Franco Zanetti, director of Rockol, remembers Paolo Carù, who passed away on the morning of Friday 14 June at the age of 77.
I clearly remember my first visit to Paolo Carù’s shop. University student – it must have been 1972 or 1973 – and already obsessed with records, I put together some of the money earned from occasional jobs, and aboard my red 126, with two classmates, we ventured from Brescia towards Gallarate. We expected to find a megastore (even though at the time we didn’t even know what megastores were) and we found ourselves in front of a small shop, convinced we had the wrong address. Instead the temple of vinyl was right there, behind the sign “Cartolibreria Carù – Books and records”.
We left after two hours with bags full of 33s and empty wallets. At the time I was going through a period of falling in love with glam rock, and from Carù I bought records by Sparks, Cockney Rebel, Mott the Hoople – all stuff that I had never seen in the shops of Brescia. The big man behind the counter looked at me with a slightly disgusted look – I would later discover that music didn’t interest him, in fact perhaps it frankly disgusted him.
After that first expedition I returned to Carù a few years later, in 1978. I had started working at EMI Italiana in Caronno Pertusella, and then our salaries were paid with a check every last Friday of the month. For an entire year, every last Friday of the month I left the EMI in Caronno (via Bergamo 315) and instead of heading towards Brescia, where I still lived on weekends, I pointed the car (which had become an Alfasud, always red) towards Gallarate. Where the salary check was essentially forwarded to Paolo. In that period I bought everything or almost everything I could find of English and American punk and new wave; also many 45s, which by now Paolo, knowing his chickens, kept aside for me knowing that I couldn’t resist buying them.
Then, well, I was transferred to Milan, and my shipments to Gallarate became more sporadic, also because in the meantime, as a music journalist, I received more records than I could listen to. But the occasional meetings with Paolo have always been cordial and affectionate. The news of his death saddened and shocked me: with our mutual friend Riccardo Bertoncelli we were working on an idea for a Music Library, and we had thought of also involving Paolo with a contribution of his collection of books, together with mine, to the planned Library. Who knows, despite everything, that project may not become concrete, and that the Music Library cannot be named after Paolo Carù. It would be a nice way to remember him, as he deserves.
