Francesco De Gregori

"I was introduced to my fifties." But this time without contracts to sign with the Pace e Bene circus touring Europe... "Bufalo Bill" turns fifty but shows no signs of age — if anything, it remains more central than ever to the artistic story of Francesco De Gregori. Yet the 1976 LP, which has always vied with its predecessor "Rimmel" for the title of the Roman singer-songwriter's best album, came together under surreal circumstances. The whole record was in fact recorded in little more than a week, with a very "live" sound, almost cut live in the studio. As if to preemptively distance himself from the accusations of overproduction he'd faced after the extraordinary commercial success of "Rimmel". "'Bufalo Bill' is my cross to bear and my delight," he would later say. "If I could, I'd probably remake it with more care given to the sounds and arrangements. I made it that way, stripped-down and essential, to punish myself for having made 'Rimmel', which had sold too much... it was crazy! I was going through a crisis, so I decided to make an album in a week." But if you're at the peak of your creativity, a week can be enough to churn out ten songwriting gems like these.

On the roadside, contemplating America

If I had been able to choose between life and death, I would have chosen America

That's how a Francesco De Gregori in a state of grace opened his 1976 American travel diary, "Bufalo Bill". An immersion into a frontier land of (dis)illusions, an eldorado for the dispossessed and a refuge for sinners, an eden of freedom and a black hole of every degeneration of consumer society. On the roadside, contemplating America, to quote him again, De Gregori sits down with a gaze that's both dreamy and disenchanted. Flying at a safe distance from the clichés of anti-Americanism, yet never letting himself be seduced by the myth either. It's a chiaroscuro America, multifaceted, the one painted by the Prince — not far, in the end, from the one portrayed in Guccini's songs, but even more dreamlike, restless, elusive. Crowded with bit-part characters who rise up as improbable protagonists. Unwitting heroes who overturn every hierarchy. From Buffalo Bill to dim-witted Ninetto, from boy scout Tobia to the anonymous cowboys drifting through the canyons of life. But in the end it's the same America as Dylan's, Hemingway's, Kerouac's, Steinbeck's — authors devoured by De Gregori, confirming a bond with the culture of the New World that has never been broken. But "Bufalo Bill" isn't a concept album or a rock opera, territory the Roman singer-songwriter has practically never ventured into, preferring instead to reserve in each of his works eccentric moments, clear digressions from the central leitmotif. Rather, it's a collection of notes, a broad notebook where, alongside the grand American commentary, other ideas found their way in too. All of them transformed into wonderful song-poetry.

Strange as it may sound, De Gregori's America is born from the brush of a German expressionist. Otto Dix was a standard-bearer of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), highly active during the years of the fragile Weimar Republic, with works centered on harsh themes rendered with brutal honesty — war, maimed veterans in the cities, the deformities of ugliness, the relationship between eros and death. Marginalized by Nazism, he would only re-emerge over the years through a slow rediscovery. Lucio Dalla was a fervent admirer of his, and introduced him to his friend. De Gregori was particularly struck by a lithograph depicting fake, ugly redskins riding standing up against the backdrop of a stars-and-stripes flag: "American riding act", from the "Circus Series" collection.
It's the spark that lit "Bufalo Bill". A song to lift the lid off the myth of clean America, the America of skyscrapers, to reveal the America of the ghettos, or the one that has erased the genocide of Native Americans. "I fell in love with this engraving because it seemed to sum up so many meaningful things," De Gregori would recall. "America seen through our European eyes, and so a bit like Kafka's America — a book I loved dearly. The confrontation between the old and the new continent, the pioneers' frontier on one side and our cultural tradition on the other... The America of the western comics I read as a child: Buffalo Bill (but with one 'f', Italian-style!). In short, Otto Dix's 'American Cavalry', the engraving inspired by a Buffalo Bill circus show in the heart of old Europe, perfectly embodied the world evoked by my song: a myth that turns into a caricature of itself, a hero at twilight between legend and operetta."
RCA, however, considered that image not very commercial and didn't help De Gregori secure the reproduction rights. In its place on the cover ended up the illustration from a 1948 American calendar, "Aiming To Please". Featuring a curvy Calamity Jane-style pin-up, smoking gun in hand against a blue background, drawn by Gil Elvgren for a 1948 calendar. A kind of cowgirl who — as De Gregori puts it — "all things considered, has a few tricks up her sleeve too."
The other crucial inspiration for the title track is a Sam Peckinpah film, "The Ballad of Cable Hogue", the parable of an old American pioneer who dies crushed by a car — a powerful symbol of the end of the western epic and the arrival of the automobile age. Fewer horses, more optimism. The roar of four-wheeled machines supplanting the screech of the railway. A new American Dream that would run aground in 1929 with the Wall Street crash.

The story — more or less fictionalized — of Buffalo Bill thus becomes the narrative springboard for exploring the myth of the new frontier.

⟦Q1⟧

The declamatory incipit is one of those stunning openings that De Gregori has accustomed us to over the years. The curtain rises on the promised land, an ancestral Eden protected by its soldiers and by a reassuring divinity. Given the choice between life and death, who wouldn't have chosen America? Then come the muted tolling of the piano, announcing the entrance of William Frederick Cody, the boy "almost as blond as Jesus," who "played rummy and whistled at women." Born in the mid-nineteenth century, after years spent scouting for the army, he earned the title of Buffalo Bill by hunting bison and supplying their meat to the railroad companies' workers. Legend has it he killed 4,000 of them. Because "a hunter always kills for sport, I killed to be the best." Yet this "American torero" is also "gullible and romantic," a poet in his own way. A wild, primordial spirit, who refuses the "set path" of the locomotive, a metaphor for the routine of industrial society, caged by monotony and sameness. Like the buffalo, he "can dodge sideways and fall." And fall he will, ground up in the gears of the new American society, the one that will have him sign a proper contract to tour the world as a sideshow freak in Barnum's Circus. The America of false, thirty-two-tooth smiles. The America of pen-pushers taking the place of cowboys. Like "Rubber Ass, the famous mechanic." "I got a bit into the language of these Americans who saw the world divided between those who rode horses and those who didn't; and whoever didn't ride perhaps had a softer backside, and the mechanic who understands pistons and cylinders is therefore called 'Rubber Ass' — a kind of human by-product in Buffalo Bill's eyes. These are all things I made up myself; maybe Buffalo Bill ended up driving a car in the end," the Roman singer-songwriter will reveal, amused.

Buffalo Bill's is a cardboard myth, straight out of a comic strip. But De Gregori uses him as a litmus test to expose the contradictions of American society, its hypocrisies, its rhetorical western-movie epos (Buffalo Bill himself would fight alongside the infamous General Custer against Sitting Bull's Sioux). The hunter's parable from hero to buffoon thus symbolizes the loss of innocence of a wild, immaculate America that perhaps never existed. Out of the bloodbath of those primordial struggles emerges another America, one that fences off the prairie with barbed wire and surrenders itself to the markets, to show business. Touring Europe with the "peace and goodwill circus," Buffalo Bill becomes its official spokesman.
Built for little "skits," with the music faithfully following the lyrical development of the text, the song plays on the interplay between a celestial piano and a rustic country guitar, and on the constant sense of a chorus that never arrives, culminating in a beautiful closing piano solo. De Gregori doesn't abandon his melodic gift, but makes it drier, leaner, working by subtraction. And he seeks out more complex harmonic ideas. The piano gains in coordination and harmony. And his singing, too, grows bolder, venturing into new registers and modes of expression. His voice, just slightly more nasal, improves in pitch, leaning into the melodies and alternating spoken delivery with more refined modulations.

The Dylan Sound on Via Tiburtina

Even the album's sonic choices closely evoke America: the raw Dylan-esque sound of the period with the Band, the driving rhythm section à la "John Wesley Harding" (Dylan), the country-and-western echoes of the guitars. In some ways, a radical shift from the subtly polished sound of "Rimmel." "At the RCA studios there was this tendency to be very prim, very clean... The Tiburtina sound! – De Gregori will recall in an interview with Paolo Vites – To pry them loose from this ideal of sonic calligraphy, from this idea of the neatly done homework assignment, I'd make them listen to anything that might help push in the opposite direction. And in the end the musicians would fall in line, some even ended up appreciating it. [...] Some say that in those years the acoustic guitars recorded at the RCA studios all had that same slightly grating sound, and I did everything I could not to conform."
The Roman singer-songwriter, then, shifts the coordinates of his sound, with a mix of devotion (to the American myth) and daring (with respect to his own stylistic habits). A metamorphosis impeccably decoded by Giovanna Marini, someone who has always understood De Gregori inside out (as well as musical technique): "In 'Bufalo Bill' the instruments start growing little by little. At first there was only a guitar, then an electric guitar is added, then an upright bass and some very light percussion. It seems to me that for Francesco, discovering a very strong electric bass was fundamental. And rightly so, because it's the discovery of harmony [...]. From the moment Francesco started playing piano, he began organizing music in a harmonic way, whereas before he circled around melodies in a modal way. I believe Francesco writes his melodies starting from the chords, on guitar or piano."

If "Bufalo Bill" is the cowboy's dream, the myth of the Frontier, "Giovane Esploratore Tobia" is the fable of the good American boy, the spotless boy scout, chasing cheap thrills on his daily explorations. A clean-cut character, but a prisoner of convention. With "a hygienically perfect childhood behind him: measles, sadness, and no other illness." De Gregori paints a sardonic, mocking portrait of him, with Lucio Dalla's hand in the music. "What's frightening about young explorers is their inconclusiveness; they learn to light fires... – De Gregori will joke – [...] He's a healthy, American character, continuing the discourse on America already begun in 'Disastro aereo sul Canale di Sicilia' and in 'Bufalo Bill.' These are three American moments, with characters who have all their teeth in place and never make mistakes. But Tobia is, after all, someone who dreams, who has big problems behind him from a clean, precise, lonely, probably neurotic childhood, and who does these predictable things. But really I wanted to refer to all those people who live out Marxism in a Catholic way, even in an evangelical way. It's a song I wrote after having conversations with some young people who shocked me with how glibly they called themselves left-wing."

All in all, little more than a pleasant but ultimately dispensable divertissement, unlike the splendid track that closes the American triptych of Buffalo Bill: "Disastro aereo sul Canale di Sicilia" is one of the most political episodes in De Gregori's songbook, sparked by reading a Lotta Continua article on military spending in Italy. The young American pilot of a NATO F-104 fighter jet is the other face — the grim, spectral one — of Tobia: he acts unwittingly, carrying out orders and completing his missions of death. With the complicity of an eternally submissive Italian ally, for whom a scathing prologue is reserved:

It is also clear, moreover, in the climate of détente
that in the event of an attack on Arab countries, Italy would find itself
in the front line
everyone knows everything about the beginning but no one can speak of the end
and this is the story of the plane lost off the Tunisian coast
The widow factory flew at ten thousand metres
over Sicilian soil...

Here the plane is corrosively defined as a "widow factory." But while the satire of American top guns and of the States as international enforcers is the initial narrative springboard, under De Gregori's lens images and inputs of every kind swell and overlap, interwoven with episodes from Italian history. "Broom shrubs and concrete a stone's throw from the sea" recalls the Portella della Ginestra massacre: the deadly May Day of 1947, when Salvatore Giuliano and his men opened fire on farm laborers, killing eleven and wounding another 27. Another verse originally dedicated to this episode — one of the first tragic enigmas of republican Italy — was later cut because it didn't quite fit the text. "The grave of a journalist, still hard to find" is instead that of Mauro De Mauro, the reporter for Palermo's l'Ora newspaper kidnapped by the mafia on 16 September 1970, whose body was never recovered.
But the plane crash in the Strait of Sicily — the NATO fighter jet going down in that stretch of sea — also sounds like the most prescient of prophecies about the Ustica massacre, fourteen years ahead of time. On 27 June 1980, when Itavia's DC-9 broke apart in flight and vanished into the sea, many would find themselves thinking back on those very lines. And who knows if that's precisely why Marco Risi called on De Gregori to write the soundtrack for his 1991 film "Muro di gomma," which tells of the mysteries and cover-ups surrounding one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Republic.
The song's greatness also lies in the contrast between the grimness of the lyrics and the almost Mediterranean brightness of the melodies, bolstered by strings and a very seventies-sounding chorus. The usual purists will turn up their noses. De Gregori will explain that, not having chosen the path of experimentalism, he simply tries to use the means available to him to compose pleasing music, even when, as in this case, everything grows out of three chords sketched on the piano. And anyone who has a problem with that can raise their hand...

"Bufalo Bill" actually contains a fourth song about America too, though disguised as a dark fairy tale. "Ninetto e la colonia" is another prescient fable, this time about the crimes of globalization, about the entanglement of multinational corporations and politics, about the ruthless exploitation of labor in Third World countries. The indictment actually names names: Boston's United Fruit Company, which also exports the Chiquita brand and which has swallowed up most of the arable land in Latin American countries. In a setting of magical realism à la Garcia Marquez (“La notte si annunciava chiara, la sera era serena/ la gente nel cinema assisteva seria al magico/ ‘Quattro per quattro del circo di Brema’”), the sad fate of "little dim-witted Ninetto" plays out: unaware of what awaits him, "with a hand in his pockets," he keeps playing at the cinema, before the marines ("three angels in the night, with chains under their coats") burst in, shooting everyone. Picking their way through the bodies strewn on the ground, the company's tie-wearing gentlemen will gather up their bananas and go off to sell them:

And behind a backdrop of stars
the company's employees
stole all the fruit from the trees
and carried it away

The cinema is a metaphor for reality projected on screen, in which people unwittingly find themselves; "the magic Quattro per quattro of the Bremen circus" is a self-quotation referring to a song from three years earlier that was never released ("5 milioni di risate"), while the protagonist, Ninetto, may recall Pasolini's favorite actor: Ninetto Davoli. Given particular punch by a pulsing bass that lends a tight cadence to the narrative, the song also shows a De Gregori unusually bold in his singing, even when called upon for an almost theatrical delivery.

Men on the Run and Rain in Their Shoes

While the American setting is the main leitmotif of the album, there are also tracks that escape this narrative thread, painted, as always, in a mix of realism and magic. Starting with the mysterious, captivating world of "Atlantide," the album's most precious gem, one that remained inexplicably submerged for a long time, just like the legendary continent itself. Perhaps because of its bitter, cryptic lyrics, hard to decipher. Like a skilled conjurer of words, De Gregori deftly handles wordplay, resorting to one of his typical in medias res openings that hurl the listener straight into the middle of the story ("He now lives in Atlantis with a hat full of memories"), taking for granted that the beginning is already known and gradually supplying the keys to piece the puzzle together. It's the admission of a defeat, of an (ir)responsibility, sublimated in the surreal reversal of roles of the unfaithful protagonist, who sends word that he's the one forgiving his beloved "for having betrayed her." ("Tell her I lost her when I understood her/tell her I forgive her for having betrayed her."
But while in other autobiographical episodes by the Roman singer-songwriter, such as "Rimmel" and "Bene," the confession unfolded in the first person, here De Gregori distances himself, steps out of the scene and gets behind the camera. Drawing on a classic formula of the literary song: sending a message to the beloved woman through an intermediary. Except that here everything is bitterly mocking, contradictory: the temporal displacement makes the belated awareness of mistakes made appear as a kind of "forgiveness." In the rest of the song, however, the story proceeds through a narrating voice, in the third person. "He" has sought refuge in the submerged world, another place of the soul. One that never existed, or one still entirely to be discovered. He fled to California, tried to rebuild his life, but remained chained to a memory that keeps hurting. So now he lives "in the third ray" and has learned his lesson.

He's become a great guitar player
and he's crazy about a woman named Lisa
when he tells her: "You're the one to live with"
a wrinkle forms on his left cheek
He now lives in the third ray
where he's learned not to ask questions anymore like:
"Do you by chance know a girl from Rome
whose face recalls the collapse of a dam?"
I knew her once and I learned her name
but the vice of love carried me far away

Grotesque yet clear, precise word associations, evoking even in physical terms the marks of pain, of a lacerating experience (the "wrinkle on the left cheek," the face that recalls "the collapse of a dam"). And in this dreamlike sequence of images, one stands out unforgettably: the "can of desperate beer" hidden under the bed, the brilliant personification that, in the most absurd of emotional transferences, manages to explain everything.
Matching the originality of the lyrics is one of the most beautiful and intricately composed pieces of music De Gregori has ever written: a slow, dreamlike sonic flow, dispensing intense oneiric, underwater suggestions, amid the celestial tolling of the piano, the dark mantle of the Eminent organ, subtle guitar arpeggios and an enveloping, deeply sad melody, the kind that melts the heart. While there's no doubt about its debt to "Three Angels" by his guiding light Bob Dylan (from "New Morning," 1970), one cannot help but recognize in "Atlantide" a uniquely evocative power. And one senses the freshness of writing done "in one go," the fruit of a state of compositional grace. The song, in fact, was born on a sleepless night at the piano, after an RCA party and before a departure for Catania. "I remember a fairly large room with two windows, and against the wall, between those two windows, the upright piano – De Gregori will reveal – I sat down there to play and write, and meanwhile day was breaking and the light was coming in through those two windows, and I thought that was the best stereophonic day I'd ever seen! And partly because it really felt like being underwater, partly because that was a rare, precious moment of solitude, it occurred to me to call this song 'Atlantide'."
But while in "Atlantide" — as in the portraits of "Rimmel" — De Gregori resorts to a still-individual perspective, on another key track of the album, "Santa Lucia," he widens the horizon, attempting the choral fresco and catching off guard those who have always stopped at the literal surface of his songs (and who thus grow suspicious at the sight of saints), with a secular prayer of touching compassion and courage. An intercession not only for the earth's dispossessed, but for all "the men who do not see." Whether out of inability or by choice. Because sometimes "they have eyes and a heart that isn't enough for the eyes," or they are "easy people who never have doubts." It's the invocation of someone who fears being left alone, "at the crossing of the winds," ending up "burned alive," or simply worn down, day after day, by "our crown of stars and thorns," by "our fear of the dark and of imagination." Only the saint who protects sight, symbol of "illuminating grace," can bring safely to harbor the "broken boat" of a blind humanity, left at the mercy of social injustice, pain and loneliness.

Santa Lucia
the violin of the poor is a broken boat
it's a young boy on the second floor
who sings, laughs and sings out of tune
so that he may go far, let even the rain in his shoes
be sweet to him
and even loneliness

In its own way, then, a social anthem, a hymn to brotherhood, where the invocation of the saint recalls the humble language of folk song. Yet in an era of watertight ideologies, it couldn't help but arouse suspicion. A mystical, converted De Gregori? Or just an opportunistic wink at Catholic imagery? Naturally, neither. The title even has a comic origin. "My mother, who's short-sighted, whenever she was looking for something around the house and finally found it, used to say: 'Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia, I hadn't seen it!' - it's a figure of speech, and the song springs from there," he revealed in a clarifying interview. "Santa Lucia is the patron saint of the blind, everyone knows that, and this is a song for those who can't see... If the criticism is only about naming a saint, I'm not ashamed of it, I have nothing against saints. And the song really is a prayer."
Time, ever the fair judge, would go on to make it one of De Gregori's most beloved songs, and not only with the public. An enthusiastic Lucio Dalla, in fact, would go so far as to call it "my favourite song by Francesco, the one I envy him most." The Roman singer-songwriter himself would rank it among his own favourites. Credit is also due to a musical setting that's no less solemn and poignant: Toto Torquati's piano underpinning the subdued vocal, with bass and drums entering on tiptoe in the final verse, then the crescendo and an electric-guitar blues coda that repeats the melody over an organ bed. It moves without chasing tears. A masterpiece within the masterpiece that is "Bufalo Bill".

Bitter fairy tales

The boldness of writing that defines "Bufalo Bill" also ventures into fairy-tale territory. Toppling a childhood icon, in a gruesome nursery rhyme that De Gregori himself likes to call his "most immoral song". The killing of Santa Claus at the hands of the "son of the son of the flowers" and the proletarian Dolly is, in fact, far more than a parable about the end of innocence and the ebbing of youth culture. It's a prophetic hallucination that anticipates twenty years of history: the sunset of the hippie utopia in a spiral of drugs and violence, the bourgeois hypocrisy of the post-'68 generation, terrorism, the deception of class struggle, the cynical individualism of the yuppie generations, baby gangs and the new natural born killers. But Francesco De Gregori had almost none of this in mind: "In 1976 the flower children were already something of a relic of war. [...] The quickest to sniff which way the wind was blowing had already put their bell-bottoms and battle-worn parkas back in the closet. It wasn't hard to imagine that their children would be very different. Maybe not exactly killers, but perhaps a bit nastier, yes [...] What happened afterwards loaded the song with new meanings, but that's not my fault," he'll demur. "I just wanted to play a little with Freudian symbolism, stage the killing of a rather special father figure and try to debunk that slightly saccharine rhetoric so many people had lulled themselves with... Woodstock, flowers in your hair, all that being together getting stoned, rolling naked in the mud and being happy."
The immaculate Santa Claus of children's imagery takes on unsettling, almost dark traits: he brings with him not toys or candy floss, but iron and coal. Not exactly what children are hoping for... The background detail deserves attention: a startled nature that seems almost to distance itself from the horror. The moon watching them pass by is "frightened", the stars are reduced to "pinpricks", and then the snow falls, mercifully hiding the scene beneath its white blanket. But it's the childlike dimension, once again, that dominates: from the enchanted atmosphere, rendered by the lovely acoustic arpeggio and the storyteller's spoken delivery, to the fairy-tale language, which clashes with the rawness of the tale:

Sure enough Santa Claus arrives
loaded with iron and coal
the son of the son of the flowers kills him
with a knife and with a stick
and Dolly wipes his hands
with a slice of bread
the clouds pass behind the moon
and far away a dog is barking
And the snow begins to fall
the snow that fell on the meadow
and within minutes word had spread
that Santa Claus had been killed

And that's how the song would have ended, had De Gregori not come up with a new verse during the concerts just before the album's release: the killer and his accomplice go back home. As if it had all been just a bad dream. Or as if the subversive urge for freedom (the toppling of tradition) had been followed by an unbearable anguish, soothed only by the warmth of a regained domestic normality: “Così Dolly del mare profondo/ e il figlio del figlio dei fiori/ si danno la mano e ritornano a casa/ tornano a casa dai genitori”.

The album's other fairy tale also hides a bitter message. A story of losers, souls lost in the gears of an adverse fate. Like Carmela's mother, who leafs through glossy magazines envying rich blonde women and dreaming of redeeming herself from her fate of immigration and poverty through the birth of an "immense" daughter ("Ipercarmela"). A nursery rhyme of dreamy, surreal naivety: the baby girl who's born becomes "a star" and always laughs, illuminating a bleak snapshot of immigration in a city that's "clean and violent", which De Gregori would identify as Turin.

Homage to Tenco

Everything is perfect on "Bufalo Bill". Even a seemingly minor track like "Ultimo discorso registrato" delivers flashes of genius: who else on earth could ever open a song with "What kind of man reads the gospel today, what have they done to your eyes, Jesus Mary"? The content of the track is interesting too, seeming to poke fun at the attacks De Gregori was facing at the time - which culminated in the notorious Palalido "trial" - through a pastiche of the clichés of the extra-parliamentary and radical-chic left of the era ("How long did it take me before becoming one of them / how much rage and how much sex behind the glass"... "Now please tell me when the war will end! I'm sick of staying in my luxury trench").
Even more savage is the invective reserved for the Sanremo "Festival" in the track dedicated to a man he never met, but who had a crucial influence on his earliest musical steps: the "young angel who walked around without a sword", who died amid the flowers and the indifference of the Sanremo carousel. "I didn't know Luigi Tenco (I was still at school back then), but like a lot of kids I'd seen him on television that night, and his face had struck me powerfully, it had disturbed me: so I gathered accounts, listened to the various versions given by those who'd been there and those who hadn't, and stitched together, just as it came to me, everything I'd learned."
The snapshot of that tragic evening, which would drape the history of the festival and of Italian song in mourning, is rendered in vivid, powerful verse.

Two hundred of them carried him away
a shame it was only when he left
the night they took the wine
and washed the street with it

The folk sound of "Festival" needs no special effects to tear through the veils of cynicism and hypocrisy that have shrouded Tenco's death. A distant breath of harmonica, the acid trail of guitars, a sardonic, biting spoken delivery: that alone is enough. Because the lyrics are an unmitigated j'accuse. Against the artists' enemies, the obtuse and opportunistic record executives. Against the television circus willing to do anything "as long as the show goes on", even at the cost of a hollow sentimentality ("And the television man said: 'Let no tear be wasted, after all what's more beautiful than life, spring has almost begun'"). Against all those who speculated on the causes of his death ("maybe he'd drunk too much", "someone thought: 'It was a problem with women', another said: 'Just like Marilyn Monroe, really'", "someone remembered he had debts" or that "he was full of tranquillisers"). Against all those who appropriated the myth ("Everyone said: 'I was like a father to him'") and Tenco's memory, erecting monuments only "to forget a little more quickly". Against the vulture journalists ("The music-page correspondent wrote: 'Everything's been paid for'"). In short, against all those who let Luigi Tenco die that night in 1969 and were left "with sweaty eyes", without crying.
As Roberto Vecchioni writes in his essay on De Gregori: "Tenco's end couldn't be likened to a public failure, to a pseudo-populist deception like Sanremo. Tenco's end lay within him, and in the despair of having arrived before his time, of having crashed against the moral and existential inattention of an audience ill-prepared by the media. And of mediocre, petty, bootlicking media, indifferent towards a song they deemed pointless in the reassuring landscape of Italian music. De Gregori makes 'Festival' a song of total accusation before it is one of pity. It sheds its lyrical garb to descend into invective, and in this it differs from the same subject as treated by De André ('Preghiera in gennaio')."

Half a century later

So what remains, fifty years on? A revolutionary style, first and foremost, one might say, in the search for harmonies and for lyrics that approach their subjects elliptically, using evocative, imaginative, at times brilliant metaphors, yet always mathematical in their precision. But none of this would be enough if it weren't married - contrary to what the author is usually reproached for - to a formidable musical inspiration, brilliant, tight and clean in its sound, even though this was 1976 and its author had chosen an all-too-spartan approach.
Too much grace, in short, just like that of the curvaceous pistol-toting pin-up on the cover. This time even the detractors will have to surrender. Torn to shreds by sheer imagination.

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31/05/2026