About Pelo

Pelo

Pelo was an Argentine rock music magazine published in Buenos Aires from 4 February 1970 until December 2001. It was founded and edited by the journalist Osvaldo Daniel Ripoll, and it was the first Argentine magazine devoted entirely to rock. For more than three decades it chronicled the birth, growth and transformation of rock nacional — Argentine rock sung in Spanish — as well as international rock, and it was widely remembered as “la Biblia del rock”, the bible of rock. Ripoll did more than edit the magazine: he organised the B.A. Rock festivals of 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1982, the foundational mass festivals of Argentine rock. Pelo was published first by Editorial Década and later by Editorial Magendra, appeared fortnightly, circulated throughout Latin America from the mid-1970s, and survived the detention and exile of its editor during the military dictatorship before closing in the Argentine crisis at the beginning of the new millennium.

Foundation in a basement in 1970

The first issue of Pelo appeared on 4 February 1970. Its founder, Osvaldo Daniel Ripoll, was twenty-three years old. He had worked at the end of the 1960s as editorial secretary of Pinap, a beat and pop magazine, and had helped organise the Festival Pinap de la Música Beat y Pop of 1969, an early large festival of Argentine beat music. After leaving Pinap, he launched Pelo with very little money: accounts of the founding record an initial investment of about one thousand dollars, five hundred lent by his mother and the rest gathered with the colleagues who would form the first staff, and a newsroom installed in the basement of his father's furniture business, recalled in other accounts as a basement on Avenida Independencia in Buenos Aires. Without money for advertising, Ripoll built his own distribution effort to persuade kiosk owners to display the magazine. He recalled that the kiosk owners, mostly tango listeners, at first hid the magazine rather than exhibiting it, until demand became so strong that they had no choice but to hang it up.

Why the magazine was called Pelo

Ripoll explained the name himself in terms that have been quoted in academic studies of the magazine. “Pelo” — hair — seemed to him at that moment the most countercultural and irritating word available, and at the same time the silent and peaceful expression of a desire for freedom of expression and individuality. To wear long hair, or hair in an unconventional way, was a form of resistance, a way of saying no, of refusing to be the same as everything established. He added, in later interviews, that young people could be taken into police custody at that time for their hair, and that what parents hated was precisely the hair: the name identified the magazine instantly with its readers and against the authority — parental, police and cultural — that its readers were defying. In February 1970, under the military government of Juan Carlos Onganía, that was not a neutral choice of title. Pelo announced, in one word, whose side it was on.

The first magazine of Argentine rock

Pelo was the first Argentine magazine dedicated entirely to rock, with a special emphasis on spreading the activities of artists of the local scene. It appeared at the precise moment when Argentine rock was becoming a music of its own: Manal, Los Gatos and Almendra had already recorded, songs were being sung in Spanish, and a generation of young listeners wanted information about a culture they recognised as theirs. The magazine detailed every new band, record and concert, and became an unavoidable source of consultation for followers of an incipient genre. In editorial terms it is classed among the international “revistas de registro”, record magazines, which register and take note of everything that happens in their field; for that reason it became one of the most consulted magazines in the newspaper library of the Biblioteca Nacional. Its early covers were given to international rock — the Beatles and their members, Mick Jagger, Creedence Clearwater Revival appeared in the first period — alongside the growing coverage of the national scene that would define it.

B.A. Rock and the Acusticazo

Ripoll's role in Argentine rock extended well beyond the magazine. Through Pelo he organised the massive B.A. Rock festivals of 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1982, which brought together large numbers of Argentine rock artists and became foundational events of rock nacional. The festivals were documented in the films Rock hasta que se ponga el sol, directed by Aníbal Uset in 1972, and Buenos Aires Rock, directed by Héctor Olivera in 1982. He also organised the B.A. Rock Acusticazo, whose live recording became the first “unplugged” album in Ibero-America and on which León Gieco, Raúl Porchetto and David Lebón, later regarded as fathers of rock nacional, made their recording debuts. The magazine and the festivals reinforced each other: Pelo gave the emerging scene a printed memory and a critical language, while B.A. Rock gave it a stage and a mass public, and together they helped convert a collection of bands and audiences into a self-conscious movement.

National and Latin American circulation

From the mid-1970s, Pelo began to send its editions throughout Latin America, reporting the work of musicians in Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela, and it was especially popular in Peru and Uruguay. Within Argentina it functioned, in the words of its founder, as a link that connected Argentine rock with itself and, beyond that, with the rest of the world, its cultures and its movements. Academic studies of the magazine emphasise the authority it acquired in defining what counted as authentic rock and what was dismissed as merely commercial — a gatekeeping role exercised through its reviews, interviews and the results of its coverage. Columnists and contributors over the decades included the journalists Juan Manuel Cibeira and Marcelo Fernández Bitar, the writer Rodrigo Fresán, and musicians such as León Gieco and Andrés Calamaro, who also wrote as columnists. Its photographers included Rubén Andón and Gabriel Rocca, and its designers included Juan Oreste Gatti.

Detention, the seizure of MAD and exile

In 1978, during the military dictatorship, Ripoll was arrested in the magazine's own newsroom. He was also editing at that time the Argentine edition of the satirical magazine MAD, which counted Jorge Guinzburg, Carlos Abrevaya, Alfredo Grondona White and Andrés Cascioli among its collaborators, and that magazine was seized from the kiosks. After days of uncertainty about his whereabouts, Ripoll was placed at the disposal of the Executive Power, his detention published in the Boletín Oficial, and he was held in the police cells of the Federal Police Central Department without any charge. In detention he met the newspaper editor Jacobo Timerman, director of La Opinión, for whose magazine Primera Plana Ripoll had done his first work as a chronicler of youth subjects. His case drew comment and demands from United States newspapers and international news agencies. Released after two months, Ripoll had to go into exile in France for two years; he later lived in Brazil, where he edited the magazines Roll, Metal and others, before finally returning to Argentina. Pelo itself had been born accompanying the rise of rock nacional against a complacent industry; under the dictatorship, as its chroniclers recalled, the enemy became something much larger and more sanguinary, and many of the artists who filled its pages were declared enemies of the regime.

Magendra, Metal and the 1980s family of titles

In the mid-1980s Magendra, the publisher of Pelo, launched Pelo Metal, an appendix of the magazine in the same format and editorial style but devoted exclusively to heavy metal, a genre then rising in popularity. Pelo Metal soon became simply Metal, which appeared regularly until the end of the 1990s and was the first magazine dedicated to that genre in Argentina; a Portuguese edition of Metal was also published in Brazil. Other publications of the same house in the 1980s included Toco & Canto, which published the sheet music of the hits of the moment, 220 Magazine, and special editions such as Rock De Luxe devoted to a single leading band. The group also published, as Ripoll's later Brazilian work showed, editions for the wider South American market. With ups and downs in sales from the 1980s onward, Pelo maintained its popularity in Argentina until shortly before the crisis of 2001.

Closure in 2001

Pelo ceased publication at the beginning of the new millennium; its last edition is dated December 2001. The closure coincided with the Argentine economic and social crisis of 2001, which struck magazine publishing across the country, and it ended a run of more than thirty years of uninterrupted publication since February 1970 — a lifespan that made Pelo a witness to, and participant in, the whole classic history of Argentine rock, from Almendra and the first B.A. Rock to the stadium rock of the 1980s and the new scenes of the 1990s. The seed record for this profile gives the closing year as 2001, and the fuller chronology available from the magazine's reference entries confirms it: founded 4 February 1970, last edition December 2001.

Archive, honours and legacy

Pelo's afterlife has been unusually well organised. Since 2016 the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes has carried out the complete digitisation of the magazine, consultable publicly and downloadable free of charge in PDF through the Archivo Histórico Digital de la Revista Pelo at revistapelo.com.ar, a project born of the conjunction of Ripoll himself and the university, conscious of the magazine's importance as a key to reading Argentine cultural history. In 2017 the magazine and its director were distinguished as part of Porteña culture by the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires. From 2019 the official collection of Pelo has formed part of the heritage holdings of the Library of Congress of the Argentine Nation, and its editions are also held in other national libraries in Argentina and in universities in the United States. The book La Biblia del Rock, by Juan Manuel Cibeira, gathered its history and called it, in Ripoll's phrase taken up by the author, the bank of the cultural memory of a generation. Pelo linked Argentine rock to itself and to the world for thirty years; in its digital archive, as its custodians put it, it continues walking — no longer a postcard of the past, but a living source for the history it helped to make.