Rudy Pensa, the Argentine-born owner of New York guitar store Rudy’s Music Stop, was in a back room polishing merchandise when one of his store’s most frequent visitors stopped by. On this particular day in 1988, Carlos Alomar – David Bowie’s longtime collaborator – didn’t want a new instrument. Instead, he was keen to produce a Latin rock band, and needed pointing in the right direction. Pensa retrieved a notebook to find a phone number he’d jotted down for a singer, Gustavo Cerati, who’d recently visited the shop, and asked Alomar: “Have you ever heard of a band from Argentina called Soda Stereo?”
Today, that’s a question that would draw a puzzled look from just about any Latino. To ask it in 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the band’s public debut, is a little like asking an American or Briton if they know who the Beatles are. “Everybody in the Hispanic market knows about Soda Stereo,” Alomar, now 72, says about a band that packed stadiums and arenas across the continent, sometimes with crowds of more than 100,000: an unheard of level of success for a Latin rock band.
