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Rating: Milan is a shitty city, it sucks, there isn't a bathroom, and where you could relieve yourself, there are homeless immigrants armed with knives who fall silent and give you dirty looks as you approach, so you realize that relieving yourself in the area isn't the best thing to do at that moment.
Anyway, getting back to the creators of Grunge, it was truly amazing to have met Mark Arm and Guy Madison—for the uninitiated, they're the vocals/guitar and bassist, respectively—outside the Pam near the Rainbow, that dump of a club where they played, a sort of filthy and dirty velvet club, in the midst of Milan's urban underclass, in a rather fascist neighborhood in my opinion, both for the name and for the right-wing municipal election campaign, there were billboards of a fascist party everywhere, anyway, the place is called Bande Nere, I think I've said it all.
Shaking hands with the one to whom I owe much of what I listen to, the one who rightfully crowned himself King of Seattle, a Seattle that for an hour and a half and more was on that stage of that filthy venue, where people were diving in spectacular old-school stage-divings, where guys in plaid shirts were around, but I was the only one with a flannel... hehe... where you could see what a real band is and what it isn't. Can you compare the difference between someone willing to talk to you despite having other things to do and someone who puts on airs of being a posh rock star without even being one?
Truly a fabulous concert, they practically played everything, everything you imagine they'd play, but the probability is scarce given their long discography and thus the many songs they could have performed, but instead, they played those, exactly the ones you expect, like a child hoping to find the gift he wanted delivered by Santa Claus and finding it, what could be more joyful? At that moment, all the troubles disappeared; it was just them and my friends in front of them, the Fangomiele, a juxtaposition of sweet and bitter, divine and low, that impact of punk-garage fury mixed with the rawest and most anguishing psychedelia. In a word, Mudhoney.
Now, for the sake of completeness, let me recount what happened after the concert, the wait in vain for public transport that didn’t arrive, the walk on foot, the sight of a source of venting and laughter, the Forza Italia stand abandoned in the night. We could have stolen their flags and burned them at the next concert, but luckily a bus came along, and we caught it without knowing where it was headed. Magically arriving in Piazza Duomo, from there we knew the way to the Station, and after a half-hour stop outside the famous gallery, we set off and arrived outside the station, sprawled out to sleep in the adjacent gardens, awakened after an hour and a half by a cold wind. We took refuge on the metro steps waiting for the station to reopen.
Then the occupation of the benches for sleep, which I couldn't do because I had to pee, and there was no damn place to do it. Finally, with the kind permission of trenitalia, Muc and I got authorization to board a stationary train and relieve our aching bellies. I swear I've never peed so much. In the end, back safe and sound from the land of the lumbàrd, I rested for a few hours under the influence of those old-time tunes, aware that they were the authors of the last revolution in the History of Rock, causing anguish mixed with joy to those who listen to them.
Goodnight.
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