Close to Paradise

Well, I, I arrive here in the late '60, '69 I think it was

And I found a paradise, something then I couldn't believe

I mean, it was a beautiful place with fantastic weather

And the payéses and the extranjeros, they were here

They were, most of them were Americans, Canadians, Swedish

And, um, painters, artists

Fantastic people, there were no classes

The houses, they were open, nobody closed the doors

It was a great, great, uh, life

I came in 1972

And, um, I came, I arrived to an island which was virgin nature

And sunny, there's flowers and everything was green and

Uh, it was just so overwhelming that I couldn't believe it

It just, uh, it just hit me so strongly

That I, uh, felt like being in paradise

In Spanish, it's Anna Maria "Noche y Día"

It's mean Ana Maria "Day and Night"

Because I was everywhere

I don't want to lose one minute of this party

Or in the beach or in the discotheques

Everywhere I was, I tried to be

All around the island, always twenty-four hours

I was sleeping nothing

Just few hours sometimes when my body was going to die

When I start to work in Pacha

They tell me, "You can be go-go dancer"

And I said, "Yes, but please with one clause

At five o'clock in the morning, I want to go away"

And then, the boss of the dancer in this time

She say the, "Okay, you can do it, but straight up

Don't say this to anyone

And when it's five o'clock, you just take the door and go where you want"

And so, five o'clock every night, when I finished work

I ran to dance in another discotheque and

I ran to Ku to make more friends here around

Like this, uh, it was okay

The minute I came here

Just getting out of the plane, landing in Ibiza

I knew this was my place forever

I don't know, even the smell I adored

I felt this is my home

My name is Rossetta Montenegro, I was born in Venezuela

But I live many part of the planet so I got to meet so many people

Everyone came to see me in Ibiza during those days and now still

I work in, um Pacha, I work in Ku, I work in Amnesia

I work in all over the places here

Imagine Ibiza in the '72, used to live with the payéses

And, uh, they were really nice people, you know

They didn't get impress about our outfits that were really freak

You know, I mean, we were freak

We used to get whatever

A bottle of Coke, we'd cut it and we'd make, uh

Two things for a bra, you know?

It was really funny

The fantasy that all the people used to have that time

At least at that time, we used to have two or three pareo

You can, you wear it on the head, over the, the shoulders as a child

And we only carry a basket, this Incan basket

With all our stuff there

So we didn't have to go to our house to get things, you know

No, it was easy going

You know, we used to go to the disco without, barefoot

In bathing suits with a pareo

And sometimes, people naked

Full of colors and things, you know, but, uh, flowers all over

Going close to paradise, but we took the wrong way

I don't know, maybe this is the right way, we don't know, but

It didn't go the way we were expecting

When I say "we," I'm talking about

All these freaks then we had dreams

Somebody asked me about her and then, "What do you think about that?"

And I say that would've been, that's what I really believed

It was a paradise, absolute paradise

Somehow, it took a way then became what it is now

And I'm sure people that arrive now are still thinking that that's a paradise

Definitely it's not the paradise that we knew, it's another paradise

But maybe now is the, I don't know, I'm not sure about anything

Reality is not the same for everybody, so

We use the words in a way like if it is an absolute truth, that don't exist

That makes the thing more complicated