Status Quo
Quo

When I was a teenager, somewhat awkward and cautious with the opposite sex, I couldn't help but go to the disco on Sunday afternoons. I didn't enjoy it much... for the girls, I was a good friend, reliable and funny but not at all "dangerous" and "pirate," qualities that at that age are often decisive, or at least they were among my acquaintances, for making conquests. So my friends happily chatted with me, but then they all tended to be pinned to the wall and smothered by some of my peers who were more self-confident and brave.

There was this New Club that was all the rage... Located in the basement of a hotel on the seafront, hastily furnished with strictly non-breathable faux leather seats and low-wattage lamps that left a decent darkness around, on Sundays at four o'clock, it filled up like an egg with more or less pimply, more or less virginal, more or less comfortable fifteen to twenty-year-olds.

The disc-jockey was Super, or Superbone (who remembers his real name...), nicknamed for a vague resemblance to a comic character from Monello. He worked the turntables all afternoon, mixing one after another the 45s of Gloria Gaynor, Temptations, Donna Summer, KC & Sunshine Band, Barry White... but the finale, the last two tracks before turning off the system and sending everyone home, always consisted of the same pair of decidedly rock pieces. Two songs not released as singles, so Super was forced to slow down the turntables and place the 33 rpm records that contained them.

The penultimate track was always "The Mexican" by Babe Ruth, a magnificence, a masterpiece, a crazy thrill to dance to every Sunday at seven in the evening. The last one was "Don’t Think It Matters," and then the long play spinning on the turntable was this one, with the aforementioned song opening on the second side.

"Don’t Think It Matters" is a boogie, one of the thousand conceived and recorded by this historic British group; and it's the best episode I know of theirs, even better than the famous "Whatever You Want," which enjoys much higher historical memory. An R&R with an imperial, infectious riff, but it doesn’t just run through the song from start to finish; it fills with variations, intelligent rhythmic ideas, driving stop-and-go, disorienting tonal changes. The Status Quo had thought out the arrangement of this masterpiece well, yet preferred other easier pieces from this disc for singles.

Thus, "Don’t Think It Matters" remained rare merchandise in our parts (not so in England, where Status Quo sold more records than Led Zeppelin) and I still feel affection for Super who, with a musical sensibility evidently very similar to mine, had chosen it as the closing theme of his performances behind the console, allowing me to discover and appreciate this hidden gem.

What about the rest of this 1974 album? It's by Status Quo, so nothing exceptional, boogie rock determined and unpretentious, occasionally some memorable melody and some driving guitar riffs, but not that often. The fact is I own only one of their records, from the endless harvest produced since the sixties. And it's this one because track 5 is "Don’t Think It Matters."