Wess & Dori Ghezzi — Era

MAY 15 1975 · 12:25

Wess & Dori Ghezzi · "Era" · Italy · 1975 Placement: 3rd · Language: Italian · Composers: Shel Shapiro, Andrea Lo Vecchio · Venue: Stockholmsmässan · Host: Stockholm, Sweden · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: color crt Wess and Dori Ghezzi walk onto the Stockholm stage in 1975 and the first thing you notice is that they look like no other Eurovision duo of the decade. Wess — Wesley Johnson, the American-born bassist and singer from the Equipe 84 orbit — stands tall and easy beside Ghezzi, the Italian pop singer with the bright, elastic voice, and together they make a mixed-race duet in a contest that had barely seen one. 'Era' is a Shel Shapiro composition with lyrics by Andrea Lo Vecchio — 'It was,' a nostalgic soul-inflected ballad that sits closer to Philadelphia R&B than to anything else in the Eurovision 1975 field. They sing it in close, tender harmony, trading lines the way soul duos had been trading them in America for a decade. Third place, one hundred and fifteen points under the freshly introduced twelve-point douze points system, and the best Italian result in years. Context 1975 was the first year of the twelve-down-to-one voting system that would define Eurovision for decades. Wess had spent the late 1960s and early 1970s inside Italian beat and soul circles; Ghezzi was an established solo star who would later become equally known for her marriage to Fabrizio De André. Legacy 'Era' is now considered one of the more musically sophisticated Italian Eurovision entries of the 1970s — often cited when commentators argue that Italy treated the contest differently from other big countries. The duo's third place stood as Italy's best Eurovision result until Toto Cutugno's 1990 win. Mythology The soul entry in the schlager year. Wess and Ghezzi as Italy's reminder that Eurovision could, if a country wanted, be a place where a Philadelphia groove arrived wearing an Italian lyric.