Fabrizio De André

Francesco De Gregori and Fabrizio De André: two very different personalities, in some ways polar opposites, yet united by a number of affinities. From a shared preference for stories of losers and outcasts, to a shared contempt for the powerful and the tyrannical of this world, to a shared passion for the singer-songwriter tradition. Indeed, De Gregori himself has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to the Genoese songwriter. "Fabrizio was living proof that a song could, if it wanted to, be corrosive and difficult, realistic and poetic: extremely musical, yes, but also narrative and, why not, political. He was fundamental at the start of my career. He made me understand that a song, even when it's about love, can have the ambition to depict reality more deeply, to depict the unpleasantness of the world. I don't think I would have taken up this profession if, at twelve, I hadn't come across songs like 'Il testamento' or 'La guerra di Piero'."

The meeting at the "Folkrosso"

It was through "big De André impressions" that De Gregori began putting songs together on his guitar strings. There's one, though, which, though built precisely by inverting the chords of a De André song, has a clear and melancholy charm of its own. It's called "Buonanotte Nina" and it's a tramp's farewell letter to his beautiful, wealthy beloved. An ideal soundtrack for his debut at the Roman temple of the Folkstudio, where De Gregori would set up camp for several years. Then, when unfathomable financial troubles forced the Folkstudio to relocate, and the "Folkrosso" took shape in its place next to the Bar delle Rose, it was there that De Gregori would come to meet and get to know De André, forging a friendship that would bear precious fruit in the years to come. "My brother introduced me to him (Luigi Grechi, ed.) and our first meeting was lovely, because De André had already heard my songs and liked them a lot, so he thought I was very talented and I felt encouraged," De Gregori would recall. "This happened around the time of 'Theorius Campus' (the album with Antonello Venditti, ed.), but we didn't talk about working together — I explained my situation a bit, that I hadn't had success with that record, that I felt out of place at IT, and then he said: 'I'll take you on, come to Milan, I'll produce you.' He went to Micocci (the RCA boss, ed.) to ask how much he wanted to let me go, but they couldn't agree — I think Micocci asked for an absurd amount. After that we saw each other fairly rarely, but always warmly."

Through his early-Seventies poetics, the young De Gregori had been one of the first Italian singer-songwriters to shift the preferred axis of reference away from the France of the chansonniers and Provençal troubadours toward the America of modern folksingers and talkin' blues. With Bob Dylan as the guiding star charting the main road. A "bad road" down which the Roman singer-songwriter would go on to lead none other than his own mentor, Fabrizio De André.

The invitation to Sardinia

In the summer of 1974, Fabrizio De André, with almost fifteen years of songwriting behind him, was feeling a bit weary. Unconvinced by his most recent work, he decided to refresh his creativity at the source of that young Roman talent. So he asked Francesco De Gregori to write the songs for his new album together with him, inviting him to his Sardinian home in Agnata, in Gallura. "Belìn, why don't you come over? I need to write and I've got no ideas!" "I'll rush right over," went the exchange between the two. Then again, De André's admiration for that irreverent young man wasn't new — he'd met him one evening at the Folkstudio, or rather the Folkrosso, while he was tearing "La guerra di Piero" to pieces in one of the era's goliardic parodies. A feeling born at first sight, in short, which had even led De André to offer himself as producer for Francesco's recording debut: "If I'm high school, he's university," he had generously introduced him to Nanni Ricordi. "I think," De Gregori speculates, "he invited me because he was curious: he liked seeing how other people wrote. And also, oddly enough, he was a bit insecure too. What interested him about me was the Anglo-American side of things, which he didn't know well, since he'd come up through the French chansonniers. With me, well, he got completely drunk on Dylan."

In short, the partnership between Fabrizio De André and Francesco De Gregori wasn't simply an apprenticeship of student alongside master. On the contrary, the encounter — and clash — between two such complex personalities would be marked by more than one difficulty, even if in the end an effective modus operandi was found. "It's very strange, because I can't write songs together with anyone else, but with him I managed to," De Gregori would later reveal. "What would happen is I'd write half a song, then I'd go off to eat while he stayed there because he wasn't hungry, and then I'd find he'd finished it; then he'd go eat, I'd add the music, then he'd come back and correct it; then it would happen that we'd throw it all away and start another one from scratch."

The collaboration

The first building block of the collaboration goes by the name "Via della povertà," nothing less than a four-handed reworking of "Desolation Row," which closed Bob Dylan's album "Highway 61 Revisited" (1965). The Italian version, which De André would include on "Canzoni" (1974), is an equally sprawling ballad, stretched out over almost ten minutes of music. A long procession of characters and metaphors, set within a refined game of demythologizing and demystifying. "Sailors crowding a beauty salon, a blind commissioner predicting misfortune, a Cinderella no longer shy and fleeing but bold and energetic like Bette Davis, a Romeo who gets chased off while making his declaration of love, the Good Samaritan sharpening pity as if it were a weapon and wearing it like a carnival mask, Mr. Hyde in tears at the sight of his so-called sane side 'laughing in the mirror,' an Ophelia who discovers she's a spinster, an Albert Einstein 'disguised as a drunk,' the phantom of the opera 'dressed in priest's robes,' a Casanova who 'is about to be raped,' the god of the sea amusing himself by sending the Titanic down into the depths while the sun is rising: these are some of the characters in a carnivalized world, masks in a theatre of the absurd perhaps, but revealing of a certain way of being human: 'they're people like all of us, they don't seem like monsters to me, they don't seem like heroes to me.'"

But "Via della povertà" is just the appetizer. The main course would come on De André's next album, "Volume VIII." Four new songs, the fruit of the long "session" in Sardinia, which De Gregori would recount as follows: "We spent almost a month alone in his beautiful house in Gallura, facing a wonderful beach that, actually, I don't think we ever set foot on: at that time we both had rather stormy love affairs going on, and it was more or less winter. Fabrizio drank and smoked an enormous amount, and I kept up with him fairly successfully. We played chess, two-handed poker; every now and then I'd take his moped and go riding around for miles. When I got back I'd often find him just out of bed, wandering around the house with a cigarette, a glass and a guitar in hand, having jotted down some notes, some chords. It was a strange way for us to work: we never sat down and said, 'Now let's write this song.' We simply added to and corrected each other's notes, sometimes without even talking about it, sometimes without even meeting, because he slept during the day and worked at night, and I did the opposite. The music came fairly easily to us — Fabrizio was an exceptional musician — and we'd record it on a small battery-powered tape recorder."

From that strange Sardinian session came four songs: "La cattiva strada," "Oceano," "Canzone per l'estate" — which De Gregori would revisit almost thirty years later on "Amore nel pomeriggio" — and the political parable of "Le storie di ieri," included a year later on "Rimmel." "He'd fallen in love with that song of mine," De Gregori would reveal about the latter. Originally slated for inclusion on the "Pecora" album, "Le storie di ieri" was blocked by RCA and only released a year later, when, evidently — as De Gregori would later joke — "anti-fascism had become more acceptable to the mass media too." That same year it also ended up on De André's "Volume VIII," in a version virtually identical to the original. With that bitterly ironic lyric, unmasking the fascisms of yesterday, but above all those of today, in their double-breasted suits:

And even now there remains black writing
on the wall in front of my house
it says the movement will win
the new leaders have serene faces
and ties matching their shirts

In the original version, instead of “new leaders,” a specific name was used: Giorgio Almirante, secretary of the Movimento Sociale. De André would settle on a middle ground: “The big boss.”

The legacy of that encounter

The meeting between De André and De Gregori will also remain, in certain respects, a missed opportunity. The meeting of two heavyweights of Italian songwriting could have produced much more. And it's almost paradoxical that the masterpiece of that record, “Amico fragile,” bears De André's signature alone. Yet those four songs alone would mean a great deal to both of them. For De Gregori, they would be the springboard from which he launched "Rimmel". For De André, they would be the first step onto that Dylanesque "bad road," taken thanks to his friend's suggestions, freeing himself from the Francophile dogmas of his early songs, in which he risked getting trapped. And in the end, it's not far-fetched to argue that it was actually the Genoese singer-songwriter who was most influenced by that meeting. As Puny Rignon, De André's wife at the time, recalls: “Fabrizio hadn't noticed he was singing like Francesco. I gave him a real dressing-down (laughs): 'Great! I left with a Fabrizio De André and now I've got two De Gregoris.'”

But – as mentioned – it wasn't a straightforward friendship. Because while De André was indeed "a generous and combative man, easy to love and extremely difficult to get along with" – as De Gregori describes him – the young Principe also had his own rough edges. So the two also found themselves at the center of a spectacular row while on holiday. "At the end of the Seventies, we went on a trip to Canada with De André," De Gregori would recount. "My wife Chicca, me, Fabrizio, and Dori Ghezzi, who had just gotten together. A bit like Chicca and me, who had just gotten engaged. Fabrizio was really bothered by one thing: we were in Canada, in Toronto, where English is spoken. He was convinced they spoke French there. Then I drove the car, because I had a licence and he didn't. And if we needed to ask for directions, or something at a restaurant, I inevitably had to be the one to ask... This stirred up a kind of jealousy in him. One day he came back to the hotel and said: 'Look what I bought.' He pulls out a Winchester with bullets. I say: sure, but what are you going to do with it, we're supposed to be travelling. Then he wanted to drive the car, without having a licence. I'd rented it, and if he happened to crash it... Anyway, in the end we had a fight. We split up on an island, telling each other to get lost. They stayed there and I went on with Chicca, taking the car. After that we didn't speak again, until he was released, after the kidnapping. Then we made up."

A stormy relationship, then, but a real one. De Gregori is one of the musicians who came closest to De André's artistic and human world. Perhaps precisely for this reason he chose not to take part in the orgy of fake revivals and phony commemorations that followed his death. So much so that they "forgot" to invite him to the tribute concert on March 12, 2000 at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, later documented on a double album ("Faber, Amico fragile," 2003). But it stung him. And it's hard to blame him, when you look at a tracklist with "La cattiva strada" handed to Jovanotti instead of him, given that he was also its co-author... Still, De Gregori will always keep the memory of those "litres and litres of coral" crossed together with his fragile friend, to reach together "a place called goodbye."

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

29/07/2026