Francesco De Gregori

A singer-songwriter on trial

The infamous trial endured by the autonomists at Milan's Palalido in 1976 is certainly not the only one in the history of Francesco De Gregori. Forever nailed to the stereotype of the “singer-songwriter with a capital S”, the prophet of commitment and rigor, the Prince has been a constant target of the radical-snob left. That mindset was embodied by the most famous savaging his masterpiece ever received: De Gregori non è nobel, è rimmel ["De Gregori isn't Nobel, he's mascara"], wrote Giaime Pintor - son of Luigi (Il Manifesto) and future editor of Muzak - in Linus in 1975. It amounts to a full-blown Stalinist trial, in which De Gregori is accused of drifting toward the love song, caught between "Baci Perugina poetics" and "pseudo-highbrow-school culture", hiding behind metaphors to escape the harsh law of realism and political commitment. "A hermetic poetics, one of lyrical intuition, is inherently an idealist poetics, therefore right-wing, backward for the Seventies, therefore incapable of reflecting tensions, of carrying positive and revolutionary values." Words from another century, yet they seem to belong to an entirely different geological era. And they still inspire more fear than tenderness today.

And yet, De Gregori himself would end up feeling guilty for the success of his first bestseller. He would record the follow-up, "Bufalo Bill", in a single week, with bare, essential sounds. "To punish myself for making Rimmel, which had sold too much," he would later admit. That's how things went, too, in the extraordinary Seventies.

Modernity

Forty years on, it seems all too clear that Pintor's logic should have been turned on its head. It was precisely his approach that already looked dated at the time, a sort of last gasp of the ideological criticism born out of '68, while "Rimmel" was a profoundly innovative record within the Italian singer-songwriter landscape. This much is acknowledged, for instance, by a critic with a finely postmodern eye like Christian Zingales: "Probably before Rimmel, classic Italian song had never contemplated the idea of transfiguration, let alone the possibility for a love song to alter the basic seed of its own codes until the very idea of love resonated in a limbo, in some enigmatic elsewhere. Yes, there had been Il cielo in una stanza, Il nostro concerto and other masterpieces, but they were still too confessional, too constrained by the era they belonged to. De Gregori captures the most intimate urgency of the Seventies as they were unfolding and hurls it into a masterpiece of distances and negations." In short, De Gregori was the first to write love songs without the language of love songs. They are little films, with anything but a linear plot, fragments of a puzzle to be pieced back together, hall-of-mirror games that distort a far broader, more indecipherable reality. An approach in line with the lesson of the great international singer-songwriters, but too modern and refined for the militant critics of the time to notice.

The shy troubadour of the Folkstudio – fresh off the strong showings of "Alice non lo sa" and its self-titled follow-up rechristened "La pecora" – completes his transformation into the Principe. He pairs a bold use of language and meter with a skillful dosage of melody. A path entirely his own, somewhere between Bob Dylan and Elton John. With rounder, more graceful sounds, elegant blends of piano, organ and guitars, a finally more incisive vocal delivery, and an entire band, Cyan, backing him up.

Cosmetic love affairs and musette waltzes

The path through the affairs of the heart traced by "Rimmel" is disarming. Starting with the title track, a worn-out snapshot of a goodbye that steers clear of all sentimentality and takes refuge in disenchantment. It isn't a confession, it's a chronicle. But everything unfolds through clues, through narrative glimpses. "E qualcosa rimane, fra le pagine chiare e le pagine scure" ["And something remains, between the light pages and the dark pages"]: nothing more than this is given away, in one of his most famous in medias res openings. Defeat is admitted ("E cancello il tuo nome dalla mia facciata, e confondo i miei alibi e le tue ragioni" ["And I erase your name from my facade, and I confuse my alibis with your reasons"]), but there's regret for that misleading prophecy: "Chi mi ha fatto le carte mi ha chiamato vincente, ma uno zingaro è un trucco e un futuro invadente" ["Whoever read my cards called me a winner, but a gypsy is a trick and an intrusive future"]. Reading it closely, it's almost an omen of what would happen to De Gregori: fame, the media uproar, the Milan "trial". Love, however, is a rigged game, because someone has cheated ("i tuoi quattro assi, bada bene di un colore solo" ["your four aces, mind you, all of one suit"]). And so all that's left is the time of a fleeting memory. An image of cosmetic beauty, the "sweet mascara Venus" captured in just a few strokes ("Ed il vento passava sul tuo collo di pelliccia e sulla tua persona" ["And the wind passed over your fur collar and over your whole self"]). Makeup and fur coat: the flatteries of vanity, of the ephemeral. Beautiful and jarring, like the woman portrayed in the nineteenth-century cameo on the cover, framed by a showy black-and-white wallpaper. Then, the theatrical twist at the end. She asks him a seemingly innocent question ("se per caso avevo ancora quella foto, in cui tu sorridevi e non guardavi" ["whether by chance I still had that photo, in which you were smiling and not looking"]) and he, "without understanding", nods, taking the most brutal of replies: "It's all you have left of me." So all that remains is the sarcasm of disillusionment, embodied in two brilliant synecdoches: "Now you can send your lips to a new address and superimpose my face onto whoever else's."

Never had a goodbye been told in such a sharp, mocking, anti-rhetorical way. This revolution in language is matched by an equally modern musicality, with a distinctly Dylanesque stamp: the piano's steady backbone sets an enveloping folk pace, the warm voice stretches over complex harmonic scales, sustained by a blend of acoustic guitars and drums, the hazy tones of the Hammond organ, and female backing vocals in the background.

Dylanesque echoes recur, even more overtly, in the album's other ballad, "Buonanotte Fiorellino", drawn directly from Mr. Zimmerman's "Winterlude" (from "New Morning", 1970). It's a lullaby set to a musette waltz, deliberately saccharine, with all its patina of caresses and pet names ("amore mio" ["my love"], "fiorellino" ["little flower"], "monetina" ["little coin"], "uccellini" ["little birds"]). And yet it leaves a bitter aftertaste ("la coperta è gelata e l'estate è finita" ["the blanket is cold and summer is over"], the ticket has "expired", while the ring "will stay on the beach"). Because, deep down, it's the other side, only seemingly sweeter, of "Rimmel": the story of the end of a love affair, of a fresh disillusionment that stings ("la tristezza passerà domattina" ["the sadness will pass by tomorrow morning"]). It's all played out along the thread of memories and emotional swings, in a flourish of disorienting "bisociations" ("tra il telefono e il cielo" ["between the telephone and the sky"], "tra le stelle e la stanza" ["between the stars and the room"], "tra i tuoi fiocchi di neve e le tue foglie di tè" ["between your snowflakes and your tea leaves"]).

Second only to "Viva l'Italy" in terms of misunderstandings, "Buonanotte Fiorellino" would remain one of De Gregori's most loved/hated songs, one he would keep performing live, albeit in different guises (from shuffle to rock, up to the recent brass-band version "Fiorellino 12#35").

Walking on broken glass

And then there's her. Half cryptic love song, half manifesto for an entire life. A marvel called "Pezzi di vetro". De Gregori would later reveal a possible reference to his youthful romantic misadventures. But these are irrelevant details, in the face of lyrics that are pure vertigo of emotion and suspension.

The man who walks on broken glass is a popular figure, but he's no circus freak ("nothing to do with the circus, neither acrobat nor fire-eater"), he's a street artist, brazen and mocking. A "barefoot saint", dancing under the blessing of his own personal star, beneath his "right angle":

The man who leaps and triumphs over glass knows no fear

and shatters bottles, laughs and smiles because

getting hurt isn't possible, dying even less so, never ever

He's a Felliniesque character, an archetype of vitality, of the reckless innocence of youth ("he has two souls and a heart hard as a branch"). But above all he's the pretext for telling the story of the enchantment of falling in love. An almost supernatural, transcendent dimension.

And together you visit the night that they say is two souls

e un letto e un tetto di capanna, utile e dolce

come ombrello teso tra la terra e il cielo

Walking on jagged shards, however, inevitably exposes one to the vulnerability of feelings, to the wounds of abandonment and the fleetingness of that "first time".

He offers you his last card

but you're fine where you are

And that's enough. Because it doesn't matter whether you know if the love has ended or not, whether the story is real or not. This time there's really nothing to understand. The visionary lyricism of the lyrics, dense with literary references (Pavese's "La luna e i falò", Montale's "cocci aguzzi di bottiglia"), is set within a sober, elegant musical framework, with its intricate, unusual textures: the crystalline sound of an acoustic guitar, the dreamlike clarity of the fingerpicking, with those dozens of chords that would become the bane of beginner guitarists, the hushed tone of the vocals, a melody that weaves through the arpeggios, tender and skipping.

Beautiful losers

Recurring patterns in songwriting. The epic of losers, outsiders, society's rejects is a longstanding topos of songwriting. From Brassens to the beat generation, from Dylan to De André and Guccini, hosts of beautiful losers have emerged from the wings to take centre stage. Songs that are, for the most part, political, songs of protest. Or simply celebrations of lives lived on the margins, of the "wrong side of the road" of Waitsian memory. In De Gregori, however, it's the style that changes. Once again, everything plays out on the thread of evocation and metaphor. As in "Pablo", "the Spanish colleague" who emigrated to Switzerland and died on the job, perhaps because the "boss" couldn't be bothered with some safety regulation. "Pablo is a Malavoglia, he has no social conscience, no political conscience," De Gregori would explain. "He's a victim of the world's injustice, not the victim of a political counterpart."

For years mistaken for a tribute to Neruda or even Picasso, "Pablo" is actually only what it says it is: a couple of news items, a minimal tale of friendship, immigration and death on the job. The chorus, touched up by Lucio Dalla (co-writer of the song) and emphasized by the Hammond organ, arrives liberating, building in crescendo, with its tremendous oxymoron: "They killed Pablo, Pablo is alive". A cry of truth, of denunciation, offset by the surreal fake, tacked-on applause symbolizing the reaction of an imaginary assembly receiving the news.

He's not a loser, but he's a little like one, "Il Signor Hood", with his "two guns loaded with blanks and a basket full of words". A noble, quixotic figure who runs headlong into common sense and society's hypocrisy ("he gave away his words to the deaf"). Like "Pablo", it would spark endless debate, with critics squabbling over who the song's subject really was, overlooking, for instance, the remarkable acoustic guitar solo and the western-style harmonies of the music. For the record, the most widely accepted reading identifies him with Marco Pannella, at the time engaged in his titanic referendum battles.

Stories of Yesterday (and of Always)

The nightmare of totalitarian regimes, of new swastikas and black shirts, creeps even into an album of portraits and romantic riddles like "Rimmel". Carving out a bitter little corner for itself: "Le storie di ieri". Originally included on the "Pecora" album, the song was blocked by Rca and only released a year later, when evidently - as De Gregori would wryly note - "anti-fascism had become more acceptable even to the mass media". That same year it would also appear on De André's "Volume VIII", the album born of the two songwriters' collaboration.

The lyrics, bitterly ironic, unmask the fascisms of yesterday, but above all those of today, in double-breasted suits:

And even now a black slogan remains

on the wall in front of my house

it says the movement will win

the new bosses have serene faces

and ties that match their shirts

In the original version, instead of "new bosses", a name was actually given: Giorgio Almirante, secretary of the Movimento Sociale. De André would settle on a middle ground: "The big boss". The device of alternating between father and son serves the shift of scene, projecting the past into the future and vice versa.

My father has an ordinary story

shared by his generation

the jaw in the courtyard spoke

too many dead have proven it wrong

all people who had understood

Some have read in this line De Gregori's debt to the historical lesson of Renzo De Felice (his professor at university) and to the thesis of fascism as a "shared history," which the majority of the Italian bourgeoisie embraced with enthusiasm (in the original version and in De André's the phrase used is precisely "shared dream"). But there's a counterpoint in how the episode is depicted: it isn't Mussolini speaking to the courtyard, but rather "the jaw," the most crudely picturesque feature of the Duce; moreover, the value of the vast crowds that filled the piazzas is diminished, reduced to a mere "courtyard." It's a counterpoint tinged with sarcasm, recalling the blood paid as tribute to that collective delusion ("too many dead have disproved it, all people who had understood") and closing with an illuminating chess metaphor: "Playing with black, you always lose." And if it's true that "Mussolini also wrote poetry," then poets must be "ugly creatures," to the point that "every time they speak it's a scam." And who knows if De Gregori is really referring to poets, with whom he would always have a fraught relationship, or to the regime's new, well-mannered apologists, the ones who've come to accept that "the horses at Salò died of boredom" and who now present themselves with a more respectable face.

But the child is the element of rupture. He comes into contact with another dimension ("he throws stones at the sky and the sea, every time he hits a star, he closes his eyes and starts to dream") and when he walks past writing on a wall he "looks at his hands." Hands that will fight against that oppression. It's the most positive passage in the lyrics, the hope of a political and cultural rebirth. The final line, however, seems to point to certain "political" dynamics experienced within the family:

But my father is a quiet young man

and his son is a pirate ship

Is the communist son a pirate ship in the moderate archipelago of the De Gregori household? Perhaps, thinking back to what Francesco recounted about his political arguments with his father. But all the other readings of the song as autobiographical are false. Producer Lilli Greco, on the other hand, didn't care for the final saxophone coda by Mario Schiano, though it can nonetheless be counted among the song's musical pillars, alongside Roberto Della Grotta's fine introductory double bass solo.

Friends at the Piano Bar

1975 is the year of the great chill between De Gregori and his former Folkstudio brother-in-arms Antonello Venditti. The more mischievous exegetes have read traces of this in the lyrics of "Piano bar," the enveloping ballad with tonalities à-la Elton John, which portrays a musician/mercenary who "sells everyone everything he does." A biting parody, disguised by melodic sweetness and the piano's soft touch:

He's a piano bar pianist

poche ombre nella vita

But he's not Venditti, the piano-bar pianist. Although De Gregori, at the time, had a bit of fun with it: "When I played the record for Antonello, before it came out, he told me it was rubbish, except for 'Piano bar'. So I told him it was dedicated to him." The song's real subject, however, is an anonymous hotel musician the author himself would later reveal he'd come across in the lobby of the Hilton.

Along the road from “Rimmel” you can also run into the strangest “Quattro cani” (Four Dogs) in Italian singer-songwriter history. Some identify them with de Gregori himself (the war dog that “has no bones or violence in its mouth”), with his friend-rival Venditti (the mongrel “who knows hunger and calm”), with the divine Patty Pravo (the bitch who “almost always refuses, sometimes gives in”), and with producer Greco (the master who “doesn't know where to go, but goes there anyway”). A theory never confirmed, but never fully denied either. What's certain, though, is that Lucio Dalla's voice can be heard in the choruses.

“Quattro cani” is almost an author's private joke, much like the sweet, slightly unripe “Piccola mela”, with its bare-bones, folk-ballad arrangement sung in a hushed voice.

Rimmel 2015

With “Rimmel”, then, De Gregori pulls off the feat of blending political commitment with personal feeling, without betraying his own language - if anything, enriching it with new shades and literary images of extraordinary vitality. Yet it's never intellectualist lyricism for its own sake. De Gregori grounds his songs in the social and political substratum. He captures feelings and situations anyone can recognize themselves in. That's why they're moving. If anything, the real challenge lies in a "sonic" use of the verses that interweaves words and musical expression. That's also because the melody, however slight and nervy, remains of primary importance - the lyrics never overpower it more than they should.

“Rimmel” thus establishes the archetype of a style that would remain a model for generations of singer-songwriters. Forty years on, the album has lost none of the freshness that fuelled its success - half a million copies sold in its year of release alone, making it the best-selling album in Italy in 1975, behind only a legend like “Profondo rosso” by Goblin.

We can therefore forgive its author the self-celebratory excess that led him to gather, for the concert-event (“Rimmel 2015”) on 22 September at the Verona Arena, an unlikely hodgepodge of guests: Malika Ayane, Caparezza, Elisa, Fedez, L’orage, Fausto Leali, Ligabue, Giuliano Sangiorgi, Ambrogio Sparagna and Checco Zalone. None of them, aside from Sparagna, has anything to do with his world.

Perhaps it was the desire to shake off that veneer of misanthropy he's always carried with him, or perhaps just the anxiety of not wanting to grow old. We, however, preferred him when he sang “i simpatici mi stanno antipatici, i comici mi rendono triste” (nice people annoy me, comedians make me sad). And deep down, who knows - maybe he still thinks so.

With excerpts from “Between the light pages and the dark pages” (Arcana, 2011)

De Gregori's songbook is a compendium of suspended feelings, evoked with a visionary, cinematic touch. A journey that, following the twists of memory, runs through the darkest and most controversial phases of Italian history. But his verses also carried out a lexical revolution that proved decisive for Italian song. The book is a journey through De Gregori's songbook, unfolding around his main thematic cores, poised between the personal and the social, reality and fantasy, while also dwelling on some crucial milestones: the epic of the Folkstudio, the Palalido trial, the partnership with Lucio Dalla, his many other collaborations, right up to the recent seal of approval from the great Dylan.

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13/09/2015