This is how Marco Stanzani remembers his first meeting with Cesare Cremonini and the adventure of “50 Special”.
Cesare rang the bell of my office one morning in March 1997. Only his nose was visible on the video intercom and so I didn’t let him in; but since he was tenacious, he showed up again in the afternoon saying that he was Caesar of the Without Filter, and this time I welcomed him. I told him that his band name was horrible and that if we worked together we would have to change it. He played us some of his songs, which he wrote mostly inspired by his frequent disappointments in love. At that time Cesare was thin as a rail, wore Raybans the size of windshields and looked like a lanky Liam Gallagher from Padania. We began to work on repertoire which led us to try out songs such as “Qualcosa di grande”, “A better day”, “Stay with me”, “Vorrei”. One night Cesare woke me up asking me to open the studio for him because he had to write a song inspired by the disappointment of a friend of his in love. In the morning he had poured everything onto a CD and rushed to school to let her listen to it. We found a version of “Something Big” in the mixer that was six minutes long. We suggested he reduce the song to 3 minutes and come back with the changes after a few days, but after two hours he was back with us, with the song ready. Because this is what he wanted to be: the Freddie Mercury “de noantri”.
With that song we decided to enroll the band, which in the meantime we had decided would be called Lunapop, at the San Marino Festival. The group won that edition, and when I was ready to start with the launch of the first single, namely “Qualcosa di grande”, Cesare brought us this song into the studio which seemed like a yeyé to “Have your mother send you to get milk”. Summer was now approaching, and it didn’t take long to convince us that that song was much more suitable for the debut of a band of almost eighteen year olds struggling with their final exams.
We made a video directed by Gaetano Morbioli and Piaggio partially contributed to covering the costs, as long as we used the new Vespa model and not the old legendary 50 Special which was already out of production.
In the first version of the video Andrea Furlanetto appears, but he was not allowed by his father (head of the Furla brand worldwide) to continue his career in Lùnapop. For this reason he was replaced by Nicola Balestri, known as Ballo, who will then appear in the second version of the video. Radio stations had different attitudes to the song, which was released on the market in May ’99. Some radio networks started without delay, completely enraptured by the fast-paced rhythm of the song, immediately engaging from the first initial piano twist. Others, more reticent, followed the success, starting to plan the song after the summer. MTV and Videomusic instead immediately embraced the project, and the video contributed to increasing the attention of the young public towards the band.
Although the song reached first position in the best-selling singles chart in Italy in October ’99, displacing Lou Bega with “Mambo n. 5”, I was saddened by not being able to get it to n. 1 in Music Control, the monitoring system that determined the rankings of the most played songs on the radio. I succeeded with the other six singles that will be extracted from “Squerez?”, the debut (and only) album published by Lùnapop, which with over 1 million 800 thousand copies sold, is still the fifth most successful album best-selling record ever in the history of Italian discography.
What else can I say? As far as I’m concerned there is a life before and a life after “50 Special”. Even today when I hear her playing on the beaches or in stadiums, and I see people who can’t sit still, I feel a sense of pride mixed with embarrassment. “Vespas with 60s makeup, they go around the center almost 90”: when Ce’s voice comes on, and I notice that someone turns towards me, I lower my gaze and generally move away discreetly, as if I were afraid of being pointed out like an Oppenheimer of all this.
25 years have passed and yet it seems like yesterday that I was driving around in the van with these kids, chasing them through the hotel corridors where they kindly asked us never to return, or with whom I improvised as a keyboard player in a TV playback because one of them was absent , I who couldn’t even ring the doorbell of my own house.
So, happy birthday, “50 Special”.
You are worth to me, as much as an Oscar for the soundtrack to the most beautiful film of life.
