In the summer of 1993, The love after Love, the best-selling album in the history of Argentine rock, was on its way to becoming the soundtrack for several generations. ’92 had been a busy year for Fito Páez, but gratifying from that job. In April ’93 he would fill the Vélez stadium twice. He already enjoyed fame like never before, money and what you can imagine in a rock celebrity. For those summer days, Fito and his partner, Cecilia Roth, go on vacation to the Fiji Islands. There is beer, weed and much more. Under the influence of alcohol, Fito, who doesn’t stop, composes Piluso Themehit from his next album, circus beat.
The couple tours Fiji. They go from one island to another until some sailors take them to visit a king who, as the musician recalls in his recent memoir, Childhood & youth, “he would not be less than one hundred and ten years old”. The king and his people ask them where they are from and what has been happening for decades has happened: that from Argentina, that Maradona, Maradona! But the king understands that the one who is in front of him is Diego himself. “No no. He is not Maradona, he is a friend of Maradona’, Cecilia Roth tries to explain to him while the king continues in his position and shouts with joy “Maradona, Maradona”. Summoned by euphoria, the place was filled with men and women who wanted to meet Maradona personally. “These people think I’m Maradona,” says Fito. The king drags him away and points to a radio while he yells “Orjenti, Madonna, Madrona.”
“They know you from the radio. They heard you out there”, Roth interprets before a misplaced Fito. “They don’t know him, idiot. Now Maradona is you ”, he explains. Someone kicks a ball and others carry it on a litter to a soccer field “hidden in the middle of the jungle.” Fito has nothing left but to play. “He had to bring out that old childish mastery, if he wanted to get out of there alive,” he now writes. “I was sweating and running like it was the last time. My surviving mettle and a football genius that I thought had been forgotten on the esplanade of the Rosario Law School reappeared through terror. So it was that I made pipes, tacos, popcorn, dribbling, kicks and free kicks with the skill of a great soccer player. I scored a dozen goals in half an hour”. The sailors who brought them to the island reappeared to rescue the couple, who left with various gift souvenirs from the islanders.
Fito always liked sports. In addition to soccer, he played volleyball and handball. If he followed the logic of inheritance, he would have been a Newell’s fan like his father, municipal employee Rodolfo Páez. In fact, he was going to see Newell’s invited by the father of one of his best friends. But over time he would ask his father to take him to Gigante de Arroyito. “He reluctantly took me,” recalls Páez. “The colors painted on the nearby walls I liked better. Blue and yellow, intimately, I liked more than red and black. I went up those stairs with my father stealthily. The moment I stepped foot in the scoundrel audience I felt that this was the club of my love”. “And I am a scoundrel from my earliest age,” he sings in The good timesfrom his disk Third World.
Fito dazzled as a footballer with his friends. He tore it up, he says, in the picados in the area of the Rosario Law School, in the streets of the neighborhood or at school breaks, where he came to play with Tata Martino. Over the years he would play some minced meat with Charly García, in Villa Carlos Paz. In a prison in Formosa, he would lend himself a football to save a friend arrested for drugs. Such an arrangement with an unscrupulous lawyer. As a boy, soccer also served him as a chance to play before the girls he liked.
Plus there was the music. He played the piano and composed. One of the remedies to cope with the pain over the death of her mother, Margarita, and the pain of her father. “He didn’t know what to do with the death of his wife. I didn’t know what to do with my mother’s death. We both acted different things, ”he says. He met Juan Carlos Baglietto and he shone with his own songs, such as life is a coin. He paid unfair rights to the floor, went on stage and began to summon his own audience. He was also traveling to Buenos Aires. He settled in the home of the family of Carlos Randazzo, the former Boca player. Between those walls they were skulled from 63, trying to grow and crazy in a carousel.
He felt that he was touching the sky with his hands the night that Charly García, on tour for the album Modern Clicks, introduced him as part of his band at a concert on the Rosario Central field: “I was playing in my city with García. There was nothing else in the world.” when his city of poor hearts, an album full of pain for the murders of his aunts, he presented it in the covered stadium at Newell’s. In a bad mood, he recalls that he “couldn’t or didn’t want to connect” with people. “Soccer in Rosario is a serious matter. Murders have been committed in favor of one shirt or another. Families have been broken forever”, he writes before recounting that in the encores someone passed him a Central shirt and he put it on: “Some members of the Newell’s fans saw this sacrilege and ran to the dressing room once the concert was over. They made it past security and destroyed the dressing room in front of my eyes. It was a real show of force. We could beat you to death in a matter of minutes, they seemed to say with that display of explicit violence. But they didn’t touch me.”
Possibly the greatest soccer euphoria was the one that lived in a mansion in La Boca, shortly after he was on the street city of poor hearts, in the ’80s. It happened after lunch, when he and his friends noticed that the floor was vibrating. Then they heard the Boca fans sing a song on the pitch to the music of And bring joy to my heart “as if the world ended”. “We cautiously approach the living room and then the sidewalk. The melody became more and more clear. What emotion seized us all at that moment!
