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Rating: This story from a time that no longer exists begins at a highway toll booth in my city of that era. I offer a ride there with a tenth-hand Fiat 500, bought with a few coins together with the other flatmates, to a friend of mine who is not even nineteen and very pretty. She is on bad terms with her family and has decided to leave home, hitchhike to Paris, and stay with Felix Guattari, or one of his friends/adepts. The political-semiologist psycho-philosopher at the time had a soft spot for young Italians from the "Movement," actively and noisily protesting against authority and governmental laws, and was willing to welcome any potential escapee.
We hug, I wish her good luck, and leave her to hitchhike. For a few months, I know little about her, only that "everything is fine," through a friend of hers who received a couple of her phone calls. But one fine day, I see her again ringing the doorbell of our small student apartment, together with two other girls: they are Parisians, they have organized to accompany her back to Italy, she has told them she had friends able to host them...
And we host them, take them around the city, immerse them in the student daily life of the seventies, in the pleasures and customs of a beautiful Italian city full of character, which was very cool at the time. After a few days, they reveal their intention to visit Rome; so I contact a friend of mine living there, in the center, in San Giovanni, and this time I give a lift to the two of them to the toll booth, direction Rome.
I later find out from my Roman friend that they stayed with her for a week, warmly welcomed and pampered left and right and satisfied... then moved to Naples, hosted by a friend of hers!... In short, a chain of fraternal hospitality.
As it should be, after several months, it's time to return the favor: this time it's us, four of us, asking for hospitality in Paris for the holiday days at the end of that year. We organize in a Renault R4 that, poor thing, also must transport two guitars, bongo drums, and a cylinder containing very nice prints. The idea is to pay for our vacation by setting ourselves up at some metro station, with the three of us musicians playing and singing and the fourth, non-musician, tasked with displaying and selling the aforementioned prints.
The arrival in the French capital is simply spectacular: we inform the day before that we’ll be there in the evening, depart at dawn but at the Mont Blanc tunnel, a sporadic strike by the toll booth attendants blocks us there for six hours. We manage to inform them from a telephone booth that we will arrive at the location in the middle of the night... At that point, the French give us precise phone instructions to manage on our own without them.
And so it happens: we land in Paris at four in the morning, we easily navigate the empty streets with all the traffic lights flashing until we reach the indicated address, we park. Street and number correspond to a dark hallway... but as soon as we manage to turn on the light, we see a note stuck to the wall with PIER written on it and an arrow drawn. We made it!
We ascend the indicated Staircase B and on the first floor identify the right door. The key is supposed to be under the doormat... it is! We insert it into the lock... it turns smoothly and opens. We feel the wall, find the switch, and turn on the light: damn! A living room full of sculptures, just enough space for a table and six chairs, and the rest of the room is occupied by more or less finished, more or less rough statues. There’s then a small kitchen on one side and a bathroom on another. Overlooking the living room, there are two more apartment floors, intended for the bedrooms and their services, so half the room is under a loft while the other half has a ceiling/roof about seven, eight meters high. The entire place is illuminated during the day by a giant window on the tall wall side. In a corner, there is a stereo with a stack of records next to it; I immediately notice the complete discography of Cat Stevens.
If this isn’t a bohemian stroke! Remote-guided from Italy to a Parisian "slaughterhouse," where it’s plausible to sculpt and happily fool around, all at four in the morning! These are the moments that remain, indelible. But also remain for a while the lice infested on the pubic hair of one of my friends, irresponsibly lying down without underwear to act cool. He discovers it and tells us a few days after returning to Italy: the same old filthy French.
Still filthy from the day after arrival: a sizable group comes to greet us, the two girls known and pampered in Italy and many other friends never seen before. One of them, once inside, resolutely heads to the kitchen sink, lifts his leg, puts it under the tap, and washes away a fresh turd stuck on his boot. Above our plates and utensils left there waiting to be washed. What a shitshow of people! In disbelief, we internalize.
Between guitar strumming at the Chatelet metro, tourist wanderings, chats, meals, and listening to Cat Stevens at home, New Year's Eve comes soon. The French, after that first evening of welcome in the garçonnière, haven't been seen since, but here they are inviting us to their New Year's party. They give us the address of a... supermarket, called Klein. It occupies an entire Belle Epoque building... almost the entire building because the first five floors are the supermarket, but the sixth and top floor is the penthouse residence of the Klein family: whether these Jews, French or what, always well-placed!
The Klein girl, the hostess, welcomes us to the super penthouse: we shake hands, speak English or Italian when possible (there are other fellow countrymen... all in all, we are about ten Italians out of a hundred people). On one wall is every delicacy... godly? Predominantly Israeli, otherwise Vietnamese.
I need to pee and ask to be shown a bathroom. I enter and turn on the light in a large six-meter by six-meter room with a giant canopy bed raised on three steps, with a large blue tub in the center. I walk around it but can't find, not to mention a bidet, not even a toilet. Upon closer inspection, I identify a small door giving access to a cubicle the size of half an elevator, carefully carpeted in light blue from ceiling to floor and provided with just two fixtures: a lamp and a toilet. But what the hell! Out there forty square meters, but for crapping instead just half a meter, sealed without air circulation, and with carpet! Very picturesque.
After midnight and immediately after the hugs and kisses, the unimaginable happens: Klein with a remote control makes two walls of the room slide, which from large becomes immense, something like twelve meters by ten. Damn! We stare in dumbfounded awe at the sliding panels and the new and distant backdrops, wondering why but not imagining the next move: the music of that damn disco starts, yes, "Saturday Night Fever," and to the first notes of "Stayin' Alive," fifty, sixty, seventy French and alike (the girls without exception, the boys every other one) dive into the center of the hall, instantly organize into four or five rows, and start swaying in rehearsed synchrony to Travolta's moves in the film, one by one, forward, back, now right, now left... much more than the Alligalli of our old folks in the dance hall!
My instinct, as a musician, musicologist, rock enthusiast, vibrates and twitches with discomfort and fear. This is the music seriously trying to dethrone my rock, not the fleeting punk of those four fools, hyped for who knows why but ultimately doesn't sell a thing. These instead make conquests, and with them Barry White, Donna Summer, Earth Wind and Fire, KC and the Sunshine Band, Gloria Gaynor... And I who delight in Supertramp, Steely Dan, Blue Oyster Cult, Boston, Cheap Trick, Toto, 10cc... those I consider the best of those late seventies, I can't stand in front of that powerful demonstration of foolish conformity to the pack.
These songs stick in my throat, but especially the film they support, certainly not the only or even the major culprit of a subculture tied to the ephemeral and to appearances, showing off, pretending, but in short, Saturday Night Fever is an excellent starting point to focus and be thoroughly bitter and appalled by that so-called reflux phenomenon, which soon invaded a good part of the eighties.
The disco seen as a solution to the squalor, to everything that doesn't work in a bleak and aimless life, seems to me a philosophy of abysmal negativity. Here it promotes stoning between contortions and tough poses as the solution to the problems. Pooh! I can't stand discos, the character and acting of that dog Travolta (then, maturing, became an excellent, charismatic actor) and even the falsetto of Barry Gibb, so this is one of the absolute best sellers in music history to which I'm most allergic. It has really legitimized a certain way of (mis)behaving in life for many people. Its historical importance does not constitute an extenuating circumstance for me, quite the contrary.
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