Long live Cement. This is the name of the file in which I am about to write. Viva, the middle; Cement, the topic. Cement, a Buenos Aires place that no longer livesa dead place, a non-place.
Precisely a place where so many groups, musical genres, countercultural identities, friendships, passions, loves. Life itself.
United States one thousand two hundred and thirty-eight, between Salta and Santiago del Estero, the streets that converged where the pilgrimage ended. Because it was precisely that: a ritual to reach CementNo matter who played, it didn’t matter.
Rock culture, that of minorities, strange, marginal people (understanding marginality for those of us who walk on the margins looking from another perspective), underground art lovers of The Black Organizationwhatever Katja Alemann and Omar Chabán did – at the beginning of these times in the mid-80s, couple and owners of Cemento – or Garlic Prawns and so many more.
Every Friday we ran to open the Yeah! of Clarion to see the agenda on the back cover. We called each other on landlines to stay with the tribe, and the corner of the United States and Salta received those teenagers – and later young people – who went to go to the temple, the refuge that protected us.
A small window with bars served as ticket sales. Exterior walls painted green? grey? Petroleum? and a minimalist brutalist looklike its interior.
Raúl Villarreal, Omar’s partner and friend, was the one who usually sat there. receiving with a smilegreeting each and everyone, exchanging tickets and tickets.
At the door, next to him, one could always see Chabán, who was rushing to enter quickly (the Police still kept their customs of the dictatorship and he wasn’t particularly friendly to rock people), and he also asked us to read Plato. Or Shakespeare. (We talked about Schopenhauer leaning on the bar, I don’t know who would play, but this was more interesting).
Once inside we could go to the right, climb a staircase and access the bathrooms, but no one recommended it. Or enter the entrance hall, and when the door on the left opened, magic was done.
We were in Cement. A large wide hallway with wooden seats on stairs to sit and have a beer on the right, which was bought at the bar on the left.
The stage was facing the front, low lights, little ventilation (read: a lot of human smell). The bands came out and the joy then was total.
“Beer and Coca a peso on the bar,” sang Chabán, walking around in his Roman tunic. As my friend Romina well remembers, it was “Cerveee zay cooo caunpeee soenlabarraaa”, in that exact cadence.
A small space that narrowed and finally faced the stage in front, low lightspoor ventilation (read: a lot of human odor).
The bands came out and the joy then was total. Towards the end of the bar a door opened that led to the small hallway that ran through everything described to reach the two dressing rooms.
Two spaces behind the stage with a cement table each, stairs that led to the bathrooms and all the anecdotes that can be told about rock underground They are summarized in that place. The United States Local 1238 will recreate the very history of underground Argentinian.
The party and its memory
Cemento had that brutalist and even minimalist intention in its architectural conceptionmore him avant garde that characterized Omar Chabán and his German school.
Those construction logs with a Katja Alemann overflowing post-Victorian beautya Fernando Noy who, as always, makes the word poetry and dedicates them all to Chabán, the great creator of the local subculture.
Of everything I saw I remember halfsays the author and journalist (and punk rocker who was trained in Cemento) Mariano Ludueña and I will apply that premise to my experiences in those dressing rooms.
As if he had known Cement and its meaning, says the Englishman Mark Fisher in The ghosts of my life: “Capitalist modernity was shaped by the always incomplete process of elimination of the festive community.”
“In that memory (…), the plague and the festival merge: both are imagined as spaces in which the limits between bodies collapse, in which faces and identities fade. The solution is an imposed individualization, the inverse of the carnival: the penetration of the regulations to the finest details of existence and through a complete hierarchy that guarantees the capillary functioning of power; the assignment to each of his ‘true’ name, of his ‘true’ place, of his ‘true’ body and of his ‘true’ illness.”
For his part, Nicolás Igarzábal, author of the book Cement, the seedbed of rock he told the undersigned: “The first show of my life was at Cemento, a show by Attaque 77, it was the time of the album Other songswhich was all covers, like Gilda’s, I do not regret this love. There I started going to recitals in Cemento every weekendespecially punk things, Cadena Perpetua, 2 Minutos, Flema, Bulldog, many festivals too.”
And, of course, there is a date that became a milestone and a trauma. He says: “I went until it closed in 2004, when the Cro-Magnon tragedy occurred, obviously. So I hardened those last years, which were already like the decline of Cement. That helped me for the book, because it begins in the heyday of the ’80s and then the decline is very noticeable, because there weren’t that many important bands and the place wasn’t that full. It’s good to have seen that decline and then reconstruct the path of history a little. When I went to Cemento they told me: ‘Los Redondos played here’ or ‘Luca was sitting here’. “Those myths were always there, between the walls of the place, and from time to time a note from Chabán would appear remembering stories about Cemento.”
Who was really in Attack 77’s first show? How many saw Enrique Symns reciting in the middle of a Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota concert? Were you there when Mona Giménez played?
That of Cement will always be a poorly told story.
Like contemporary troubadours from an era where democracy was just emerging, we will forever tell each and every one of the legends who grew up in Cemento with the aura of Omar Chabán flying over.
The worst of endings: they ripped out the soul of the property when it was acquired by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires in 2011. Transformed into a parking lot for the School Infrastructure area (belonging to the Ministry of Education and Sports), a soulless passageis the cruelest way to liquidate what was “the capital of dreams”, as Yamil Chabán, Omar’s brother and an active part of the place crowned it. Cement – The documentaryby Lisandro Carcavallo (2016).
Thousands of memories fight to enter our unconscious and to bring us back to what we werewhat formed us to be the adults we are today: free.
But you know what? The space that housed everyone, everyone different, who we walk bones through that space we keep it alive, so again as at the beginning of this chronicle: Long live Cement!
