Buenos Aires, Argentina was home in the late 1960s and early 1970s to one of the first truly local and original rock music scenes in the Spanish-speaking world. The 1967 release of the countercultural anthem ‘La balsa’ (‘The raft’) by Los Gatos marked the emergence of a movement of local rock musicians singing in their native Spanish and performing not only covers of English language hits but also original songs. Bands including the heavily blues-influenced Manal and the more acoustically oriented Almendra dominated the early scene, but by the mid-1970s a subculture centred around ‘progressive national music’ had seen the emergence of a surprising number of artists who would rise to national and international prominence for several decades to come: Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Gustavo Santoalalla, Litto Nebbia, León Gieco and Claudo Gabis have all enjoyed long careers across a range of genres and are important referents for any student of Spanish-language rock.

These figures all also share the commonality of having known the author, journalist and activist Miguel Grinberg, and their interviews with him form an important nucleus of intriguing primary documents collected in this re-edited and expanded volume. Grinberg was one of the few journalists who was quick to support the underground movement almost from its very beginning, and this volume is suffused with nostalgia for those early, heady days of what would only later earn the title ‘rock nacional’ as well as no small amount of disdain for what he perceives to be the narrow commercial aims of contemporary Argentine rock. On this topic, as on the relative aesthetic, political and ideological merits of all the music of the time period, Grinberg's authorial voice is emphatically that of the critic-fan rather than the detached scholar; he laments that ‘almost the totality of “youth” music today … leaves one with the impression of a multifaceted jingle aiming only at selling soft drinks, beer, clothing, and cell phones … the Malvinas (Falklands) war entirely rotted our collective vitality, and the legacy of the military dictatorship was a splintered country that, in the last twenty-five years has done no more than to intone the tango of failure’ (pp. 15–16, my translation).

But to lament the lack of scholarly contemporary cultural criticism in this book is to miss the point entirely. Each of the successive three re-editions of this volume after its appearance in 1977 as one of the first substantial volumes dedicated to Argentine rock has included a new preface, and to read the four of them successively (they all appear in this edition) is to witness the diminishing returns of an author who has since largely devoted his attentions to other topics and activities. This new edition is nonetheless important in its own right for several reasons: it includes previously unpublished interviews with Miguel Cantilo and Rodolfo García (former drummer for the seminal groups Almendra and Aquelarre), 16 pages of beautiful black-and-white candid photos of musicians and lyricists, and 70 pages of Grinberg's collected articles and reviews spanning the period 1968–1977.

The heart of the volume, though, and for this reviewer the book's greatest contribution, remains the set of lengthy, often candid and personal interviews with many of the most important personages from the first decade of Argentine rock. We see Spinetta, in a 1977 interview recorded in his home during a violent thunderstorm, muse confusedly about his future projects by candlelight. Santoalalla, years before his first Oscar or Grammy, recalls the adventures in monastic-style collective living with his first band, Arco Iris. León Gieco, several months before going into exile during the military dictatorship, is frighteningly candid about the repressive government's tactics of silencing musicians. The musicians and lyricists contradict one another and Grinberg himself in what ultimately functions quite well as a multivocal oral history of a turbulent and fascinating period in Argentine musical history.

While this edition does make some concessions to the non-specialist or fan – an unnamed editorial hand has provided some helpful biographical and other glosses in footnotes – ultimately this book is not likely to garner a great deal of interest for audiences outside the scholars and fans of Argentine rock. The reader is provided with little in the way of historical or musical analysis or context, and neither does the author attempt to engage any of the scholarly conversations (now much lengthier than when this volume originally appeared) about rock nacional. (For an excellent overview of these sources, see Fanjul Reference Fanjul2008.) But for the historian, musicologist, sociologist or other scholar interested in this subculture and period, this volume has enormous value as a meticulously edited set of fascinating primary documents.