Gricel

The story behind

Luis Alberto Spinetta and Fito Páez gave an unexpected twist to a classic tango in 1986 when they included Gricel on their joint album La la la. The original song, composed by Mariano Mores for the music and José María Contursi for the lyrics, was a portrait of love and regret: Contursi wrote it inspired by his romance with Susana Gricel Viganó, a relationship that marked him forever. But in the hands of Spinetta and Páez, the tango ceased to be mere nostalgia to become something darker. The version, performed as a duet with Spinetta on electric guitar and lead vocals, and Páez on piano, keyboards, and backing vocals, incorporated ambient effects — such as distorted choirs and train sounds — created with a modified Hammond B3 keyboard by Farley Parkenfarker. The result was a sinister reading, where the original pain was amplified with a paranoid air, especially in the obsessive repetition of the phrase *"don’t forget about me."*The inclusion of Gricel on La la la was no accident. The album, recorded in 1986, was a bold experiment at a time when Argentine rock still clashed with tango and folk music. Spinetta and Páez were not merely covering a classic: they aimed to dismantle it. The song, which in its original version lasted just over three minutes, here stretched to 4:07, with an atmosphere oscillating between the liturgical and the dreamlike. The idea came from Páez, but it was Spinetta who defined the harmonization, taking the song to a territory where the romantic and the disturbing intertwined. In a 2012 exhibition organized by the National Library, Páez recalled how that meeting of voices and sounds ended up being one of the most intense moments of the album, a record that Rolling Stone Argentina ranked decades later among the hundred best in the history of local rock.