\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t The unexpected news of the death of rock icon Indio Solari took a whole country by surprise on Friday, leading to a nationwide mourning.<\/p>\n
The information began to roam social networks at 9 a.m. and soon reached headlines at news portals, TV and radio. Fellow members of his solo band Los Fundamentalistas del Aire Acondicionado confirmed Solari\u2019s demise off the record.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At 12.30, his official IG account posted a communiqu\u00e9 about \u201cthe saddest news\u201d. The statement mentioned an intimate farewell by his family, and promised to provide further information about a public memorial.<\/p>\n
\u201cMeanwhile, let\u2019s cry, listen to his songs and take care of each other, like he taught us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carlos Indio Solari was the frontman of highly popular band Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota, which began playing in the mid-Seventies, recorded their first albums a decade later and reached enormous popularity in the Nineties.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His solo career broke all attendance records, with an incredible show for 400,000 fans in 2017.<\/p>\n
He was 77 years old and retired in 2023 due to advanced Parkinson\u2019s disease but continued recording songs as El Mister y los Marsupiales.<\/p>\n
A true phenomenon The rise of popularity of Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota exceeds the usual dynamics of a rock group. For starters, they were pioneers of independent production, working outside the handful of concert promoters in Argentina.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The band began playing in their hometown of La Plata in the late Seventies, during the Argentine dictatorship, and by 1979 reached Buenos Aires for the first time.<\/p>\n
Those first shows were a blueprint of their career: they rented a theater once a year, usually on December 28, and played for a small crowd of friends and fans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The informal setting added to the mystique, as a man in disguise handed out small cheese biscuits \u2014 or redonditos de ricotta \u2014 inspired by their exotic name. They also explained that the group\u2019s leader was an invisible Patricio Rey who channeled the music through them.<\/p>\n
Slow but steady, in 1985 Solari, guitarist Eduardo Skay Beilinson and their manager Carmen Poli Castro raised enough money to finance their first recording, Gulp!\u00a0<\/p>\n
They were one of the most popular acts in the underground circuit during the early years of democracy in Argentina, with 150-200 loyal fans that soon became 1,000 and eventually sold-out large venues.<\/p>\n
Jump to massive fame By 1989, Los Redondos, as their audience loved to call them, found out that every place they played felt small. They searched for bigger arenas and open-air football clubs, always leaving people outside.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Somehow, a blessing became a curse of sorts. More security measures had to be taken, and every so often there occurred a tragedy: police detained fan Walter Bulacio outside Obras stadium in 1991, and he died a few days later.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The band decided to stop performing in Buenos Aires and began touring around the country. This only made their mystique grow even more: their fans began to follow their every step, in a way similar to the Grateful Dead in the United States.<\/p>\n
Every concert became a nightmare in logistics, but meanwhile they outdid themselves with new albums and an impeccable collection of hits. Concert setlists became longer and their shows exceeded the two hour standard.<\/p>\n
All this tension, plus Solari\u2019s dream to go solo, led to two packed shows at the Monumental River Plate stadium in 2000. Only two concerts later, in Uruguay and C\u00f3rdoba province, the band began a hiatus and finally announced the end.<\/p>\n
Fans mourned the demise of their beloved band, but soon discovered that their chances to see Solari and Beilinson multiplied: each one began a solo career that included Redondos\u2019 songs in their shows.<\/p>\n
Larger than life Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos was a true collective creation headed by the trio Solari-Beilinson-Castro and fueled by an unparalleled mystique. Their individual careers clearly showed each artist\u2019 distinctive style. And while both continued composing brilliant songs, the Redondos\u2019 massive audience mostly gravitated towards Solari\u2019s solo career.<\/p>\n
But El Indio was uncertain that he could achieve the same success without the band, and waited until 2004 to release his first solo album, El tesoro de los inocentes (The treasure of the innocents), dedicated to his newborn son, Bruno. He once again recruited the help of rock critics who he knew from Redondos\u2019 days and gave intense promotional interviews, a practice he had discontinued when his former band outselled concerts despite never meeting the press.<\/p>\n
Rave reviews and excellent sales gave him the confidence to stage live shows, and a year later he debuted at La Plata\u2019s 45,000-seat Unico stadium with sold-out tickets on November 12-13. He named his new band Los Fundamentalistas del Aire Acondicionado (The Air Conditioning Fundamentalists), an inside joke about his obsession with cold temperatures at rehearsals.<\/p>\n
In the 12 years that followed, Indio Solari released a new album every three years and performed live several times with each show clearly drawing larger crowds and needing bigger venues. By 2017, their last concert at Olavarr\u00eda attracted 400,000 fans but the glory was marred by the tragic death of two people by suffocation, as well as several wounded.<\/p>\n
A swan song of sorts, his 2018 album El ruise\u00f1or, el amor y la muerte (The nightingale, love and death) was a nostalgic overview of his life but not a farewell: his songs continued to exist onstage thanks to shows by his band Los Fundamentalistas. Once again, the loyalty of his fandom exceeded any expectations, and they sold-out entire football stadiums without their leader.<\/p>\n
Since then, Indio recorded a handful of compositions under a new alias, El M\u00edster y los Marsupiales. He also collaborated with rising rap star Wos.<\/p>\n
A true Renaissance artist, Solari was involved in experimental films in his early years, and also released a graphic novel Escenas del delito americano. His political stance began in the early Seventies with an admiration for anti-capitalist leader Mario Silo Rodr\u00edguez Cobo, and decades later he identified firmly with Kirchnerism, with tough criticism towards right-wing presidents Macri and Milei.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The unexpected news of the death of rock icon Indio Solari took a whole country by surprise on Friday, leading to a nationwide mourning. The information began to roam social networks at 9 a.m. and soon reached headlines at news portals, TV and radio. Fellow members of his solo band Los Fundamentalistas del Aire Acondicionado […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":368,"featured_media":72414,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,37,59],"tags":[133,169,86],"class_list":["post-72413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-culture-ideas","category-music","category-politics","tag-culture-ideas","tag-music","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/368"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}