Francesco De Gregori

Author: Claudio Fabretti

Title: Between the Bright Pages and the Dark Pages

Publisher: Arcana

Pages: 300

Price: Euro 18,50

c’è sempre un viaggio da ricominciare”

 (from “Viaggi & Miraggi”, 1992)

"But write them when I'm dead, these biographies!" The outburst aimed at one of his first biographers, Enrico Deregibus, says a lot about Francesco De Gregori's aversion to books dedicated to his story. It's no easy task, in short, to tackle a volume on the figure of the Roman singer-songwriter. He himself has always admitted as much: "I defend myself pre-emptively, I've built an invisible protective wall."

To take up the challenge, "Between the light pages and the dark pages" attempts an approach that is as simple as it is subversive: putting the songs at the centre. The name of its author, Claudio Fabretti, hardly needs introducing on these pages. And it's precisely in continuity with the philosophy that gave rise to OndaRock that we find the essence of Fabretti's approach, put to the test in his first book: "what it shares with the OndaRock experience is the desire to approach music with passion and without prejudice," he explains. "Trying to tell a story and spark curiosity, rather than hand down verdicts."

Not a biography in the traditional sense, then, but rather a cross-cutting journey through De Gregori's songbook, tracing themes and suggestions from one of the most complex voices in Italian song. An approach which, while it inevitably brings some redundancy, on the other hand manages to escape the trap (typically Italian) of what Fabretti himself calls "the gossip to which music journalism in newspapers and on TV is now so often reduced."

Love is the starting point of the journey, whatever the proponents of reducing De Gregori to the stereotype of the engaged troubadour might think. Because "it's precisely in the love songs, perhaps, that his most significant semantic and conceptual revolution took place."

Love captured in its final act, love caught right as it slips through one's fingers, "when awareness of its irremediably unfinished nature sharpens." From "Atlantide" to "Compagni di viaggio", it's through this angle that De Gregori sidesteps the conventions of the love song, building tracks with a cinematic feel, made of interlocking games and plots freed from temporal linearity. And it's from this perspective that even the beloved-hated "Rimmel" finds its truth: "Never had a farewell been told in such a sharp, mocking, anti-rhetorical way. Exactly the opposite of what those critics will go on rambling about, accusing the whole of "Rimmel" of excessive sentimentality and romanticism."

Amid travel chronicles, glimpses of disinherited lives and children's eyes, the path traced by Fabretti skirts both well-known and lesser-known episodes in the discography of the now sixty-year-old De Gregori. But the vision of history is the other key theme around which the journey through the Roman singer-songwriter's lyrics revolves: history seen through the perspective of the human heart, "the infinitely small in which the infinitely great is reflected."

Delicate territory, where the universal inevitably intertwines with the particular. Even "Between the light pages and the dark pages" doesn't escape the temptation of a political reading. But beyond the game of more or less implicit references (Giorgio Almirante in “Le storie di ieri”, Marco Pannella in “Il signor Hood”, Bettino Craxi in “La ballata dell’Uomo Ragno”, to name a few), the attempt to draw a dividing line between right and left runs up against the nuances of songs like “Scacchi e tarocchi”, “Chi ruba nei supermercati?” or “Il cuoco di Salò”. Fabretti is right, then, when he concludes that “De Gregori's lyrical, minimalist approach demands a capacity for analysis that certainly doesn't belong to current political affairs”.

The biographical narrative, as it unfolds through "Between the light pages and the dark pages", proceeds in brief snapshots, from the early days at the Folkstudio (“the sense of belonging that united those Trastevere carbonari was, deep down, that of an entire generation”), to the buen retiro with Fabrizio De André in Gallura, drinking, smoking, playing chess and capturing songs on a battery-powered tape recorder.

To evoke the leaden atmosphere of the notorious “trial” at the Palalido in Milan, when De Gregori was put in the dock by a group of extra-parliamentary left-wing militants after a concert, Fabretti draws on Mario Luzzatto Fegiz's contemporary reporting in the “Corriere della Sera”. Showing how the deepest alternative to the violence of ideology is the truth of a friendship: a friendship through which one rediscovers one's own face, a friendship capable of building rather than destroying. For De Gregori, this means his bond with Lucio Dalla, with whom he embarked on the “Banana Republic” adventure: a triumphant tour that gave Italy back its music after the Years of Lead, and through which the two “ferried the singer-songwriter tradition from the elite to the masses, joyfully dissolving the very ideological shroud in which they themselves had become entangled”.

Although starting from the premise that, in De Gregori's songs, it is often the music itself that is the main course, the thematic approach that characterizes "Between the light pages and the dark pages" inevitably ends up favoring literary exegesis. Without falling, however, into the easy misconception of “De Gregori the poet”: “To claim that songs should be equated with poems is an indirect way of diminishing their autonomous scope”, Fabretti observes, “of reducing them to subculture, denying them the literary dignity that, precisely because they are ‘songs’ — an indissoluble union of sound and verse — they deserve to be granted”.

More than the analysis of that meticulous catalogue of rhetorical figures that make De Gregori a true “conjurer of words”, what matters is the essence of a style that Roberto Vecchioni effectively defined as “crypto-popular”: “A language that is apparently cultured, aesthetically refined, often not immediate, but with the same intent as the ‘popular’ to grasp, through symbols, abstractions, transliterations, the meaning of man, of life, of things”. A language that always runs along the thread of evocation, with a “natural inclination never to stop at the first meaning of things”.

But the portrait painted in "Between the light pages and the dark pages" is certainly no hagiography: OndaRock readers, after all, know well that it's not Fabretti's habit to spare harsh verdicts. And on this occasion too, there's no shortage of references to the “moments of fatigue” that surface over the long career of a performer who, as the years went by, grew ever more conservative. Nor are there any shortage of the chiaroscuros of an artist whose mythos has always been prickly, capable of reacting with impatience to his first radio hit in the days of “Alice”, or of suing Gianni Morandi over a cover of “Buonanotte Fiorellino” he deemed insufficiently respectful. On the other hand, ever since the days of “Povero me”, De Gregori has always admitted that “I dislike likeable people”: “With the unlikeable ones, if you dig and dig you can find likeability; with likeable people, you just need to dig a little and you find nothing, you find emptiness — behind that apparent likeability you find the void”.

The final stop has a very specific name: Bob Dylan. The Dylan icon is a countermelody that, in the topography of "Between the light pages and the dark pages", runs constantly through the plot. A suggestion offered right from the book's opening, built on the parallel between the Roman alleyways through which a shivering seventeen-year-old De Gregori slips, heading to the Folkstudio basement, and the streets of Greenwich Village depicted on the unforgettable cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”.

It is by following in Dylan's footsteps that De Gregori discovers his own America: the America of a thousand contradictions in “Bufalo Bill”, the promised-land America of “Titanic”, the bittersweet America to be contemplated while sitting on the roadside. And it is at Dylan's court that De Gregori brings his full band, on the occasion of a concert in Brescia in 2001: “Listen to how he plays with his band, I told my guys, let's try to do the same thing”. It's no coincidence, then, that the ongoing transformation of his songs on stage increasingly recalls the adventure of Dylan's Never Ending Tour, or that his recent albums (like the incisive “Pezzi”) increasingly and explicitly show the imprint of the man De Gregori has never hesitated to point to as his own master. “I feel like the character Dylan sang about at the end of 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'”, he reflects. “I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking. I know my song well: do whatever the hell you want, set off your atomic bombs, but I'm here and I'll sing you these songs regardless”.

It's precisely this stance that, in the end, prevails over the inevitable ups and downs of a career. “A stubborn defiance of reality”, Fabretti calls it. An irrepressible tension that keeps vibrating through the songs of the Roman singer-songwriter: “when you get close to something you may discover it isn't there, that it vanishes, and then you spot another one further off to turn to”. Never ceasing to search for another Egypt, to paraphrase the title of one of his most lucid Dylan-esque nightmares. Because, as De Gregori says, “every man carries within him a sense of the infinite”.

(17/04/2011)

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21/10/2025