Alberto Radius

After the dress rehearsal with the Battisti-esque "Che cosa sei" (1976), it's "Carta straccia" (1977) that once and for all lands Radius on the black list of non-aligned artists. An anthem against prevailing conformism (so well represented by the single "Nel ghetto"), a scornful refusal to play along with the ideological machinery of a script that, in Italy, filed the so-called politically engaged artist under the left, relegating everything else to a vague, unspecified right. In the eyes of the politicized critic, Radius was already starting from a difficult position. Having been the guitarist for Lucio Battisti — the silent guarantor of disengagement and thus the antithesis of militancy during the turbulent early '70s — was in itself no small mark against him. Up to that point, what saved him from outright condemnation was the virtuosity of Formula 3 (the band Alberto co-founded), which made a decisive contribution to the dazzling Italian prog movement, the subsequent project Il Volo, which in some ways followed the same logic, and his collaborations with Franz Di Cioccio of PFM and with Demetrio Stratos and Giulio Capiozzo of Area.

Although by 1979 many of the artistic and social dynamics that had defined the decade were fading in favor of a more widespread individualism, Radius still finds a way to make people talk. Seen through the eyes of young Italians in the '70s, the United States took on a dual, dissonant meaning: on one hand the enemy to be brought down (capitalism, the root of all evil), on the other the great dream of freedom fueled by the long wave of a counterculture that, from the late Sixties until at least '77, never stopped churning out stereotypes for export.

Yet there's another America that can be observed from unusual angles — from below, from within, from beyond. Perhaps with the debunking eye and shadowy disenchantment with which Radius interprets the lyrics of two great Italian pop lyricists, the mercurial Daniele Pace and Oscar Avogadro — already responsible for the misdeed that was "Nel ghetto" — who that same year co-wrote the lyrics for Loredana Bertè's super hit "E la luna bussò", while Avogadro also penned those of "Vincent Price" for Faust'o (for whom, in 1978, he had also produced the debut album "Suicidio").

It's thanks to these premises that "America Good Bye" stands as the concept album that tells the story of a lost, losing nation, the merciless veil lifted to reveal its least marketable face. This is clear from the cover itself, which — not by chance — in its first vinyl edition featured a transparent plastic stars-and-stripes mask that could be lifted to reveal Radius's face, drawn in color on the cardboard sleeve. A full-on assault on the roots of the dream, carried out with romantic cynicism and a recklessness aimed not at destroying or suggesting the kind of remedies favored by a certain intelligentsia, but simply at recording cold realities. Scenes of everyday life, small human stories and myths in which America becomes the occasion to register injustice, greyness and misery, but without any expectation of having a solution tucked away.

The cast involved in making the record is small in number but sumptuous in quality, with Tullio De Piscopo on drums, Julius Farmer on bass, Gigi Tonet on synths and maestro Sante Palumbo assisting Radius with the arrangements: all top-tier studio names who, in various capacities, took part in the Italian musical story of the '70s and '80s.

Musically, we're faced with a peculiar blend of prog fusion channeled into song form (the use of the minimoog), and the latest technological gadgets (the Synare drum pads used by De Piscopo, already heard in the sound of groups like Devo and Yellow Magic Orchestra), while the sound itself is stripped of excess, introverted, with round bass lines often up front accompanying a streaked voice, steeped in a barely restrained anger.

Whispers and sudden surges, as befits stories that are by turns melancholic, sarcastic, solipsistic, held together only by a detached bitterness.

Bitterness you can feel right from the start: “America goodbye, ti abbiamo visto noi al di là della fessura, America goodbye, oggi non mi fai sognare né paura…” and then it slips beneath the surface, collar turned up, moving between sighed invocations (“Marilyn dove sei”?) and sarcastic resignation (“la bandiera ha stelle a volontà e allora come mai non brilla?”), all converging into a impassioned apology for the defeated.

"Poliziotto" sounds like an early draft of the screenplay for Il Cattivo Tenente, the film directed by Abel Ferrara in 1992 starring a memorable Harvey Keitel. The cop who, in the name of "Fatherland, family and God", enforces his own personal law, setting out to straighten "crooked backs, perverts, Puerto Ricans, queers and criminals". Bold strokes of a cliché that casts the policeman as the lord of the neighborhood, a character corrupted by a warped ethic: whereas in the epilogue of Ferrara's film death arrives as the result of an extreme act of repentance, here it's merely the accident of a path that allows for no moral redemption. "California Blll", between pulsing basslines and jolts of drum pad, paints a funk-tinged idyllic picture of the land of the sun ("...e cavalcano l'onda, tanto lì non si affonda"), only to fill it with sharp disillusionment ("...e pensare che senz'altro c'è la neve un po' più in là... e pensare, ma pensare non si può..."), while "Il buffone" — prog keyboards, black-tinged backing vocals and a vocal register that vaguely recalls the Litfiba yet to come — first celebrates and then dismantles the legend of Muhammad Ali.

"Coccodrilli bianchi" is the sardonic metaphor for the corrupters of a morality tied hand in glove with the respectable image the conformists are so desperate to preserve - the same morality that offers no escape for the yuppie ante litteram of "Giù", the irreproachable white-collar man, secretary and all, who burns through a frustrated life and a dead love affair in the loneliness of a room on a Sunday, amid rivers of alcohol and cigarettes. Dark sides and loneliness, precisely. Like that of "Patricia", the album's masterpiece and one of the gems of an entire career, who "sells love and drinks gin" in the dark outskirts of New York, carrying in her pocket the dream of one day returning to her Mexico. And finally "Las Vegas", the illusory city par excellence, the place where the myth of wealth shows its fake face amid gaudy lights and bastardized sambas, shattering against the inescapable rock of illusion.

"America Good Bye" is also the album that inaugurated the legendary Studio Radius, the recording studio that would go on to give birth to albums such as Alice's self-titled record, "L'Era del cinghiale bianco", "Patriots" and "His Master's Voice" by Franco Battiato, Giuni Russo's "Energie", and Faust'o's "Poco zucchero" - projects that would see the Roman guitarist involved as session player, arranger, sometimes co-writer, and even producer (as in the cases of Giuni Russo and Faust'o), testament and seal to a career with few equals, one that still continues today.

In memory of Oscar Avogadro, great Italian lyricist (Turin, 9 August 1951 – Milan, 30 September 2010)

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06/02/2011