By clothing-bag, 26/06/2022

Hernán Cattano in the first person: how his love for music was born

For those who were born in the mid -sixties, the year 2000 sounded like a future so distant that it seemed that it was never going to arrive.We believed that on that date I could change something and in my case it was fulfilled just before.In 1999 I was the resident DJ of Pachá, the best club in Buenos Aires.He had a fixed salary and was part of the electronic scene since its most analogical beginnings.I didn't need more jobs or I was interested in making myself see, I almost didn't go to other discos.However, I got an offer to which I could not resist.On May 21 in Museum, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Oakenfold were going to play, the 22 would be the turn of the Chemical in Soledad.By 21 they were looking for a disc jockey that could open and had thought of me.I asked permission in Pachá and luckily there was no problem.I didn't know it but that night my life was going to change a lot, very much.

The line-up could not be better. Oakie was the most famous DJ in the world and here he already had his audience because he had come several times, in 93 he had touched in heaven and then returned to Pachá. In addition, there was a lot of expectation with the Chemical because it was the most powerful (and danceable) electronic band that was live. I was rather filling, it didn't even appear in the Flyer, my mission was going to be the Warm Up. The problem began when the Chemical Brothers said they wanted to play at ten o'clock at night. The organizers told them that there was no one to be because people in Buenos Aires are used to the show start later. They didn't care, all they wanted was to play early and it was. Then it would be my turn and Oakie would close. As soon as that order was defined, I had everything very clear: I would have to iron the track. The challenge would not be for everyone to dance (that would take care of others), but to generate something that was useful for what was going to come after me, that is, Paul.

When we saw the Chemical essay we realized that the show was going to be a flattener. They sounded tremendous and here they had not come for electronic music bands at such a good time. They went out to play superpunctual and those in Museum were really fortunate. The show was so power that, when they ended, museum should have been closed. As they say in Spain, people had already given everything. It was my turn, what could I propose after "Hey Boys, Hey Girls, Superstar Dj’s, Here We Go!"? What I did, with good DJ tino, was to throw the party down. No one could continue dancing after them, it was illogical. I had always been critical and low profile, so it was not difficult for me to make that decision. I made seventy -five minutes from Deep House for people to rest and then be willing again for Paul. Many of those who were there, almost everyone, knew me and knew that I usually made more fast sets. In Pachá he was accustomed to 128, 130 revolutions per minute (BPM), nothing to do with the proposal of that night. "Give him, I went up," I listened to me, I was still very low, as if it were an interval. I saw the people on the cross -cross track but I didn't care, it was like a sacrifice that I made very convinced. He was thirty -three years old, he had already learned that the control is from Disc Jockey and he is the only one who makes decisions, there is no room for orders or suggestions. In my opinion, in Museum everyone needed a break. I didn't know that Paul was listening to everything, nor could he assume that he was interested in my set. When he came to take the cabin, he told me: "Thank you for this gesture, I will not forget it." And he didn't. Three months later he offered me to be the opening of his on a tour of the whole world. Luckily he had the passport a day.

For more than twenty years I traveled around the world spending music. After the confinement that we suffer from the pandemic, I know it may sound fun, but two decades are a long time and spent thousands of hours in which I was alone and, at the same time, surrounded by strangers. I was no longer excited about the routine of the airports, the sealing of the passports, the waiting in the lounges, the delays, the connections, the takeoffs, the descents, but I did it again and again, because when I arrived at destination I expected me The best feeling of all: share music with others. One of the last times I traveled to the United States asked the migration officer if he appeared on his computer the number of times he had entered. He told me yes, but that he was not authorized to read it aloud. I calculate that they were between 150 and 200. Frequent Flyer put on my Instagram profile because it was the pure truth: I worked around the world, in perpetual transit, as Charly García says. The body got used to the flights, the volume of the discos, the hotel beds. My dream was governed by the twenty -three hours of Argentina to be in Sync with my family. He took two hundred planes per year, thousands of kilometers traveled and at times I missed the ease with which we resolved everything in Caballito when he was a boy.

In my family nobody knew how to drive, we had no car, so we didn't move too much. The only one who went far, day by day, was my dad, Juan Enrique, who was a lawyer and worked in an insurance company. My sisters, Ana María and Mercedes, walked to Santa Rosa school. Until four years I was in my house because it was not mandatory to go to the garden. Anyone who came knew where to find me: next to that wooden furniture from which music came out. As they told me, from baby I spent a long time in the armchair with my mother, and a little bigger too, always listening to records. She was called Ivonne and she was the daughter of Germans and French, maybe that's why she had preference for the European. She loved the Long Plays of the San Remo Festival and Michel Legrand. She was fine my mother: she bought everything she found a German Oscar, for example, and she smiled when she sounded the "delicate" guitar. She also liked Tommy Dorsy, Glenn Miller and the great singers, such as Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby and, more here in time, the Beatles. To us she chose some songs in English that were called Nursery Rimes and the albums of María Elena Walsh. Her mother, the Oma, knew Solfeo, played the violin and piano. She loved classical music and had her fertilizer at the Wagnerian Association and Colón Theater. She took advantage of the musical vein to teach us her language, the German, that's why she put us to the singers of Vienna. Mom had worked as an English translator, she had some ease for languages ​​and was encouraged to sing. I did not understand music or pronunciations but she seemed to me that she did well. Like so many other women from the sixties, her professional life ended when she began mother's. She dedicated himself to my two sisters (Ana María is five years older, Mercedes takes me three) and then to me. Until I started preschool I was with them, so there were three women willing to give attention to that baby supported by the speaker. I could stay hours right there, with the grid increasingly marked on the face of so close that I put to listen to everything. To be at that height, almost at the floor, I remember a hairy carpet, the wood of the furniture and the smell of the turbound valves when they were heated.

We lived on Rosario Street, between Viel and Doblas, just in front of the Rivadavia Park. I was born on March 4, 1965 and my first memories have to do with my sisters, I don't have a specific image, I was simply with them everything I could or what they endured. We were going to the sand, to the numismatic fair (coins and stamps, there was still no records) and the bars of Rivadavia Avenue to take underwater. As soon as I woke up, I asked about the girls and went by his side, at least they told me. They did the same thing that I see that now do Olivia and April, my two older daughters, with Mila, the youngest: they show a fascinating world that cannot be denied. If it were for Mila, I would spend looking at Masha and the bear, something impossible considering that the other two decide for her (almost always). They look at too complex stories for their age, like Harry Potter, but it doesn't care because he loves to share that with them. Perhaps the idea of ​​what is the ideal time to discover something is overvalued. Each one understands what he can and other things only perceive them. In our case, it was not TV that united us, but music. They, at the beginning of the seventies, listened to Carpents, Yes, Led Zepelin and, luckily, Pink Floyd, my favorite band until today. The dark side of the moon was one of the first musical trips I had. Who could Margarito Tereré interest, that children's character who was a Yacaré, if he could listen to David Gilmour guitar? No, at least, until today nothing transports me as that fantastic and unrepeatable album.

Our coexistence was not precisely a democracy. If I chose one of Gaby, Fofó and Miliqui, they came, they took it out and put Jethro Tull. I was interested in both music and being with them. Perhaps, if they had chosen another activity, such as reading, drawing or listening to radio, I would surely have approached me, because I had the reflection of following them. Luckily, they opened the door to music. I loved going to the park with Karting, receiving visits, even playing football, although it did very badly. Before all that preferred discs. I had no idea what the letters said, nor of the names of the authors, but I did not take off from Winco. What attracted me was not the sound, nor the noise of the spike when leaning on, nor the silences between song and song. It was all that and much more. For a while I had to ask for help to put them, I did not give me fine motor skills to get it out of the envelope, support it on the tray, grab the pouge. Mom helped me, if she didn't ask any of my sisters. They also put a long play behind another, almost at any time. The music took me away from Caballito and made me float by choruses, words that I did not understand but still repeated.

Our situation was the typical middle class in Argentina. At times, more tight, sometimes with margin to buy something. Nothing was missing, neither was there too much. On vacation, for example, we visited relatives in Mendoza, Corrientes and Tucumán to save the stay. The uncles of the interior were synonym of summer. I was transparent, quite cheerful and like almost all the boys, I said everything I thought. Without my dad, Mendoza went with my mother and the Oma (my grandmother) to visit my godmother Alicia on the El Libertador train. She left at 17 and arrived at 7. Obviously, what I remember most is from the dining room with white tablecloth, dishes and blue corduroy seats. They were reclining and had feet, like those of ancient hairdressers. In addition, luckily, all summers took a month of vacation to Villa Gesell. We were in micro, always with the Rio de la Plata line. We left Plaza Once, I sat down and at ten minutes I told Mom: "I'm hungry." Ida, I was eating homemade crumb sandwiches that my dad and around, alfajores amalfi. In the middle, they were throwing everything that I would sit down: caramelos sugus, alfajores jorgito, coca, to a yogurt of dulce de leche that I liked and that my mother carried in a ice cream. In Gesell the sun suffered a bit. I went from being white to red in a very short time, I peeled and again I returned to white. He enjoyed the beach early because at seven he was already awake. My family was still sleeping and I was just fishing cars and grabbing clams. My dad was in charge of cooking them. At that time, when there was almost no one, he approached me to talk to the lifeguard and then I had breakfast again.

During the year, family fun was completed with the cinema and Sunday lunch in the Emilian My dad's favorite. Without him, in the house there was swing and laughter. Everything became more serious as soon as he arrived. He was a formal, conservative, very ethical and honesty type that no longer exists. For example, as a young man he worked at the National Board of Meats, in that office they knew the value of the markets one day before, info with which everyone made great differences, but he said it was not fair to "take advantage." Another would have become a millionaire. At that time I did not understand it and now I admire it to the fullest. When I was born, he was already forty -five years old and was a huge difference. Many times I wondered how that would have been for him (although our differences in my youth made it very clear). I also had three daughters with more than forty but now it is very different: I slept with them when they were newborns, I spent nights at the colic and so many more things that were generally reserved for women.

My parents met in an insurance company, they got boyfriends, married and then divided the tasks: she, at home, he, to the office.In our classic scheme, Dad was expected to eat, Mom prepared what he wanted.At every dinner, my old man sat in the head and hoped everything would come while he smoked.He was always smoking.As a boy it didn't even question it, but a few years ago, especially since I left the cigarette, which I have been thinking about some images, such as smoke inside the house.

The relationship with my mother, I think, over the years, became so affectionate, so tender, because it had an almost romance beginning.Those first five years with her, alone at home, or with my sisters, were like a capsule.They did not come a babysitter or a large cousin to take care of us.She was always mom, for everything, for us three and also for those who would like to invite.She took us every afternoon to Rivadavia Park, to the games, to walk by bike.She snacks, bathrooms, tasks, she was in charge of all.In my taste for music I also accompanied me.She told the family that I was crazy from the records, so for my birthdays they didn't give me toys or clothes, they directly brought me vinyl.

My uncle Horacio de Corrientes always gave me money and I was going straight to the disquerity, and Alicia, my mother's sister, gave me my first long duration: Willy and poor children, from Creedence Clearwater Revival. I spent whole hours with that lid on my hands, hypnotized. In the center was the band, with their instruments, at the door of a warehouse or something. Very attentive, black boys looked at musicians. I had never seen a person who wasn't white, had not even left the country. They hit me, I don't know how many hours I will have spent looking at them. Songs like "Cotton Fields" talked about cotton fields and children who worked there and I couldn't understand why they had to work. I remember very strong of the visual shock of the black and poor boys. Besides, I think, the poor were less poor. There was less quantity and there was no native category. There were Miserias Villas, but at least in Caballito, it was not heard so much about that. Today, because of the way music is consumed, perhaps I would not have paid so much attention to that lid or even I would have seen it.

I spent the first section of primary school at the English school San Cirano, also in Caballito, which was double schooling. Everything was normally to the third degree, when I began to take very bad with a teacher, Miss C., to the point of having nightmares with her. It is hard for me to remember why she feared him so much, for me she was an ogre. During the day I had to endure it in the degree and at night it appeared to me in a repeated dream: the school flooded and she drowned. She was obsessed with her bad vibes, with the index finger she raised to challenge us very much in the style of The Wall's teacher or Matilda's director. Going to school every day became a little denser, something like this happened again. She was demanding and sometimes cruel. For example, those who did not have good performance in English could not go to sports day. I never liked physical activity, football was so so wooden that, every time I hit the ball my friends sang me "Norwegian Wood", of the Beatles. The sport of our degree was rugby. Violence did not interest me even in a joke and it was too skinny for such an abrupt game. I didn't attract me especially but I didn't want to miss that time outdoors with my friends either. Much less wanted to be punished. When she didn't let me go and I had to stay at school she felt that she had knocked me down. She was silent, dead of anger inside, in a semi -vaulted classroom, maybe with some partner who had been late or something. What hate it gave me. I had it in third grade and again in the fourth and incredibly the first day of fifth, my mother told me that I saw me return from school in the micro with a terrible face, as if someone had died, and asked me what was happening: " I have Miss C. again, ”I said. It was the end of the world, the worst. My mom well understood that for me it was a really downturn. She decided to get me and something great happened to me: I met the public school. The San Cirano was a great school, but half posth for horse, and in the only school they could score with the year in progress was Antonio Schettino. I went from sitting on the bank with upper middle class boys, while I was middle-media class, to being with many low middle class boys. The social change could summarize it in an image: in San Cirano there was a boy who returned alone in the car with the driver sent by his father, he lived very close to my house and never invited me. In the Schettino there was a partner who sat next to me, the black Melo, who had a taxi driver. In my memory, we were twenty boys above the car and he took us all. Beyond the economic issue, I felt much more comfortable with those colleagues and the course was very easy for me, I don't know if it was because it came with a good level or because I had relaxed away from Miss C. at eight my uncle Antonio Me He brought another disability: the sound band of living and letting die, James Bond's first movie with Roger Moore, which was a kind of family idol. That issue of Paul McCartney put it continuously for hours, I loved rope arrangements and felt that the living room for a while became a dangerous place.