Luigi Tenco - A wrong story

I gave my love to the Italian public and I devoted five years of my life to it, uselessly. I'm doing this not because I'm tired of life (quite the opposite) but as an act of protest against an audience that sends “Io, tu e le rose” through to the final and a jury that selects “La Rivoluzione”. I hope it helps clear some people's minds. Bye. Luigi

Luigi Tenco took his own life with a gunshot to the right temple in room 219 of the Hotel Savoy in Sanremo, during the night between January 26 and 27, 1967. In the midst of the Festival.

That was how the shadowy, controversial trajectory of one of the most misunderstood and emblematic singer-songwriters of the Sixties came to a close, in the most tragic and murky of ways (not least given the farcical, bungled investigation that followed).

Of course, it's all too easy to reread a story starting from its ending and draw a neat moral from it. But “quello che conta” ("what matters"), to quote one of the finest songs he ever performed, in this case means shedding light not so much on a patchy, erratic biography over which, with the benefit of hindsight, far too many crocodile tears have been shed and embellishments spun, but on the public, conceptual and above all musical merits (and limitations) of a figure who was sharply ahead of, and thus openly at odds with, his times.

Across that truncated, broken decade (1960-67) – running from the still-rosy twilight of the economic miracle to the first stirrings of student protest, from the street uprisings that would bring down the Tambroni government (which he personally took part in, alongside Genoa's dockworkers) to the university occupations that heralded 1968 (the first of which, just days after his death, would take place at the Sapienza in Pisa), from basement jazz clubs to the chaotic rock'n'roll of youth festivals, from the French school to the Genoese school, all the way to the turbulent and often confused social themes of early Italian folk-beat – Tenco embodied, viscerally, often against his own will and to the most extreme consequences, the deepest and most lacerating contradictions, but also the liveliest and most fertile ferments, all contained within a songbook of barely a hundred tracks and just three albums, not always, taken as a whole, equal to the highest peaks of his idiosyncratic lyrical and compositional talent.

Tenco moved through and mercilessly portrayed the Italian society of those years, the stifling world of our popular song, like a vivid cross between Jacopo Ortis and the character played by Jean-Louis Trintignant in Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso. He oscillated stylistically between the "decadent" existentialism and chamber pop-jazz of his early work and the committed (and sadly unfinished) folk of the so-called "linea gialla", between a melancholy, despondent resignation and a biting, almost neurasthenic urge toward subversion and renewal. His harsh, unadorned prose – mostly written in free verse, so unconventional against the puritanical aestheticism of the era – blends hallucinated soliloquy with a spare, essential intimacy, the crepuscular poetry of small things with searing, exasperated invective, much like his prickly, antisocial persona, making him a forerunner of the tormented, "accursed" heroes of alternative rock (who would pay tribute to him time and again) even before he became a forebear of the politically engaged singer-songwriters of the Seventies.

Io sono uno…

Luigi Tenco was born on March 21, 1938 in Cassine, in the province of Alessandria, in an almost pastoral setting already shadowed by mournful hints of mystery: Giuseppe Tenco, who had died about six months earlier under circumstances that were never entirely clear (apparently kicked in the temple by a cow), was not Luigi's real father. Paternity, though never legally acknowledged, belonged to a young man who would go on to become a lawyer after the war and would die in 1985.

In 1948 the family moved to Genoa, where Tenco attended the Liceo Scientifico through to his final exams and showed a particular inclination for jazz, playing piano, clarinet and eventually saxophone in small groups of friends and peers, many of whom would become famous in the following decade (among others: Lauzi, Paoli, De André and the Reverberi brothers). His idols at the time were Jelly Roll Morton, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond.

From 1957 he was a professional musician and a permanent member of Marcello Minerbi's band, and he also had the chance to play in the orchestra of the future “Gufo” Lino Patruno. In 1958, still as an instrumentalist, he took part in the brief but fervent season of homegrown rock'n'roll: he toured Germany with Giorgio Gaber and Adriano Celentano, formed a band with Paoli and other friends picturesquely named “I Diavoli del Rock”, and was a regular fixture at the venues devoted to this kind of music between Genoa and Milan, often alongside Gaber, Jannacci and Gianfranco Reverberi. Thanks to the latter, in 1959 he was hired by Ricordi as a session musician, and little by little, almost against his own will (“I couldn't stand singers: all the nonsense they were made to sing,” he explained a few years later), that same year he recorded his first singles, at first songs written by others, then his own compositions. Among these: “Giurami Tu” which, despite a rather flat, colourless lyric concerned only with sticking to the metre and the dance-hall clichés of the late Fifties, boasts a jazz-swing verve and an orchestral arrangement (by Reverberi) worthy of Henry Mancini; the shuffle rhythm and Nat King Cole-style vocal of “Mai”; the naive echo of “Rock Around The Clock” in “Vorrei Sapere Perché” or of Gene Vincent in “Amore”.

Miscellaneous material, in short, not without a certain refinement and, despite the low regard in which the author himself held it — to the point of signing with just his surname or the pseudonym Gigi Mai — at least indicative of the post-adolescent standards of the time.

Far more refined and significant is his subsequent output, still parcelled out for the then-thriving 45rpm single format, with songs such as the romantic “Quando”, the first track to gain a certain notoriety, which, despite an excess of rhetorical figures steeped in the romantic tradition of the Fifties, can rightly be considered, with its melancholy and supremely elegant chamber arrangement (an almost madrigal-like arpeggio, strings and flute), one of the founding songs of the Genoese school, alongside Paoli's “Il Cielo In Una Stanza” and “Senza Fine” ('60-'61) and Umberto Bindi's “Il Nostro Concerto” (1960). Even more fully realized in this sense is “Una Vita Inutile”, built on jazz phrasing and Jacques Brel-like harmonies, the first existentialist parable of a young man alien to the optimism of the “boom” (“Una vita inutile vivrai/ se non diventerai qualcuno/ questo diceva a me un signore/ e la sua casa era una reggia”), who finds himself alone and lost, staring into the depths of a dark, enervating malaise (“I tried to be someone/ but I remained no one”).

Also standing out are the languid exoticism of “In Qualche Parte Del Mondo” and “Ti Ricorderai” (a hushed cool-jazz rhythm, an orchestral crescendo of violins), both in some way centred on the desire to escape the arid disappointment of the present into an idealized, Edenic elsewhere, the nightclub harmony of “I Miei Giorni Perduti” (a mix of Latin cadences and eccentric string and choral counterpoints), and the evocative interweaving of French chanson and white jazz (with a prominent sax) in “Se Qualcuno Ti Dirà”.

The Land of Plenty

1962 — the year of the first centre-left government, the Cuban crisis, the Second Vatican Council and Marilyn's suicide — could be considered the crucial year in Tenco's career, bringing events that seemed to open the doors to the fame he had always approached with a mixture of reluctance and curiosity. Although, in reality, his attempt to sell himself on the record market as the most original and unconventional voice of the first generation of singer-songwriters would never amount to more than a limited following and a general kind of recognition.

A few years later, Tenco would defend this apparently ambiguous, unselfconscious attitude of his, stating: “(...) today those are the tools for communicating with people, and even at the cost of running some gauntlet, you have to reach those tools, because they are formidable instruments... The minstrel who goes singing under windows today says nothing, is of no use to anyone.”

In the summer he made his debut as a leading actor in the film “La Cuccagna”, directed by Luciano Salce, playing an almost autobiographical role: an introverted young singer-songwriter who rails against bourgeois society and contemplates suicide on a beach used for target practice. Beyond the intrinsic merits of the film itself — a well-crafted, mordantly sketched commedia all'italiana with a nervous, snappy direction almost reminiscent of the Nouvelle Vague — special mention must go to Tenco's exceptional contribution to the soundtrack composed by Ennio Morricone, who gave the singer-songwriter two of the finest compositions of his career, “Quello Che Conta” and “Tra La Gente” (both co-written with Luciano Salce), as well as a cover of a song by the then-unknown Fabrizio De André (a young exponent of the “Genoese school” and a close friend of Luigi's), “La Ballata Dell'Eroe”.

Although these are songs composed by others, Tenco's interpretation is so intense and personal that they effectively become inseparable from his most authentic body of work: the first is sumptuous, aching and crepuscular (orchestrated, as was typical of vintage Morricone, with instruments from both the classical and folk traditions — harp, harpsichord, harmonica — in a modern, expressionistic key), telling a love story that flickers tenderly amid the ashes of high society and hypocrisy (“adesso che il fumo cancella l’estate/ e il grigio ritorna scendendo su noi/ la lunga vacanza si chiude per sempre/ pure qualcosa di noi resterà”) as the sole antidote to alienation (“ormai siamo soli nel centro del mondo/ qualcosa divide la gente da noi/ ma quello che conta è non essere soli/ quello che conta è che tu sei con me”); the second is a boulevardier minuet (for violin, piano, accordion and harpsichord) that sketches a portrait of a woman worthy of Truffaut; while the third (sparse picking, an almost western-sounding harmonica) turns its sentimental core — a bride's longing for her husband missing at the front — into a lucid satire of patriotic rhetoric.

The film was released in cinemas in mid-October; a few weeks later Ricordi put out the artist's first LP, simply titled Luigi Tenco. In truth, rather than a proper debut work, it was a collection that, as was the editorial logic of the time (not only in Italy), gathered together some singles already released on the label along with other, more recent compositions deemed less “marketable” for the 45rpm format.

Despite a certain stylistic and thematic disjointedness resulting from its limited overall design, the album would prove, with hindsight, to be one of the finest products of the “Genoese school” and an interesting forerunner of the Italian singer-songwriter tradition. Alongside melodic, traditional songs such as the aforementioned “Quando”, there emerges the Mitteleuropean “La Mia Valle” (set to a Tchaikovsky waltz), in which Tenco dwells on one of his characteristic themes: escape from the present and refuge in a fairy-tale, bucolic world as a panacea for social and personal conflicts — a theme taken up again, together with that of lost childhood in “Il Tempo Passò”, in allegorical form also in the Fifties-style confidenziale song “Il Mio Regno” (in both cases the chamber arrangement by maestro Giampiero Boneschi, “neoclassical” as we might call it today, is a touch cloying).

But the record also contains more significant and original material, both lyrically (neorealist) and musically (venturing into territories almost entirely unexplored by Italian pop up to that point). Starting with “Cara Maestra”, one of his finest songs ever, in which, with lashing picking and the irreverent irony of a Brassens, Tenco pillories, through three strikingly effective vignettes, the class-ridden society of the time (“Cara Maestra un giorno mi insegnavi/ che a questo mondo siamo tutti uguali/ ma quando entrava in classe il direttore/ tu ci facevi alzare tutti in piedi/ e quando entrava in classe il bidello/ ci permettevi di restar seduti”), the pillars of Christian Democrat power (“My good priest (...)/ how can a poor man who walks in/ now feel as if he were at home?”) and the shame of former Fascist officials who had recycled themselves into public administration (“Egregio sindaco mi hanno detto che un giorno/ tu gridavi alla gente: vincere o morire/ (…) e al posto tuo è morta tanta gente/ che non voleva vincere né morire”).

Also worth noting is the swing of “Una Brava Ragazza”, a candid snapshot of the sexual mores of teenage girls liberated by the economic “boom” (“se tu fossi una brava ragazza/ quando incontri per strada una di quelle/ guarderesti altrove/ invece di stare ad osservare come si muove”), laced with a subtle but biting irony aimed at the commonplaces of bourgeois respectability (“if you were a good girl, the girl I dreamed of meeting/ right now, instead of loving you, I'd probably be elsewhere”), and the licentious, tormented praise of adultery in “Io Sì” (almost an apocryphal Brel number, set to a catchy sirtaki theme).

Equally bold for its time is the cabaret-style, boulevardien epic of “Angela” (a cross between Brel and Weill); the torpid, Sagan-esque existentialism of “Mi Sono Innamorato di Te” (a pianistic vocal piece with string accompaniment) still sounds magnificent today, while the waltz-time surrealism (almost “Buzzati-like”) of “Come Mi Vedono Gli Altri” (“My fear is that seeing me as I am/ I might end up disappointed”) comes across as decidedly more idle and dated.

Vedrai, vedrai…

Aside from the modest success of “Mi Sono Innamorato Di Te”, in a year dominated by “Fatti Mandare Dalla Mamma”, “I Watussi” and “La Partita Di Pallone”, Tenco's debut quickly fades into obscurity, further hampered by the Rai censorship board, which flatly rejects “Cara Maestra”, “Una Brava Ragazza” and “Io Sì”, keeping the singer-songwriter off both radio and television for almost two years. Curiously, in one of his last public appearances, interviewed by Sandro Ciotti, he would pay tribute to another brilliant newcomer with whom he would soon share the fate of great misunderstood outsider of the singer-songwriter tradition: “(…) then there's a certain Piero Litaliano, who isn't very well known but I like him a lot, and he writes lyrics that are really excellent.” Piero Litaliano was the pseudonym of Piero Ciampi.

The period of forced exile only sharpens his contradictory relationship with fame: on one hand, he proudly asserts his own artistic and moral integrity (“The persona, like the anti-persona, is something constructed, a mass-produced stereotype. Whereas I want to be a real figure, with my own ideas, right or wrong as they may seem. And by what measure should they be judged, that of a bank balance? Well, I'll gladly leave that metric system to others. I couldn't care less about being ‘integrated’ into the system”); on the other, he breaks his contract with Ricordi, apparently complaining, among other things, that he hadn't been “pushed” the way his former friend, now rival, Gino Paoli had been.

After completing his military service, long postponed through deferrals granted for study reasons (while toying with the idea of conscientious objection), in May 1965 Tenco releases his second full length, again self-titled, for the Jolly label.

This second, self-titled Luigi Tenco marks a decisive step forward: more cohesive, elegant and elaborate, built on lavish chamber arrangements blending popular melodies, classical harmonies and jazz rhythms, languid, intimate, decadent moods, and lyrics that, for the most part, set aside (anti)social themes to focus on an obsessive, erratic introspection.

Musically, it is without doubt the high point of the Piedmontese singer's brief career. Stylistically, it's a compendium of the most significant influences he had absorbed up to that point.

The set of songs, while refining recurring underlying themes, is varied and rich in nuance: his leaning toward a nostalgic, retro form of pop-jazz is evident in tracks like “Tu Non Hai Capito Niente” (punctuated by a Hampton-style xylophone) and “Non Sono Io” (with vocal harmonies reminiscent of a barbershop quartet), but while the driving shuffle of “Ah… l’amore, l’amore” flaunts a successful soul fusion, “Ho Capito Che Ti Amo” and “Quasi Sera” (at times almost lounge) indulge in a striking parallel between Bacharach and French chanson, over which the heartfelt “Com’è Difficile” (“Com’è difficile veder sfuggire / tutti i miei sogni in un bicchier d’acqua / senza neanche aver visto il mare”) casts a melancholy, late-melodic shadow (Modugno). The eccentric “Io Lo So Già”, on the other hand, serves up a kind of “liscio” dance tune in the epic, cavernous tones (bass and guitar especially) of a Lee Hazlewood (forty years before Baustelle!).

Within this unsettling sonic landscape lie the three most famous songs on the record, the ones destined to endure, resurfacing again and again over the decades, three true classics of his repertoire. “Vedrai Vedrai” (later covered by Ornella Vanoni and Mia Martini) is a dark, vibrant piano torch song, a touching confession with almost Pasolini-esque (and Freudian) echoes (“tu non guardarmi con quella tenerezza come fossi un bambino che ritorna deluso”) in which, stripped of any rhetorical posturing, the artist's (and the man's) deepest inner contradictions surface: pride and fragility, moral fiber and guilt (“mi fa disperare il pensiero di te e di me che non so darti di più”), pessimism and hope (“vedrai, vedrai, non son finito sai/ non so dirti dove e quando ma vedrai che cambierà”). The syncopated brass-band march “Ragazzo Mio” (later a hit for Loredana Bertè) is a kind of prophetic letter to an imaginary heir (“Ragazzo mio, un giorno ti diranno che tuo padre/ aveva grandi idee per la testa/ ma in fondo poi non ha concluso niente”), a spiritual testament and manifesto of his own idealism (“Ma tu non credere, no/ che appena s’alza il mare gli uomini senza idee/ per primi vanno a fondo”), here and there cracked by disillusionment. Finally, there's the madrigal-like spleen of “Se Potessi Amore Mio” (long a staple of Vinicio Capossela's live repertoire), which, with its simple, conversational style, digs into feelings and emotions worn down by the weight of everyday life.

E se ci diranno…

This second self-titled album is the nul plus ultra of early Tenco – the one shaped by 1950s music, existentialism, jazz and French singer-songwriters – and it already seems to hint at an imminent turning point (in a 1966 interview: “… decadent, because this kind of music is decadent, that is, it's a matter of returning to the same themes – love, flowers and so on – with new phrasing, new kinds of language and so on, which amounts to formal self-indulgence but a lack of substance. That doesn't mean they don't make wonderful things, because there are songs I like very much, songs that I myself have written…”), the urge to dive into something new, something capable of more incisively reflecting his need for social commitment and his drive for recognition through difference and change. And the moment seems to offer him just the right opportunity.

By the end of 1965, Italian music (and youth culture as a whole) is swept up in a turmoil as fervent as it is superficial: people talk about Carnaby Street and Vietnam as if they were just around the corner, crowds go dancing at the Piper (the reference point of the new scene and the only showcase for rising stars like Who, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Genesis or Soft Machine), on the radio “Bandiera Gialla” filters through the sounds of the “British invasion”, the Beatles make their first television appearance, the new “electric” Dylan achieves international consecration (and the Byrds even break into the Italian charts with “Mr. Tambourine Man”), and a colorful, ramshackle horde of Italian bands (Equipe 84, Rokes, Ribelli, I Corvi, I Nomadi), commonly labeled beat acts, churn out quirky, slapdash covers of foreign hits.

Tenco, who had been one of the first to “discover” the genius from Duluth, going so far as to record an awkward cover of “Blowin’ The Wind” (“La Risposta è Caduta Nel Vento”, 1964, played at a train-like clip with lyrics adapted, somewhat roughly, together with Mogol), throws himself into this seething circus – an indigestible mix of old and new, breathy crooning and screams in the style of black American singers, melodic pop and beat, libertarian posturing and corporate conservatism – with the ambition of leading it toward full expressive autonomy, toward an awareness of its own communicative potential, and of steering it decisively, both musically and politically, by fusing, following Dylan's example, dance music and protest song, beat and folk. It's an idea he championed to the very end, as in this January 1967 interview with “Big”: “In my opinion the solution isn't to look abroad and imitate other people's genres. The only thing to do is draw on our national musical heritage. (…) We should take typical Italian melodies and work them into a modern sound, the way black musicians do with rhythm and blues, which comes from jazz, or the way the Beatles did, giving a contemporary sound to Scottish marching tunes instead of playing with bagpipes. (…) A nation's folk heritage, I repeat, is so vast that every singer and composer could draw on it while keeping their own personality: if someone wants to protest, they can protest, if someone else wants to get people dancing, they can get people dancing, there would be room for everyone.”

Tenco's project, as he once again changes record labels in 1966, signing with Rca, would prove – partly for reasons of time (his impending death) and partly of circumstance (the failure of almost all his final songs and the recording industry's resistance to any kind of genuinely “alternative” music) – far more erratic and fragmentary in practice than it had been clear-sighted and forward-looking in intent: he rewrites and adapts covers of James Brown's “It’s A Man’s World” (“Mondo Di Uomini”, sung by Lucio Dalla) and “Yeeeeeh!” and “Johnny No” (for the Primitives); he inspires and promotes the manifesto of the so-called “linea gialla”, calling for a freer, more innovative beat music more attentive to social issues (“In peace and freedom we don't just want to hope, we'd rather fight now on a trench made of splendid, meaningful notes, to keep them or win them. It's good that this be known, just as it's good for young people to beware of the con artists of pop music”); and he defends his ideas at a debate on “protest song” at Beat 72 in Rome, where he is heavily heckled by the young audience in attendance.

That same year, he releases his third and final album, laconically titled Tenco.

There's an evident sense of precariousness and dichotomy running through it, partly due to the backwardness of the times, partly to the artist's own personal turmoil, which is also reflected in the composition of an unbalanced work, clearly transitional, lesser than the sum of its individual songs precisely because of this rigid split between different styles (the by-now well-honed pop-jazz and the folk-rock experiments of his new direction), and due to the lack of an artistic vision capable of blending these ideas (often brilliant, or at least decidedly original) into something coherent and effective.

Tenco's two souls, the decadent one and the engagé one, split the album into two distinct strands: to the first belong tracks like "Lontano, Lontano", a typical slow 3/4 number straight out of a seaside dance hall, modern lieder (just piano, organ drone and double bass) for disenchanted scenes from a marriage (“un giorno io ti sposerò, stai tranquilla/ così avrai diritto a tutte quelle cose/ che io oggi ti do solo per amore”) such as "Uno Di Questi Giorni Ti Sposerò", the chamber bossa-noir of "Un Giorno Dopo L'altro" (already the theme tune to Gino Cervi's TV "Maigret"), one of his finest fatalistic masterpieces ever (“La nave ha già lasciato il porto e dalla riva sembra un punto lontano/ qualcuno anche stasera torna a casa deluso piano piano/ Un giorno dopo l’altro la vita se ne va/ e la speranza ormai è un’abitudine”); to the second belong "Io Sono Uno", a self-portrait painted in the harsh, bellowing style of a Barry McGuire, the Dylan-esque "E Se Ci Diranno", a declamatory hymn to civil disobedience and the absolute forefather of the Italian folk-rock scene (or folk-beat, as it was then called), the rose-tinted garage-beat of "Ognuno È Libero", and the dazed "Ma Dove Vai", a stornello sung over a Merseybeat tune.

Ciao amore, ciao!

And we have nearly reached the epilogue. If this were a fairy tale, we'd now be witnessing a happy ending. If it were a detective story, someone would reveal the culprit's identity. But Tenco's life more closely resembles a noir, one of those realistic 1930s films written by Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné, full of fog and ambiguous characters hiding their true identity behind a long coat and a hat pulled artfully down over their eyes, and so it's only logical, whatever the reasons may be, that the protagonist should meet the inevitable checkmate of fate, an apparent defeat that would grant him a tragic stature worthy of his art, a posthumous recognition of his singularity and his worth.

With the last of those unpredictable swings typical of his character, Tenco, at the dawn of youth protest, caught everyone off guard by accepting an invitation to take part in the seventeenth Sanremo Festival, paired with French singer Dalida.

It might have been a move by Rca to repeat the success of the "sensual/dark", "bonnie & clyde", "intellectual vs. not-quite-proper young girl" duo Hazlewood-Sinatra (who the previous year had struck gold with "These Boots Are Made For Walking") — something that, incidentally, their French counterparts would pull off far more successfully the following year, with Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin — or perhaps it was simply the singer-songwriter's last-ditch attempt to chase the popular success that had haunted him like an evil eye throughout the final stretch of his career; we'll never know. What is certain is that his final song, "Ciao amore, ciao", cheapens one of the most lucid and poetic lyrics ever written about rural depopulation and the cultural uprooting of emigrants ("in un mondo di luci sentirsi nessuno/ (…) non saper far niente in un mondo che sa tutto/ e non avere un soldo neanche per tornare) with a certain rhythm'n'beat charge grafted onto the conventional melody of a Sanremo pop tune, and, in practice, it pleases no one (least of all the author himself); it's rejected by the popular vote (!?) and definitively excluded by a panel of experts (!?) tasked with any potential last-minute reinstatements.

The ending is well known: the act, whether intentional or not, symbolic or not, makes far more noise than the bang of a Walther PPK .765 calibre; as for the rest, it's certainly not up to us to have the final word, given that an inquiry by the judiciary into this latest Italian disgrace has only just come to a close.

A wasted life

After his tragic death, the three record labels he had recorded for continued to capitalise on the sensation of the event and the aura of mystery that still surrounds the man, successfully releasing a string of anthologies divided by period (five from Ricordi, two from Rca and one from Jolly/Joker). In Tenco's name, there also emerged a battle for quality pop music, an "alternative" to the media circuits of mass distribution, free from the obsession with popular success and mass approval — first a testimony to, and later the survival of, other possible worlds within this narrow and maligned cultural universe.

In 1972 Amilcare Rambaldi founded the Club Tenco, which two years later also became an award — a tribute to the values handed down by the Piedmontese singer-songwriter and a prestigious recognition of excellence in the field of the singer-songwriter tradition — given, over more than thirty editions, to some of the leading figures in Italian music (De André, Conte, Guccini, Vecchioni, Gaber, Jannacci, Baustelle) and international music (Ferré, Brassens, Brel, Cohen, Newman, Mitchell, Donovan, Waits, Cave, Cale).

There are, moreover, numerous musical tributes and references to Tenco throughout the history of popular song. Besides countless covers and tributes involving artists old and new, from both mainstream and alternative music (from the Nomadi to Alice, from Guccini to Capossela, from La Crus to Parente, from Afterhours to Gatto Ciliegia Contro Il Grande Freddo, from John De Leo to Mike Patton), particularly significant, for their symbolic weight, are a few verses dedicated to him over the years: from Fabrizio De André's "Preghiera in Gennaio", written in one sitting the day after his friend's death, which honours him in its long farewell by even reserving him a place in heaven (“Quando attraverserà l’ultimo vecchio ponte/ ai suicidi dirà baciandoli alla fronte/ andate in paradiso, laddove vado anch’io/ perché non c’è l’inferno nel mondo del buon Dio”), to Francesco De Gregori's "Festival" ("Bufalo Bill", 1976), which defends Tenco's human depth and tormented fragility against the most morbid speculation ("qualcuno ricordò che aveva dei debiti, mormorò sottobanco che quello era il motivo/ Era pieno di tranquillanti, ma non era un ragazzo cattivo") and highlights the opportunism with which, after the tragedy, many colleagues and record executives jostled to bask in the gruesome reflected light ("si ritrovarono dietro il palco, con gli occhi sudati e le mani in tasca/ tutti dicevano: Io sono stato suo padre!', purché lo spettacolo non finisca"). More recently, fresh tributes have come from Baustelle, who in "Baudelaire" ("Luigi Tenco è morto per te") glimpse an almost messianic aura in his act, likening him to the great French poet, and from Fabri Fibra, who, at the end of a grotesque tirade against the king-makers of Italian pop, identifies with him in the track "Andiamo a Sanremo" (“lo trovano per terra sdraiato sul tappeto/ con una pistola in mano e un buco in testa/ non sono certo il primo che protesta/ che protesta a Sanremo!”).

Thanks to the website Luigi Tenco 60's – La Verde Isola (http://www.luigitenco60s.it/) for the period material made available and for the passion poured into keeping alive the memory of the singer-songwriter from Cassine.

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