Umberto Balsamo
Balla!

Umberto Balsamo: Dance! - 1979

The polyester woman of Dance: you could write a history of records from their covers, there are covers that are so beautiful, so iconic, so hemopoietic, they seem like Rorschach tests administered at military visits: the sphinx of the record stares at the Sun and at me, with the insistence of an archetype, of some of my psychic celluloid phantoms. I wonder how she has turned out, what lunar phase the face of the record model is in today.

She sits there, python-like in the sun, and poses a question to me: will you avoid the eclipse of memory, baby?

The sensation of thousands of blurred pixels is returned by a prototype to my imagination: yet another ex story, of which I possess only photographs in my mind. A film, true? But let's admit it, gentlemen, each of us is absorbed by our own sensations, that the Apollonian is besieged by the Dionysian. Imagination, summer phantoms that form, my fantasies take the path to where the sun sets, when with Cancer it revolves... to quote the poet.

Under the heatwave, I cannot review heavy records, but past vagueness; according to Ptolemy, the age of Mercury is from the end of the Moon-age - infancy to age 4 - up to age 14 puerility - and today under the wings of hermes of the j.box the woofers bustle forth: I untie the braids on the horses they run, and your elegant legs are dancing...Dance for me dance dance, all night you are beautiful With Roberta M. we bought half of the 45 of Dance - the album was too much for the weekly allowance. When I met her, she wore those big Lolita glasses like the ones on the cover, short shorts, and a sailor T-shirt.

She had a woman-child mix that stirred up the boys, and even Ruggero, a friend of mine, tried to steal her from me without my knowledge.

I, a bit older than her, tried at all costs to corrupt her, despite her father, a b-movie photographer for the cinema, made me feel quite apprehensive. And she had the classic jerk brother, yet harmless. Officially we were not together... but we played our little games whenever there was a chance to sneak away... I felt a tremendous attraction for her and couldn't stay away: she would drag me on the skateboard -a splendid yellow Supersurfer today costly retro on eBay - with her skates - I dreamed of triumphing as a new Elagabalus on a chariot drawn by women - joyfully fondling her charms as a restless maladolescent, until we overdid it in petting, her mother discovered something and on a terrible day she rang my doorbell...

Yes, who is this? - Are you Valerio? Is your mother there? ...and I, wiser than her - ahem no ma'am, I am the younger brother - what did you wish for? You must tell your brother that if he gets caught with my daughter again, he'll be in trouble! I didn't show up in the courtyard for two weeks, until things calmed down.

The 45 of Dance remained with me, Roberta was taken away from me forever. Only a few years ago, I managed to find the album of Dance, with great difficulty because it didn’t have the success of the single and there were few copies around. The packaging is luxurious, design by Convertino, with an inner gatefold featuring a romantic sunset photo of a couple by the sea, a she on a bicycle. A vinyl Arcadia, in short, with songs darting among the waves like flying fish before a storm.

Easy listening, Wonder'soul, disco music, and songwriter songs filled with reflux are the album's motifs, and the wizard Balsamo-Cagliostro still evokes my midsummer night’s phantoms. Magic from another time, indeed, when records were sung and played, not cloned, sampled, hippopped. The 33 begins with the blues Veiledly mine, then the disco track Woman, and finally the single Dance had great success in all European discotheques, and it's the driving theme of an album in which good Balsamo, coming from the successes of the Blue Angel, continues putting blue or pink fairies on the cover, and slavishly follows his inspiring singers, Lucio Battisti, and Alan Sorrenti in full-dance regression, with arrangements, and recordings in London with renowned session musicians. On drums is Simon Phillips. The bassist is excellent who in the title track Dance mimics the rural sound of a caccavella with a 4-string of an improbable disco tarantella: among other songs, all inspired - I forgive Balsamo even the pleasant lyricism like a wave more blue only you on Woman, my favorite piece - that among sexy sax 'à la Papetti' and 4/4 beat, has an atmosphere of the son of the stars. Only you and Understanding are in the Battisti-style, with melancholy veiled by a tram. I bid farewell with the rhymes of Woman:

Eternal lover and I your companion, Woman, no, there isn't a film shot without you, yes, I the deluded director yes I know, it's fine as it is I agree...

Ah, I forgot Roberta M. I bumped into her many years later, at a bar about nothing in the neighborhood... she with friends maybe the camouflaged boyfriend, me, oh well, we looked at each other for a long millisecond, but missed the beep beep moment, we didn’t talk or greet, throughout the ages amen.