The Walrus #4 - Down in Mexico

There is this Tarantino movie where at some point a girl performs a striptease for Kurt Russel. The song is called Down in Mexico, and who has listened to it has never forgotten it. 

Dear Marco, I liked that song so much that I have been listening to it over and over again. It talks about a descent to an unknown place called Mexico, where some wild and adventurous things happen to you, like meeting women and mysterious musicians. To go to Mexico means to get out of the shell we built around us and explore a place “south of the border” where rules don’t exist. All of that is both dangerous and fascinating. 

Now, I don’t exactly know where my Mexico is and where is yours, but I hope that one day, soon perhaps, we can meet there and spend some time together, like the old times. 

See you soon, gringo!

*

Down in the Mexicali
There's a crazy little place that I know
Where the drinks are hotter than the chili sauce
And the boss is a cat named Joe

He wears a red bandana, plays a blues pianna
In a honky-tonk down in Mexico
He wears a purple sash and a black moustache
In a honky-tonk down in Mexico

Well, the first time that I saw him
He was a-sittin' on a piano stool
I said a-tell me dad, when does the fun begin?
He just winked his eye and said man, be cool

He wears a red bandana, plays a blues pianna
In a honky-tonk down in Mexico
He wears a purple sash and a black moustache
In a honky-tonk down in Mexico

All of a sudden in walks this chick
(In Mexico)
Joe starts playing on a Latin kick
(In Mexico)
Around her waist she wore three fishnets
(In Mexico)
She started dancin' with the castanets
(In Mexico)
I didn't know just what to expect
(In Mexico)
She threw her arms around my neck
(In Mexico)
We started dancin' all around the floor
And then she did a dance I never saw before

So if you're south of the border
I mean down in Mexico
And you wanna get straight
Man, don't hesitate
Just look up a cat named Joe

He wears a red bandana, plays a blues pianna
In a honky-tonk down in Mexico
He wears a purple sash, and a black moustache
In a honky-tonk down in Mexico

Yeah, como esta usted senorita? Ha-ha-ha
Hey, come with me to the border, south of the border, that is
In the Mexico, yeah in Mexico
Yeah, you can get your kicks in Mexico
Come with me baby, come with me
Come with me, yeah, crazy, ha-ha-ha
Yeah

A tea with... Dana Gillespie

BY ALESSANDRO CINELLI

"I don’t judge by what I see, but by what I can’t see."

Today my brother and I had the pleasure to join Dana Gillespie for tea.

On the trip to get to her house, we noted down some questions to ask her.

Dana is a highly enjoyable person and I am very fond of her company. Indeed, I have known her for a while now. Not many know that when her regular drummer Evan Jenkins can’t make it to play in a show, I am the next one on the list. 

Since 2016, I had the pleasure to drum for Dana Gillespie quite a few times today so I got to know her, for instance, a bit better than my brother does. 

She just wrote her biography and published it with the name Weren’t Born a Man, just like her 1974 album. If you hover on that name you might find a direct link to buy it (just 15 quids on Amazon) in case you want to dig deeper. Anyways, I got the book signed from Dana and I read it voraciously in a few days. Weren’t Born a Man is the story of her life, told from her cheerful point of view. Boy, did she have quite a life!

Great part of the book essentially is a snap shot of what I have always liked to be told about England in the 60s and 70s, a place whose fame vaguely echoes today and this society of overacting humans, all distracted by socials and cheap thrills of consumerism. 

In the frame of a rocking and rolling London, where Eric Clapton was just a lad with a soon-to-boom career, David Bowie a companion to go to open mics with, where you could hang with Bob Dylan in some Soho bar (with the possibility of encountering the Stones or the Who), Dana thrived and forged her ultimate shape. The British diva of Jazz and Blues counts more than seventy albums published, plus a rather successful career both as an actress and as a singer. In fact, she played Mary Magdalene in the first London production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972. She has been around the music business for more than half century, travelling the world and performing on some pretty bloody amazing venues too. 

All of that she inked down the pages of her biography with a style that is unmistakable if, like me, you know the character a bit. Dana speaks what to me seems to be a close-to-perfection English for eloquence and vocabulary, definitely due to her noble origins and education. What I think is funny, is that she is capable of literally spewing out expressions that only someone who frequented rockers, punkers, bohemian poets, harlots, junkies could know. 

When asked what instrument she would learn if she could go back in time, she didn’t hold back saying that on of them must definitely be the electric guitar, as the guitar is the extension of your dick in terms of sensuality of the instrument. 

Dana is a concentrate of epic quotes and flares of wisdom. Every time I get to chat with her, I always regret not having set a recorder in order to learn all of her expressions so this time I decided to film our chat with my brother’s phone and I sort of edited the video to make it look like an informal interview. 

The three of us sat on the sofa of her living room, trying to stay as close to each other as possible in order to get in the frame. She served tea and my brother got the mug with the writing UNT on it and the handle acting as a big ‘C’ before it. 

"I think that one note in the right place with the right feeling can send shivers down your spine, make the girls all quiver and wet and give guys a hard-on. If you play a million notes nobody is gonna get a hard-on."

We had many questions prepared even if we knew that she would set the conversation in a way that we would not manage to ask them all.

As soon as we sat down, she declared that she would never reply to questions like who was her favourite artist or who or where she got her inspiration from etc. because, in fact, it is very silly to ask this to a woman like Dana Gillespie, who loved every man she slept with and got a little inspired by every soul she came across. I looked at my brother -who by the way, was becoming as red as a tomato - and I nodded to take off at least half of the questions that might disagree with Dana’s instructions. 

I believe if it was not the heat that got my brother red, it must have been the presence of Dana. She doesn’t look at you, she scopes down and makes you feel like a little thing. Yet, she makes you feel at ease. She loves to talk but she also loves to listen to what somebody has to say. Her voice is low and placid, sturdy as her English in opposition of us two little Italians who where there to impress. She even treated us with some Latin. 

Then the phone rang in the middle of the conversation and she picked up the receiver. I hadn’t seen a receiver in years now.  We thought it would be fun to leave it in the final cut of the video. 

"Somebody thinks I’ve been sexist, I’m just having fun. Everyone is so politically correct these days. You can’t say anything without somebody complaining and jumping down your quote. But I’m old school and I don’t give a toss".

So, eventually it turned out that Dana loves to be interviewed and may I say that she knows very well how to answer questions. She naturally links answers of a question to the other without knowing what’s next, so that our list of questions to ask shrunk drastically. In the end it all looked like a typical English tea chit chat, and the clock on the wall stroke 4pm. 

*"So fabulous getting older, ‘cause nobody can tell you what to do, you can tell everyone to piss off and you just get away with what you like." *

If you would like to explore more of Dana before buying the book (it is very entertaining, I am not overstating) you can listen to some of her music. Her personality already comes out from the lyrics of her songs. Sometimes I find her so amusing, others genial. I even took time to gather a Spotify playlist for you with the Dana’s songs I love the most. Many of them I knew from playing with her and when I will have finally listened to all her 70+ records, the playlist will probably be a few songs longer! 

The Walrus #3 - Potato Head Blues

I reckon it was in the movie Manhattan when at some point Woody Allen, while lying on the couch, lists all the things that are worth living for. Eventually, after mentioning the Swedish cinema and this recording of Potato head blues, he remembers the eyes of the girl he had left halfway through the movie. Then he slowly gets up from the couch and runs to go find her. 

Dear Marco, I believe that we all, every now and then, would want to have such a vivid enlightenment and suddenly remember why “it’s worth living” and most of all what exactly we had fallen in love with at the beginning of the story. We all are “waiting for the miracle”, as dear old L. Cohen sings.

I don’t know what to say, I am not a man of wisdom. Perhaps those moments of anticipation aren’t totally worthless and to have an enlightenment you shall learn to be patient. Thing is, we have a lot of noises in our heads all the time. Not often life is like a movie. 

Well, then maybe we have to do like in Potato head blues, forget about the meaning of the words and only focus on the rhythm.

Talk soon my friend,

The walrus

The Walrus #2 - Que beleza

Dear Marco,

Being happy is like booking an appointment with the cosmos.
No, I did not become a guru but that is precisely what this song has taught me. 

I was driving when I listened to Que beleza for the first time. I remember that all of a sudden it seemed to me that everything was nice and easy, that there was no need to be afraid. I felt like that dark, silent and lonely centuries had gone by but at that time, in that very car, it was all over.

While I was still dazed by that sudden energy and happiness, the radio started playing this amazing song. It was a sort of a ode to joy, a song by someone who had suffered, someone who felt lost but then found himself again, finally able to distinguish from good and evil.

Since then, I obviously had other low moments: that feeling of happiness was not everlasting. Since when I listened to Que beleza however I know that finding the right path only depends on me; that being happy is sort of a journey.

Yours truly,

The Walrus

The Walrus #1 - Capriccio Diabolico

Dear Marco,

Do you know how I discovered the Capriccio Diabolico? It was recommended by this one guy from a call-centre. 

I have worked in that place for almost a year. I don’t ever remember what we were selling. A hideous place, where your soul was taken and smashed for eight hours every day. The others were like me, more or less young, more or less broke, more or less interested in something else. Everybody was skint.

On a day by the coffee machine I met this guy with a different look. Quite serious, glasses down his nose. We started to talk and it turned out that he was a classical guitar player. Ten years of conservatory. He had travelled the world and he was going to do it again. Madrid, but first he needed some money for the trip. 

During those ten minutes we became friends. He told me: “Do you know Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco? I recommend it, the Capriccio Diabolico is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever listened to. Performed by Segovia is the absolute best”,  and he smiled at me in a way that I have never seen in anyone in there. When I went back home I took a listen to the Capriccio Diabolico. It was like a magical melody, full of the melancholy of sad things but also the lightheartedness of happy things. In fact I believe that’s the reason of the word diabolico: it tells you there’s nothing else you can do but keep moving with joy. Some time after I quit that job and I started to get myself busy again. When I think about my life, I believe it started on that day, with the Capriccio of Castelnuovo, after a long period of darkness. 

Sometimes I listen to it again. Artists still go to work in call-centres and things don’t go the way they are supposed to, in fact it looks like they are going the other way around! At least now I know that the Devil smiles to us when we are in trouble. Maybe he doesn’t even wish evil upon us. 

Yours truly, 

The Walrus 

Decadent & Self-Indulgent in Pontinia

Editor’s note

Latina (formerly Littoria) and Pontinia are relatively young towns in Italy created in the 1930s by the then in power Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. His regime along with its writers and architects had the marshes drained and undertook an urban planning based on modernism. Their architecture which can still be seen across Italy, designed buildings intended to submerge an individual when walking into them. To give the individual a feeling that they were irrelevant in comparison to the state or the nation. Powerless. The Italian Fascists wanted to build a society where only the future would be relevant. Their future. For them, man had reached his or her limits. Individualism was dead. Machine and technology controlled by the state would take over to drive Italy forward. Individual innovation was no longer necessary and anyway it was only there to serve the state.

History not only proved the Fascists wrong, but almost a hundred years later, a blues and rock festival which the Fascists would have labelled decadent and self-indulgent is being held in Pontinia every year.

And tell the Cinelli Brothers that improvisation and creativity stemming from the individual is dead.

Authorship and Copyright: Fabrizio Libralato

My Diary Entries for 14 July -19 July 2019: Pontinia Rock & Blues Festival
Marco Cinelli of the Cinelli Brothers

Always nice to know you are going home but its especially nice when you know you are going to play in front of a hometown crowd at a summer music festival. The audience and sometimes even the performance is different.

Fly into Rome’s Ciampino airport on Sunday missing the Wimbledon final but as I told my lawyer who was watching it, “didn’t really care”. Was already thinking of the show we would be putting on Thursday night at the Pontinia Rock and Blues Festival. Reach home after a short flight and short drive from the airport but tired from Saturday’s double gig. Kissed my mom who was in the kitchen and went to bed.

Wake up on Monday morning feeling better and decide to drive into central Rome which can be an experience in itself. But hard to complain when you get a haircut at Mod Academy & Salons in Rome. It's located right in front of the Spanish Steps. Lawyer gets jealous about that. Being at the Spanish Steps that is, not the haircut part. Emanuele who is more an artist than a hair dresser decides that our drummer who is also my brother Alessandro needs to have his hair bleached a bit in order to look like a proper rock ’n' roll blues drummer. He ends up looking like a Ziggy Stardust drummer. Emanuele must have been a David Bowie fan.

Once done we need to drive to the airport to pick up JJ our guitarist and harmonica player but we manage to squeeze in time with Martina (Mangialardi) another Italian ex-pat living in London who also happens to be in Rome this week. An art expert at Christie’s she still loves to talk about art with people seeing a painting or landmark for the first time.

Enzo our bassist decided to be a quint-esential rock star and flew in the day of the concert only.

It was nice having all of the band together at my parents’ home and the band must have felt comfortable as we all napped for an hour or two before going to the festival grounds to prep for the show.

It took us a couple of hours to set up the equipment and go through the sound check.

One thing the organisers and founders should be proud of, is that while the Pontinia Rock & Blues Festival may have been started to bring music and the blues to Italians, it has also over the years attracted performers from around the world with American and British musicians such as Sugar Ray Norcia, Joanna Connor, Eric Bibb, Lurrie Bell, Sonny Landreth, and Matt Schofield leading the way.

We went on stage just after 10:00 PM .

The show went well. Lighting worked and did what it should, audience danced through a number of our songs and we peaked during "Your Lies” and “Chain of Fools".

We even looked good apparently. People complimented our moves. Guess all that time practicing in front of the mirror has paid off or they were simply being kind. They also noticed and kept asking about the small stylish guitar I used. An old Eko that is modest in frame and which I modified at the neck to get the specific sound I wanted. It worked. The sound was as amazing as it was different maybe even distinctive.

People ask whether performing a concert in front of your hometown, family, and friends is like any other concert. No it is not and it can’t be. You turn it up a notch especially when your Dad is in the audience and he is the one who took a broken old plywood board that used to be a guitar, cleaned it, fixed it, and brought it back to life as the stylish small Eko guitar everyone was asking about.

The next day I am really tired while waiting for the flight back to London to play another Saturday night double bill. I was already thinking of our Brazil tour.