friends. And he immediately told me that the owner, Jorge Pistocchi, was devising another publication. The next free time we had, he took me to Pistocchi's apartment on Viamonte street. And that was a before and after for me."
-Because?
-His house was a mess, there were a couple of mattresses on the floor, a long table full of papers. And Pistocchi would start talking and he was like some kind of guru. Guru for his ability to persuade and for his thought, which was very deep. The people who gathered around him were extraordinary.
An expected debut
At the end of last year, Kleiman released his first album, Era hora, which includes an eclectic guest list, with legends such as León Gieco, Ricardo Mollo, Diego Arnedo and Gustavo Santaolalla; pioneers such as drummer Rodolfo García (Almendra), guitarist Claudio Gabis (Manal) and keyboardist Ciro Fogliatta (Los Gatos); blues heroes like the maestros Marcelo Ponce and Jorge Senno or the drummer Juan Carlos Tordó (La Mississippi); and a selection that includes the Uruguayan murguista Alejandro Balbis, the star violinist Javier Casalla, the singer Claudia Puyó and musicians from the Ratones Paranoicos, among many others. An impressive staff for any debut album, which garners the respect and, fundamentally, the affection that Kleiman has planted in all these years of music. There are eight own songs and two co-authored (with Skay Beilinson and Pipo Lernoud), which dialogue with some national rock obsessions, paint an urban landscape and investigate a certain neighborhood existentialism.
When he returned to Psychology, in May 1976, Kleiman found himself with a completely different panorama from the one he had left before entering, still in a democracy. The halls of the college, which had previously been riddled with posters and abuzz with political activism, artistic expression and sexual tension, had died down. "The walls were white, bare. There was no activity, everyone was submissive, like something out of 1984, from Orwell. So if the race had interested me little from the beginning, the context definitely drove me away."
At the time, the Imaginary Express was on the tails and Kleiman had taken over the record-review section. In part, because of his incipient training on the subject, but also because of his work in the bookstore and record store that his brother had in Flores, y
where Pedro Aznar and Daniel Melero went to buy, allowed him to have access to the latest releases. For the first issue, which came out in August 1976 and offered a "Practical Guide to Inhabiting Planet Earth" on the cover, Kleiman reviewed records by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Frank Zappa. The recognition came in the email of the second number, when Charly García sent a brief but extremely auspicious text, where he congratulated all the staff and especially highlighted the Records section. "I still didn't know him personally. That's why I owe it to him: I was a recently arrived asshole and, from that, they began to look at me with more respect."-You ever said that, more than a magazine, the Express... was a vital experience.-Clear. It was like a salvation for us, and many readers also felt that way, because we were able to create ourselves as a microworld. It was like an island within that sinister reality that was lived. The initial group was an amazing gathering of talent. In addition to Pistocchi, there was Pipo (Lernoud), who would be the co-director of the Express and Negro Fontova, an illustrator and art director. Also Alberto Ohanian, who was not for nothing later the manager of Spinetta and Soda Stereo, a very important guy to carry out the delusions that Pistocchi had in his head. And Uberto Sagramoso, who was the first photographer of the Express. They were all a few years older than Alfredo [Rosso] and me. Imagine that all of us who are still alive are still very good friends.-And how was the relationship with the musicians?-We were part of the same thing: a small group of people who had to close ranks. That immediately produced a brotherhood and many remain friends to this day: Gustavo Santaolalla, León Gieco, Claudio Gabis, even Luis [Alberto Spinetta] and Charly, of course. With some of them we played memorable football matches.
rock wonder for this world
Although he wrote many emblematic articles, such as a long profile of Bob Dylan and a couple of anthological interviews with Charly García, Claudio Kleiman will go down in history for the chronicle of the first of the Lozanazos, those famous concerts in La Plata that gave rise to the myth of the Round ones. "The incipient rock movement from La Plata seems to make old laurels green again. This is how the presentation, at the Lozano de La Plata theater, of Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota, a delirious band of nine members and a multitude of collaborators, seems to herald it. rock and roll strength, wit and good humor seems to want to ape the golden days of psychedelia," he wrote. A couple of paragraphs later, he prophesied: "Those Redonditos de Ricota are going to give a lot to talk about in the future."
Four decades later, Claudio recalls the initial shock and, once again, the instant friendship that was born that night. "The closest parallel that occurred to me when I saw them was with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, because they put on a freak circus on stage. There were special effects that failed, they threw chickens. Here, there was no precedent for something like that. And the name had a very clear reference to '50s rock & roll groups like Bill Haley & His Comets, and that was politically incorrect."The night of the first concert, in a bar, Kleiman, Skay and Poli forged a friendship that continues to this day.
He met the others, but the approach and the talk was with them. "They made music that was different from any other music out there. That really appealed to me, because I realized all the cultural baggage they brought with them, that these guys had been trained in psychedelia and had read the same books that I had."-And from that initial meeting and that first mythical note, how did the relationship continue?-They had an apartment here in Buenos Aires and whenever they came, once a week, Poli would let me know and we would go out for drinks. We would go to drink and in those laps you would meet characters that they were incorporating into the Redondos. Like Enrique Symns, at that time a monologue of the under. And several more that we discovered on those nocturnal adventures.-And how did you get along with the Indian?-We had a bond on the side of melomania; he made some compilations on cassette because he said he got bored of listening to complete records. Ahead of his time (laughs). We listened to them when he went to the house. It was a box of surprises because he didn't mix them in any way, he had a question, he was a DJ. And we argued a lot because we didn't agree on many things. He boasted of being more open and he is right, I have always been more classic in my tastes. For example, at the time of the new romantic I didn't even bank there and he liked it. I'm talking about the second half of the 80s.Kleiman saw the exponential growth of the group until it reached the dimension of stadiums. And he also witnessed the consecration of artists such as León Gieco, Charly García and Gustavo Santaolalla. "Charly confessed to me, not long ago, that he was especially looking forward to reading my reviews of his records. And that, imagine, what it means to me", he prides himself between memories of recording sessions and shared reports.-How do you deal with the idea that many of your musician friends became millionaires? -I do the best I can. Let's say, that contradiction is not lost on me, but just as I have seen that, I have also seen very talented people end up in misery. Complaining would be pretentious or unfair on my part. Maybe I was never very clever. I was always more after what I was attracted to do than what could provide an economic return. And well, what do I know, skull does not squeal. I would have liked to earn more money, but I don't know if I didn't have the ability or the talent. On the other hand, if I had wanted to make money I would have pursued a career as a notary, just like my dad, which was what he wanted, and I would probably be very well off financially. I would have inherited my old man's office. But hey, one entered this as a way to rebel against the established order. And that, in my case, does not have many awards.
Word of Santaolalla
From Kuwait, where he is participating in a large video game conference, and before leaving for Switzerland for a special visit to CERN, the largest particle physics research laboratory in the world, Santaolalla writes about Kleiman. "Claudio is one of the most capable rock journalists I've ever met. I've always been an avid reader of music publications from around the world, and having read authors like Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Robert Hilburn, Timothy White and Joe Boyd, among others, I can say with certainty that Claudio is on a par with any of those monsters of world rock journalism.His knowledge is so vast and his capacity for analysis so accurate that he has always been a fundamental reference for the discovery of new artists and the deepening of the work of those already established.Claudio is one of the pioneers of rock journalism in our country and one of the few who have given validity and seriousness to the profession.To his work as a chronicler He has also added his talent as a musician and I think that today makes his understanding of what he writes even deeper. But in addition to his incredible skills as a chronicler, Claudio has a human quality that allows him to relate to his interviewees in a very special. In his reports we managed to discover aspects of an artist that are often unknown. Finally, I must confess that, in my case, the endearing affection I have for him as a friend adds to my admiration and respect as a professional".