elio1971

Hello everyone. My rock story begins at the end of the 80s. Attracted by those rock pieces I heard on Sunday mornings on those shows presenting the Moto GP races ("damn this music is cool, I wonder what it is" I thought. Was it metal or hard rock), I decided I wanted to discover and listen to that music that I found amazing. I was 14/15 years old, there was no internet, no record store (Calabria countryside, only bars and a cinema). The radios played music from...radio and among my friends Nino D'angelo was very popular. My more refined brother loved Baglioni (I love him too, even now)! Luckily there was the newsstand... so one morning while I was going to school (science high school, books under my arm and tied with a belt. That’s how it was done) I spotted right at the newsstand in the square the first issue of "grande rock" by De Agostini. The vinyl accompanying the release of that issue was "Love You Live" by the Rolling Stones. It was with them that I started listening to rock. I was struck by their "roughness", dirty songs but that got inside me and never left. I listened to that vinyl until the second issue came out, then the third, then the fourth... 120 issues. I started sourcing rock music everywhere. A cousin of mine gave me Back to Black by AC/DC (I’m giving it to you, I hate them he told me), and that’s how I entered the metal world through the front door. What I knew about rock was what I read in that encyclopedia. I was fascinated by characters whose songs I didn’t even know. Jim Morrison more than anyone. I remember buying the book "No One Here Gets Out Alive" increasing in me his myth as a cursed rocker... AND I HADN’T EVEN LISTENED TO A SINGLE SONG YET!!!!!! When I managed to collect the money to buy a record, I would get a ride to the city with some friend who had a driver’s license and a car (I was still underage), and I would go to the little record shop and buy. AC/DC again, then Foxtrot by Genesis, L.A. Woman by The Doors... all bands whose exploits I knew because I read about them but whose music I had never listened to. I bought blindly, ahahah. With some friends we picked up vinyls from Nannucci warehouses in Bologna (we chose titles from a catalog with advance payment via postal bulletin). Weeks of waiting then the joy of the postman knocking. I remember the trip to Ivrea, 1989, there I bought the first Cure albums I listened to (The Concert). There was some expert in town from whom I tried to capture whatever I could. Among the town’s experts, Deep Purple was very popular (diirpapol as they called them with Calabrian-accented English), but the only record going around was Made in Japan. Then there was my friend Nicola’s uncle, a technology lover who only listened to Pink Floyd (The Wall), because the special effects enhanced that Technics amp...!!! In short, mine is the story of a boy who grazed on rock everywhere and whatever genre it was. The little you could graze on where I was born and raised. Then Rome and everything changed. Everything was within reach of a shop or a rock-loving colleague (and at the university of political science you were lucky enough to find some). And then the internet, YouTube...! Now I have a fairly large discography. Of everything. But it is never enough. I love rock. I go from the Ramones to Yes, from R.E.M. to Cure, it’s like moving from one room to another in a house. The house of Rock.! I don’t have a favorite genre. But if one day I had to leave for the moon I would take with me some Rolling Stones, Cure, Genesis, Bowie. BYE.