The silver bullet had to be spent. That’s what I felt Trotsky Will Revenge, as he was going to feel so many times in his 33 years: that this was the last shot, that everything was going to depend on it going well. That to survive, to make this band continue to sustain itself, a knock-out blow had to be struck. It was 2003. Uruguay was a wounded country, Guillermo Peluffo He had gone to live in Chile and the group that until a few months ago seemed in agony felt that, for the first time, someone was paying attention to them. He couldn’t let the glow fade. The last bullet had to be burned, and that bullet was Pogo.
Twenty-one years later, the Trotskys do not even attempt to unravel the mystery. They say things that seem to convince them—which is a live album of greatest hits, that before people listened to the complete albums—and they refute them minutes later, when Peluffo says that many Pogo themes They are in the shows, but it is not the same when they are all played together, and Hugo Diaz He asks why, and no one can answer anything other than “I don’t know,” “I don’t know,” “I don’t know.”
What they know is that when they were fulfilled 20 years of Pogo, in 2023, they, who are reluctant to look back, understood that it had to be honored. Because it opened doors. Because never again Trotsky album was able to reflect with such precision the overflowing happiness that occurs when this band and its audience meet. Because for many people, Pogo It is the soundtrack of their lives, an album to which they always return.
Therefore, next weekend they will play it again. Before, the story of an album that wanted salvation and became a classic of the latest Uruguayan rock.
How the album “Pogo” was made and the hard road to it
“It was the first time I felt part of a professional rock band,” says Hugo Díaz in a conversation with El País. I remember the feeling of having a lot of people working for us, that the first thing we did when things started to go well for us was to put a lead person to carry things, but that day there were three assistants. Was Claudio Romandini recording everything with Rafa Trabal who assisted him, Pata Torres came to take photos of us, other people… It was being a main part of a whole scaffolding, and you turned around and there was one, ‘what do you need?'”
The road to the nights of May 9 and 10 in the extinct Pachamama It had been arduous. In 1999, Trotsky had released the album I was not that, they defend, it sounded, on par with the Californian punk bands of the time; They had been signed by the Universal label that had invested a lot of money in the album, and they were convinced that something was going to happen. But nothing happened.
Depressed and without direction, they renewed their faith when Jaime Roos appeared to produce sleeping outside (2001). Intermittently, they worked on this material for two years and ended up “tired, exhausted” and “dissatisfied”: the album, full of songs that were going to become essential (mostly thanks to Pogo), it didn’t sound like Trotsky. He was “clean,” says Peluffo. “Like, after two years of taking measurements, the clothes didn’t fit.”
Photo: TKY VGN file
The few unconditional fans who followed them at that time felt the same. The punks complained that they had written a song about “Police On My Back” by the Clash about going to the court (“You have to jump”). The blow came again. The only alternative was to make a new album.
By that time, Argentina had already exploded into a socioeconomic crisis that rebounded to Uruguay, which in 2002 suffered mass exile. There was Peluffo, with a truck bought in dollars, going to live in Chile, and there was the question of how Trotsky was going to survive, and there was the director of the Koala Records labelBeto García, warning them that in that context there was no chance of releasing an album.
But while the group was composing, something happened. At an X Festival they met about 2,000 people hungry for stoning issues sleeping outside. “It looked like a movie,” says Díaz. “We looked at each other and said: fuck it.”
That day, the Trotskys—Peluffo, Díaz and Cuico Perazzo plus Héctor Souto, in whose place he is today Juan Pablo Granito— they understood that that album that their fans had reviled had reached a broader audience, who was consuming everything that the new wave of Uruguayan rock gave them. So Quite the opposite was recorded, saw the light of day with “Revertiré” as an apt opening song, and was a “gigantic” success.
“And we were very concerned about keeping Trotsky alive, because for the first time someone was paying attention to us,” says Peluffo. So, the silver bullet: Pogo. A live album that they would record to a full house, with tickets at 50 pesos to ensure sold out, with a backdrop, with an infallible repertoire made of the best they had harvested so far (“It was time to show everything that we had,” says Cuico), with the audience on fire. An album that came with the cover design of Santiago Guidotti already done—a provocative tribute to the London Calling by the Clash— and that would be completed with the indicated photo that Pata Torres would take.
Photo: Diffusion
From those nights they remember that on the first they were rigid, obsessed with sounding good, and that only on the second did they relax. That there were songs like “Vestida para mata” or “El traidor” that didn’t make it onto the album because they didn’t turn out well. who came up with the name Pogo by the dog of one of his friends from the Banda del Cerro. That later they rented the Circo Beat studio that Fito Páez had, but they arrived at the place to mix the album and thanks to the recording of some ambient microphones and the work of Romandini in the recording, everything was there, ready to be closed in three or four hours homework.
In the CD booklet they proudly wrote: “No additional recordings were made or anything strange.” It is a “real live” album, they say.
Pogo would end up defining the career of Trotsky Will Revenge. It would be the album that would save them, the one that would propel them on a path that, 20 years later, finds them working harder than ever and proud of their present (“Now you see that you can play any of the songs you made at that time and none of them have aged badly.” , says Cuico); the one who would open the doors to all places. And there is a reflection effect. “The enormous number of people who tell you: ‘it’s the first rock album I heard’, ‘my brother gave it to me’, I like plena and I listen to Trotsky because of this’, is incredible,” says Peluffo. “There are people who discovered Trotsky through this album and discovered rock from Pogo. And that’s what Trotsky has: he is a gateway to rock and roll. It’s like that.”
The shows that are coming and the excitement of Granito
“It was exciting because I started listening to them in those years, and seeing myself up there playing those songs was very emotional. What’s more, they were friends at that time and we all cried,” says the bassist. Juan Pablo Granitothe only one of the four that was not on the original recording, on the four recitals of Pogo made in December in La Trastienda. “Maybe they are not very aware, but it is an album that marked many lives.”
That celebration will be repeated this Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Montevideo Music Box (Redtickets), and the shows will be recorded to continue generating memories, they say, and a little bit comes full circle; The material will be edited later. Then they will take Pogo at the Vorterix in Buenos Aires, on July 20, and they have performances in Mexico and Colombia ahead, and a very important show in September in Montevideo.
Photo: Diffusion
