Among other things, the late Dionysis Savvopoulos in the first of six documentaries “Savvopoulos – Long Play”edited by the journalist Pavlos Tsimasto .

In these documentaries, which were supposed to be Dionysis Savvopoulos’ last legacy, he tells stories that marked his life and the lives of all of us, from 1965 when he released his first album until today.

The Lambrakis murder and the “Truck”

The incident that broke the glass for the then young Savvopoulos was an event that marked the modern political history of Greece. As Dionysis Savvopoulos recounts, in May 1963, the MP Grigoris Lambrakis was murdered in Thessaloniki, in front of the eyes of the world.

“We were upset. Demonstrations, rallies, marches. The police couldn’t screw us up. They brought an army from Larissa. We were running up and down… my stomach was tight. I passed out in the bus. They took me down, there was a barber shop there, they brought out a chair and made me sit there until I recovered.”the great songwriter, lyricist and performer, who left a deep mark on Greek song and the cultural life of the country, narrates with disarming honesty.

“People would also lose their tickets… Together with the blessed Alkis Sahinis, we spent the night with Lambrakis outside AHEPA. Alkis was asking “What are we going to do?”with Dionysis Savvopoulos answering him: “We will come out real, I decided… I come home and they shout at me, ‘what time are you coming back?’ In their world, that is, they. I didn’t say anything. I turned my back on them. I threw some clothes in a suitcase, took my cousin Fotis’s guitar with me, because I still didn’t have my own, and slammed the door behind me.”

The door closed and the adventure began for Dionysis Savvopoulos. This is the story, as Pavlos Tsimas explains in the documentary, of a journey from Thessaloniki to Athens by truck. It could be a very common – for that time – story of internal migration, but it is the story of the “birth” of a record. “Truck” was “born” on this journey and at the same time a new musical world was “born”.

The teenager Dionysis stood on the side of the road and waited “for a vehicle to pick him up”. The driver of a truck responded after hours. In order to pass the time, he made up in his mind the song “Sun, sun, chief”. The red Volvo stopped and picked him up. The driver sleepless for two days. With one eye open “like a shark”. At one point, in the middle of the Thessalian plain, he entered a parking lot to sleep. Savvopoulos was waiting for him to wake up. “I felt as if this was not a simple trip from Thessaloniki to Athens” we hear him say. Suddenly the truck door slams and Savvopoulos sees a woman in a red dress and a gold tooth. Zozo.

The driver rested and the journey to Athens began again. Just before Stylida, they saw the striped awning of a circus. “A battered circus” outside of which a child was playing. And with these images in mind, “The Wanderers”, “Zozo”, “Bouluki” were created.