Edoardo Bennato - The Roads of Rock Are Endless

We fans are often ungrateful creatures, with little empathy for those we should, deep down, be thankful to - if nothing else, for having produced five minutes of noteworthy music in their artistic career, which is already far more than 99% of us armchair critics could ever manage in our own lives. Yet even with an artist of absolute worth like Edoardo Bennato, who has given us dozens of unforgettable songs and whole albums of the highest caliber, we tend to indulge a kind of resentment toward his supposed "downward arc", as if it were some scandal that a musician, once he stops interesting us, should dare to carry on with his career - perhaps even finding growing success with the masses, while we, puffed up with self-importance, drag on through our own sad, anonymous existences.

Often, too, it's our judgments about the present that get in the way of properly assessing the importance and impact that this or that artist had in the past - and, by extension, on everything that followed. It's hard, for instance, to talk about Vasco Rossi without stirring up uncritical detractors, despite his undeniable merits, which they really ought to come to terms with. The issue is slightly different with Edoardo Bennato, who isn't subject to the same lazy midcult scorn as the man from Zocca, but who has nonetheless been relegated by critics for years to an unjustified state of neglect for an artist of his stature - while, far more importantly, the affection of his audience (still very substantial, even if not quite what it was between the Seventies and Eighties) has never wavered.

That said, it's undeniable that the Neapolitan singer-songwriter's innovative drive played out mainly over the decade running from 1973 (the year of his debut LP) to 1983 (when the ambitious but unresolved È arrivato un bastimento came out). Still, the sheer weight of his output from that period - prolific, too - is enough to make him one of the most important artists in Italian music from the postwar era to today, a figure who, alongside Ivan Graziani, helped steer the singer-songwriter tradition toward forms closer to rock, but with a distinctive style, a wide range of influences and, above all, an impatience with formal constraints that would make him the forefather of a whole breed of mavericks in our popular song, who, as it happens, all emerged between the mid- and late Seventies - from Rino Gaetano to the aforementioned Vasco Rossi, taking in Alberto Fortis, Eugenio Finardi, Alberto Camerini and Fausto Rossi along the way. But above all, "Edo" is the author of numerous songs that have become part of Italy's collective memory, and it's thanks to these that he'll be remembered for decades to come. Managing to combine popularity and quality, as he has done for so long, is a feat reserved exclusively for the greats.

The (biographical) notes are well known: Edoardo Bennato was born in Naples, in the Bagnoli district, in 1946… early musical experiences in a band formed with his brothers Giorgio and Eugenio – the latter destined for a brilliant career first as a member of Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare and later as a solo artist – the move to Milan in 1965 to study architecture, then the first contacts with the record industry.

In 1966 he recorded his first single for Parade, "Era solo un sogno/ Le ombre". More than the saccharine A-side, what stands out is the B-side, reportedly the first track ever recorded in Italy to feature harmonica. What's certainly unprecedented for our country is the iconic image on the back cover: Edo with an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder and a harmonica, like an American folksinger.

The single was no success, and for the following three years Bennato worked in the shadows, writing for Herbert Pagani and Bobby Solo, this time with good commercial results.

A new opportunity for his solo career came from record executive Alessandro Colombini (later one of the figures mentioned in the song "Rinnegato"), who brought him into the Numero Uno roster. For the label of Mogol and Battisti, he recorded three singles ("Marylou/ La fine del mondo", "1941/ Vince sempre l'amore" and "Goodbye Cophenagen/ Marjorie"), marked by an increasingly raw edge.

The turning point, however, came in 1973: Colombini, having fallen out with Numero Uno, moved to Ricordi, bringing Edoardo along with him. In the meantime, Bennato had gone through an experience that would prove decisive for his artistic evolution, busking as a one man band on the streets of London. The new label finally gave the singer-songwriter the chance to record his first LP.

Don't Give Up is a stellar debut: contrary to what the singer somewhat slyly claims in the song "Rinnegato", the break with the singer-songwriter tradition is not clean-cut, and the record features some wonderful ballads that would later become classics of his repertoire – despite the album's poor commercial performance – such as "Una settimana …un giorno" (recently turned into a hit in a cover by Velvet), "Campi Flegrei", "Lei non è qui, non è là" (lyrics by Bruno Lauzi) and above all "Un giorno credi", a poignant reflection on the gap between dream and reality, halfway between hope and disillusionment, with lyrics by Patrizio Trampetti of the group Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, closing on a brilliant allegory (“mentre tu sei l’assurdo in persona / e ti vedi già vecchio e cadente / raccontare a tutta la gente / del tuo falso incidente”).

America, meanwhile, starts peeking through in tracks with a marked blues approach like "Quando arriva il treno" or "Fiato sprecato", but the overall feel is of a record still moving within the groove of traditional Italian song. Except for that UFO placed right at the end: the aforementioned "Rinnegato", a percussive rock track, played with real power and accompanied by lyrics in which Edo affectionately mocks four of his friends and collaborators. The song unfolds over six minutes with a very long coda in which, for the first time, the singer makes extensive use of the stammers and verbal tics that would come to define his vocal style from then on.

In short, a record still largely looking to the past, but one in which the corner of the eye is already starting to turn toward the horizon.

That horizon is suddenly reached the following year with the release of the album The Good and the Bad. Actually, to be more precise, the revolution should be dated a few months earlier, to the release of the single "Salviamo il salvabile/ Ma che bella città". These are two acoustic tracks that have nothing to do with the "classic" Italian song tradition (whether pre- or post-Battisti), but seem to come, at least in their instinctive, headlong approach, from another world entirely, beyond the Channel or beyond the ocean. Journalist Manuel Insolera, in the February 1974 issue of "Ciao 2001", would call Bennato "the first authentically and genuinely punk Italian musician" (mind you, the "punk" movement didn't exist yet at the time, but the term had been used by Anglo-American critics since the start of the decade to describe garage bands or acts from the Detroit scene).

And the second LP confirms the approach and style set out by that trailblazing single: with a stripped-down lineup (often just himself) and using exclusively acoustic instruments, Bennato takes the singer-songwriter tradition out onto the street corners, thrashing the strings with frantic energy, enough to make you forget the absence of feedback altogether, and inventing a vocal delivery often completely detached from the rhythm, packed with sobs and orgasmic ad-libs never before attempted in Italy (one can picture young Vasco Rossi and Piero Pelù taking notes), filling the gaps with harmonica or kazoo – helped along by Tony Esposito's percussion, which from this album onward would become a defining feature of the singer-songwriter's sound.

Besides the two tracks from the aforementioned single, the record includes the long, pounding "Uno buono", the lopsided ballads "Facciamo un compromesso" and "Tira a campare", and the parodied folk melodies of "Bravi ragazzi" and "Arrivano i buoni" – all of it marked in equal measure by minimalism and instinct. The only exceptions are the reprise of "Un giorno credi", swollen with strings, and the folk-band-style march "In fila per tre", which would go on to become perhaps the record's best-known track.

Compared to the debut, there are substantial changes in the lyrics too, no longer focused solely on the private sphere but decisively political, with the emergence of several themes that would become typical of his work in the years to come: contempt for nationalist rhetoric, for cunning exploited at others' expense, for the bourgeois obsession with security, for the conformism that stifles freedom… and above all, the constant suspicion of living in a country that's democratic only on the surface. A prime example is the lyrics of the already-mentioned "In fila per tre", a demonstration of how our choices are shaped from a tender age by institutions like family, school, the army, or any other form of authority.

It should be said that the singer-songwriter's political engagement, while occasionally naive, has the great merit of never descending into pedantry and of staying clear of any form of ideology – a fairly courageous stance in an era (that of Guccini's "Avvelenata" and the political trial of De Gregori) of exasperated militant tensions.

The Good and the Bad meets with decidedly positive response from both critics and the public, and Edoardo's high-energy concerts begin drawing sizeable crowds. And since the policy of record labels at the time was to "strike while the iron's hot" (something that would later be the subject of the polemical song "Sei come un juke-box"), 1975 saw the release of I, Who Am Not the Emperor. Preceded by the rousing single "Meno male che adesso non c'è Nerone", a wild Jerry Lee Lewis-style boogie with ironic lyrics once again on the theme of sham democracy (and, worth noting, recently covered by the legendary Pino Scotto), Edo's third album is perhaps the most American-sounding of his career: having all but abandoned any singer-songwriter ambitions, he throws himself body and soul into personal takes on blues ("Signor Censore"), psychedelia ("Ci sei riuscita", with Esposito's percussion once again front and center) and rock'n'roll (besides the aforementioned "Meno male…", also the closing "Affacciati Affacciati", a wild j'accuse against the papacy).

Also worth noting is the title track, a driving busker-style tune reprised at the album's close in an almost Neapolitan folk-song guise, and "Io per te Margherita", a 1930s-style song delivered with a knowingly over-the-top, ironic flair.

If the first three albums showed a fascinating artistic evolution, Bennato reached his definitive expressive maturity in the two-year span 1976-1977, with what stand as his two finest works. On La Torre di Babele, the sound thickens and becomes decidedly more varied, ranging from the funk of the title track that opens the record to the piano ballad – though at a notably brisk tempo – of "Viva la guerra", by way of the soundtrack-like grandeur of a Christmas TV drama in "Franz è il mio nome" (which, put like that, sounds dreadful, but is actually an excellent song with an anti-capitalist lyric that must have earned him some criticism after 1989, yet feels extremely relevant again today).

The best tracks on the album are also the best known: "Venderò", a touching ballad for guitar and harmonica with a wonderful lyric written by his brother Eugenio, and "Cantautore", which starts out as a lazy nightclub jazz number before suddenly accelerating in its finale, turning into an invitation to pogo ante litteram. The lyric of this last track is particularly caustic in mocking both the artists placed on a pedestal and the audience that put them there. A deranged, zany side of his artistic personality also begins to emerge here ("Ma chi è?!" and, above all, "Fandango"), one that would be further developed later on.

But the definitive masterpiece arrives with the following Puppet without strings, a concept album based on the fairy tale of Pinocchio and his first major commercial success, thanks above all to the radio-friendly appeal of the track "Il Gatto e la Volpe". The need to stick to a specific theme (at least apparently) curbs the digressions, and the album comes across as more compact than its predecessors, even while drawing on a range of different styles.

But what truly makes this record stand out from the rest of Bennato's catalogue (and from much of Italian rock music) is the extraordinarily high level of inspiration behind every song, both in the songwriting and in the arrangements. It's hard to single out a best track, caught as it is between sweet ballads ("È stata tua la colpa", "La Fata" and "Quando sarai grande"), tributes to early rock'n'roll ("In prigione in prigione" and the already-mentioned "Il Gatto e la Volpe"), to the blues ("Tu Grillo Parlante") and to Italian folk tradition ("Dotti, medici e sapienti" and "Mangiafuoco"), all of it filtered through his own personality and flair.

And just how peculiar Edo's personality truly is can also be grasped from the three years of recording silence that followed his first taste of real popularity – much to the chagrin, I imagine, of Ricordi – and from his rather rocambolesque return to the scene in 1980. First, in a TV appearance, he unveiled a song called "Sono solo canzonette", another irresistible swinging rocker that seems to follow the blueprint of "Il Gatto e la Volpe", only to then release an indefinable object such as the album Uffà Uffà, which contains no trace of the aforementioned song. No great loss, though, since it's another formidable leap in his career: where Puppet without strings was devoted to the song form, the following album is heterogeneous and unpredictable, starting with the a cappella opening of "Li belli gladioli" all the way to the closing anti-militarist punk of the title track, played together with Gaznevada. In between, assorted oddities like "Così non va, Veronica", "Restituiscimi i miei sandali" and "A Licola", marked, besides a stylistic instability often found within the songs themselves, by a zany streak already glimpsed in his previous work but which here seeps into every groove of the record.

It might look like a joke, a commercial suicide (despite the undeniable radio appeal of a few tracks, like "Sei come un juke-box" or the already-mentioned "Così non va, Veronica"), were it not for the obscure prophecy contained in the delta-blues "Allora, avete capito o no?!", in which Edoardo declares "si era sempre fatto uno per volta…e allora?! … e invece mi piace due per volta!".

What he meant becomes clear just fifteen days after the release of Uffà Uffà, when, out of the blue, the follow-up Sono solo canzonette hits the shops and becomes an absolute smash – real, bona fide superstar status. Of the eight tracks on the album, three have gone on to become hugely popular evergreens of Italian song: the ballad "L'isola che non c'è" (fairly similar to "Venderò", if we're being honest), the driving "Rock di Capitan Uncino", seemingly lighthearted but concealing a not-so-veiled attack on the "bad teachers" of the Years of Lead (“Io sono il professore /della rivoluzione / della pirateria / sono la teoria /il faro illuminante… ma lo capite o no?! / io ve lo rispiegherò / per smuovere la gente / non servono i discorsi / ci vogliono le bombe”) and, above all, the title track mentioned earlier, which every Italian has heard at least once, with its "Happy Days"-style beat, its delightfully retro style and a kazoo-hummed refrain that even the rocks know by heart. Too bad the rest of the album, while enjoyable, never quite reaches the heights of the records that came before it.

Sono solo canzonette is also, at least in part, a concept album, this time based on J.M. Barrie's fairy tale of Peter Pan, though it feels less sincere and urgent than the one on Puppet without strings. And pairing the singer with the figure of the boy who refuses to grow up in rebellion against an overly rigid society starts to smell a little too much like image marketing.

It's nonetheless a thoroughly enjoyable album, if you set aside the rather dull "Rockodrillo" and the pointless "Tutti insieme lo denunciam" (a fairly self-indulgent operatic experiment), standing out alongside the Italian-song classics mentioned above are the opener "Ma che sarà", with its dark, funk-tinged groove, and the jazzy "Dopo il liceo che potevo far". Even so, something in the inspiration seems to be creaking a little, even if it's still easy enough to overlook.

Sono solo canzonette, as mentioned, marks the peak of Bennato's success, and on the triumphant tour that followed, he filled Naples' San Paolo, Turin's Comunale and, for the first time, the San Siro stadium (Carlo Massarini would later rave about that concert).

The frenetic live activity was interrupted only by the release of two very interesting singles, "E invece no/ Canta appress'a nuje" and "Nisida/ La Freva a quaranta", both showcasing the artist's versatility: in just four tracks he pays tribute to Ry Cooder, rediscovers the Neapolitan dialect (after an album that had been overly scrubbed of local inflections) and, for the first time, experiments with reggae.

Of course, all of this requires a sense of measure, and the lack of it is the main shortcoming of the following record, È arrivato un bastimento (1983). Another concept album (this time based on the fairy tale of the Pied Piper), it boasts excellent production by Garland Jeffreys and was meant to be the foundation for ambitious plans to turn the record into the soundtrack for a stage show. The (relatively) poor sales would put that idea on hold (at least until 2005, when the album's songs were revisited in the musical "La fantastica storia del pifferaio magico"). And, for once, we can even agree with the public's cool reception: this is a record where ideas and solutions are shown off to excess. The gimmick of using a different genre for each track (hard rock, ballad, ska, reggae, opera, techno-pop…) already wears thin on its own. And when, as happens here, the songwriting turns out less sharp than in the past, the result is a scattered, rather uninteresting album. It's pleasant enough to listen to, but in the end no single track really sticks.

Decidedly underrated, on the other hand, is the following Kaiwanna (released in 1985 after the fine live album È goal the previous year, which featured the previously unreleased title track), on which Bennato takes a gamble – braver than it was savvy for an artist who, like him, was comfortably living off the income built up over the previous decade – venturing into the synthetic, pop sounds in vogue at the time. The true protagonists of the album are in fact the keyboards, used with real creativity, as in the surprising futurist-tribalist experiment of the title track and in the ballad "In cerca del futuro".

Where, on the other hand, the guitars shine, albeit heavily processed, ("Asia" and "Zero in condotta") the clear inspiration is that of his future collaborator Gianna Nannini – especially the masterpiece album "Latin Lover", released three years earlier.

Also worth mentioning is "Eroe fantasy", its lyric drawing on video games and Tolkienesque literature.

Unlike È arrivato un bastimento, the author seems to have rediscovered balance and inspiration: the result is certainly not groundbreaking (or, if it is, only in flashes), but it's a good record nonetheless, and its poor commercial performance (which would cause the split with Ricordi) is this time down to the gap between the record and the public's expectations.

The move to Virgin marks an upswing in his fortunes, at least in terms of sales, thanks to two highly successful albums, Ok Italy and Have Doubts. The first (1987) is decidedly the better of the two, remembered above all for the brash, muscular rock of the title track and of "Tu vuoi l'America" (songs that would strongly influence the second-era Litfiba and the early Ligabue), while the second (1989) is well represented by its single, this time unquestionably crowd-pleasing and backward-looking, "Viva la mamma".

In between come another live album and an EP recorded with Tony Esposito, both utterly uninteresting.

In 1990, Edoardo would record with Gianna Nannini the unbearable earworm "Un'estate italiana", the anthem of the Italian football World Cup (a song German commercial radio still plays today – partly out of nostalgia for their own victory, partly for the Adriatic-seaside mood that Germans are so fond of).

The impression is that Bennato, perhaps burned by the failures of 1983-1985, had lost his appetite for risk and was settling into "safe bet" formulas. The years that followed would confirm this suspicion, with one thoroughly enjoyable exception: the pure electric blues album The Boss Has Gone Mad (1992), released - not by chance - under the pseudonym Joe Sarnataro. Here too there's nothing new under the sun (did someone say Pino Daniele?!), but the tribute to his city - in its themes (though with lyrics that are anything but accommodating) and in its exclusive use of Neapolitan dialect - as well as to raw American black music, is sincere, and the record turns out to be thoroughly enjoyable, played with passion and blessed with a compositional freshness that seemed long gone. Alongside the album, Joe Sarnataro would also be the protagonist of a film ("Joe e suo nonno") and a comic book.

The same year saw the release of The land of toys, which, for better or worse, would set the template for all his subsequent work: pleasant radio-friendly rock with varied influences, lyrics mostly dealing with social issues, and ever-present sarcasm, though by now with few real highlights. It's no coincidence that, both on this record and on the following If They're Roses They'll Bloom, the best tracks are the singles pulled from them.

More intimate and anguished, on the other hand, is Girls Have Big Dreams, released after a terrible personal loss (the death of his partner in a car accident), although the end result doesn't really change. It's a pleasant little record that would deserve a barely passing grade, were it not that we're talking about the author of Buoni e cattivi and Puppet without strings.

The following Adrift returns to more rock-oriented sounds, while in the years that followed we'd witness an irritating proliferation of pointless greatest-hits collections (often disguised as reworkings of his old repertoire, now in acoustic guise, now in classical dress), soundtracks (worth mentioning only the one for the cartoon "Totò Sapore e la magica storia della pizza", made with his brother Eugenio and full of Neapolitan and Mediterranean flavor), and live albums.

His last two albums of new material - L'uomo occidentale and The endless paths of rock (a shoo-in for worst album cover in history) - add nothing, and if anything risk taking something away.

In 2015, Ready to Set Sail marks a slight course correction, between an additional character to add to the Puppet without strings gallery, Lucignolo ("Il mio nome è Lucignolo"), stories of immigrants and street vendors (the title track), a talking blues in Neapolitan sauce ("A Napoli 55 è 'a musica"), j'accuse as sharp as ever ("Niente da spartire", "Al gran ballo della Leopolda"), learned digressions ("Non è bello ciò che è bello", written many years earlier for Luciano Pavarotti) and a moving tribute to Enzo Tortora and Mia Martini ("La calunnia è un venticello"), on which Bennato reinterprets the lyrics Cesare Sterbini wrote for the aria of the same name from Rossini's "Barbiere di Siviglia".

Nothing new here: plenty of guitars, scattered American touches, and the usual irreverence, seasoning a dish that isn't irresistible but is at least put together with some taste.

Two years later, however, it's anniversary time (40-plus years) for Puppet without strings, which gets reissued in a new 2017 edition, with the previously unreleased "Mastro Geppetto" added to the colorful Collodi-inspired miscellany, rearranged for the occasion with new sounds and musicians - the same ones who've been backing the Neapolitan rocker on tour in recent years.

Now well into his seventies, Edoardo Bennato keeps treading the stages, delivering energetic, exhilarating performances. Among the many things music seems to have given him is eternal youth (Edo is a bit like our own homegrown Lemmy!).

It must be said that, thanks above all to the first part of his career, he will always be owed a debt of gratitude by his audience and by Italian song, despite the "flying blind" approach of the last twenty years. It would be absurd and ungrateful to ask any more of him.

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