Thursday, August 30, 2007

The Boss in Florence!




Florence, June 8th, 2003, The Boss in concert with his legendary E Street Band. It was a 3.5 hour show with "only" 3 encores! Indeed WELL worth the price of the admission ticket. At one point, Bruce, in perfect Italian, shouted out: "Sono stracco morto. Non ne posso piu'”! (I’m dead tired. I can’t stand it anymore”! And so was the fan in the pic waiting for the concert to start!). Quite the show indeed (and just 2 days before the Stones in Milan’s San Siro stadium! All pics by M. Rimati).


Thursday, August 23, 2007

Yes, the Blues Brothers Band!







This concert took place in 2004 in Udine’s castle. Most of the original band members were there (with the exception obviously of poor Jim Belushi and Canada's very own Dan Aykroyd). I tagged alone because like millions around the world, I thoroughly enjoyed the first Blues Brothers movie. And yes, the band that night did play Solomon Burke's, "Everybody needs somebody to love" (all pics by M. Rimati and thanks to my friend Federico V. for having helped me how to figure out loading some complicated JPEG files)!

Monday, August 20, 2007

On with the concerts!





The following concerts are in no particular order. I’ve been throwing around the idea in my head of also writing a book on all the concerts I’ve ever seen, both in Italy and in North America. Since the idea came to my head a few years ago, I’ve been (trying) to take pictures of all the concerts and I’ve also kept the ticket stubs to prove that I’ve seen them.

Here’s the Billy Joel/Bryan Adams concert in Rome in the summer of 2006 right in front of the Coliseum. Personally-speaking, Joel’s performance was greater than the one by Sir Elton John, in the very same spot, the year before (and Adams I’ve only seen three times. All pics by M. Rimati)!

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Hail,hail rock'n'roll!


Dear music/concert fans out there,

I thought that I’d start my third blog (my other three are:
http://acrazycanucklivinginzanyitalia.blogspot.com and http://italianwomenssoccer.blogspot.com)
on all the rock concerts I’ve seen so far (as of August, 2007 I’m at no. 156!) by rendering homage to the late, great Ronald Belford Scott, also known to millions of loyal AC/DC fans out there as “Bon” Scott. The picture of Bon was taken by yours truly 1977 (circa) at the Winnipeg Arena in Canada. It was the first AC/DC concert for me (three others at the time of writing would follow with Bon’s valid successor, Brian Johnson, in MontrĂ©al, Modena and Rome, Italy). Truly an honour to have seen what could have become one of THE great front-men, along with Mick Jagger, of rock'n'roll.

The thing that I’ll never forget about the Winnipeg show was that at one point, during “Let There Be Rock”, Angus Young had disappeared from the stage along with Bon. He was still playing but you couldn’t see him. I was leaning against the boards of the ice rink (I had floor seats at the Arena). I still vividly remember that I was on the right side facing the stage. All of a sudden, there was Angus on TOP of Bon's shoulders running directly towards me! I got pushed aside by the body guards as the two made their way up the right aisle, then they cut across the floor to the left aisle and then back up on stage. Indeed an honour to have seen the two so close up!
Unfortunately though, on February 19, 1980 evening in the back of a taxi cab in London, Bon would leave us all after having apparently drunk a whopping 7 double Jack Daniels (John Bonham, Led Zeppelin’s former drummer, had died around the same period after having downed 40 doses of vodka)!

I had become a fan of AC/DC around 1975 or so with their album, “High Voltage”. I got immediately hooked by their particular style of rock (some have defined it as heavy metal. For me it’s just good’ol HARD rock’n’roll, nothing more). Some 32 years later, I’m still one of their diehard fans (after The Beatles and before the Rolling Stones they're my all-time favourite rock'n'roll band in the world).

I won’t dwell too much on the life of Bon nor AC/DC as lot of information can be easily found in Internet. I will though leave you with some epic sayings which are taken from the interesting booklet that is part of the "Bonfire" CD collection (it contains "Let There Be Rock", "AC/DC Volts", “AC/DC Live” and their greatest selling album so far, the historic “Back In Black” CD). They mostly regard Bon Scott:


“My new schoolmates threatened to kick the shit out of me when they heard my Scottish accent. I had one week to learn to speak like them if I wanted to remain intact. “Course, I didn’t take any notice. No one railroads me, and it made me all the more determined to speak my own way, That’s how I got my name, you know. The Bonny Scott, see”?

As fate would have it when Bon was in London in the early seventies he saw Brian Johnson singing in Geordie. He told Angus about the incredible guy who screamed his arse off. What Bon didn’t know was that Brian had appendicitis at the time. “F..king good singer’? Brian roars with laughter. “I was in f..king agony”!

Bon: “I was married at the time when I first joined the band and my wife said, ‘Why don’t you write a song about me’? So I wrote ‘She’s Got Balls’. Then she divorced me”!

Bon: “It keeps you fit—the alcohol, the nasty women, sweat on stage, bad food. It's all very good for you".

Bon: “The story is, we all had a house together in Melbourne. And we had about twenty chicks who would come around and service the band, the whole thing. So the whole band got the jack (n.b. venereal disease). And so Malcolm said one day: “Why don't we do a song about it"? As we wrote it that afternoon and played it that night and during the quiet part in the middle I went around and pointed out all the girls, you know...'She's got the jack' and 'She's got the jack' and so on. And all these chicks are makin' a mad dash for the door. It was quite funny actually”.

Angus: “Bon joined us pretty late in his life, but that guy had more youth in him than people half his age. That was how he thought, and I learned from him. Go out there and be a big kid".

Bless your rock’n’roll heart Bon, wherever you are (all pics by M. Rimati)!

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