Claudio Lolli

That the '70s were the golden age of Italian singer-songwriter music is by now beyond dispute. But while many songwriters of that generation eventually gained full recognition, sometimes at the cost of a few compromises, for others the road remained uphill all the way. Such was the case for Claudio Lolli. A figure "anything but easy-going and so out of step" – to borrow Fossati's words – yet paradoxically a victim of exactly the kind of labels that have always plagued the Italian scene: first "loser" and "depressive," then "communist," and even "Red Brigades sympathizer" (a label he himself revealed he'd been given). While nothing can be done about the shallowness of certain views, it's never too late to rediscover the work of this brilliant outsider from Bologna. A man who fully belongs among those poets who "scare people" – to quote the very title track – because "they always open their window, even if we say it's the wrong window." A nomad of ideas and verses, Lolli always walked against the wind, dusting his shoes and not giving a damn about applause. With a consistency almost unique on the Italian scene, one that earned him, if nothing else, the everlasting esteem of a small but deeply loyal circle of fans.

When, on April 7, 1976, he released the album "Ho visto anche degli zingari felici," Lolli was no longer the irreverent kid strumming anthems to action ("Aspettando Godot") and class struggle ("Borghesia"), or brooding wistfully over childhood memories ("Michel"). He was a twenty-six-year-old man who, in the midst of the Years of Lead, when it was all too easy to "only meet again at funerals" ("Piazza, bella piazza"), and when Montanelli was urging people to "hold your nose and vote Christian Democrat," managed to lucidly capture the anguish of a country where "people die from bombs, people die from massacres," the latest being the Italicus bombing, still "burning in the blood" ("Agosto") – all without losing the urge to fly, to savor the childlike joy of those Roma kids rolling around on the ground in Piazza Maggiore, to reclaim "that tenderness we're all entitled to" (as De Gregori sang in "La campana," another manifesto-song of those years). Because, unlike other "political" songwriters of the time – including Guccini himself, who discovered him in a Bologna tavern – Lolli wields the weapon of disarming tenderness, the kind that moves you without a shred of rhetoric, through the sheer force of his candor. The kind that whispers in your ear: "Let's take back our lives, the earth, the moon and abundance." In the end, that's really all there is to it.

The fourth LP by the Emilian songwriter (following "Aspettando Godot," "Un uomo in crisi. Canzoni di morte. Canzoni di vita" and "Canzoni di rabbia," all released on Emi), "Ho visto anche degli zingari felici" was conceived, in effect, as a concept album, or even a single long ballad divided into seven different chapters plus a final reprise of the first, all bound together by the idea of the piazza as the ancient agora, a meeting place of every kind and a litmus test for the Italy of those years. Specifically, Bologna's Piazza Maggiore – a crossroads of ideas and love affairs, assemblies and demonstrations, but also the stage for dramatic funerals like the one for the Italicus bombing victims – appears to Lolli as "an open space, a powerful drive toward concrete political action, a new way of coming together that is neither contrived nor frustrating." And this sense of freedom also translates musically into a far more anarchic and complex score, unafraid of airy arrangements verging on progressive rock and forays into jazz, with frequent tenor and alto saxophone solos (both courtesy of Danilo Tomasetta). An ambitious project, conceived "like a puzzle," together with the Collettivo Autonomo Musicisti di Bologna after six months of live shows. But certainly also a political project, including the decision – revolutionary for the time – to force Emi to lower the price (3,500 lire instead of the usual 5,000).

A haunting sax kicks off the finest "Introduction" in Italian song: the nearly seven minutes of "Ho visto anche degli zingari felici," a title borrowed from an old Yugoslav film ("Skupljači perja") "that Fantozzi would have treated far worse than Battleship Potemkin," as Lolli himself jokes in the liner notes of the remastered 2006 CD edition. The spine-tingling lyrics are matched by ravishing melodies (is it any coincidence that Lolli is a Beatles fan?) and equally evocative arrangements, where delicate fingerpicking alternates with refined horn parts and even a robust electric guitar solo. And then there's that voice, mercilessly described by its owner as "straight out of an underground festival… so full of crabs, spiders, frogs and other rather strange things." A warm, emotional voice, though, that lays us bare with its truths: "It's true that from the windows/ we can't see the light/ because night always wins over day/ and night produces no blood… It's true that we don't want to turn/ our winter into summer… It's true that the road often feels like hell to us/ and a voice in which we can't stand together/ where we never recognize our brothers."

Lolli's humanism is not some abstract lyricism. It's a hymn of hope addressed to all those "happy gypsies," free and nonconformist, who wanted to change the world: the flower of Italian youth in the '70s, burning with revolutionary passion and ready to embrace the exhortation of the final four verses of the closing reprise ("Conclusione"), freely reworked from Peter Weiss's "The Investigation" [Song of the Lusitanian Bogey]: "It is we who make the earth rich/ we who endure/ sleeping sickness and malaria… But let's take it back in hand, take it all back/ let's take back our lives/ the earth, the moon and abundance." A text that originally denounced Portuguese colonialism in Angola, which Lolli turns into a universal hymn to liberation and brotherhood.

Hope, then, but also outrage: on August 4, 1974, Lolli is on vacation with his girlfriend when the Italicus train is blown up. Twelve dead and fifty wounded in a massacre destined to vanish into the foggy harbor of Italy's unsolved mysteries. "Agosto" is a re-evocation of that "fistful of rage with the terrible sound of an old blast." A lucid, unflinching text ("People die in massacres/ more or less state-sanctioned"), hastily filed away, just like the case of anarchist Pinelli's death in Milan ("nothing has changed/ since that fourth floor at police headquarters/ since that window"). Just as dramatic, despite its fairy-tale inspiration drawn from a popular Tuscan nursery rhyme, is "Piazza, bella piazza": the coffins of ten Italicus victims lined up on the steps of San Petronio, before the stiff, upright profiles of Bologna's mayor Renato Zangheri, President of the Republic Giovanni Leone, and Christian Democrat secretary Amintore Fanfani. And in Piazza Maggiore outrage builds: "I could have done without Leone/ someone was heard shouting/ nothing but jeers for those pigs/ we're tired of only meeting/ at funerals," sings Lolli, "fists in his pockets" and fiery words in his holster, against those "bald heads, politicians/ five feet tall without wings." The uprisings of '77 were right around the corner.

But the first conflict to deal with, in those turbulent years, was within the walls of home: "May Day of celebration today in Vietnam/ and maybe all over the world/ May Day of death today at my house/ but maybe I'm confused." A liberated Saigon has "the taste of the sun" but also a bitter aftertaste of family misunderstandings ("maybe it's my father, I'm confused") amid the sax flourishes of "Primo maggio di festa." And the mind drifts to the "ingrates of French prosperity" of another May, the one sung by Fabrizio De André in "Storia di un impiegato" three years earlier. The young Lolli, too, sings of the disorder of dreams, but he has no need for slogans: his vocabulary thrives on mad hares and corn on the plateau, on the smell of embers and dying flies, on blood in the eyes and toothpaste clashing with wine. And on legendary figures like "Anna di Francia," who "kisses the square and then walks away," a poignantly tender and feminist sentimental digression ("I won't be a clock for you/ the chandelier that takes off your bra/ when it's late, it's night and you're tired/ and your desire, like time, runs short"), which nonetheless doesn't shy away from jabbing at the cultural rifts on the left ("and Luigi Nono is an idiot/ the alternative in culture/ isn't only ideology/ the alternative is organization"). "More beautiful than mad," Anna di Francia is the passionate heroine of that generation's dreams, and perhaps of all of ours: the sublimation of feminine freedom and elusiveness.

But it's not just words: the strength of the record also lies in a whirlwind of musical ideas flowing seamlessly into one another, with themes cyclically returning, as is customary for concept albums. So it's again a languid sax that introduces the epitaph of "La morte della mosca," in which Lolli chooses one of the smallest and most unpleasant creatures in the universe as a metaphor for social injustice: "Flies are a nuisance/ when they fly in a united swarm/ alone they bother no one/ they get squashed between two fingers," closing with a line stronger than a thousand slogans: "Flies are left with the shit/ the sky belongs to the powerful."

Lolli's strength lies precisely in this: shooting straight for the heart, stripping ideology of its dusty veneer and turning it into living, throbbing flesh, through simple yet touching images – like that Albana, the white wine of Romagna "not drunk since '68," capable of uniting "the old left and the new," reassuring the elderly comrade who "walks around with a red handkerchief and a photo of Togliatti" ("Albana per Togliatti," a parable of generational confrontation and the eternal rifts on the left).

Memories, dreams, anxieties, despair, idealism, passion: everything flows into the lyrics of this anti-blockbuster of Italian song, which perhaps only recently has begun to receive the recognition it deserves, partly thanks to the tribute paid by new generations of artists. In 2003 it was reworked into a live album with new arrangements curated by Il Parto delle Nuvole Pesanti. In 2009 Luca Carboni and Riccardo Sinigallia recorded a cover of the second part of "Ho visto anche degli zingari felici" (on the CD "Musiche ribelli"). And Rolling Stone Italy ranked the album at n. 67 in its list of the 100 greatest Italian albums of all time.

Who knows if time will be kind to this bearded master, grown old between semi-clandestine poems and lessons at the high school desk; who knows if it will finally be possible to read his work stripped of political prejudice and labels that refuse to die. "Nowadays gypsies aren't well regarded, we have a price imposed on us, to survive we have to disguise ourselves as decent people... But our smile can't lie," Lolli writes in the liner notes of the 2006 edition. One thing is certain: we'll always find him there, at his tavern table, resolutely sitting on the wrong side.

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

13/04/2014