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Vitico: the “Chancellor” of rock talks about his life in “Memories” without a filter

Vitico: the “Chancellor” of rock talks about his life in “Memories” without a filter

Dialogue with the co-founder of “Riff”, along with Pappo. and protagonist of several decades of music in the country and abroad.

“When they ask me what I did in London I answer: For half an hour I played with Pete Townshend and Keith Moon, and I put it where Jimi Hendrix put it.” This is how one of the most hilarious chapters begins, in its description of a life of sex, drugs and rock’n roll, from the book “El Canciller-Memorias” by the bassist who founded Riff together with Pappo, Víctor Bereciartúa, better known as Vitico. The chapter in question is “My Swinging London”, where he talks about the three years he was in the world rock capital between 1970 and 1973, when he became friends with Pete Townshend from The Who while the quintessential mod band was recording “Quadrophenia”. , his second conceptual work after the rock opera “Tommy”, and where he lived with Pat Hartley, Jimi Hendrix’s ex-girlfriend (she appears with him in his film “Rainbow Bridge”) who was actually the partner of another filmmaker friend of the manager’s of the Who, Kit Lambert (the bassist assures, a bit bitterly, that he was the inspiration for the song “The Punk And The Godfather”, of course in the role of the punk).

Among many other things that are funny or dramatic, but always illuminating, like the painting of each era, place and band with which he lived and played, in those London pages Vitico also recounts the rise of heroin in British rock and a party that began quietly. until the police came, and since he still did not understand the English accent, he swallowed the 20 doses of LSD he had to invite the guests. “The policemen only came to recommend that we not play the music loud, but luckily I was able to vomit the acids, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you now; I swear I met someone who seriously swallowed a similar amount of acids and was never the same again,” Vitico says in a long dialogue with this newspaper about his brand new book, which he will present on March 21 at the Roxy, where In addition to talking about this autobiography, he will play music –“an acoustic set”, he says- with his current partner in rock, Gabriel Carámbula.

What makes these “Memoirs” so interesting is that Vitico wrote without hesitation or dissimulation -with the help of Fernando García- all the experiences, whether good, bad or ugly that moved him through the decades, whether when He started in the Buenos Aires beat world with friendly bands like Los Mods, or later the very successful La Joven Guardia –he replaced the original bassist Quique Másllorens, to play on big hits like “La reina de la canción” among many others- and later he participated in Billy Bond and La Pesada del Rock to later try his luck in England, and on his return to form Riff with Pappo, the great comrade of the greatest adventures of his life.

While other figures only reveal something of their past, generally recounting episodes that make them look good, Vitico lashes out with everything and that’s why “El Canciller” narrates that kind of forbidden stuff that one only finds in unauthorized biographies. When we mention this to him, Vitico laughs and proudly explains; “I didn’t write this book to sell millions, but to tell about the things I did and how I got through it all and ended up, to use a metaphor, with a healthy ass. She wanted it to be fun and fair, I wasn’t going to face her. It took me a long time to write it, I signed the contract and I was writing it years before the pandemic, and I kept it there for a while and wrote a kind of epilogue about the time of quarantine, where I was locked up because of my age and COPD: I was a person risky”.

Born in 1948, Vitico went through intense times in recent Argentine history, and can tell first-hand important episodes but with his own vision, for example the closure of the Di Tella Institute or the famous and still discussed concert in which Billy Bond promoted to the public so that they would break everything in Luna Park, which made the acceptance of rockers by the Creole establishment go back years. A serious, intense and very dramatic episode is when in 1977, during the military dictatorship, he was kidnapped and tortured for drug addiction. “A long time later in a TV interview they asked me if I was not going to ask for compensation from the State, but it is something that I refused, there are people who deserved it more than me, who was finally involved in a matter of a package of cocaine that was too big for me ”.

The big moments in the book have to do with Pappo. “He was my best friend and my worst enemy, the two of us together were terrible and sometimes they were afraid of us. He came to the conclusion that in Argentine rock ‘they had softened the milanesa too much’ and that’s why we made Riff. I was the one who had it a bit short, I did the accounting for the group and I also registered the name as a brand. And whenever Pappo got too crazy we’d split up and he’d go back to Pappo’s Blues for a while. He had no filter, he was capable of doing anything that came into his head, like the time the landline phone rang, and it was him who was in California and I heard him embarrassed telling me that at a party with top people, Like the one in the movie with Peter Sellers, he had seen some young girls undress and jumped into the pool, and he couldn’t handle his genius and he stripped and jumped in with them, as fat and mature as he was.

‘What do I do now?’ She asked me, and I told her, ‘I don’t know, come back!’

Vitico also participated in Pappo’s sex and alcohol bacchanalia, and he tells them with hilarious details, like the strange ritual between a rocker and a Fellinian that they did with a fat prostitute the night they decided to put together Riff. “Many of these experiences of Pappo’s and mine also involve girls that I asked if he could mention their names, and some of them said yes. I tried to be chivalrous despite everything.” He also recounts that he did everything possible to avoid the excesses of Riff’s public, including a rare episode in Paladium where Pappo invited his girlfriend at the time, Celeste Carballo (“before she dated Sandra Mihanovich, whom Pappo called the Uncle Sandro”, says the bass player in the book) and the whole crowd began to insult her. “I stopped the show and challenged them, I told them that they all had a mother and they owed respect to women. But I never found out why Pappo didn’t do anything.”

In the successive reincarnations of Riff, some with Oscar Moro and Luciano, Pappo’s son, along with his own son Nicolás, current guitarist for the Black Crowes, Vitico also imposed a little more order to avoid former excesses: “After the show Let the musicians do what they want, but before they can do the delusions of Pappo, who once in Viña del Mar began to eat Johnny Walker soup dishes at 3 in the afternoon. Something that I explain well in the book is that if I survived all this it was by learning to have limits”.

Source: Ambito

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