Wild boys on holiday: Toni Vescoli at Lake Neuchâtel, summer 1959/60.
Archives of Toni Vescoli

The Schwarze Ring café was the beatnik hangout in Zurich. The Kruggasse had the jukebox with all the latest tunes, and the flamboyantly dressed young people with their Töffli mopeds were tolerated. It was also at the Schwarze Ring that Vescoli was given his first gig as a musician, and he played his jazz guitar on a Wednesday afternoon for a fee of ten francs.

Soon Vescoli decided he’d rather not be alone on the stage anymore, and started looking for musicians to form a band. In 1962 he founded Les Sauterelles – the ‘Grasshoppers’. The band’s line-up changed frequently in the first few years. But Vescoli as lead singer and the band name remained the same through the years. One other constant was Vescoli’s Höfner electric guitar. Acquired in 1963 and paid off over several years, the guitar became Vescoli’s main onstage accompanist. Over the years, the appearance of the guitar has changed so much as a result of the heavy use it’s seen that today, it bears little resemblance to the white Höfner guitar from the 1960s. From 1963 to 1971, Vescoli performed well over 1,000 concerts on this guitar. However, the guitar was not present at one of the most legendary Les Sauterelles concerts: when the ‘Swiss Beatles’ supported the Rolling Stones at Zurich’s Hallenstadion in 1967, Vescoli performed with a different guitar.

During the Stones concert – the first international rock concert in Switzerland – there was rioting in the audience, which ended with wooden seating being smashed up and clashes with the police. Now, the concert and the riots are often seen as precursors of the youth unrest which, in the summer of 1968, reached a peak in the Globus riots.

Selina Stuber

Toni Vescoli and the beatniks