Claudio Lolli - A Life on the Wrong Side

Merging, confusing, remelting

and finally refounding

the alphabet of life

on stones of honey

of beauty

("Analfabetizzazione")

Among the protagonists of the golden age of Italian singer-songwriting, Claudio Lolli is the one who had to wait longest to achieve full recognition. It's no coincidence that his first (and only) Tenco Prize arrived right at the time of his musical last testament (The Big Chill, 2017), released just months before his death. A figure who was "anything but easy-going and so out of step" – to use Fossati's words – yet paradoxically a victim of precisely those labels that have always plagued the Italian scene – first "depressive," then "communist," and even a "Red Brigades sympathizer" (a label he revealed himself). Lolli always walked against the wind, a proud nomad of ideas and verses, getting his shoes dusty and caring nothing for applause. With a consistency almost unique on the national scene, which earned him, if nothing else, the undying esteem of a small but utterly devoted circle of fans.

But while nothing can be done about the superficiality of certain viewpoints, it will never be too late to rediscover the work of this brilliant outsider from Bologna, capable of pitting the contradictions of verse against the dogmatic furies of ideology. A poet who truly belongs among those who "frighten people" – to quote his own famous "I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies" – because "they always open their window, even if we say it's the wrong window." A man who truly stood with the downtrodden, not as a pose. So much so that he dedicated a song to the death agony of the smallest and most repulsive of animals: the fly, a symbol of the weakest, who "get crushed between two fingers" and are denied even the concept of death ("Death belongs to the powerful… flies are left with the shit"). All without ever losing his composure, with a gentle mildness that often clashes with the lyrical force of his verses. Because, as Rosella Postorino writes ("Tempo e corpo"), "Lolli uses calm, understated words, which you have to hold in your mouth for a long time before they release their power. His is not an aggressive language, it doesn't lash out at you; it's subdued, and for that reason even more penetrating, like Pavese's, whose poem 'Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi' he set to music, not by chance."

At the Osteria delle Dame

Claudio Lolli was born in Bologna on March 28, 1950, into a petit-bourgeois family that he would openly criticize in some of his songs, such as "Borghesia" ("You can have plenty of misfortunes, for instance an artist daughter, or a non-businessman son, or worse still a communist one… Old petty bourgeoisie, old folks of my house") or in "Quando la morte avrà," dedicated to his father, described as obtuse, strict and irritating, though always remembered with great regret. "I was a fairly solitary teenager, a habit I thankfully gave up," he would recall. "I loved listening to music and writing, it seemed to give at least a minimal sense of meaning to my life."

The young Lolli devours the sacred texts of the Beat Generation (Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso), but his earliest passions are not the protest songs of American folk, but rather the pop hits of the Beatles, from whom he'll learn the art of melody and sweetness, traits that define his songwriting and are often inappropriately compared to the far harsher, thornier work of Francesco Guccini. Yet it's the Maestrone himself who will pave the way for Lolli's career as a singer-songwriter. Lolli has known Guccini's brother Piero since his high school days, and through this valuable connection he gets his first songs to him. It's at the table of the Osteria delle Dame, in the early Seventies, that his bond with his mentor is cemented. Between a flask of wine and a strummed guitar, those first dazed, off-kilter compositions take shape, often forged with the fingerpicking technique, illuminating glimpses of everyday life with flashes of poetry. Guccini is captivated, despite that "voice fit for the kingdom of the lowest or some underground festival... so full of crabs, spiders, frogs and other rather strange things", as Lolli himself will ruthlessly describe it in one of his songs ("Autobiografia industriale", 1977). The singer-songwriter behind "Radici" brings him to Emi, and the audition works: Lolli goes home with a contract with the label that will release his first four albums, from 1972 to 1976.

Godot and the French friend

For his debut LP, Aspettando Godot (1972), Lolli replaces Christopher Columbus on the cover, taking his place on the five-thousand-lira banknote. Pensive gaze, moustache and wavy hair, our tavern poet already presents himself as exactly what he is: an unphotogenic outsider, indifferent to trends and looks, but brimming with ideas and thoughts, in tune with the many young people of the time who identified with his "Angoscia metropolitana", with his existential unease made of a downpour of subtle, penetrating thoughts.

Lolli expresses it in a hushed voice, with those curls of acoustic guitar spilling abundantly from his spare arrangements. The title track already stands as its ideal manifesto, where Samuel Beckett's play is translated into a bitter reflection on lives left to drift by in the nerve-wracking wait for something that will never arrive, squandering dreams and ambitions until it's too late to make up for it: “Non ho mai agito aspettando Godot/ Per tutti i miei giorni aspettando Godot /E ho incominciato a vivere forte/ Proprio andando incontro alla morte”. A final epiphany in which Lolli "betrays" Beckett's original, as if trying to redeem the failings, the cowardice and the sloth of an entire lifetime.

The bitter awareness of a meaningless existence also recurs in the urban desolation of "L'isola verde" (“Ditemi come si fa/ A vivere tutta la vita in questa città/ Di giorno sudore ed attrezzi/ Di notte cercar nelle strade le donne coi prezzi”) and in the deeply bleak "Il tempo dell'illusione", which takes no prisoners: “Quando i vetri di una stanza resteranno le tue sole passeggiate/ E i figli e i nipoti rideranno delle tue guance scavate/ E per scherzo giurerai di sentirti proprio forte/ Sarà giunto anche per te il tempo della morte”.

Arranged by Marcello Minerbi, former leader of Los Marcellos Ferial, the album reveals more than one link to Guccini himself and to Fabrizio De André, as well as, in a few tracks ("Quello che mi resta", "Quanto amore"), to the French singer-songwriters of the Fifties. But the real star is Lolli's unconventional songwriting, able to wrap the fiercest invective in enchanted guitar filigree. Like the one that surfaces between the strings of his guitar as he strums a Georges Brassens-style progression. He calls it "Borghesia", and it becomes his first political anthem. An ironic, ferocious manifesto against the hypocrisy, the smugness and the squalor of the social class he himself declares he belongs to:

Vecchia piccola borghesia per piccina che tu sia

Non so dire se fai più rabbia, pena, schifo o malinconia

Sei contenta se un ladro muore o se si arresta una puttana…

Godi quando gli anormali sono trattati da criminali

chiuderesti in manicomio tutti gli zingari e gli intellettuali

ami ordine e disciplina, adori la tua polizia

tranne quando deve indagare su un bilancio fallimentare…

Sempre pronta a pestare le mani a chi arranca dentro a una fossa

always ready to lick the bones of the richest man and his dogs

The ruthless j'accuse closes with a stark conclusion ("One day the wind will sweep you away"), to which Lolli, almost thirty years later, would add the ironically disenchanted qualifier "maybe". His is not a post-high-school rebellious protest, but the mature awareness of an atypical twenty-two-year-old, one of those "who grew up a bit strange and never had many women on their arm" – as he confesses in the poignant "Quelli come noi", which condenses the utopia of an entire generation into a melancholy autobiographical portrait (“Quelli come noi/ così timidi e ambiziosi/ piuttosto silenziosi /e sempre con la testa piena/ di musica di arte e grandi amori… e basterà che un giorno/ trovino un po’ di forza/ e aiuteranno gli altri a dare un calcio al mondo”).

While De André and Guccini often take refuge in sarcastic verses, Gaber and Jannacci in flashes of nonsense, and De Gregori in a polished, metaphorical lyricism, Lolli has no shame in baring his most intimate feelings, shedding real tears as he recalls memories of a lost, mythologised adolescence, as in the splendid and tender "Michel", dedicated to a young French friend of his, a song warmly recommended to anyone who only thinks of the Bologna singer-songwriter as a "political artist":

Do you remember, Michel, our little toy soldiers, dead in the heroic defense of the ramparts, buried in a hedge with military honors invented on the spot

Do you remember, Michel, the black desk in the third row, which heard all the laughter, of two children living in a dream that will never happen again

Do you remember, Michel, that I liked Garibaldi, but you said he was a buffoon and that he surely couldn't measure up to your Napoleon...

Do you remember, Michel, how exclusive was the tenderness that bound us together, and accompanied our childhood up to the days of the new reality

Do you remember, Michel, the day your mother died, when you cried so much that even the dog who loved you so dearly didn't dare come near you

Do you remember, Michel, how sad those days were, I truly didn't know what to say to you, and what confusion I had in my head, and what astonishment on your face, and what longing to leave

Ti ricordi, Michel, quei due saluti alla stazione e i lacrimoni venir giù, quando la macchina comincia a far pressione tu dovesti salir su

Framed by the embroidery of acoustic guitar and scattered flute notes, "Michel" is a spine-tingling ballad (and, for this writer at least, reliably tear-inducing). A small coming-of-age tale that shows the full sensitivity of the young Lolli, able to open up a whole world of anguish and hope in three lines of verse. An artist who wields the weapon of disarming tenderness, the kind that moves you without a shred of rhetoric, through the sheer force of his candour. Polished and simple at once, poetic without ever becoming narcissistic or overly literary. Close, in this respect, to an illustrious, if utterly different, fellow citizen of his: Lucio Dalla.

Backed by a spare musical structure, with fingerpicking, a very light rhythm section and a violin adding a bit of depth to the songs, Lolli sketches out dense, evocative lyrics in which, alongside existential unease (also palpable in "L'isola verde" and "Quanto amore"), he denounces family obtuseness ("Quando la morte avrà", dedicated to his father, with a dichotomous feeling of love/hate) and the oppressive weight of a rapacious, stifling society, where "the noise of cars has already smothered every trace of remorse" and "a child who worked as a bricklayer lies dead on the pavement" ("Angoscia metropolitana", with exquisite string embellishments underpinning the guitar arpeggios). The spectre of death also recurs throughout, mentioned no fewer than twelve times on the record. But to stop there and dismiss his approach as merely "depressing" means failing to get beneath the surface, settling for a shallow, simplistic view.

The Lolli waiting for Godot is a young poet, both mature and reflective, his heart overflowing with dreams and hopes, ready to embrace the ideals of the Movement and to "roll around on the ground" during sleepless nights in Piazza Maggiore, just like those Happy Gypsies he would sing about a few years later – who were none other than the fellow travellers of his generation, utopian nomads and outsiders on permanent active duty.

His debut LP, then, already reveals the unique style of Claudio Lolli, almost an Italian Nick Drake with his minimalist arpeggios and his refined, shadowy vocal filigree. His songs are played on radio shows dedicated to new talent, including "Per voi giovani", devised by Renzo Arbore and hosted by Carlo Massarini. His voice-and-guitar sets open the concerts of Area, featuring singer Demetrio Stratos and bassist Ares Tavolazzi, who had also taken part in Aspettando Godot, albeit uncredited.

La guerra (non) è finita

A year later came Un uomo in crisi. Canzoni di morte. Canzoni di vita (1973), a record that follows in its predecessor's footsteps, yet sharpens its graver, more pessimistic vein in a handful of noble, dust-worn ballads. “Fa capolino un po’ di tristezza/ Fa capolino un poco di rabbia/ Fa capolino una vita schifosa”, he sings without mincing words in "La guerra è finita", an anguished ode to the hard life of the postwar years. And the sepia-toned portrait of unease on the cover certainly does nothing to lighten the mood... Perhaps this is precisely the Lolli who can be accused of excessive gloom, not least because this time his pop instinct doesn't always come to the rescue, so that at times the songs drag on a little wearily around his bleak arpeggios.

Musically, the blueprint is essentially the same as on the debut, with the involvement of an interesting group of collaborators: Andrea Carpi, Piero Guccini (Francesco Guccini's brother) and Stefan Grossman on guitars, plus the two Volpini brothers, Enzo and Elio (on piano and accordion, and bass respectively), both members of the prog group L’Uovo di Colombo, Icaro Fornado (flute, percussion), and the then-violinist for Alan Sorrenti, the American Talia Toni Marcus, who years later would end up playing for Van Morrison.

Among the standout tracks is undoubtedly the opener “Io ti racconto”, which would become one of his classics and would later be re-recorded on the album Nove pezzi facili: a rapid, paranoid parade of existential flashes, between “people who no longer know how to make love” and “friends recruited at the pizzeria”, all daily immersed in the “neurosis of living with your eyes shut, in search of company”.

After this introductory prologue, the album splits into two parts, roughly corresponding to the two sides of the record: the three “Canzoni di morte” on side A are a bleak chronicle of marginal existences, touching on both personal matters (the aforementioned “La guerra è finita” and “Morire di leva”, dedicated to a Sicilian friend and centred on the scourge of soldier suicides in the barracks) and social ones, as in “Hai mai visto una città”, another grey snapshot of that “Angoscia metropolitana” dense with alienation and loneliness already narrated on the debut: opened by an initial arpeggio from Grossman, the song is then underpinned by Marcus's violin, which plays a kind of perpetual “lament”.

Side B is more optimistic (so to speak), although it opens with “Un uomo in crisi”, which, despite the title, turns out to be one of the liveliest tracks on the record, with Grossman's driving fingerpicking punctuated at the end by Marcus's violin. There's also room for three “Canzoni di vita”, in search of a way out of the tunnel entered up to that point: the solution, Lolli argues, may lie in the search for our deepest selves (“Un uomo nascosto”, almost Cohen-esque in its acoustic sweetness, between piano chimes and violin inserts), in political commitment (“Quello lì”, which tells the story of Antonio Gramsci as a student in Turin, seen through the eyes of a neighbour), and in the courage to take one's own life in hand and change it (“La giacca”, again with Volpini's piano to the fore). The closing “Un bel mattino” ends on a chiaroscuro note, where the resurgence of Side A's nihilism is countered by the note of hope in the final line: “Ma oggi amore dobbiamo andare, giù nella strada, dobbiamo lottare”.

At over 50 minutes long, Un uomo in crisi. Canzoni di morte. Canzoni di vita would turn out to be one of the longest Italian LPs of the period. What it lacks, however, are catchy, instant-hook refrains, the kind of songs that work as slogans. As a result, it would remain above all a cult object for fans of the Bologna singer-songwriter, quickly fading into obscurity for (almost) everyone else. The record is also tied to the legend of a supposed EMI press release describing a “Lolli who never smiles, swallowed up by a hopeless world, laden with pessimism (…) that leaves little room for feeling, so intent is he on suffering a universal alienation that forecloses any hope for the future”. A text that — as Jonathan Giustini recalls in “La terra, la luna e l’abbondanza” — no one has ever actually seen, but which for a long time pinned Lolli down to the stereotype of the sad, melancholy singer-songwriter. A rather damaging label, all things considered.

For the follow-up, Canzoni di rabbia (1975), the Emilian singer-songwriter felt the need for a change of musical direction. For the arrangements he brought in Ettore De Carolis, a musician and musicologist already known in the Sixties as a member of the psychedelic group Chetro & Co, and later a collaborator of Guccini, Alunni del Sole and Alan Sorrenti. The main novelty is above all the addition of Giorgio Battistelli's percussion to the guitars of Roberto Picchi and Lolli himself, but unusual instruments also come into play, such as the flugelhorn, xylophone, piccolo and saz (a sort of Arabic bouzouki), as well as the “violaccia”, a 6- and 10-string instrument invented by De Carolis himself from an existing cello body. De Carolis's wife, Donatina Furlone, also takes part on the record as a backing vocalist.

Lyrically, however, the themes of the previous two records return. Hence “Viaggio”, which opens with unusual major chords and plays out as a wrenching clash between the urge to live and to leave and nostalgia for a lost past, before closing with the reprise “Viaggio di ritorno”, amid the “soft and swift” fog enveloping Turin. And then there's the anti-clericalism of “Prima comunione”, a bitter outburst against the suffocating bigotry of the 1950s (“E quello grigio e stonato ero io, nel giorno triste in cui cominciò a sanguinare il mio conto col dio, nel giorno triste che non scorderò”).

Also resurfacing is the unease of loneliness, including that of “Vent'anni”, which are “rabbia, sete e acqua salata” — as he sings over an arpeggiated guitar — along with a De André-style pacifism, à la “La ballata dell’eroe”, in “Al milite ignoto”, the story of a soldier killed in war whose unidentified body is chosen to be buried in the tomb of the unknown soldier. Among the first Italian songs to tackle the subject, the etno-folk of “Dalle capre” instead takes on the thorny issue of life in prison, through the parable of a shepherd who comes from tending goats to stand guard “ad un compare per un po’ di vino e pane”, sealing one of the record's finest achievements.

But there's also room for a love song dedicated to the “Donna di fiume”, a mythical maiden “negata ai beati”, who drags you along in her currents and carries you down into the depths of love, lighting up the darkness of loneliness (“la dolcezza preziosa che nascondi tra i denti è la ridicola e meravigliosa discesa, di un uomo che impara a non morire da solo”). It's only the first of many aching love ballads to come, such as “Io ti faccio del male”, “Dita”, “Tutte le lingue del mondo”, “Come ho fatto a stare tanto senza te”, “L’amore è una metamorfosi”. So much for the singer-songwriter incapable of making room for feeling, as painted in that clumsy EMI press draft.

Closing out Canzoni di rabbia is a harsh yet contradictory personal outburst, one that catches in the throat, contained within the lines of “Compagni a venire”: “Potrò mai perdonare al vostro amore stanco il piacere segreto di una notte lontana, che mi ha sbattuto in un mondo extravaginale senza nemmeno chiedersi se preferissi nascere o la morte gloriosa di un aborto illegale” — Lolli asks himself, taking aim also at his friends and his few women, and at “the God who doesn't exist”, and finally at himself and his own rage, “cruel as a sea that overwhelms ships and drowns fishermen”, but closing on something close to an act of contrition: thanks to the “unknown comrades, always ready to offer love and wine” even though “lost in this world, not built to the measure of man, nor of woman, nor even of a child”. It's the bittersweet farewell of a sharp, uncompromising, in some ways extreme record, closing out the first phase of Lolli's career, the one marked by a bare, essential folk sound.

La terra, la luna e l’abbondanza

When he releases the album I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies on April 7, 1976, Lolli is no longer the irreverent kid strumming hymns to action (“Aspettando Godot”) and class struggle (“Borghesia”), or pining nostalgically over childhood memories (“Michel”). He's a twenty-six-year-old man who, in the midst of the Years of Lead, when it was easy to “find yourself only at funerals” (“Piazza, bella piazza”) and when Montanelli was urging people to “hold their nose and vote DC”, manages to lucidly capture the anguish of a country where “people die from bombs, people die from massacres”, the latest being the Italicus bombing that still “burns in the blood” (“Agosto”) — without ever losing, however, the urge to fly, to savour the childlike happiness of those gypsies rolling around on the ground in Piazza Maggiore, to reclaim “that sweetness we're all entitled to” (as De Gregori sang on “La campana”, another anthem-song of those years). Because, unlike other “political” singer-songwriters of the time, Lolli knows how to touch the chords of a throbbing, candid emotion. The kind that whispers in your ear: “Riprendiamoci la vita, la terra, la luna e l’abbondanza”. In the end, that's really all there is to it.

The record was conceived, in effect, as a concept album, or even as a single long ballad, structured into seven different chapters plus a final reprise of the first, all tied together by the idea of the piazza as the ancient agora, a meeting place of every kind and a litmus test of the Italy of those years. Specifically, Bologna's Piazza Maggiore — a crossroads of ideas and loves, assemblies and demonstrations, but also the setting for dramatic funerals such as that for the victims of the Italicus bombing — appears to Lolli as “an open space, a powerful spur to concrete political action, a new way of coming together that is neither contrived nor frustrating”. And this sense of freedom also translates musically into a far more anarchic and complex score, one that doesn't hold back from airy arrangements with a whiff of progressive rock and forays into jazz, with frequent tenor and alto saxophone solos (both courtesy of Danilo Tomasetta). An ambitious project, conceived “like a puzzle”, together with the Collettivo Autonomo Musicisti di Bologna after six months of concerts. But, of course, also a political project, including the then-revolutionary choice to force EMI into a lower price (3,500 lire instead of the usual 5,000).

An aching sax gives the send-off to the finest “Introduzione” in Italian song: the nearly seven minutes of “I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies”, a reference to an old Yugoslav film (“Skupljači perja”) “that Fantozzi would have treated far worse than the ‘Battleship Potemkin'”, as Lolli himself jokes in the liner notes to the remastered 2006 CD edition. The spine-tingling lyrics are matched by ravishing melodies that recall Lolli's love for the Beatles, and equally evocative arrangements, where delicate fingerpicking alternates with refined horn inserts and even a robust electric guitar solo. And then there's that voice, warm and charged with emotion, which lays us bare with its truths:

È vero che dalle finestre

we can't see the light

because night always wins over day

and night produces no blood…

It's true that we don't want to change/ our winter into summer…

It's true that the road often feels like hell to us

and a voice in which we can't stay together

where we never recognize our brothers

Lolli's humanism is no abstract lyricism. It's a song of hope addressed to all those "happy gypsies," free and non-conformist, who didn't want to pay "the price of having no fault," except that of wanting to change the world: the flower of the youth of the Seventies, burning with revolutionary passion and ready to embrace the exhortation of the final four verses of the closing reprise ("Conclusione"), freely reworked from Peter Weiss's "Cantata del fantoccio lusitano": “Siamo noi a far ricca la terra/ noi che sopportiamo/ la malattia del sonno e la malaria… Ma riprendiamola in mano, riprendiamola intera/ riprendiamoci la vita/ la terra, la luna e l’abbondanza”. A text that denounced Portuguese colonialism in Angola, which Lolli turns into a universal anthem to liberation and brotherhood.

Hope, then, but also outrage: on August 4, 1974, Lolli is on vacation with his girlfriend when the Italicus train is blown up. Twelve dead and fifty wounded in a massacre destined to vanish into the foggy harbor of Italy's unsolved mysteries. "Agosto" is a re-evocation of that "fistful of rage with the terrible sound of an old blast." A lucid, unflinching text ("People die in massacres/ more or less state-sanctioned"), hastily filed away, just like the case of anarchist Pinelli's death in Milan ("nothing has changed/ since that fourth floor at police headquarters/ since that window"). Just as dramatic, despite its fairy-tale inspiration drawn from a popular Tuscan nursery rhyme, is "Piazza, bella piazza": the coffins of ten Italicus victims lined up on the steps of San Petronio, before the stiff, upright profiles of Bologna's mayor Renato Zangheri, President of the Republic Giovanni Leone, and Christian Democrat secretary Amintore Fanfani. And in Piazza Maggiore outrage builds: "I could have done without Leone/ someone was heard shouting/ nothing but jeers for those pigs/ we're tired of only meeting/ at funerals," sings Lolli, "fists in his pockets" and fiery words in his holster, against those "bald heads, politicians/ five feet tall without wings." The uprisings of '77 were right around the corner.

But the first conflict to deal with, in those turbulent years, was within the family walls: “Primo maggio di festa oggi nel Viet-Nam/ e forse in tutto il mondo/ primo maggio di morte oggi a casa mia/ ma forse mi confondo”. A liberated Saigon has the "taste of the sun" but also a bitter aftertaste of family misunderstandings ("maybe it's my father, I'm confused") amid the sax flourishes of "Primo maggio di festa." And the mind runs to the "ingrates of French prosperity" of another May, the one sung by Fabrizio De André in "Storia di un impiegato" three years earlier. The young Lolli too sings of the disorder of dreams, but he can do without slogans: his vocabulary thrives on mad hares and maize on the plateau, on the smell of embers and dying flies, on blood in the eyes and toothpaste clashing with wine. And on legendary figures like "Anna di Francia," who "kisses the square and then leaves" and "toasts to her own anarchy" — a sentimental foray of aching sweetness and feminist nobility, in which Lolli goes so far as to promise:

I won't be a clock for you

the chandelier that takes off your bra

when it's late, it's night and you're tired

and your desire, like time, is lacking

I won't be a tax collector for you

of a tear twenty-one times a month

I won't count the days by your moons

to make love without expense reimbursement

And amid such intimate verses, there's also a jab at the cultural conflicts of the left (“e Luigi Nono è un coglione/ l’alternativa nella cultura/ non è solo ideologia/ l’alternativa è organizzazione”). "More beautiful than mad," Anna di Francia is the passionate heroine of that generation's dreams, and perhaps of all of ours: the sublimation of feminine freedom and elusiveness.

But it's not just words: the strength of I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies also lies in a whirlwind of musical intuitions flowing seamlessly into one another, with themes cyclically returning in alternation, as tradition dictates for concept albums. So it's again a languid sax that introduces the epitaph of "La morte della mosca," in which Lolli chooses one of the smallest and most unpleasant creatures in the universe as a metaphor for social injustice: “Le mosche procurano noia/ se volano a schiera unita/ da sole non danno fastidio/ si schiacciano dentro due dita”, closing with a line stronger than a thousand slogans:

Alle mosche rimane la merda

il cielo appartiene ai potenti

This is precisely Lolli's secret: shooting straight for the heart, stripping ideology of its dusty shroud and turning it into living, pulsating flesh, through simple yet touching images, like that Albana - a white wine from Romagna that "hadn't been drunk since '68" - capable of uniting "the old left and the new," reassuring the elderly comrade who "goes around with a red handkerchief and a photo of Togliatti" ("Albana per Togliatti," a parable of generational confrontation and the eternal rifts within the left).

Memories, dreams, anxieties, despair, idealism, passion: everything converges in the verses of this sweeping anti-blockbuster of a song, which remains its author's biggest commercial success (over a hundred thousand copies sold in no time) but perhaps only recently has begun to receive the recognition it deserves, helped also by tributes from new generations of artists. In 2003 it was reworked into a live version with new arrangements by Il Parto delle Nuvole Pesanti. In 2009 Luca Carboni and Riccardo Sinigallia recorded a cover of the second part of "I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies" (on the CD "Musiche ribelli"). And Rolling Stone Italy placed the album at no. 67 in its ranking of the 100 greatest Italian records of all time.

At the time, though, it didn't go much further than a few spins on the fledgling free radio stations, becoming above all a banner for the sprawling Movimento Studentesco and for the groups of the extra-parliamentary left, of whom Lolli was by then the chronicler. A modest success that nonetheless pushed the Emilian singer-songwriter to undertake a long tour with the same musicians from the album.

At this point, however, something breaks: Lolli decides not to renew his contract with Emi and to move to Ultima Spiaggia, the alternative label founded two years earlier by Nanni Ricordi and Ricky Gianco, with a roster that brought together young talents like Ivan Cattaneo and unorthodox singer-songwriters like Gianfranco Manfredi and Enzo Jannacci. "My contract with Emi had expired," Lolli would recall, "and I was curious to change environment. I wanted to find greater involvement, a closer harmony between my ideas and those of the label. I was looking for a more congenial environment, closer to me, I wanted to be more inside things."

Farewell to '77

The fruit of this new partnership is Disoccupate le strade dai sogni (1977), in which Lolli keeps the multicolored framework of its predecessor, granting great freedom of action to his musicians, those of the Bologna collective "La Cicala": Piergiorgio Bonafè on winds, Marcello Castellana on keyboards, Roberto Costa on bass and trombone, Bruno Mariani on guitars, Adriano Pedini on drums (some of them would later also take part in the prog-rock project Orchestra Njervudarov).

In the full climate of '77, amid a mixture of chaos, euphoria and terror, Lolli opts for an anarchic musical format, where the singer-songwriter's lexicon weds bolder, more experimental sounds, with injections of prog and free jazz: "Everything was so agitated that we chose music that was equally agitated, unconventional," he would explain. "The first side is a kind of suite, I really liked this idea of going beyond the song format."

But while the Zingari record sounded vital and overflowing, Disoccupate le strade dai sogni comes across as grey and apocalyptic, like the sky over Bologna in those days of 1977. A city shaken by the events of March 11th, when at the University, amid the unrest that broke out during a student demonstration, a carabiniere shot and killed Francesco Lorusso, 24, a medical student and militant of Lotta Continua. The tragedy sparked serious street clashes and looting, prompting Interior Minister Cossiga to send in armored vehicles. The atmosphere, in short, was leaden, and it's reflected in the album, even though most of the tracks had been written before March 1977 (two of them - "Autobiografia industriale" and "Canzone scritta su un muro" - date back to the Zingari sessions).

Lolli draws from it a prophetic conclusion: the end of dreams, the defeat of an entire generation. Implicitly evoked in the opening "Alba meccanica" - with its sequence of bass lines and its jazzy piano dress converging into the alienation of the lyrics - it bursts out in all its disillusionment in "Incubo numero zero," an unnerving recitative, tied more to rhythm than melody, with a long sequence of chords rising by a semitone each time:

Disoccupate le strade dai sogni

They're cumbersome, useless, alive

And let the rats and the garbage be placed under arrest

We'll decentralize the cheese and the archives

Disoccupate le strade dai sogni

To contain them more effectively

We can supply you with photocopies of a check

A fake diploma, a wallet, a briefcase

The realignment, the restoration, shows no mercy, smothering every instinct, including the sexual one (“As of today masturbation is forbidden/ Lambro and lambrusco dressed in black… Let no one catch you hiding to make love”). Accompanied by disorienting psych-jazz improvisations for horns and guitars, Lolli makes his way through an unsettling gallery of horrors, which even finds room for the German journalist and terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, “made to commit suicide” in Stuttgart prison in 1976. Faced with the prospect of the “clean, industrious paradise of our new (social)democracy”, the bewildered poet can only conclude: “It's true that the day smelled of dirt”. Words that sound almost quaint today, in an age of far more aggressive and dangerous nationalisms, but for the extra-parliamentary left of the time, the real bogeyman was precisely that supposed normalization, restated in the sarcastic little march of “La socialdemocrazia”, a “headless monster” that only seems reassuring, because in the end it's “that dwarf who arrests you”. All that's left, then, is to start over from the meaning of words (the Weather Report-style jazz-fusion of “Analfabetizzazione”) in order to break free from one's roots (“La mia madre l’ho chiamata sasso/ perché fosse duratura sì/ ma non viva”) and resume the journey toward freedom (“I miei amici li ho chiamati piedi/ perché ero felice solo/ quando si partiva”), without letting oneself be constrained by pre-established dogmas:

I never had a quiet, servile alphabet

I always turned the pages with fire

No teacher was ever so good

as to breathe in my oxygen and my play…

Merging, confusing, remelting

and finally refounding

the alphabet of life

on stones of honey

of beauty

Pure poetic subversion, from a Lolli who dreams of refounding the alphabet of life by playing with words, flying beyond ideological fences. Because, as Postorino again reminds us, “it was poetry, before politics, it was the ability to capture the human condition, eternal and universal, made of abuse and betrayal and injustice, yet also of unexpected flashes of candor, even before any gaze on History in its contingency”. Thus even the far-sighted appeal addressed to the Movement's “comrades” in “Attenzione” takes on visionary poetic shades: “Attenzione che non ci ritroviamo con la testa di un serpente incapace di strisciare/ tra i fori ancora aperti di un’idea… Attenzione che non ci troviamo una mattina per le strade/ a raccontarci le nostre storie di bambini nati morti”. An uncertainty that is also reflected on the emotional level in the poignant “Canzone dell'amore o della precarietà”, which closes side A by capturing the fragility of a love hanging on “the carousel of the strange breath of this distracted, interrupted life”.

Less cohesive, side B nonetheless reveals excellent tracks, such as the melancholic “Canzone scritta sul muro”, which sets against the empty social amusements (“the carnival of a city under the weight of a tremendous happiness”) “poor, bare words, but free like lonely girls”, or the sarcastic “Autobiografia Industriale”, which pillories the aridity of the major record labels, recalling his first steps in Emi's studios over an insistent musical backdrop driven by piano and percussion: “Viva le tette dell’industria culturale/ tette opulente e dissetanti/ ma in definitiva un po’ troppo pesanti”. It's one of his most entertaining lyrics, full of moments of biting self-irony, from the business of the voice “full of spiders, crabs and frogs” to the description of that somewhat overambitious young singer-songwriter (“At that time I was still waiting for Godot, that is, I was waiting for death so I could say I would be reborn… but Godot never came, he goes about his own business, and it's better that way, for both of us”) and probably out of place (“of everyone, I was the silliest, the only one who took himself seriously and still ended up feeling bad about it”).

And while “Da zero e dintorni” is dedicated to a friend standing on the edge of the abyss, the closing “I giornali di marzo” – the only track written after Lorusso's death – picks up the thread of that tragic affair through a tragicomic pastiche of articles from Resto del Carlino and Repubblica published on March 11 and 12, 1977: it was on that very last day that police shut down Radio Alice, the Movement's free radio station, sealing the fierce repression of those grim days.

Reactions to the album were mixed, as Lolli himself recalls: “It caused a bit of bewilderment. It was judged difficult, obscure, too intellectual, strange. Time has rehabilitated it. Today I see it as an album inhabited by the melancholy of the shy. I sense something tragic in it (the way it can be tragic to watch, from a street corner, the end of something you love), but a tragic quality that still has its own sense of belonging, its own tenderness, its own insolence, almost like love”.

Inevitably dated and inevitably misunderstood, Disoccupate le strade dai sogni would cost Lolli plenty of goodwill — even on the left — and earn him just as many unfair labels, from "turncoat" to "scythe-bearer of the dream" of '77. But at bottom it was simply testimony to the left's eternal, self-destructive fracture, a fate that has repeated itself for decades regardless of political and social change. After that stark de profundis, branded on its cover by a "clown Christ" played by Roberto Manfredi, scythe in hand, the Bologna singer-songwriter himself would also gradually drift away from the Movement. As he would later recall about the "Convegno sulla repressione", held in Bologna in September 1977: "One evening a band called Centro d'Urlo Metropolitano played — I believe that's where Skiantos and Gaznevada came from. It was an emblematic situation: we found ourselves playing together on the shared basis of belonging to the movement, but I — as a musical expression — represented the past, while they represented the future."

Meanwhile, Lolli was thinking about putting together a live album, but Ultima Spiaggia (nomen omen!) went under, and the project was shelved.

Long live the boobs of the culture industry: back to Emi

So, well aware that "as a product, I haven't done all that well — Jagermeister certainly sells a lot more than me" ("Autobiografia industriale"), Lolli buries the hatchet with the record industry and returns to the Emi banner, for which he releases Extranei in April 1980. The title is anything but accidental: "We no longer knew each other, and when we ran into one another we'd ask: 'Which group were you with?' In other words, we used the past tense, because the movement no longer existed." Closing out an era was the tragedy of Aldo Moro's kidnapping and murder: "We were looking for a no man's land," the Bologna singer-songwriter would admit.

More detached from current events, with a calmer, more reflective mood than its two predecessors, the album still draws on the prog-flavored contribution of the Orchestra Njervudarov, though the arrangements are leaner, handled by Bruno Mariani and Danilo Tomasetta (except for "Il ponte", arranged by Roberto Costa).

The standout is above all "Come un dio americano", certainly the most engaging track of the set, with sinuous horns wrapping around a tender urban poem. The style of the happy Gypsy of Bologna remains as unmistakable as ever, but for the first time it opens up to other singer-songwriter influences: "I musicisti", for instance, winks at the jazzy nightclubs of Paolo Conte, while "Der Blaue Angel" recalls Lucio Dalla's "Settima Luna" with its driving pace and its division into 8 chapters.

Elsewhere, though, his anarchic wordplay (even breaking from the meter in the grotesque fable "La canzone del principe rospo"), his chronicles of family torment (the anguished father-son relationship revisited in "Double Face"), his literary flair and his free-jazz inflections ("Il muto", "Il ponte") once again attest to the uniqueness of a singular, uncompromising songwriting path — tempered, however, by a climate less chaotic and leaden than the turbulent Seventies (just listen to a track like "Non aprire mai" to sense the shift into a new decade).

Wringing out the verbosity of Seventies-era Lolli into just 37 minutes of jazzy nuances and literary invention, Extranei manages to entertain pleasantly, but it almost never bites the way its predecessors did.

In a decade when traditional singer-songwriter fare, the kind from the Sixties and Seventies, was starting to lose steam, Lolli stubbornly kept offering his own recipe of social reflection and intimate sketches, curled up in private introspection. Still, he had to reckon with new sounds and atmospheres. So on Antipatici antipodi (1983), its cover designed by Andrea Pazienza, a few synths and some electronic arrangements creep in, aiming to beef up his sound.

Overall, his approach seems more settled, more relaxed and composed. The result is a batch of soft, carefully carved songs, like the single "Notte americana", with which Lolli unveils fresh shreds of urban poetry and — believe it or not — overcomes his aversion to television, appearing on the set of Azzurro and even managing to win that bizarre competition, with the "Farfalla" team, alongside other Emi artists (team captains Alice and Nada, plus Franco Battiato, Lou Colombo, Garbo, Richie Havens, Giusto Pio and Peter Tosh).

Along the same soft lines is the title track, with fine guitar and sax solos, and a moving closing passage:

Davanti a me una vecchia donna dolce mi offre un panino pieno d'insalata

io la ringrazio e poi mi fa un segno

c'è una ginestra sulla massicciata

The mournful "Torquato", on the other hand, is the first warning against that "terrible cancer of indifference" to which Lolli would later dedicate his musical testament, The Big Chill, with lines that already seem addressed to a new generation: “La gioventù non è questione di anni/ Ma piuttosto di sassi nel cuore/ Se c’è una fionda si può sempre tirare/ E rompere i vetri, espropriando l’amore”.

Like Dalla (“Nuvolari”, “Ayrton”), Lolli too is drawn to the mythology of drivers “half men and half machines”, dedicating a poignant ode (with lyrics by Roberto Roversi, the very author of “Nuvolari”) to the tragic end of “Villeneuve”, the young man “who came from Canada” and whom “the air flipped over like a noble animal, led to the slaughter”.

While “L’uomo a fumetti” nails a sharp keyboard riff, other electronic touches feel less focused (“Non voglio mettermi il pigiama”, “Romantic Ballad”), making the man who waited for Godot seem a bit out of place in the decade of synths par excellence.

The professor in the no-man's-land between anguish and Gorbachev

In the same period (1983-’84) Lolli put together, with Gian Piero Alloisio, the show “Dolci promesse di guerra”, produced by Giorgio Gaber, in which the two singer-songwriters performed their most celebrated songs, trading a few pieces and singing “Come un dio americano” together.

Meanwhile Lolli graduated in Modern Literature (with a thesis on Elio Vittorini's “Menabò”) and began his “second life”: that of a high-school teacher, thus aligning his path with that of the other teacher-turned-singer-songwriter, Roberto Vecchioni.

No room, however, for politics: when in 1990 the mayor of Bologna, Renzo Imbeni (PCI), suggested he run in the local elections, Lolli agreed, but only on condition that he not be elected and without campaigning, simply to lend his support to the cause. He breathed a huge sigh of relief on discovering he was the first runner-up among the non-elected. And perhaps he kept a clear awareness that he was no longer much loved by his city, he, an atypical Bolognese, as Giustini recalls, “without the distinctive traits of the genetic type: generally jovial, cheerful, fairly well-fed”. In short, someone very different from the likes of Guccini, Dalla, Carboni...

No giving up on music, though. He wrote a few songs for a themed album about cinema that would never see the light of day (a couple of them – “Keaton” and “Ballando con una sconosciuta” – would later be recorded by Guccini), then released the new self-titled album Claudio Lolli (1988) with liner notes by Stefano Benni. A work in which his songwriting returns mainly to the guitar arpeggios and the spare arrangements of his early years, along with the occasional fleeting sax flourish.

Lyrically, however, Lolli remains an ace. Just take the existentialist sketch of “La fine del cinema muto”, where the subject of the title becomes a pretext to voice the bewilderment of these “old, barely photogenic actors full of melancholy” faced with a contemporary society that has put “Un idolo d’oro al posto del sole/ Un nuovo dio che non riusciamo a comprendere/ Né a descrivere con le parole/ Un dio moderno che tutti adorano/ E che regala vuoti di memoria/ Un dio impaziente e annoiato /Che sembra stanco della nostra storia”.

Lolli sings of the confusion of a disoriented generation, plunged into the “no-man's-land between anguish and Gorbachev” (“Aspirine”), where the only goal seems to be staying “together for at least ten weeks” (a clear nod to one of the decade's glossiest cult films, Adrian Lyne's “9 1/2 Weeks”). A malaise mirrored in romantic relationships, where “All the languages of the world aren't enough for us to understand each other, and the only language I have isn't enough to kiss you” (“Tutte le lingue del mondo”), or in his new world of school life, to which Lolli dedicates a small, poignant gem called “Via col vento”, where, starting from a dream/nightmare starring Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (“Stavo sognando Ronnie stamattina con Maggie in ‘Via col vento’ ad Hiroshima”), he questions his role as a teacher facing a new, innocent and fragile generation:

What will we talk about this morning

Marx or perhaps the ottava rima

or will we study

in the fog on the windows

the odds

of a future for the innocent

innocent as you are

vulgar saints and ignorant heroes

of a world that doesn't want, and yet will buy

your freedom

"Tempo perso" (nomen omen…) is instead proof of how uneasy Lolli can sound in contrived, forcibly uptempo settings.

After an unusual outing as a songwriter, penning "Segreteria telefonica" for Stadio (included on the Bolognese band's LP "Siamo tutti elefanti inventati"), Lolli released Nove pezzi facili (1992), his first album issued solely on CD, effectively an anthology featuring three songs in their original versions, three reworked, and three previously unreleased tracks: the mournful ballad for the young victims of the Tiananmen uprising, "Tien An Men"; the delicate "Vite artificiali" (another hymn to the will to live, even if suspended "tra le vite artificiali e le morti naturali"); and a musical setting of Cesare Pavese's poem "Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi". The album's title, meanwhile, is drawn from Bob Rafelson's film "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), from which the booklet reproduces a dialogue between Bobby (Jack Nicholson) and Catherine (Susan Anspach).

The Acrobat of Melancholy

From 1993 onward, Lolli went back to performing live with only maestro Paolo Capodacqua accompanying him on classical-electric guitar, alternating his best-known songs with lesser-known ones.

The following album, Intermittenze del cuore (1997), opens with a new political parable, "Curva Sud", in which football fandom is portrayed as the desperate palliative (“i cori, bestemmie infelici, della curva Sud/ e i disperati stanno male, soli/ e lontani anche dalle parole…”) of a sick, confused country sliding toward new forms of fascism ("Senti che aria di fasci stasera, stanotte… L'Italy è una macchina calda che va fuori strada, un processo alla moda, da un tempo lontano un saluto romano…").

But on the whole this is an increasingly melancholy Lolli, one who seeks refuge in "una rima baciata" ("Dita"), in the sweetness of an arpeggiated guitar or a piano's chime, without forgoing flashes of biting irony in spoken-word form, as when he asks his friend: “Ma dove vai a scopare, Ignazio/ Quando viene la sera/ Dopo la tua giornata morbida e pesante/ Come la crema pasticcera” ("Ignazio"), closing with the awareness that "è dura scopare, se non riusciamo a volerci bene, e non riusciamo a dimenticarci di questa guerra che viene". Arrangements reminiscent of a small-town dance hall conceal yet another bitter slice of a burned-out generation, for whom even the possibility of love seems out of reach.

A latter-day "Ulisse", "navigatore solitario che discende in canoa le intermittenze del cuore", Lolli watches the "Adriatico" from the window of a train bound for Vasto, turning it into the threatening metaphor of an advancing enemy (“Uno specchio lontano, statico/ E riflette il cielo poco sereno/ Di questi giorni da dimenticare/ Vissuti senza storia e il cuore/ Sotto il livello minimo del mare”), pausing to provocatively strike up a "Canzone di bassa lega" (with a disarming closing march in a Capossela-esque style ante litteram) and to recall "I musicisti di Ciampi", who "non gli volevano bene e lo accompagnavano così, senza passione, e mentre lui cantava e moriva, loro facevano la loro professione", unable to grasp his genius, "troppo strana e distruttiva". And even on one of his less striking albums, he still manages to move us, with that image of a Sunday spent with his son in Piazza Maggiore, which he invites us to share, should we find we can "davvero più a ridere, neanche all'ora del telegiornale" ("Il re dei piccioni")

Venite con me una domenica in piazza

nella piazza più bella del mondo

dove io sono nato, e dove ancora resisto

nonostante il mio sonno profondo

and you'll see my son, just think, my son!

A fishbone with two kind eyes

everyone knows him by now, because there he is the king

he's the King of the pigeons

So his proverbial melancholy triumphs once again, though - as Alioscia Castronovo points out - it "stems from an ongoing existential search for happiness, from the search to understand the other, their humanity, from empathy and from encountering the anxieties, miseries, frustrations and desires of different generations".

The Nineties close with Viaggio in Italy (1998), produced by Mimmo Locasciulli, in which the Bolognese singer-songwriter offers reworkings of old songs (from "I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies" to "Aspettando Godot", from "Michel" to "L'isola verde") and three new tracks ("L'amore ai tempi del fascismo", almost a prophecy of an Italy sinking into racism, hatred and fear of the other, plus "L'amore è una metamorfosi" and "Vorrei farti vedere la mia vita") as well as two songs ("Non conosco sorrisi" and "Come Fred Astaire") written and sung by his guitarist, Paolo Capodacqua.

But the real gem is "Keaton", in the version originally written by Lolli, before it was performed - and partly altered - by Guccini on "Signora Bovary" (1987): another example of his understated, dreamlike songwriting, dedicated to an eccentric pianist who "never smiled", as brilliant in his craft as he was disastrous in life, with whom Lolli felt he formed a pair of "acrobats of melancholy". But the mind naturally drifts to the other Keaton, Buster, melancholically heading toward the sunset, toward "the end of silent cinema". And, once again, it all comes full circle.

In 1998, the Bolognese singer-songwriter finally received his first major recognition: the Piero Ciampi Lifetime Achievement Award. Just in time, before the end of that twentieth century which he had managed to narrate in his own way, from his marginal and partisan viewpoint, yet always so human and universal. And it was precisely to the narrowly avoided apocalypses of the "short century" that he would dedicate a monologue on Luca Bonaffini's album "Il ponte dei maniscalchi" (1999).

Brecht and the lowly of the world

Lolli returns in the new Millennium with his usual stubbornly mocking, contrarian smirk. That of someone who always feels he's Dalla parte del torto (2000), as he titles his new album, drawing on a line from Bertolt Brecht quoted on the inner sleeve ("since all the other seats were already taken, we sat on the side of the wrong"). The tracklist features some reworked classics (including "Borghesia" alongside Gang, with that "perhaps" appearing between the words "the wind" and "will sweep you away"), four new songs and, serving as a dividing point, a reading by the poet Gianni D'Elia commenting on the old album I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies.

Decades go by and the Bolognese professor stays right there, consistent and unchanging, always ready to wage his quixotic battle against the horrors and injustices of the world. No matter if there's little to be done against windmills: "We'll always be right there, sitting on the side of the wrong, with the lowly of our world, simply because that's who we are and we like the lowly: children, the old, the poor, thieves, gypsies, addicts", as Lolli himself explains alongside the release.

But the good news is above all seeing him fly, light and nimble, once more among the hushed notes of his poetry-songs, increasingly spoken and whispered, amid refined, minimal arrangements: Capodacqua's guitars, with their liquid, dreamlike shimmer, scattered touches of added electric guitar, programming and keyboards by Diego Michelon, and nothing more. That's how the poignant "Nessun uomo è un uomo qualunque" comes to life, asserting the nobility of every life (“Nessun uomo è un uomo qualunque/ il suo corpo può essere pieno/ di un amore cercato da tanto/di un amore pensato di corsa/di un amore che non perde il treno”), or the other nostalgic ode dedicated to the legendary "Folkstudio", the Roman temple of 70s singer-songwriting, where "people in the end want to move their feet/and climb mountains truly higher than you/who remain, breath reeking of wine/blowing against the windows".

And Lolli keeps breathing out his verses with delicacy, scattering thoughts and clues, building new imaginary testaments, like that of the title track, in which he almost seems to reassure his unwavering fans:

For you my enchanted heart will always be there

perhaps melancholic but never resigned

a caress to the moon, to the stars

and a ball on the grass

A fierce promise, to be kept to his last breath, even if "Il mondo è fatto a scale", as he reaffirms in a dazzling folk number with a catchy rhythm and a sardonic lyric.

Overall, Dalla parte del torto turns out to be one of the most inspired records of Lolli's recent output, celebrating and, at the same time, renewing the cult around one of the most uncompromising singer-songwriters in our musical history.

Il bisogno orizzontale

Meanwhile, Claudio Lolli also carries on a parallel career as a writer, both of prose and poetry, as well as that of a teacher (he will teach until retirement at the Liceo scientifico Leonardo Da Vinci in Casalecchio di Reno), without neglecting his music: between 2002 and 2007, he tours Italy also offering a reinterpretation of his classic Ho visto anche degli zingari felici together with the Calabrian band Il Parto delle Nuvole Pesanti.

In 2002 he also releases the live album La terra, la luna e l'abbondanza, bundled with the eponymous book by Jonathan Giustini, published by Stampa Alternativa, which offers a fully rounded portrait of his poetics.

With his usual prophet's beard and flowing (if thinning) hair on the cover, in 2006 Lolli renews his eternal fixation with an album of entirely new material, La scoperta dell'America. "An existential record", as he calls it. Just as existential, almost a place of the soul, is the America that surfaces and vanishes within its grooves.

It's another manifesto of his placid, trembling songwriting, where his "reciting songs" still takes center stage, enriched by curious arrangements that are never banal: lean and sinuous on the opening "Majakovskij e la scoperta dell'America" – between piano, guitars, synth and an intense sax solo – almost folktronic on "L'eterno canto dell'uomo", dedicated to the tragedy of the Sarno flood, more intensely electric on the tender "Piccola storia di un dio", set to music by Capodacqua.

But what truly sets the record alight are above all the Professor's poetic flashes, soaring freely between love and politics, backed by sax flourishes, on the splendid, almost "Fossati-esque" "Bisogno orizzontale":

Certo che ho bisogno di te

del mare nero, criminale

Delle tue onde che mi piegano

in un gioco naturale

Certo che ho bisogno di te

carta da lucido e da giornale

And my need for you

is a horizontal need

More verbose are the talking-folk à la De Gregori of "Nuovo carcere paradiso" and the neo-partisan ballad "Poco di buono", while a dry sense of compassion pervades "Le rose di Pantani", where a slender refrain and synthetic strings accompany the celebration of the defeated, marginalized champion, built in parallel with the dynamics of repression that marked the tragic end of Pier Paolo Pasolini ("the murdered author of Scritti corsari").

It closes with "Medley con Rumori di rosa", a reading taken from a book of poems by Lolli ("Rumori di rosa" - Stampa Alternativa).

Not everything runs smoothly, because it's true - as Giustini writes - that at times Lolli "overloads his songs with meaning, fixating on theoretical correctness and losing immediacy, simplicity, spontaneity". True, but only in part and only for the second half of his career, since more often it was the superficiality of the reception that dispersed the disruptive potential of his verses.

The following year Lolli took part in the making of Andrea Parodi's second album, "Soldati", singing on the track "Per non sentirsi soli". Then, in 2008, he received a tribute from Luca Carboni and Riccardo Sinigallia, with a successful cover of the second part of "I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies". The track, included on Carboni's album "Musiche ribelli", was paired with a video in which Lolli himself appeared alongside the authors. Sinigallia would also bring the song to the Sanremo Festival 2014, during the covers night, together with Paola Turci and Marina Rei.

Next came Lovesongs (2009), which celebrates Lolli's sentimental side, revisiting the finest love songs of his repertoire, with contributions from his faithful collaborator Capodacqua and saxophonist Nicola Alesini.

A year later, the Bologna singer-songwriter was embraced by a new generation of fans, taking part in the May Day Concert, where he opened his set with "Primo maggio di festa" itself. He also kept bringing his reading performances to the stage, like a modern beatnik and concrete poet, never taking himself too seriously - if anything, marking the distance from himself with a touch of (self-)irony. And he never failed to lend his support to social and political causes: on 25 September 2010 he played at the Forum Sociale Antimafia del Nord, following the demonstration commemorating Peppino Impastato and the naming of the Ponteranica library; on 19 July 2012 he performed in Brolo at a gathering in memory of Paolo Borsellino, alongside numerous figures from Italian entertainment and music. On 29 August 2012 he returned to Sicily, performing at the Lido dei Ciclopi in Acitrezza, a property confiscated from the mafia. On 16 April 2014, he was among the guests of We Love Freak, a concert in honour of Roberto "Freak" Antoni, who had died two months earlier.

The Tears of Our Rage

Almost as a surprise, after an eight-year recording hiatus, came the new album, The Big Chill (2017), with which he would finally win the Targa Tenco. It seems incredible, then, that the record could only be released thanks to crowdfunding (on becrowdy.com). A paradox so striking it almost overshadows the main one: the fact that a master like Lolli had to wait 45 years into his career to receive the most prestigious award reserved for our singer-songwriters.

To once again unveil his poetic universe, the Bologna professor borrowed the title of a famous Lawrence Kasdan film that became a metaphor for the entire 1980s. "The Big Chill", however, is not just the springboard for a new bittersweet generational portrait, tinged with melancholy and disenchantment. It is above all a positive distillation of life stories, born at the rough tables of a tavern, where in Bologna "decisions get made". The whole record plays on the contrast between the cold outside (a mirror of today's indifferent society) and the warmth of this close-knit group of friends, an intimate, familial refuge that Lolli chose to extend to the musicians themselves, bringing back the core of the Zingari Felici: Danilo Tomasetta (horns) and Roberto Soldati (guitar).

The long break allowed the Bologna singer-songwriter to bring into sharp focus a clear snapshot of our times, from a mature perspective, disheartened yet serene at the same time. As in the artwork's drawings - created by Salento artist Enzo De Giorgi - Lolli's touch remains light, never giving in to the easy temptations of cynicism or political polemic, even when reckoning with the end of a collective utopia of which he was both protagonist and chronicler: "The fact is I no longer dream, and I should", he accuses himself amid the sinuous horns of "Non chiedere".

Even though life (just like death) "has a sports guide", Lolli always sings in a soft, caressing voice, gradually dissolving that great cold which "can only be melted by the tears of our rage", as he prophesies in the splendid title track, amid soft piano chimes and Tomasetta's ever-refined sax phrasing:

And how much love lost on the buses

In this circus of different people

For whom life is just a struggle

Ma è troppo spesso una battaglia persa

Una grande mondo sicuramente non bello

Ma fatto di briciole di tanti amori

Un grande freddo che si può sciogliere

Solo con le lacrime dei nostri furori

His delivery often settles into a soft talking style, enunciating the words, underscoring the melodies, freezing the moment, even when everything rushes by frantically, as in "La fotografia sportiva" (driven by a hypnotic bass line and inspired by Bolognese photojournalist Roberto Serra).

Anyone smitten with the prodigious instrumental openings of "Zingari felici" will find that same taste for improvisation, for free-flying flight, for instance in the sudden, searing woodwind and electric guitar solos that tear through "400000 colpi", where the tribute to Truffaut becomes a pretext for a reflection on loneliness ("alone like when Jean Pierre Léaud reaches the sea"). He's the first in a series of disillusioned characters forced to reckon with this condition of isolation: the fighter in "Sai com'è" (the posthumous letter of the partisan Giovanni to his wife Nori), "Gli uomini senza amore", set to a bossa nova rhythm, the "Prigioniero politico" (a chiaroscuro electric self-portrait), and the women honoured in the ironic "Principessa Messamale", which recalls the lyrical flashes of "Anna di Francia", confirming Lolli's skill, unmatched by few, in portraying the female universe - in this case through the perhaps somewhat flabby figure of a decadent prostitute who has devoted her entire existence to serving others.

It closes with the Lolli-esque crew gathered in his bunker, the recording studio, watching a "Raggio di sole", wondering whether the great cold can ever truly be defeated: a reading inlaid with woodwinds and acoustic guitar arpeggios that brings the album to its most moving conclusion (complete with a quote from De André: “Non so se tutti morimmo a stento”). Because no one like Lolli knows that there are never any definitive answers, but that if "it's true we don't understand each other, that the two of us never speak the same language", there's no other way out than to recover our lost feelings: "Quanto amore sprecato negli autobus, tra gente che potrebbe volersi bene" - as the album's brilliant opening line puts it.

For anyone who has always loved Lolli, it's impossible to stay unmoved by this noble, majestic parting shot. There's pride in his nostalgia, because, unlike Gaber, the Bolognese songwriter is convinced that, in some way, his generation won. Tearing down barriers, conventions, authoritarianisms. Yet there's no nostalgic rejection of the present in his lyrics. On the contrary, he declares loudly that "stopping the crazy pressing of unhappiness" is only possible "with the great wonder of what's new" ("La fotografia sportiva"). Also because "growing old is fine, yes, but growing up, never" ("Non chiedere"). And so Lolli's poetic lesson proves burningly relevant once again. Unique, in depth, substance and irony, within the - frankly unexciting - landscape of today's Italian singer-songwriter scene. Perhaps, then, it's no coincidence, nor merely a lifetime achievement award: that Targa Tenco, paired with the naïve artwork of The Big Chill, fits perfectly.

Unfortunately, though, it will also remain Claudio Lolli's final musical testament. Suffering from cancer for many years, the Bolognese singer-songwriter died on 17 August 2018 at the age of 68 after a sudden illness, leaving behind his wife Marina and sons Federico and Tommaso, and plunging his devoted fans into grief - though they have never missed an occasion to keep paying tribute to him. Even his mentor and friend Francesco Guccini paid him a moving tribute, in an interview for his eightieth birthday: "I was very close friends with Claudio Lolli, a great poet, a truly great songwriter, better than me. His only misfortune was never managing to win over the public."

Personally, I will never forget the interview he gave me in 2014, that voice always soft and courteous, just like his songs, but also that irony, sharp and tender at once. "I hope your next record comes out, and that maybe, with the occasion, someone will rediscover your old songs too", I said as I took my leave. "I like your optimism", he replied, with a smile I will always imagine hidden beneath his thick white beard.

Who knows whether time will be kind to this acrobat of melancholy, who grew old with pride between semi-clandestine poems and passionate lessons at the high school desk. Who knows whether one day it will finally be possible to read his work stripped of political prejudice and labels that refuse to die. "Nowadays gypsies aren't looked upon kindly, we have an imposed price, to survive we have to disguise ourselves as good people, but you can't lie about our smile", he wrote in 2006, in the liner notes for the reissue of his masterpiece. We will always picture him there, at his table in the tavern. Invariably seated on the wrong side of the argument.

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