Early days

José Alberto Iglesias was born September 16, 1944, in the industrial town of San Martín, Buenos Aires Province. His family lived in a modest house in the town of Caseros, close to the city of Buenos Aires.

Iglesias showed no interest in school, and after flunking out at age 13 he tried different apprenticeships, including gardening school, but did not persevere. The only issue that held his interest was rock and roll. At age 17, José was a fixture of social ballrooms in the Mataderos and Flores neighborhoods, singing mostly rock and roll covers. He also gained local fame as a rock and roll dancer, while most people in the suburbs were tango dancers. To highlight this contrast, his friends started calling him "Tango" or "Tanguito" (the diminutive of "tango").

With his first band, Los Duques, he recorded a few covers and one original song in 1963.

La Cueva

Tanguito with his guitar, circa 1967.

Tanguito playing guitar on the street, 1968.

Tanguito playing guitar in Plaza Francia.

In 1965, Tanguito and his friend Horacio Martínez became regulars of a night club named La Cueva ("The Cave") in the Recoleta district. The club was to become the cradle of Argentine rock, with celebrities-to-be such as Moris, Sandro, and Litto Nebbia performing regularly, and other figures such as Pipo Lernoud, Miguel Grinberg and Miguel Abuelo sharing the limelight. Many of them were struggling with writing rock lyrics in Spanish, and Tanguito was initially perceived as a novelty act, who could sing energetic Elvis Presley covers in broken English.

The musicians would end the night by walking up Pueyrredón avenue together to have late supper or breakfast in café La Perla del Once in the Balvanera district. When Tanguito once ranted in the café's washroom about being alone and sad in the world, Nebbia encouraged him to write a song based on his refrain. Tanguito obliged, and Nebbia added a choir with a vaguely bossa nova air. That song would become the first mega-hit of Spanish language rock and roll: "La balsa" ("The raft"). Nebbia's band, Los Gatos, recorded it on June 19, 1967, and got a significant amount of radio play that helped the single sell over 250,000 copies. Both the name and the lyrics of the song may refer to José Feliciano's La Barca, and many of Tanguito's friends acknowledge that Tanguito had Feliciano's song on his mind.^[1]

Tanguito's own rendition was not immediately recorded, but was broadcast on national television a few months later, in a segment about the Buenos Aires version of the hippie phenomenon. The success of "Los Gatos" and Tanguito's status as co-composer of "La Balsa" hinted that a career break was around the corner, yet his first single, recorded January 18, 1968, was not marketed effectively by RCA and sales floundered.

During 1968, several songs by Tanguito, notably Amor de Primavera ("Spring Love"), were being covered or borrowed by emerging artists in the Argentine rock and roll scene. Tanguito would also take credit for other people's songs, including the ribald song "Errol Flynn" which was popular in the summer of 1968.

All of Tanguito songs are credited to "Ramsés VII", one of his many pseudonyms, after the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses and Tango's affectation for seventh chords. Other pseudonyms he used from time to time include Susano Valdez and Drago (after a then-popular seltzer machine).

When Tanguito broke with RCA he found a new home in Mandioca, a label dedicated exclusively to rock, which immediately arranged for studio time. But he had trouble motivating himself to complete an album. Typically, Tanguito would record one or two song sketches alone with his guitar, or jam with available musicians, and disappear for days. By that time he had switched from alcohol and casual marijuana use to hard drugs, and was injecting amphetamines whenever he could afford them.

In those years, Argentine's police used hard-line tactics against drug addicts and had very little education about how to deal with them effectively. Tanguito would get arrested repeatedly for vagrancy or inebriation and be left unattended in a detention cell. One such episode in late 1970 was so damaging to his mental health that Tanguito became unable to recognize his friends, and was taken home by his mother for recovery.

Later days

In February 1971, Tanguito was arraigned and charged with heading a drug gang. Diagnosed as mentally insane, he was committed to the José T. Borda Neuropsychiatric Hospital, where he was submitted to insulin shock therapy and other treatments designed to wane him off the amphetamines. Instead of recovering, his mental health deteriorated and in 1972 he was committed to the hospital's long-term care facility.

Tanguito escaped from the hospital on the dawn of May 19, 1972. He managed to reach the Pacífico train station, where he apparently hoped to board a train to his parents' home in Caseros; at 10:50 am, he fell on the tracks and was fatally hit by an oncoming train.