Carlo Massarini

We interview Carlo Massarini on the occasion of his photography exhibition, held at the Auditorium Parco della Musica and closing on July 30th. The event is part of the Rome-based series "Per voi giovani", curated by Claudio Rocchi (who recently passed away) and Francesco Coniglio, and produced by the Fondazione Musica per Roma. The series focuses on the historic Radio2 Rai radio programme that, in the early '70s, introduced millions of listeners to great international rock music and to the new homegrown ferment, and it becomes for us a great opportunity to talk about radio and photography with one of the defining voices of those years - and of today too. From our long conversation come interesting insights and comparisons between the two eras: the pioneering one of the early '70s, with the "onda rock" (rock wave), as Carlo calls it, coming out of the radio to change youth culture, and today's hyper-technological one. All seen through the attentive eye of one of the great protagonists, in the media, of both periods. Have a listen.

I'd like to start with your memory of Claudio Rocchi, who passed away the day before this series began, one he had helped devise... he had strongly wanted it and wrote about it with great enthusiasm on his Facebook page, despite his serious state of health...

We started out in radio together. Since he was utterly convinced of what he was doing, he was already, back then, a lover of the East and would quote Tagore, even though he was involved - albeit not in an organized way - in the political movement of the time. Everyone had their own obsessions, and he would play his records and, in a way, hand out life instructions, some sensible, others more esoteric. But he left a strong mark, there are a lot of people who still remember him and his "Volo magico" with affection. Actually we never spent that much time together, but, if you recall, in my book "Dear Mister Fantasy" I mention the anecdote of when, in the early '70s, I was supposed to leave for Egypt: the trouble was that the girlfriend of the friend I was travelling with, who had driven us to the airport, had taken our tickets with her by mistake. Obviously, without mobile phones it was impossible to get them back, and so - desperate - we walked out of the airport, where we ran into none other than Claudio, dressed very cool, getting out of a big rented car he was about to return. We didn't think twice, and asked to borrow the car so we could chase down our tickets, but he didn't blink and put the car keys straight in our hands: you can imagine that's not something many people would have done, but that's just how he was - relaxed, calm, rather joyful.

As you were saying, he passed away the very day before this "Per voi giovani" series kicked off. I have to say he showed extraordinary moral strength, because he had been seriously ill with a bone condition for a few years by then, but he always tried to play it down with lines like "I fell, I broke my pelvis, I'll bounce back." Instead the illness was wearing him down, and recently it had even cost him the use of his legs, only he'd tell you about it lightly and with irony, saying things like "Look at the karma I've got here: what else could possibly happen to me after this?" The surprising thing is that he had this detached relationship with his body, even comparing it to a car that was leaving him stranded...

Clearly he managed to put into practice what he had learned over many years of meditation, seeing as he had also been part of the Hare Krishna movement...

Sure, but then there are things you study and learn that you also have to be good at putting into practice. And he kept on living as if nothing were wrong, he had self-financed and produced his record, he even came on as a guest on "Cool Tour Classic Rock" to talk about it: right up until the last minute, until the evening before he died, he kept working, giving instructions for this series. He had even started writing his autobiography, but then a respiratory crisis proved fatal. And yet, thinking back to how Claudio was, to his outlook on life and his contagious serenity, it really doesn't make you want to cry and despair - if anything, it pushes you to learn his great lesson of accepting everything life throws at you.

In our previous chat, on the occasion of the release of your book “Dear Mister Fantasy”, we mainly talked about music on television and on the internet. Now, with this exhibition, the topics can only be radio and, of course, images and photography in rock music… First, tell me how the exhibition came about…

As I mentioned, I got back in touch with Claudio when his latest album “In Alto” came out in 2011, interviewing him for “Cool Tour”. After that, he contacted me specifically about this event, asking if I'd like to do something with him. Of course I said yes, and I proposed this photo exhibition, which runs alongside a series of talks and concerts by artists from the period the radio show “Per voi giovani” dates back to, so the first half of the 1970s. It was originally meant to be held in an outdoor structure at the Auditorium, but then, partly because I'm a regular there and partly because they really liked the idea, they gave me this beautiful room, very spacious, all white, with just the right lighting, and it turned out really well. I have to say it's going quite well, there's a lot of interest from the media too. It's all material from the book you mentioned, thirty-three shots presented in a different form.

Tell me some anecdotes behind those images…

Lucio Dalla was a magician, a person of absolute creativity, not just in songwriting or on stage, but also in the little things. So even when you photographed him, he always had these flashes of inspiration, these bits of humor, and that's how the famous apple photo came about. I remember we were at a friend of his's place in the center of Rome, on a lovely little terrace overlooking the beautiful Piazza Campitelli. While I was shooting, he got up, went inside and grabbed this apple: I don't even think I asked him to, but somehow he put it on his head; out of a hundred photos, I only took one of him with that apple, but that's the one that stuck, forever capturing one of his many quirky, offbeat flashes of inspiration.

Another time, I came up with an idea thinking about him, so I called him up and suggested a feature on basketball, since I knew about his great passion for Virtus Bologna. It wasn't possible to do it with his favorite team, but I managed to arrange something with Stella Azzurra Roma, coached at the time by Valerio Bianchini: in this feature too, his great sense of self-deprecating humor comes through, him this little guy among those giants, getting ready to walk onto the court to play, even though he barely came up to the players' waists. It was all very funny: Lucio was a fantastic actor, someone who always knew exactly what he needed to do.

The photo of Jackson Browne was taken in Venice during that beautiful two-hour documentary we shot with him for Rai in 1982, so I really had a lot of material to choose from. I picked this photo because it captures his classic young face, that look framed by his typical half-smile, a bit “Mona Lisa”-like, on a boat, among the Venetian canals.

I photographed Finardi in Piazza Navona, during a Radical Party rally that was also covered by Arbore's TV show “L’Altra Domenica”. On that occasion he was playing bass, which was actually his original instrument, but it's a rather rare shot, since at concerts he usually played guitar.

I went to visit Guccini back when I was writing for Popster, and this was the centerfold portrait of the issue for which I went to Bologna to interview him. He took me to Pàvana, in the Apennines, of course to a tavern where I photographed him eating too, with his mother there as well. I think that was the fun thing back then: with certain figures you'd actually go around together, in a convivial way. Just think, for example, of the black-and-white photo with Venditti, which I took in the stands of the Olimpico before a derby we went to watch together. There was this feeling of friendship that has, in part, faded over time, even though we've all stayed on good terms: after all, these were the stories of a bunch of twenty-somethings who'd hang out together, all chasing some kind of glory, some on the radio, some on the charts. It was a very generational story, and sometimes it meant taking foreign musicians around the city too…

Like that time with Leonard Cohen…

Yes, someone at Rome's Università Statale had found out Leonard was in town, and he agreed to improvise a concert in the Aula Magna of the Law faculty, all organized within twenty-four hours. He didn't have a manager with him, and I don't even think the guitar was his, although he had played a little just for us at the hotel; anyway, he showed up at the university with that guitar, and started singing using the microphone that happened to be at the lectern, in a very spontaneous way: there was, in short, a great openness to doing things outside the rules and conventions, something that's been somewhat lost today.

Some of the people you've captured on film have also become your friends—how did you manage to reconcile your work as a critic and journalist with the bond of friendship? The two roles don't always sit well together…

I never really felt it as a problem, because I became friends with the people I liked, so the issue never really came up…

Right, but if at some point your musician friend flopped with their new album, what happened then?

Basically, back in those years pretty much nobody got it wrong, they were all great records. Take Venditti, who was actually criticized by some at the time: throughout the '70s he put out one great album after another. "Lilly", which was his central work, the one that brought him mainstream success, if you listen to it again now - setting aside considerations about the theme of drug addiction - was very raw. The classic '70s accusation was that he wanted to cash in on that subject, but in fact the song came out instinctively, as part of a really beautiful LP. "Ullalà", which I was involved in as the cover artist, was maybe not his best record, but even there you had three or four truly remarkable tracks, like "Per sempre giovane", with that coda lifted from Springsteen's "Born To Run".

To think that someone had made the wrong record, you'd have had to go about it the way Bertoncelli did when, faced with Guccini's third album - which was nonetheless the product of his own artistic path - he attacked him, accusing him of repeating himself and telling him to change careers (this is how Guccini's song "L'avvelenata" came about, in which the Emilian singer-songwriter drags Bertoncelli into it in less than flattering terms, repaying him, in his own way, for the attention he'd received, ed.). That was an overreaction on Bertoncelli's part, it certainly wasn't a bad Guccini album. If anything, the problem was that critics in the early '70s had grown so used to things that if you made an album similar to the previous one, or even one without too many new elements, you were seen as someone who had nothing left to say.

The exact opposite of what happens now: today, if you make a record that's different from the previous successful one, you're seen as crazy because you risk a flop. Besides obviously thinking about sales, back then there was also a great desire to make a first-rate product, an ambition that has been somewhat lost today.

To go back to your question, I was very close friends with Bennato, Venditti, and Finardi, and I saw quite a bit of Dalla too. All people who, in those years, didn't get anything wrong, although I did criticize Finardi at times, and I realized this again recently when I went back through the material I gathered for my book. I gave him some fairly harsh reviews, in which I told him to stop with the rhyming couplets and that tendency to tell everyone else how to live their lives: in short, whenever I thought there were things worth saying, I said them without hesitation.

The title of your exhibition refers to a rock wave, and since we feel indirectly namechecked, let me ask you: what was the rock wave for you...

It seemed to me that "onda rock" [rock wave] could work for my exhibition, I needed something to convey that it all started with radio, and you'll also remember it was the title of a chapter in my book. It really was a huge wave, a tsunami, because before those programmes there was almost nothing, and afterwards there was a whole world revolving around music: concerts, records, books, magazines, appearances, debates, it all started at that moment. The singer-songwriter movement and Italian prog were born then, but above all the infrastructure that had previously been missing came into being, and music was truly placed at the centre of youth culture. This happened with the usual limitations, typically Italian ones, and I'm referring to Autonomia Operaia and its doctrine that concerts had to be free, which created a pretty abnormal and dangerous situation. "Per voi giovani" and "Popoff" were the only two music programmes on the radio, so everything revolved around them, and we found ourselves in the driver's seat of this small but great cultural revolution. You inevitably became friends, since many artists came into the studio to promote their first records, and that's what gave them exposure: there was a mix of gratitude, warmth, friendship and shared purpose.

"Per voi giovani" was a groundbreaking and cross-genre radio programme. Groundbreaking because it was the first to broadcast rock content on the radio, cross-genre because there was a great variety of material that also reached the ears of an audience not necessarily young, given that back then there were no broadcasters besides Rai...

In the end we didn't worry too much about who our target audience was, also because we knew the average listener was under thirty. I don't think there were that many middle-aged people following it, it was a bit of an oasis within a schedule that reached everyone. There were certainly some forty-somethings listening, but I think mostly to get a sense of what direction the student youth movement was heading in, since "Per voi giovani", especially in its first two years, was very politicized.

Would a programme like that still be conceivable today?

As a musical format, it would undoubtedly be a groundbreaking programme, while from a socio-political point of view the analysis would obviously be more complex, since too much has changed in the way people consume media. From a musical point of view, as I was saying, it would be, because we mixed Keith Jarrett with Venditti, Bob Marley with Genesis, Joni Mitchell with Weather Report, Frank Zappa and the Canterbury scene. Looking back at those playlists now, there were undoubtedly things that made sense together, like Neil Young with the Eagles and Jackson Browne, but then there were also leaps, like when I put Jarrett right after Venditti just because they both played piano.

What differences do you see between the radio of yesterday and today's radio? How has radio language changed?

Today radio slots are extremely tight: when I go on as a guest, you can talk for three minutes at most and then you have to cut to a record. Ours really was an experience of free radio, because we followed our own rhythms: yes, there was the Rai censorship committee that would occasionally cut some track from the schedule, but aside from that, which has to do with the historical and political moment, nobody gave you a hard time about format, it was up to your own taste to make things work, and it worked. Today radio stations have become containers for a single genre, that kind of cross-genre journey simply isn't an option any more, whereas our strength was precisely creating a cross-genre taste in music: we'd start from rock, but then we'd range further and bring in elements of jazz, folk, blues and singer-songwriter music. We put across the message that music was history, culture, that it had a past and roots, a journey, connections. If David Bowie loved painting, that was an occasion for us to range into the field of painting; maybe there were literary references too, and so certain authors would get read out and flagged up: Springsteen quoted Walt Whitman, and back then you might hear one of his poems read out on the radio. But you had no time constraints, it's not like today when, after thirty seconds, the host starts cutting you off; nobody gave you any rules, so you had to make your own: now we're overloaded with rules and it's transgressive to break them, whereas back then it was transgressive to create them.

Is that why you don't do radio any more today?

I've had plenty of talks with various Italian radio stations, but there's always something that stops the project from taking off. Sometimes the format isn't right, or they won't let you pick the records so you'd just be doing hosting duties, and that's certainly not why I'm there; other times they'd let you do what you like but with limitations, with certain timing constraints I've already mentioned. Basically there's a format problem: when I say that a show like "Popoff" (more so than "Per voi giovani") would be revolutionary, it's precisely because it would be outside any contemporary format: for a network today it would create a suspension of identity that simply can't be allowed. Let's be honest, these are ideas from forty years ago, but given how the world has gone, they'd still be something innovative.

Today, though, you carry on your work as a TV host, but also as a photographer, so I have to ask: how much has the latter changed with the shift to digital photography?

It's changed enormously - for me, digital has paradoxically had as much impact on photography as it has on music, if not more. Back in the day there was tungsten film for shooting under artificial light at concerts, and it was 160 ASA. Push it to 320 ASA and the grain already started getting a bit coarse; pushing it above 640 ASA was absolutely impossible. Most of the photos in the exhibition were shot at an exposure of 2.8-1/30, 2.8-1/15; now I shoot at ISO 6400, with no grain, autofocus, and if you want - since it costs nothing - you can take two thousand photos at a single concert. Back then the hassle was dropping the film off and picking it up from the lab; today it's sorting through it all, because it's one thing when you have fifty shots, another entirely when you have two thousand. The way you shoot live photography has changed too, since back then you could stand in front of the stage from start to finish of the show, right there two metres away, you could rest your lenses on the stage and nobody said a word. The lighting was also worse, so you'd often shoot at a very low speed and the photos would often come out blurred, but in exchange you had total access.

Nowadays you have an incredible camera, but they only let you shoot three songs, so during those three songs you take nine hundred photos and don't even have time to think about what you're doing - it's a rush, a shot of adrenaline. You're standing there, and in a few minutes you have to get everything, but it doesn't make sense, because a concert doesn't last a few minutes: as everyone knows, the best photos come at the end, when the singer is a bit worn out and you can capture their more natural expressions, and besides, towards the end the lights are turned up more, and the musicians aren't still working through their soundcheck nerves, so they hold much more restrained poses on stage. And let's not even get into the backstage, which, if the artist isn't a friend of yours, is completely off-limits. The environmental situation has drastically worsened while the technological situation has improved a great deal: the two things somewhat balance each other out, but in a strange way. I've got nine hundred photos of Green Day and maybe a hundred of those are even good, but you can no longer get that one sensational shot because you don't have the time for it. The result is that the photos are all excellent quality, but also all the same: if you look at the reportage work of the ten photographers working in Rome, and you looked at it without knowing the author's name, and swapped them around, you'd struggle to say who shot what.

I notice some curious parallels between what you were telling me earlier about radio, and what you're telling me now about photography...

True. It's a bit like the contemporary world pushing towards homogenisation. Technologically it's perfect, extremely advanced, really cool, with extraordinary means of communication, but in the end it's also a bit banal, because it's a world where everyone has access, with the same tools, to the same thing, at the same time, and that makes the result very similar. You can barely invent anything anymore, whereas before, whoever had the steadiest hand was the better one, whoever had a particular style and maybe knew how to create the right situation: these aspects have been homogenised by digital photography, which could actually be a good thing and have a faint whiff of democratisation of the image, but in the end it makes it harder to tell photographers apart from one another.

Photos kindly provided by Carlo Massarini

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