Return Receipt Requested - Italian sci-fi prog

Life had been reduced to a stage of marionettes. Man was going mad, man was going mad!

Return Receipt Requested (also known as RRR) were a Roman band devoted to progressive rock in the years when the genre, in Italy and across Europe, was enthusiastically living through its golden age. Formed by Luciano Regoli (vocals, acoustic guitar), Francesco Froggio Francica (drums, percussion), Manlio Zacchia (bass), Damaso Grassi (flute, sax), Nanni Civitenga (guitar) and Stefano Piermarioli (keyboards), they released a single album in 1972 - "For a World of Crystal" - before quickly splitting due to various disputes among the musicians. Despite the brevity of their career, their one and only LP remains today an utterly distinctive album from a musical season full of innovation and complexity that went well beyond the earlier experience of Italian beat music.

Before joining Return Receipt Requested, Luciano Regoli was a young singer infatuated with the histrionic, chameleon-like Arthur Brown ("Few people in Italy had noticed how good Arthur Brown was, but I had already bought all his records"), and he tried to put his abilities to use recreating albums and live shows that drew in part on the theatrical and vocal flair of the Crazy World leader. His first experience was with Il ritratto di Dorian Gray, a Roman band that left no recordings behind but did have time to play at the historic 1971 Festival di Caracalla; among its members was keyboardist Claudio Simonetti, who, once that experience ended, became the creative mastermind behind the hugely famous Goblin. The band split precisely because of the differing visions and musical ambitions of Regoli and Simonetti: the former wanted a group that could showcase his talents as a singer, while the latter looked instead to the Keith Emerson of the Nice as his model. With no way to reconcile the two, the inevitable outcome was a split. Yet the legacy of this small, little-known group with no recorded LP to its name is significant: besides Simonetti, who went on to Goblin, bassist Massimo Giorgio went on to play with Quella vecchia locanda, another landmark band of Italian prog, while Luciano Regoli formed RRR.

It's 1972. The year before had seen the release of albums like "Alpha Centauri" by Tangerine Dream, "Pawn Hearts" by Van Der Graaf Generator, "Fragile" by Yes, and "Aqualung" by Jethro Tull; Italy was struggling to keep pace, with releases like "Caronte" by Joe Vescovi's Trip and "Collage" by Le Orme, while New Trolls put out their landmark "Concerto grosso". For Italy, though, 1972 was the year of the real boom: Alan Sorrenti released his masterpiece "Aria", Balletto di Bronzo recorded "YS", and both Banco del Mutuo Soccorso and Premiata Forneria Marconi made their debuts, each with two albums - "Banco del Mutuo Soccorso" and "Darwin!" for the former, "Storia di un minuto" and "Per un amico" for the latter; as if that weren't enough, there was also "Fetus" and "Pollution" from the experimental period of Franco Battiato, "Nuda" by Garybaldi, and the self-titled debut of Quella vecchia locanda. It was the golden age of Italian prog, and within it even the lesser-known RRR played no marginal role.

For a World of Crystal is the finest Italian example of a sci-fi-themed prog concept album. The lyrics were written by the poet Maria Comin, and she herself summed up the story told across the record: "A man sets off on a space expedition and returns to Earth, but the planet he once knew no longer exists - there is only the 'Nothing' around him, he is alone in a world that is no longer a world. He climbs 'Onto a cliff', the only thing left standing, and looking out over all the ruins he tries to understand why mankind destroyed itself, seeing himself again as a child playing 'In his neighbourhood'. Suddenly a flash in the sky, the only thing that still reminds him of life, but he sees 'The world falling' on top of him from the sky and he cannot react, watching the sun advance menacingly from the horizon toward him like 'A shadow' - but this world, which had been 'A stage of marionettes', leaves nothing in his mind but 'Dreams of crystal' that shatter into 'Nothing'."

The album's greatness rests on several factors: being a post-apocalyptic concept album that manages to tell a story rich in food for thought, the obsessive, repetitive rhythms found in almost every track, echoes - besides the already-mentioned Arthur Brown - of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" (1970) and "Hunky Dory" (1971), the very strong influence of jazz, and the sense of desolation with which it so precisely describes a world destroyed by nuclear conflict.

The album opens with "Nulla", an initially liturgical moment in which an astronaut returns to Earth after years away only to find it utterly destroyed; from the liturgical organ we move straight into "Su una rupe", which starts off with fast, obsessive rhythms over which Luciano Regoli can place his vocals. The fear of nuclear conflict, so present in Cold War-era cinema and literature, surfaces here too in the Italian music scene. The protagonist climbs a cliff, from which he can look down on the world, or what remains of it. The landscape before him is bleak. He looks and sees nothing ahead of him, and begins to wonder why mankind, too busy with its own petty problems, hadn't climbed up to that cliff sooner to see what it had become. Had people looked beyond themselves and had the courage to see the bigger picture, perhaps they would have been saved. The monologue is interrupted by "Il mondo cade su di me", which opens - after a start of guitar, cello and voice - into a repetitive chant with female choruses marked out by a few piano notes, describing the long trek through nothingness that the astronaut undertakes after climbing down from the cliff.

The astronaut continues on his journey, leading into "Il mio quartiere", a complex, fragmented instrumental steeped in Canterbury-style jazz-rock that again echoes the agoraphobia of these vast, desolate spaces. But the album's most commendable moment is the prolonged, obsessive repetition that returns right on cue in "L'ombra".

The shadow advancing menacingly is nothing but the nothingness pursuing and surrounding the astronaut, who cannot escape it - a metaphor for evil spreading at the expense of good, for concrete replacing green space, for hope fading ever faster. After much wandering, the astronaut finds other human beings, and we arrive at the true gem of the album, RRR's little masterpiece, probably one of the finest tracks in all of Italian prog. "Un palco di marionette" is a prog suite that ranges across driving new rhythms, flute solos, sweeping keyboards and warnings for a lost humanity. Such grandeur is striking when one considers how young the musicians were, all barely into adulthood. The last survivors of the atomic war are slaves to a great puppeteer who controls them from above. This new metaphor describes certain traits of modern man, absorbed only in his own small, selfish problems; people are small and weak, incapable of doing good for others, like marionettes controlled from on high: they think they are free, but they are not. Every time the puppeteer pulls too hard on the strings and distracts them from their petty problems, they cannot understand why, and they go mad: "Se uno strappo cruento faceva alzare una mano la guerra per noi. L'uomo impazziva, l'uomo impazziva". The album closes with "Sogni di cristallo", its airiest, sunniest moment, yet one that still keeps a pessimistic spirit. Past the marionettes, the journey continues without finding anything; all that remains are memories of crystal (that is, destined to crumble away over time), among them a child's crying or birds flying in the sky. But it is all just memory - the ending indeed tells us: "Ci son mille colori che non hanno più colori". The beauty and variety of nature have been destroyed; even the colours struggle to re-emerge from the nothingness created by man.

Although this is certainly a successful LP, its main flaw lies in audio quality that doesn't match the musicians' talent, and in lyrics that at times aren't quite aligned with the concept's narrative. The idea was genuinely significant, and there was potential to make an even greater album. The excessive friction among the musicians probably didn't help, even though in 1972 they took part in the first Festival di Villa Pamphili, the Palermo Pop Festival, and the Piper club in Rome, even serving as the support act for Gentle Giant's Italian shows. These successes and strong live performances led Fonit Cetra to offer RRR a slot at the 1973 Sanremo Festival, but at that point the divergence between those seeking a more jazz-oriented sound and those hoping for a more mainstream pop approach came to a head, and the project collapsed. Excessive rivalry and constant bickering among the musicians, probably still too young and immature to handle sudden fame, were the real undoing of RRR.

Having gone their separate ways, the members of RRR scatter and lose touch: singer Regoli and guitarist Civitenga form Samadhi, while drummer Froggio Francica plays in Procession. After the collapse of the Samadhi project, Regoli disappears from the music scene entirely to pursue a fruitful artistic career as a painter and sculptor.

In 2010, amid a wider rediscovery of the early Italian prog scene, Regoli tries again with the project Nuova Raccomandata con Ricevuta di Ritorno. Alongside the founder we find Nanni Civitenga (RRR), Roberto Gardin (RRR), Walter Martino (RRR, Goblin) and Claudio Simonetti (Goblin), as well as outside contributions from Lino Vairetti of Osanna, Nicola di Staso of Lybra, and Carl Verheyen of Supertramp.

Il pittore volante owes its title to Regoli's career, which spans both music and painting. But by this point the reunion has abandoned any progressive ambitions in favor of simpler, less elaborate sounds, though it doesn't entirely give up on sporadic experimental moments, like the deranged horn chaos of "La mente".

On 6 November 2010 the Nuova RRR performed at the Prog Exhibition in Rome. In 2013 they recorded Live In Elba, later released in 2015, named after the island where Regoli has lived for years. The record is a kind of nostalgic farewell, a ceremony of gratitude in memory of a musical season that brought so much joy to those who followed it with passion.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google