Gianni Maroccolo - Twenty Years of Italian New Wave

Italian new wave took shape around his basslines: first the real Litfiba, then the final phase of CCCP and its metamorphosis into CSI, and then, together with his longtime bandmates (Ferretti, Magnelli, Canali), the new project PGR. In between, his work as a producer and talent scout. When he debuted as a solo artist in 2004 with "ACAU La nostra meraviglia", Gianni Maroccolo was finally able to reap what he had sown up to that point. Here is the exclusive interview he gave us, during the PGR tour and just before joining Marlene Kuntz on stage.

Thanks for your availability and the time you've decided to give me. Since you're one of the most important figures in Italian rock, I thought I wouldn't ask you the usual questions about your current or future projects, but instead talk to you about rock in general. That is, what you think of rock, what you try to communicate through rock, and above all whether you believe an original form of rock has been or could be possible in Italy, in some way comparable to the American and English kind. Or, conversely, whether you use rock as a means to communicate content other than the music itself. I have a theory. Rock is a subgenre of popular music made with three instruments - guitar, bass, drums - born out of an exasperation of rhythm and blues, which arose in America around 1967 and burned itself out, if not died, around 1991, once it had used up its creative charge. Now we have various movements which, beyond the various -isms, can basically be reduced to revivalism.

I ended up in rock almost by chance. Around the late Seventies I was listening to a lot of electronic music (Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Neu!), but also Can or Zappa; I loved Pink Floyd, because even though their form of expression wasn't classic rock 'n' roll, and even though they've been labelled psychedelic and lysergic, they had a rock spirit. Pink Floyd had a lot of blues influences (chord progressions and so on). Even earlier I was listening to Canterbury music (Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, Peter Hammill). I also listened to a lot of rock. I had the first three Led Zeppelin albums, and Black Sabbath. I was crazy about certain things by David Bowie, about Lou Reed... and then the Stooges, who basically invented punk. Very mixed listening habits, in other words. I ended up in rock by chance because I knew Aiazzi and we casually formed Litfiba at the end of '79, completely green. I got to know a whole set of rock bands thanks to Ghigo and Piero, bands I had no idea even existed. Back then you appreciated a bit of everything, and the dominant culture was the one carried by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus and so on. With the Eighties, I was blown away by The Residents and above all by Tuxedomoon. In some ways also by the first two Police albums: a blend of a kind of music I've never loved, reggae, with a very original way of tying it to what was happening at the time. What I liked so much about the Police was the energy they unleashed. I saw them live twice. They'd make mistakes, drift off time, speed up - like us tonight - but they had energy to spare, energy that real punks like the Sex Pistols could only dream of! As far as screaming music goes, I loved American punk more than the Sex Pistols. Dead Kennedys: the quintessential punk band was Jello Biafra's.

Going back to the idea of a 'rock temperament', you were probably far too kind saying it died in '91, because in my opinion it died much earlier. In any case, what I loved about rock was never so much its formal side: I think there's a temperament involved that has to do with DNA, with character, with a way of relating to life. It's not the usual line that rock is a life mission. But I do realize that rock musicians are, in life, different from other people: they share common histories, a similar outlook on life, even similar ideologies, they practise a kind of ideologization of music. It was never just the song itself that created the bond with the audience - it was also an attempt, often a poorly achieved one too, to express something that could be felt collectively, that gave people a chance to reflect on things. And I notice this in so many bands. Dylan, whom I don't love, had exactly this temperament. Even though his songs are inhumanly boring. Neil Young started out as a country singer-songwriter: but he's someone who has rock inside him; whether he then makes a guitar-and-voice record or a country record doesn't matter. PGR, whatever they do, have that same temperament. There's Ferretti, more of a punk, me, more of a rocker, Canali, leaning towards even harder rock. But what unites us is being moved and vibrating over the same things. In Italy in the Eighties, Gianna Nannini was labelled 'rock'. Four or five years ago I saw an interview with Biagio Antonacci in which he said: I drew inspiration from the Sex Pistols and the Clash to make an album, and I've finally made a rock album. I believe rock music is territory that's absolutely sealed off to anyone who isn't truly a rocker. And that doesn't mean having tattoos, wearing leather jackets and so on, but having rock inside you. Because otherwise it would be easy. You'd just plug a distortion pedal into a guitar and, presto, rock music. It's not like that - plenty of people have tried, and failed. Another thing that's part of rock music is the live show: never as in rock music is the concert the primary form of expression, the ultimate goal a musician sets for themselves. While eighty per cent of people making music today do it for the sake of the new record, for us making a new record means going back to playing in front of people. And only someone who has that kind of vibration in them can understand and transmit rock. Another thing that has vanished is the unifying power rock once had. For the last seven or eight years that's been gone. Not because the genre hasn't evolved formally, but because there have been cultural and social changes and so on. Just as politics no longer affects people's lives the way it used to, rock no longer does either. For many years it held enormous potential power, but it was used at the bare 'minimum wage' level, and now it doesn't have that power anymore; now music exists in a dimension where it's simply music for its own sake. Even rock music, which as you said is part of popular music, becomes just music, full stop. I'm not saying this to suggest things were better when they were worse. Life just moves on; the whole world is faster, things get consumed more quickly, the avant-gardes struggle more but they're still there, and who knows where they'll take us; rock music will remain current the way Neapolitan music, Salento's taranta or Irish music are current today. It will no longer have the power to create a movement of thought regardless of who's singing and what they're singing about, the way it did in the Seventies and Eighties. What you said about the death of rock - I already heard people saying that back in the Eighties.

I really enjoy talking with you because you're a sincere person, you say meaningful things, and I'd have so many questions to ask you. I brought up 1991 for this reason. I was thinking of various bands, so-called post-rock bands, who in fact were actually playing forms of minimalist rock, like Slint, I don't know if you know them; Slint made a landmark album in 1991 which, in my view, marks the end of rock... and not so much the grunge of Nirvana - in '91 came out "Nevermind", which reconciles the commercial level with having things to say, because Cobain had things to say, and the ability to say them to the masses... it reconciled pop and punk, with truly meaningful lyrics... also because it's easy to say now that he killed himself because of fame and success... but when you kill yourself it's not a small step... I'd like to put anyone in front of a gun to their temple and ask them: what do you choose? Life or success? In any case, I'd draw this distinction: Nirvana were the last band to be creatively forward-looking at a commercial level, and Slint were the last band to be creatively forward-looking at, so to speak, an avant-garde level. Now I'd like to bring you to another line of thought. I believe rock was born thanks to a great social movement that brought a considerable mass of people to a culture I wouldn't call middle- or upper-class, but rather lower-middle. That is, even the so-called punks still went to their proper high schools, and so they had ideas - crude, banal and naive as you like - but derived from philosophy and poetry, which, for example, folk singers at the start of the century didn't have. The problem is - and here I get to the question I want to ask you, namely whether rock is an art form - for rock to be considered an art form, you'd have to place it on the same level as poetry or literature. Without naming great poets or painters, I ask: in your opinion, is it possible that rock is a kind of 'neither fish nor fowl', driven by a set of ideas, perhaps drawn from philosophy, poetry and so on, which had already worked out those same ideas - take nihilism - centuries before rock existed, and which rock then trivialized, spread to the masses, because they were read in a naive way by eighteen-year-olds? Because rock is made by young people - the essential rock albums were made by people between 18 and 23, there's no way around it - who managed to communicate those ideas thanks to the immediacy of sound, because rock is simpler than classical music and the avant-garde... but it had enormous social power, one that led kids of 15 or 16 to have existential crises which then showed up either as more or less passing depression or even as suicide.

The equation 'rock 'n' roll equals simplicity', a less complex, simpler form of expression, both in the content of the lyrics and in the way of playing - I disagree with that, and anyone who has followed a path like mine should disagree too: I studied music at the conservatory, I studied double bass, I did phonology, electronic music, I studied the history of music, contemporary music, twelve-tone music and so on... only to end up making rock 'n' roll: I believe there's nothing harder than being simple and creative at the same time. I mean, managing to be direct and understandable while starting from a fairly elevated base form, not simplicity for its own sake. As bohemian as it might sound, I don't find a song like "Imagine" simple; I just find it a beautiful song, full stop; even though, in my own private listening, I go for much more obscure stuff. As a musician I've tried - we tried too, in CSI and PGR - to write 'songs', and it's actually not that simple. As for the content of lyrics, which need to be able to communicate with people at concerts in a universal way while still weaving in the author's personal experiences, I think that's simply a natural thing, something that has always driven art and culture forward in general.

I believe rock is one of the finest forms of communication there is. I'm 45, I have a certain kind of background, I've studied certain things, read others, I've had reference points that obviously are part of my baggage - not only culturally, but intimately too, I'd say, on an unconscious level. Now, the moment I sit down to play or compose, in that moment I'm putting in everything that makes up my 30 years of listening to music, of falling in love with it, of digging deeper, of studying certain artists; and I think the same goes for whoever writes certain lyrics: you can't invent anything truly new unless you have a clear grasp of what came before you; and that's true not just for music, but for life in general. Even back in the Eighties, when I started out with Litfiba, I never felt comfortable calling rock 'n' roll 'art'. I do still feel, however, that I can call music one of the finest art forms possible. And that's considering all the changes that have taken place from the late Sixties to today - the evolution of life, of human beings, of the way people communicate in general, with all the problems created by the clash between the speed of progress and total mass-homogenization, whereby everything becomes global, globalized, globalizing... I don't want to make this a political statement, let's be clear, I'm talking about concrete things: record shops close down because only big distribution chains survive. The market offers you 8, maybe 10 per cent of the music that's actually produced and played around the world. Then it's up to you to go looking for the music that interests you, or to settle for what's offered and not look any further. But I believe that within this evolution - which, on a human level, is partly a regression too - music still has to be regarded as one of the possible forms of art.

Everyone lives their own days. If you look back, digging into the past, and realize that at certain historical moments there was more innovation, more exploration, or more quality, that doesn't necessarily mean anything... It's the same in art, painting, sculpture, and even in more modern forms of art like communication, or even in politics, which was itself born as a form of art. It's not a matter of settling for less. Today we have a certain kind of political class. Not just in Italy - let's say, as the Western world. We can't avoid calling it a political class, even though it's made up of wheeler-dealers and figures who have little to do with politics and are so much in thrall to power that they can't control it in the slightest - something that, up until at least 20 years ago, politics still managed to do, trying to mediate and rein in economic power... now it can't manage even that anymore, politics no longer has the power to influence economic power... but you still can't refuse to call it a political class, you can't say they're not doing politics; you can say they're doing terrible politics, that they're terrible politicians; just as you could say of PGR that we're bad artists, but not that we're not making art... maybe low-grade art, poor-quality art. And in any case, it's not up to us, nor to my generation, to be part of the avant-garde. What remains to be understood is what the avant-gardes will give us. We were, perhaps, in our own modest Italian context, part of - for better or worse - the musical avant-garde of the late Seventies and early Eighties. But, coming back to us: either you define music as an art form, or you can't say Slint made art and Nirvana didn't. You can't say Laura Pausini doesn't make art while PGR do: Pausini makes music and PGR make music; we're all part of the same pot. Each of us then offers up whatever we are and whatever we're capable of.

Coming to a less abstract and more real-life kind of point, I'd like to offer you this other consideration. Take the case of a twenty-year-old who has a great passion for performing in public, for showing what he has inside, and has always held it back because he's convinced rock is dead… he's never felt up to going off with two or three friends, shutting himself in a basement, working out some chords and putting a song together… but it's not easy. He can make up for that lack, which he might even suffer over, by moving from being a rock musician to being a critic. Someone who plays rock, like someone who works as a critic, such as that guy, has a need for expression that maybe he wasn't able to vent through other art forms. Maybe because being a good painter or writer requires a cultural and technical background that's actually higher than what's needed to be a good rock artist. For example, name me any major rock musician: I'm convinced that the hours he's put into studying his instrument are fewer than those put in by a writer or a painter. I think this can be proven, and it's what determines painting's high artistic level and rock's low artistic level…

You have to factor in talent. What you're saying would hold up otherwise. If someone decides to become a classical musician, they know that if their goal is to play in an orchestra, they'll have to study for however many years it takes them to become a fourth- or fifth-row musician. A conductor, or someone who wants to compose, studies more because that's their goal. But this reasoning doesn't take talent into account. Someone like Paganini didn't need to study all that much: he had insane talent. Full stop, no argument. Talent then has to be recognized. If you have limitations, you need to see whether they really are limitations or whether they're actually strengths, because maybe they set you apart from others. Technique and study are things that have to be tied mainly to what you want to do and say. If in your life you want to draw an owl the whole time — on a tree, on the ground, on a car and so on — you'll study to do that; then your talent, your flair, will let you draw owls your whole life. Along the way you'll want to broaden your horizons, change things up, and you'll study again, obviously, you'll experiment, you'll come into contact with other artists, you'll be shaped by what's around you, but at the start, the spark that makes someone pick up an instrument and try to play, whether it's rock or something else, is purely passion and instinct, and ultimately the ability to understand your own talent and to study so you can manage to express what you want to express. If you want to drive a motorboat, you don't need to spend years and years studying how to drive an F1 car, a tractor-trailer, a truck, a coach, and so on. If you want to drive a motorboat, you go to school for six months, get your license, and learn to drive a motorboat… If you've then got talent and you push that motorboat to full speed, that's thanks to your talent; but you don't need to, unless it's some deep need of yours, learn to drive every kind of motorized vehicle there is. The same goes for music. It's the same thing.

I think I have a broad background, not on a technical level, but in terms of experience, experimentation, small trials and studies, which I've deepened over time, aiming it toward finding the tools that would let me express myself the way I wanted. I'm also a fairly atypical bassist, I taught myself to play bass, and from there I worked to invent something as personal as possible, something that would represent me. Sometimes I have trouble with technique because I can't express myself through bass alone, so what do I do? I play a bit of keyboards, I know synths well, I program things, I mess around a bit on drums… it depends on what someone is looking for in life. If someone wants to end up on a stage playing rock music, all they need is to study in proportion to the talent they have, because I remember when I started playing acoustic guitar I was 11 years old, I'd put on an LP and in 10 minutes I'd worked it out by ear; I'd work out the bass part, the vocal part, everything; a friend of mine who taught me my first three chords, in order to keep time or play guitar decently, took three times as long, but it was a matter of ability, I was more gifted and he was less so. To do the same things I was doing, he needed three extra months on the instrument. But what mattered to me was studying in order to reach the goal of being able to do what I wanted to do. And that goes for all music. If you want to get into synths, twelve-tone music, minimalism, early-20th-century electronic music, their evolutions and so on, you need to study a bit more; if you want to play rock 'n' roll and you've got talent, maybe you can study a bit less, and in any case it's rare to find people in rock music, aside from a few exceptions, who are technically outstanding. But you do find great creativity, because you're talking to me about '91, but I believe an album like "Ok Computer" by Radiohead shouldn't be considered a record lacking in creativity. You're not dealing with technically outstanding musicians, but with hugely gifted creative minds. What they needed in order to express themselves came through study. But you can study as much as you like — if you don't have talent, there's no band, no art, only performers who are more or less excellent.

So basically you have to have something to say…

I'm happy to have spent these 14 years — and I hope to spend many more, by the way — with Giovanni; because I've always liked something about him, even back in CCCP, when everything could seem to have a revolutionary veneer, his ability to force people to reflect, however unpleasant or provocative he might be, extreme and excessive, but with a great capacity for questioning his own thoughts and himself. For many that might look like a sign of inconsistency, for me it's a sign of flexibility and of great intellectual as well as human depth. The music I love most, on the level of lyrics, is the kind that forces you to reflect. That makes you stop and say: what is this guy saying? Music that raises questions for you. That rock then ended up shaping, often excessively, confused younger generations who had no points of reference, that may well be true. But if you look at the other side, growing up with that music helped form generations of politicians, writers, filmmakers, good people, rich precisely because they're attuned to a certain way of looking at life.

If rock is dead and people's existential emptiness has remained, would you still advise young people to start a rock band or not?

What hurts music in general is labeling it or putting boundaries around it. I'd advise anyone, if they're passionate about it, to pick up an instrument and learn to play it. In my view, that's more interesting than going to a club, or not knowing what to do with yourself from morning to night, or going to play football. It would be better to have no goal at all, I didn't have one at the start. You get together with friends, twice a week, and you play. Without saying: in six months we'll do auditions, then the record, the concert, and so on. That kind of thing ruins music a bit. With Litfiba, we made our first album after five years of playing together. If there's a passion for music and a desire to try to have fun, play for two or three hours and end the evening at a beer hall, but don't form a band at 18 with talk of auditions, recordings and this and that, because it doesn't make sense. Especially in band music. If the music is made by a soloist, a composer, a singer-songwriter, that's a different matter; you're dealing with yourself, you can grow even faster. Music made together is harder. Four or five kids who get together and try to come up with something even vaguely personal necessarily have to work by subtraction, each of them has to give up something they're good at, something they'd like to do and so on. Finding the right balance takes time and willingness. In ensemble music you work by subtraction, everyone gives something up, because what matters is the whole, it's the song that has to come out, but with everyone's contribution. If making music amounts to "in a year we need to make a record, earn money and so on," then I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone, because music has to do with talent, and talent needs time to express itself. To express talent you have to plan on starting out just to have fun and get to know each other, and then, if you realize it might actually work, from that point on you work hard and try to build something concrete.

Who wrote the lyrics for "Eroe" or "Eroi nel vento"?

Piero.

Who wrote the lyrics for "Regina di cuori"?

Piero.

How do you explain this change? In most bands you see this escalation: someone says to themselves: "It can't be the same author." Does this person lose their mind — I'm not talking about Pelù, mine was just an example — or does he deliberately, for other purposes, change his expressive abilities?

I think life changes people. Their desires. And as a result you can make choices that might seem drastic, almost without realizing it, that's how it is, you stop to reflect and you come to see what you'd been up until that point as something imperfect, not yet fully expressed. You get the impression of having reached a certain awareness, even if there's success alongside it, and then you say: "Let's really change." Life reshuffles the deck, sometimes raising the quality of things, sometimes lowering it. Sometimes just changing them. But the person is the same. It's the life around them that's different.

So can the same person say "scatti ai nervi e i sensi che/ le ombre dei sogni scuotono" and "regina di cuori mi mandi di fuori"?

What can I tell you? That's how it is. Even Giovanni doesn't always write the same way… if you listen to the first PGR album, you almost don't recognize the Ferretti of CSI.

Does the commercial factor have nothing to do with it?

Not much more than that. There can be a psychological element to it: seeing that something works, you keep going in that direction. Also because you might start thinking: I want to be more direct, make myself understood better, be less convoluted and so on. And you try it with two or three songs. It happened with Litfiba too, but at a certain point in your life you say: that's what I want to do, not the rest; and you decide which of the two paths to follow. I left partly because I was interested in developing the "rest". But let's be clear: I don't feel either better or worse than those who stayed in that story. I inevitably feel different. Because at a certain point in our lives, each of our lives changed

At the time you said you'd found your true path with CSI...

Yes. I believed I'd found it, even though CSI lasted seven years and then we split up. Anyway, I consider myself lucky. Lucky because I did what I needed to do. And it wasn't right to force the other members of Litfiba to do things they didn't want to do. In the end, I was the odd one out, not them.

Litfiba are the most shape-shifting Italian band. Eighties new wave, Nineties grunge, then dance-pop...

I think it's a good thing to be shaped by what's happening around you. I understand that people who experienced early Litfiba might feel disoriented. But I find that normal. The same goes for the CCCP-CSI-PGR progression.

At least they changed their name...

A hypothesis I've always considered. Maybe we should have had the courage to break up Litfiba in '90, and perhaps all gone our separate ways saying: gentlemen, this story is over for now. But that certainly wasn't an easy choice for anyone at the time.

The problem is that someone who gets on a stage and sings to thousands of people ends up hurting them. It's not simple...

Because people have expectations, but we musicians are human beings. You shouldn't have expectations. Just expect good music, good words.

But people are weak...

I understand, but it can't be the responsibility of the person performing not to "disappoint" the expectations that people, weak or not, build up for themselves. And besides, I don't think there are musicians who get on a stage intending to "hurt" their audience.

But if you're a public figure, without wanting to crucify anyone, you have to consider that you have a responsibility, that you're speaking to an enormous number of people. Nobody pays attention to the major contemporary artists. How many millions of people does Litfiba reach?

I understand that, but that's how it is, it's part of what I told you before... music has completely lost that function, it doesn't have it anymore, it no longer brings people together. Rock today is pure entertainment.

But that applies both to those who reach millions of people and to those you call "contemporary artists".

Let me give you an example close to home. I'm sorry to bring up Marlene Kuntz because everyone talks to you about them. In the mid-Nineties they made great hard-rock albums, but now they make much softer music.

When you talk to me about communication and the quality of lyrics and words…

The lyrics have gotten worse too, too baroque and self-indulgent…

Worse? That's your opinion, I'd say they've changed, evolved in some ways. The great thing about Marlene Kuntz is that, in my view, they're evolving and they have the courage to experiment.

Yes, sure, but I never thought of Marlene Kuntz as being on the same level as commercial bands…

After six albums, a change is understandable. And besides, why shouldn't Marlene Kuntz be considered a commercial band while Litfiba are? I don't get it. Who decides who's commercial and who isn't? What are the criteria that determine that kind of distinction?

Godano's voice must have given out…

Why?!

On the early tours the barriers would get torn down and people would jump off the stage…

Yeah, I get it…

Now at concerts I just stand there with my hands folded…

Then don't bother coming to the shows we're about to play…

No, but tonight you guys hit hard… even if the acoustics were terrible.

I wasn't talking about PGR, we don't have that kind of problem.

Right, of course, you're going on tour with Marlene…

Yes.

Of course, who else was going to go? But when it comes to the singer-songwriter style, Marlene…

It will be a more atmospheric show, but that doesn't mean it'll be flat.

Thanks a lot. Good luck.

Don't worry about it. Same to you.

(Siena, Auditorium Essentia, March 31, 2005)

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