That day in Milan the rock’n’roll landed …

Already from mid -April all of Milan began to fill up with posters. The first rock and roll festival and jazz dances was coming. Date and time: Saturday 18 May 1957 at 9.30 pm. A large dance race sponsored by Oransoda and financed in part by the Christian Democracy, in which three orchestras (the Original Lambro Jazz Band, the Swing Parade and Celentano and His Rock Boys) would have accompanied both the numbers of the professional dancers (the French national team of Be Bop, the acrobats of the Duo Corsaro, the Colombet Detti brothers “I Kings of the Cha Cha” and The Rock Ballet Dossena), which the competition of amateurs whose winner would take home the beauty of two hundred thousand lire. Location designated: the ice building in via Piranesi 14, at the time the largest ice rink in Europe and the spearhead of the Italian Liberty style, a structure that according to experts “constituted an unpublished and happy encounter between architectural virtuosity and engineering rigor”, and which in fact represented an institution for four generations of Milanese who went to us who knows how many times in their lives. To see a game of hockey, a skating gala, a convention, or to take a ride of the track with the ramshackle rental skates that cost nothing, but they also applied less. Such a suggestive scenario that on June 19, 1971 he was also supposed to host a Pink Floyd concert (later moved to Brescia for fear of accidents), and which remained so until 2002 when he was converted into a futuristic multifunctional space.

But let’s go back to May 18, 1957. From the early hours of the evening the ice building was stormed by two thousand boys who ironed him well beyond his capacity, immediately starting to claim dancers and singers. “There was a hallucinating mess inside and outside,” Paolino confided, a very young Teddy boy from Porta Romana who was there that evening. «A Burdel that you saw only at the stadium, but never in the theater. Maybe because he pulled new air and then someone was crazy because he didn’t understand or knew how to behave. He split the chairs, punched the windows, screamed, but it’s not that he hurt anyone. However, when other five thousand people who wanted to enter came outside the street, then the story was heavy. The organizers unravel, they decided not to pass anyone anymore, and just before nine and a half they closed both the main entrances and those of the artists ». So, not only those who still wanted to enter, but also most of the cast. The swing parade and the presenter Jack La Cayenne remained outside, replaced quickly and furious by Piero Pelissi, eight couples of professional dancers, the entire jury, and also the trophies intended for amateurs who lost in the bedlam, and were never found again.

Disgusted by the affront, a bowed crowd put the neighborhood on fire for more than two hours, breaking machines and showcases, and the intervention of the police served, which, indeed, as often happens in these cases, further worse the situation. The calm returned only when, with a skilled expedient, the organization announced the cancellation of the show, which instead began at half and a half precise when the spotlights were all for Adriano Celentano and his rock boys. For the occasion: Enzo Jannacci, Franco Ratti and Iico Cerutti on guitars, Pino Sacchetti with sax, and if I saw it just from certain photos, I also seemed to see Marco Ratti on bass. As predictable, after two hours of fibrillation, the public exploded in the most interminable of the roars. Electrized, the band produced himself in the three unoped songs in his repertoire, which according to Hadrian could be “jailo ostus ‘,’ ‘(we’ere skirt) Rock ARound the Clock’ and ‘Everyone’, and saved some possible intermediate performances (I who sing ‘Caldonia’? GUIDONE I who sing something else? Sixteen couples of surviving dancers. First the amateurs of the Oransoda Trophy, then the professionals. And in closing, the highly anticipated show by Bruno and Marisa (with him who had just conquered his second world title), and the students of the Rock Ballet Dossena who were covered with ovations. In particular, the two favorites of Bugghi, Giancarlo Gatti and Lilli Napoli, who in the years to come never lost the opportunity to remember their great teacher, who passed away on April 4, 1958 in a road accident. Adriano, on the other hand, became a star already from the end of the evening when a hundred admirers fed his clothes in his dossos, and they resvced him at a frightened and half naked house.

A few weeks later he would have consoled his first record contract for Walter Gürtler’s music and, as someone will remember, depopulated in the summer of 1959 with ‘your kiss is like a rock’.

This text is drawn, out of granting of Tsunami Edizioni, from the book “The walls of sound”, which we reviewed on April 24th.