Rino Gaetano

Mio fratello è figlio unico

Because he never found the courage to have his liver operated on

And he never paid to make love

E non ha mai vinto un premio aziendale

E non ha mai viaggiato in seconda classe

Sul rapido Taranto-Ancona

Rino Gaetano is unquestionably one of the most important voices in the history of Italian singer-songwriter music. The Calabrian artist is often remembered for his abrasive vocal style and the biting streak that ran through most of his songs, but his contribution to the history of Italian cantautorato goes well beyond these already remarkable qualities.

The courage Rino Gaetano showed in using his position to thumb his nose at the entrenched traditions of the music industry, and at the deferential reverence shown to every kind of establishment - political, entertainment, cultural or sporting - carved out a divide so deep that only time, and unfortunately his death, could later grant it the seminal importance that still shapes much of contemporary singer-songwriter music today.

Unmanageable, uncategorizable, unpredictable, Gaetano embodied the figure of the anarchic singer-songwriter better than anyone else. Unlike De André, who played the part with the reserved, rigorous manner of the intellectual, the Calabrian minstrel instead chose the guise of the clown, the irreverent jester who, laughing and joking, X-rayed the entire society of his time, from the political class to the middle class, from institutions down to the so-called lowest rungs of the ladder.

The shell formed by Rino Gaetano's lyrics, which only look unengaged and set to trivial music if examined with careless superficiality, protects a core that touches on areas of profound social accusation, capable of stirring even the most distracted listener.

It's very hard to rank his records, all of them genuinely essential and each different from the others in its personal or social nuances.

Among them, "Mio fratello è figlio unico" - released in 1976, his second album in chronological order - clearly stands as the objective milestone for broadly defining the personal opera omnia of the singer-songwriter from Crotone.

In the year "Mio fratello è figlio unico" came out, the twenty-six-year-old Rino Gaetano was at the peak of his creative phase, a moment in which his attempts to stay attuned to the times led him to tackle subjects such as alienation and exploitation as though they were commonplaces, describing society in simple terms and, to paraphrase his own definition, like the conversations overheard among people meeting on a tram.

At the time of its release, Rino Gaetano was coming off the modest reception of the single "Ma il cielo è sempre più blu" (which would only become a classic years later, especially after 2000), a song that would never be included on any album. With its wordplay and its opposites mocking society, the track effectively paved the way for the fierce yet good-humored political satire of the album that would follow shortly after.

Produced by Vincenzo Micocci - the first, and perhaps only, person to believe in and support Rino Gaetano even through the toughest times - "Mio fratello è figlio unico" lays bare every facet of the artist: his vivid imagination, his deft way of juggling words, and his keen attention to the world around him. All of it is chiseled with a melodic touch that probably never achieved the same results again over the rest of his, sadly brief, career.

With the extraordinary opening title track, Rino begins his analysis, in this case aimed at concepts such as marginalization and isolation, brought into focus with enviable precision and blended with his peculiar, almost dreamlike method of juxtaposing conflicting states of mind. The oxymoron in the title is reinforced by the idea of a brother excluded from the world because he doesn't conform to the common spirit - that surface-level spirit that hides away, in its own recesses, truths nobody wants to admit, like the fact that Chinaglia might not be able to move to Frosinone, or that even someone who doesn't read Freud can live to be a hundred. Musically too, an area critics have wrongly dismissed as sloppy, there are some notable touches, such as the use of the sitar played by Gaio Chiocchio - an instrument hardly common in Italian singer-songwriter music - over a structure driven by Hammond organ and piano, both played by Arturo Stalteri, Gaetano's loyal collaborator since his earliest days.

Together with his trusted musicians, the singer-songwriter thus wrote what we're not afraid to call an anthem. A song destined to fly the flag for the underdogs, the underpaid, the exploited, the outcast, the forgotten, generation after generation of socio-musical history. An ideal embrace for anyone who feels abandoned or pushed aside by a callous, selfish society.

Over the years "Mio fratello è figlio unico" has been the subject of numerous covers, the most famous of which is probably the one by Afterhours' Manuel Agnelli. The song also gave its title to an interesting film by Daniele Lucchetti, further proof of just how firmly the phrase has entered the collective memory of Italy.

Rino Gaetano didn't write albums with an eye toward potential singles, being a tireless seeker of stories to weave into his visionary concepts, but there's no denying that a song like "Berta filava" was blessed from the start with all the right qualities to work its way forcefully into people's hearts.

From its very first performance at the Venice Festival, where Rino took the stage pulling a little bicycle along on a string, its playful, seemingly light lyrics, steeped in brilliant double meanings - real or imagined - go on to write one of the most significant pages of his entire body of work:

And Berta kept spinning

E filava con Mario

E filava con Gino

E nasceva il bambino

Che non era di Mario

E non era di Gino

Words that capture the artist's full sharpness, a proverbial ability to sketch, in just a handful of words, a sequence of information that has since fueled decades of studies and research by esteemed colleagues, who have dissected every artistic facet of it.

Rino was remarkably skilled at pushing his collaborators beyond their usual limits, thanks to the fierce burst of energy he conveyed when laying out his ideas. Proof of this lies in the instrumental coda of “Berta Filava”, where a jumble of instruments - saxophone, synthesizer, boogie piano and cascading guitar lines - seem to scatter confetti and streamers in every direction.

Here too we find a timeless classic wedged into the collective memory, instantly recognizable from the very first chord of the legendary synthesizer, which seems to mimic a clown's toy trumpet.

“Sfiorivano le viole” is another cornerstone track, not just of the album's sequencing, but a moment Rino seems to dedicate to a teenage love, the kind that shines and burns in the light of the sun:

Fiorivi, sfiorivano le viole

E il sole batteva su di me

E tu prendevi la mia mano

Mentre io aspettavo

A spasmodic wait, one that Gaetano probably uses to dig up and unleash a few unexpected slices of history that seem lifted straight from a schoolbook, even though what remains, deep down, is always love, everlasting:

Otto von Bismarck-Shonhausen

He achieves German unity and annexes half of Europe

While I was waiting for you

Michele Novaro meets Mameli

And together they write a piece still popular today

Mentre io aspettavo

It's a device, moreover a recurring one and thus a stylistic signature of the author, that reminds us how impossible it is to determine our personal stories by extracting them from their historical-social context. How much the circumstances we move within determine who we are. All of this through a text that seems like a children's nursery rhyme, one that sticks in your ears and creeps into the unconscious.

The arrangements of "Sfiorivano le viole" confirm the complexity, care and even the modernity that Gaetano dared to apply to his creations of the period. A rather long piece, divided into two parts: a first one with almost Latin-leaning stylistic touches, into which surprising, icy organ notes à-la Tangerine Dream are inserted, and a second, more regular part, aided by piano, organ and synthesizer, where the listener is swept away by his iconic drawling way of singing.

In "Cogli la mia rosa d'amore" too, the meaning Rino always strongly expressed for this feeling emerges, along with all its peculiar connotations, within the realm dedicated to the good intended in the most universal sense of its meaning, not necessarily directed at a person, a love to be cultivated and nurtured, watered every day like a rose, picked at its most radiant splendor. With the classical guitar strings plucked forcefully, following a trajectory of Mediterranean arpeggios and aching strings, the arrangements smell like gardens hanging over the sea of Southern Italy

Pick my rose of love

Pick my rose of love

Give its scent to the people

Pick my rose of nothing

"Glu Glu", on the other hand, is an exhilarating divertissement that starts with a simple piano riff, which then ripples through all the other instruments, like banjo and saxophone, which gradually join in and engage, in the best possible way, with Rino's colorful imagination as he shares his unusual creativity:

Glug glug

The Eskimo in the igloo

Suicidal, he goes up and down

And drowning he goes glug glug

A sensational piece of nonsense, delivering pearls of irony and mental short-circuits that ask only to be followed with genuine delight and abandon.

Dreams are wishes, and they take on the shape of "Rosita", the image that makes you forget everything unsatisfying in life, whether it's the person by your side, your job, your anxieties; she's what consoles you from whatever problem grips you, she's an ideal, not a woman, she's the finish line reached after searching in vain through dozens and dozens of others, the dream that, once attained, wipes out every dream that came before it:

Money, the hope of having it, making others die of envy

Work is at home, with her a secure career

Then in the evening, to be yourself again, to think, to think

Yesterday I met Rosita, so this life is worthless

How beautiful Rosita was, dressed in white, more beautiful than ever

Rino Gaetano manages to create a scene of human reality so strong and so true, using as a direct device the figure of a woman, beautiful, dressed in different colors each time, precisely because we all have a Rosita, something, someone, a belief, that gives a different meaning to existence.

"A penthouse on Via Condotti, wall-to-wall carpet, ceiling, coffered panels" is a line taken from "La zappa il tridente il rastrello", a song whose title and folk-inspired sound seem to portray a slice of rural life, a setting the artist has always held dear, not only because of where he came from, but also for his closeness to those who build their existence through sweat, like the precious people who work the land with passion and toil. The truth, as usual, lies in between. The song draws a contrast between this cited life in the fields, marked by genuineness, and the fake reality of that period, defined by rampant consumerism shaped by examples from across the ocean, which in Italy were reinforced by the influence of the P2 lodge, the absolute puppet-master of the centers of power. On this point, in the song's closing section, a line lifted from "Rosita" is quoted as a trait d'union, a line that had in fact referenced certain Masonic details, though this time entrusted to a chorus of village women celebrating.

Political themes that were and always will be one of the great cornerstones of the singer-songwriter's thinking, often handled through satire, but far more frequently with a not-so-veiled streak of protest, which caused him no shortage of trouble.

With its iconic cover and the iconoclastic force of its irreverent approach to the singer-songwriter tradition, "Mio fratello è figlio unico" is very probably the pinnacle of Rino Gaetano's career. In truth, though, it is also merely the beginning of what we might consider his golden period, one that would last for two more albums: "Aida", released the following year, its title lifted from Giuseppe Verdi and carrying an implicit dedication to an Italy both rotten and marvelous, and "Nuntereggae più" from 1978, which brought new sonic contaminations - among them, naturally, reggae - and a fresh wave of mainstream popular success thanks to "Gianna".

Right around the release of this last album, Gaetano committed his final affront to the intellectual allure of the singer-songwriter class of the era: appearing at the Sanremo Festival. A gesture revolutionary in its own way, on a stage nowadays used by countless artists labeled as alternative, but without his irreverent charge: an absolute trailblazer.

On June 2, 1981, a tragic car crash on Via Nomentana Nuova in Rome robbed us forever of the talent, wit and irony of the Calabrian singer-songwriter.

Adventure

Thirst, fear

There won't be any adventure, that already calms me down

I already see my corpse being carried on shoulders

By people cursing, who are angry at me

These were the words sung by Rino Gaetano in another song from "Mio fratello è figlio unico", the sparkling "Al compleanno della zia Rosina". It's yet another biting display of self-irony, but in truth Rino knew full well how much his beloved Italy would mourn his passing, and how gladly entire generations of singer-songwriters would go on to carry his coffin, and his inextinguishable legacy, on their shoulders.

Among those who cite Rino Gaetano as one of their guiding influences are indeed the likes of Daniele Silvestri, Alex Britti, Max Gazzè, Brunori Sas and Le luci della centrale elettrica. Widening the list to include artists whose music bears the imprint of Gaetano and of "Mio fratello è figlio unico" would take all night.

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24/04/2022