“In loving memory of our times… in honor of the sound of Chillywack” (Open letter to Dennis Pieri)

“In loving memory of our times… in honor of the sound of Chillywack”

(Open letter to Dennis Pieri)

Dear lifelong friend Dennis (but to me you’ll always be “Denys”)… 🙂
“So, you decided to invite the hare to run!!”…

I think I was the first, still awake last night, to see your comment (previewed in our group chat) about Chillywack, so, overcome by enormous curiosity, I immediately opened the blog tag, but for some strange reason, it didn’t appear…
I tried again several times, until this morning (late at night), to finally see it appear in the section, also encouraged by the other comments in the group…

Well, I swear that (without any rhetoric of circumstance), as soon as I finished reading your meticulous and beautiful, so evocative, story—for me, your “contemporary”—I was suddenly overcome by a sense of nostalgia mixed with an indefinite, poignant feeling of “back in time.”

Nothing, however, once I clicked the link, compares to the growing and impetuous vortex of emotions that accompanied listening to the song, in today’s studio version, of “Fly at Night,” from the first guitar arpeggios to the final ones, masterfully played by the formidable Bill Henderson, now eighty years old and still wonderfully vigorous…
My soul, in the midst of an emotional climax, was filled, over the course of the song’s five minutes, with a purely regenerative energy, a sort of spiritual “trip” back in time, enraptured by the melodies of the arpeggios and by Bill’s legendary guitar solo, still faithfully reproduced with the same verve of years gone by, while the tears, now flowing copiously from my eyes, prevented me from focusing on the images of the clip…
How was it possible, I ask myself now, to unleash such evocative power from a memory of my youth now so distant?
The only “rational” answer I can give myself certainly lies in my still-strong emotional component, undoubtedly fueled by the inexorable passing of the years, which makes everyone like me more sensitive, more melancholic, because more aware of the transience of our time and of all things in this world. And yet, once again, it has managed to make me experience new sensations that I certainly could not have felt so intensely back then, when still young “tradesmen of the airwaves,” we played serenely and enthusiastically to the notes of certain vinyl masterpieces…

Finally, in this regard, I cannot help but dwell, even in this case, on a reflection that has been recurring in my mind for some time now, whenever I open the YouTube channel’s home page…
This technological communication tool (and its digital successors) now represent, for all of us “in our twenties,” a true bridge to every aspect of our lives… from the old images of a world that once belonged to us and has now definitively disappeared, to the sounds, music, and every other type of suggestion we can punctually find in that multimedia universe that encompasses everything, regardless of theme, topic, or discipline, over the course of a time that is, indeed, lost, but which remains embodied, immortalized in every audio/video clip to be re-proposed…

We are and have been lucky…

Yes, we have been truly privileged, I dare say, to belong to a generation that has managed to grow, live, and thrive in a truly unique historical, social, and cultural context (and probably unrepeatable, unfortunately, for current and future generations). (future)…
And Chillywack, listening to them again today with their current age behind them… reminded us of this very well.

Open letter from
Gianni Pierantozzi