Roberto Vecchioni

Roberto Vecchioni was born in 1943 in Carate Brianza, a small town in the province of Monza. After graduating in Classical Literature from the Università Cattolica in Milan in 1968, he soon became a teaching assistant in the History of Religions, though most of his career as an educator was spent teaching at classical high schools in the Milan area. His career as a musician, however, began during the second half of the 1960s, as a songwriter for major performers such as Mina, Iva Zanicchi, Gigliola Cinquetti and Ornella Vanoni. But it wasn't until later, in 1971, that Vecchioni made his debut with his first proper LP, titled "Parabola", immortalized by the presence of one of his great classics, "Luci a San Siro" (already recorded in 1968 by Rossano, under the title "Ho perso il conto"). The album as a whole still sounds somewhat unpolished, with an almost amateurish production, but it does feature musicians of the caliber of Tullio de Piscopo and Franco Cerri.

In 1973 Vecchioni decided to enter the Sanremo Festival for the first time, bringing to the competition the evocative, autobiographical "L'uomo che si gioca il cielo a dadi" (dedicated to his father and included on the album of the same name): during the event, the song finished in seventh place, opening the door to a first breath of fame. 1973 also saw the release of "Il re non si diverte", the album that marked the beginning of his collaboration with producer Michelangelo Romano, already a trusted collaborator of Alan Sorrenti at the time.

The first essential piece in Roberto Vecchioni's discography would be "Elisir", released in 1976, a year that was rather turbulent politically as well. Things came to a head during the general election on June 20, when the PCI made an exceptional yet ultimately futile leap forward, only to remain stuck, once again, on the sidelines. The final outcome of the election made clear both that the parties entitled to govern were too weak to form an executive, and that parties without a mandate to govern were nonetheless strong enough to exercise a veto power that effectively paralyzed the system.

Against this backdrop of constant political uncertainty, it's not hard to trace the meaning and mood of "Elisir", released only in September. The album featured contributions from Lucio Fabbri (violin and cello), Alessandro Zanelli, bassist of the Bergamo-based progressive rock group Madrugada, as well as two members of the Nuovi Angeli, Paki Canzi (keyboards) and Mauro Paoluzzi (drums and guitars), who had been collaborating with Vecchioni since 1972.

An elegy of an unresolved journey, as dramatic as it is timeless, the album reached number 17 on the Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni weekly chart, also marking the singer-songwriter's first-ever chart entry.

“Elisir” was recorded and mixed at Phonogram studios in Milan by Davide Marinone. The album cover, created by illustrator Claudio Doveri, depicts the game of goose board, an apt metaphor for everyday life, with its penalties and sudden fresh starts. The songwriting, meanwhile, draws on the influences dearest to the Brianza-born singer-songwriter: Neil Young (the guitar on “Velasquez” is inspired by that of “Cortez The Killer”), Bob Dylan, especially the Dylan of “Desire” [Note 1], but also Claudio Lolli and Angelo Branduardi (the parallels with the latter are evident both in the use of violin and in the nursery-rhyme approach of some melodies).

The album's incipit is entrusted to “Un uomo navigato”, where Lucio Fabbri's strings and Naimy Hackett's backing vocals (credited simply as Naimis) take centre stage. In the lyrics, Vecchioni confronts himself, mapping out the paths taken and the choices made in his life, particularly as an artist.

The album's masterpiece, “Velasquez” is the emblem of “Elisir”, as well as one of the most significant songs in Italian rock songwriting. A man who has always sided with the left politically, Vecchioni declared himself a communist from the very first Unità festivals he attended. Yet his relationship with politics has almost never conformed to the party's rhetoric or banner; indeed, “Velasquez” becomes pure self-analysis disguised as historical narrative, a metaphor as intense as it is anguished for Vecchioni the man, suspended between intimacy and political-intellectual turmoil. In the song, the singer-songwriter presents the figure of Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar (1465-1524), the Spanish conquistador and governor of Cuba, through an intense dialogue with his own sailor. The topos of the journey begins to take shape through vivid scene-painting, in which the storm – a symbol of suffering, inner turmoil and eros – evokes a psychic tension capable of overwhelming, but also of revitalising and purifying the soul. Vecchioni splits himself in two, finding his own nemesis in Velásquez, while at the same time distancing himself from the hero, because Vecchioni the man is capable of embodying contradiction, driven by a fierce will to seek redress from the world itself. The song thus becomes a confession of his own inability to fully believe in his own ideals, a full acknowledgement of politics as a human affair. Musically, as mentioned, the track draws on Neil Young's “Cortez The Killer”, although the instrumental solo that opens “Velasquez” uses a very pronounced fuzz effect, especially in the sustain, and adds a light phaser effect, making the guitar tone less raw. It should also be noted that the musicians backing Vecchioni come from a background rooted in progressive rock and Italian folk music, making the result quite distant from the sound of Crazy Horse. The song ends with a guitar, bass and drums coda lasting more than two minutes, in a striking and powerful rhythmic drive.

“A.R.” is the acronym for Arthur Rimbaud, “a fanciful, frightening and ruinous poet” as Vecchioni himself described him during a 1984 live broadcast on Radio Televisione Svizzera. As the reader will have gathered, there's a clear intent here to weave together the singer-songwriter's autobiographical experience and the lives of great poets. In particular, amid the folds of the lyrics, we can glimpse the names of Calvino, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud. One stylistic device sheds light on our reading of the text: in the song's two verses, the poet's life is emphasised through a brief third-person narrative, while in the two choruses Vecchioni returns to first-person narration, almost as if wanting to separate Rimbaud's figure from his own, in an interlocking game that highlights both the existential turmoil shared by the two men and the stark contrast between them as loci of consciousness – hence a more cautious, less turbulent existential return than that of the poet of “Una stagione all'inferno” [Note 2]. But the song is also meant as a warning against the “old, decrepit bourgeoisie” – in Rimbaud's time that of the French Second Empire, in Vecchioni's that of the Christian Democrat First Republic [Note 3].

“Il suonatore stanco” is a seemingly ironic song, yet it carries within it a sharp critique aimed at the slick hucksters of the record industry, the true targets of the piece. The lyrics hint at the need to fight hard against homogenisation, while also conjuring up mental images central to Vecchioni's own mythology: telling, in this sense, is the opening line “Il suonatore stanco/ Ritaglia foto di Dylan con grande maestria/ E poi le appiccica badando alla simmetria/ Era tempo fa/ Era la realtà”.

The nostalgia of “Canzone per Francesco” is the litmus test of a fertile musical and cultural era. The song is a portrait of Francesco Guccini, whom Vecchioni met during the first half of the Seventies. The track – as Vecchioni later explained – is an act of consolation, an attempt to lift the Modena-born singer-songwriter out of a very difficult period in his personal life, which culminated in the death of a Basque friend and of a beloved cat (turned into a dog, for metrical reasons). The song is also packed with references indissolubly tied to that precise historical moment: the students of 1968 in the line “loro han soltanto meno dubbi e meno anni”, while the following passage echoes Italo Calvino's “Il castello dei destini incrociati”. Above all, though, we find a sequence of images lifted straight from Guccini's own songbook, among them “Auschwitz” (“Susanna è andata su per il camino”), “La locomotiva”, “L'isola non trovata” and finally “Le osterie di fuori porta”, the ideal places to lose oneself in the intoxication of wine.

Having thoroughly explored the narrative of inauthenticity, hopping between erudite references, cursed poets and devotional images of Bob Dylan, it's time to lay a hand on Francesca's face (named in honour of Francesco Guccini), in one of the album's most celebrated songs: “Figlia” is a love letter as believable as it is heart-wrenching about the meaning of being a parent, yet once again it projects the singer-songwriter's own struggles and his sense of being an artist “against the grain”. “Figlia” is also, however, a cross-generational snapshot of the young people of yesterday and today, those living with sufferings more or less incurable. Musically, the song is held together by just a few guitar chords and a curious jaw harp that smooths over the overall atmosphere, making it gentler, while, by contrast, the entrance of Lucio Fabbri's violin seems intended to heighten the drama, in a rhythmic and lyrical crescendo that manages never to tip into mawkishness.

For Roberto Vecchioni, major success would only arrive a year later, with the follow-up “Samarcanda”, which climbed the charts as high as number two. It's worth noting that, throughout his career, the singer-songwriter never reached number 1 on the album chart, yet placed twenty-one albums in the top 10 and four at number two. The impression, at least for this writer, is that Roberto Vecchioni remains a first-rate artist, yet one constantly misunderstood – one nonetheless capable of thoroughly shaping the soul of Italian song, and before that, the soul of a city, his own Milan, forever in need of light and attention.

[Note 1] It should be pointed out that these parallels are also drawn in the Wikipedia entry on “Elisir”, but then again, they are unavoidable references, since Vecchioni himself has acknowledged them on several occasions.

[Note 2] This analytical insight is drawn from the book “Canzoni. With commentary by Massimo Germini and Paolo Jachia on Roberto Vecchioni” (published by Bompiani).

[Note 3] This observation is put forward in the book “Roberto Vecchioni da San Siro all'infinito” by Paolo Jachia (published by Ancora Editrice).

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21/05/2023