By the Zonagirante.com team @spinning zone
If we ask fans what the ten best Latin American rock albums of all time are, surely a large portion will include Modern Clicks, of Charly García. This album, which in a few months will be forty years old, is an unforgettable production full of great hits that are still played on commercial radio, on specialized programs, and in the memory of several generations., Those who experienced the premiere firsthand and those who, realizing the timelessness of the nine tracks that make up this album, have adopted it as their own to this day.
Engraved in Electric Lady Studios in New York (a space famous, among other things, for being a classic institution created by Jimi Hendrix thirteen years earlier), Modern Clicks It was produced by Charly García himself, in the company of Joe Blaney (who worked with the Ramones, The Clash and Prince, among others).
Apart from García (who handled the piano, Rickenbacker 365 guitar, Roland and Moog synthesizers, keyboards, samplers, TR-808 drum machine and vocals), the following participated Larry Carlton, guitar in I am not a stranger, Dinosaurs y Silver on silver; Casey Scheuerrell (some drum tracks); Doug Norwine, saxophone in New rags And most notably, the very Pedro Aznar on bass, guitar and vocals in They keep hitting us down. This is an album that marks the end of the civic-military dictatorship and the beginning of Argentine democracy., And it shows in the caliber of his lyrics, where, for that reason, they stand out Dinosaurs (I'm not at peace, my love / It's Saturday night / A friend's in jail / Oh, my love, the world is disappearing), Silver on silver (Footprints in the sea / Blood in our home / Why do we have to go so far to be here? / To be here?) and They keep hitting us down (I was in a club, there was hardly any light / The exit door had a little blue lantern / He fainted in front of me / It wasn't the pills, it was the men in gray).
As Charly himself recounted in 2007, for a special edition of Rolling Stone Argentina, Modern Clicks «It's a self-produced album, even financially, made in New York, where I met Joe Blaney. I bought the instruments, set up a sixteen-track studio in the Village, and at one point Pedro Aznar showed up with his girlfriend and we did the first rehearsal (…) Yes, I remember crossing Washington with a shopping cart full of emulators and equipment. (…) The album started like this: I go to Electric Lady Studios And I tell them, "I want to rent the best, rent it.". The owner says to me, "Is your father rich or what?" I show him the money and he asks, "A coffee?", and then gives me a list of engineers, the last of whom was Blaney. I called him and he showed up the next day, tall, cool, leopard print shoes… He saw the loft, the sixteen-channel Tascam mixer; I showed him my records and we agreed to get started. I needed a drummer and I loved Jan Hammer's drummer; I tried him out and he didn't work, nothing was happening. We even went to record and I asked Blaney what kind of drum sound I could get from him. And it didn't work: we knew he played phenomenally, but it just didn't work with us. And the next day I had no choice but to put on a TR-808 electronic drum kit and we recorded "They keep hitting us down below," and it all came together. Blaney realized it, we all realized it, and we continued with machines. "I wouldn't change a thing about Clics today.".
An album like this deserves to be reinterpreted by other artists. Therefore, we have made a playlist with a total of ten versions of seven original tunes. It's incredible, but there are two songs for which we couldn't find any covers anywhere on Spotify. The first one is the third track, Two Zero One, and The other one is the very popular They won't let me out. Therefore, we open and close the list with the recordings they made Addicted y Mercedes Sosa of Silver on silver, and we have selected Luciano Supervielle already The Bird Woman, both from Uruguay, for their versions of I am not a stranger. Supervielle's song has the striking fact of having been recorded in French, for his album Reviere. La Mujer Pájaro participated with this recording in the Zonagirante.com compilation published in 2020 called Castaways at home.
The oldest version included in this playlist dates back to 1984, They keep hitting us down, in charge of the Spaniard Miguel Ríos, to whom we pay special tribute, since he was one of the few Iberian artists who took the time to support Latin rock in the Iberian Peninsula. The most recent one was published a few days ago and is a live recording of Dinosaurs from the Chilean Manuel García, accompanied by the pianist Lito Vitale. Here is pop, rock, electronic and folk material that we are pleased to present as a tribute to Charly., on a remarkable anniversary of one of his great works.