Francesco Guccini

A row of low brick houses lined up side by side, resting in the shade of the trees that separate them from the road. A street perhaps like many others, tucked between the Cirenaica and San Donato neighborhoods in the heart of Bologna's urban fabric, yet special in its own way as the destination of a pilgrimage that has now been going on uninterrupted for almost half a century. The street is named after Paolo Fabbri, a partisan and anti-fascist killed in the Apennines in 1945. The house number, almost hidden, is 43.

The reasons that led Francesco Guccini to title his seventh studio album after his home address (at the time, no longer his today) are, all things considered, easy enough to guess. First of all, the singer-songwriter from Pavana had written the songs within those very four walls, and he surely wanted to celebrate and showcase the domestic dimension of this new set of songs. On the other hand, a title like "Via Paolo Fabbri 43" inherently reeks of anti-stardom, of collapsing the distance between artist and audience. No other musician, then or since, could perhaps have the nerve and the plain-spokenness to do the same.

When "Via Paolo Fabbri 43" hit record store shelves in 1976, Guccini already had ten years of a solo career behind him. His debut, "Folk Beat n. 1", had come out back in 1967, containing a few songs already familiar to the public because they'd been recorded by other artists ("Auschwitz (La canzone del bambino nel vento)", "Noi non ci saremo") alongside some new material. The Seventies proved to be a period of intense activity: in the first half of the decade alone came "Due anni dopo" (1970), "L'isola non trovata" (also 1970), "Radici" (1972) and "Stanze di vita quotidiana" (1974). The latter two, in particular, reveal a Guccini who had by then fully mastered a mature, sharp style of writing, thoroughly ahead of its time within the Italian scene. Songs like "La locomotiva", "Piccola città", "Canzone della bambina portoghese" and "Canzone delle osterie di fuori porta", just to name a few, are small-yet-great masterpieces that blend, with a wholly personal poetic sensibility, commitment to "just" causes with slices of everyday life and firsthand experience. Existential notes, in a way.

Of these concerns, of this way of making music, "Via Paolo Fabbri 43" is perhaps the high point, the emblem, and probably also the most successful album. The most recognizable and widely acknowledged one, perhaps also because of its unusual and therefore iconic title. Certainly, the Guccini who emerges from this record is at his most inspired and biting, defending the rights of others ("Piccola storia ignobile", dedicated to the subject of abortion) as well as his own, in "L'avvelenata", a symbol of the artist's payback against critics - and against other artists too, for that matter. The anti-hypocrisy jab of "Piccola storia ignobile", in particular, opens the album like a Bocca di rosa stripped of any mocking undertone. A small story, sure, but one of many just like it, made worse by the complicity of an entire society that is still fundamentally bigoted at heart. A story that "isn't worth two columns in the newspaper", and after all "politicians have far bigger things to worry about".

The distinctive interplay between acoustic guitar and keyboards also speaks to the arrangement work behind these songs. Once again, in the studio, Guccini is backed by a roster of top-tier musicians: Ares Tavolazzi on bass and double bass, Ellade Bandini on drums, Vince Tempera on keyboards, Deborah Kooperman on guitar and banjo, just to name a few. "Canzone di Notte n. 2" is a hymn to the artist's life, a chatty, sprightly monologue, a song to that night which for ordinary people means rest, but which for Guccini is a whirlwind of verses and melodies, a chase of notes stained with wine, solitude and company, and proud nonconformity ("mi spiace non mi lego a questa schiera, morrò pecora nera").

Perhaps everything has already been said about "L'avvelenata". About the grievances of Guccini the artist, proudly naive as he'll later recall in "Quattro stracci", the happiness "of this eternal stumbling of mine". What comes through here is an artist eager to assert his own artistic freedom and a lifestyle quite different from the one somehow imposed by society ("mi piace far canzoni e bere vino, mi piace far casino, e poi sono nato fesso"). But "L'avvelenata" is also a bridge toward criticism of his "fellow singer-songwriters", another recurring theme throughout the tracklist, and especially within "Via Paolo Fabbri 43" itself, where Guccini name-drops Lilly, Alice and Marinella, directly calling out Antonello Venditti, Francesco De Gregori and Fabrizio De André. The title track is a constant back-and-forth between inside and outside: the street as a stand-in for home, and the entertainment world, at once an attraction and a place riddled with pitfalls, envy and double-dealing.

The album's ending unfolds, in a way, in a minor key. "Canzone quasi d'amore" is another portrait of domestic yet fundamentally universal situations, a meditation on our deepest nature and on the light and shade of living as a couple, of worn-out everyday routine, and once again of being an artist with everything that entails. "Il pensionato" tells a story in a similar register, about the songwriter's neighbour, a monument to the simplicity of living humbly and honestly ("fra i mobili che hanno visto altri splendori, giornali vecchi ed angoli di polvere e di odori, fra i suoni usati e strani dei suoi riti quotidiani: mangiare, sgomberare, poi lavare i piatti e mani"). It is perhaps, unexpectedly, the record's most lyrical moment: the one in which Guccini gives himself over to the small, fragile poetry of his characters, setting aside less noble feelings.

There is, in short, a gulf between "l'avvelenata" and "il pensionato", the two extremes of Francesco Guccini's way of making music. Which isn't just making music: it's literature in verse and prose, it's a protest against injustice, it's the restlessness of someone who feels a moral duty to tell the story of life, especially in its roughest, most jagged aspects. All of this within a single address: via Paolo Fabbri 43.

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04/07/2021