Interview with the Lawyer

The trilogy made together with the poet Roberto Roversi was a decisive step in the maturing of Lucio Dalla. “If I hadn't met Roversi, I'd be a plumber by now,” the Bolognese singer-songwriter would joke in an interview given two years before his death. It was, above all, a lexical revolution in Italian song, one that upended the traditional verse-chorus formula, replacing it with a distinctive flow of music and poetry — experimental, yet never pretentious or self-indulgent.

Roversi was the right man at the right time for Dalla, driven by the ambition to tear open a view onto society, holding up the arrogance and contradictions of power to ridicule. Not quite an “ideological” singer-songwriter approach in the style of Pietrangeli, Guccini and Lolli, but rather an effective compromise between political ambition and pop music. Three albums, “Il giorno aveva cinque teste” (1973), “Anidride solforosa” (1975) and “Automobili” (1976), sealed a perfect rapport between the two authors — one destined, however, to crack not long after.

After a few minor artistic disagreements, what ultimately sparks the definitive rift between the two protagonists is a banal matter of censorship, standing between the theatrical show "Il futuro dell’automobile" (also broadcast by Rai in six episodes) and its subsequent record adaptation, "Automobili", which was stripped of part of its title as well as the five most political songs ("I muri del ’21", "Statale adriatica Km 220", "La signora di Bologna", "Rodeo" and "Assemblaggio"), and of two verses included in the song at the center of this piece, "Interview all’Avvocato".

Dalla fights tooth and nail to save the integrity of the project, but faced with Rca's intransigence he is forced to capitulate. Roversi doesn't forgive him. He refuses to have his name appear on the record, hiding disdainfully behind the pseudonym Norisso (an eighteenth-century Veronese count, member of the Accademia dell’Arcadia in Rome). By the time "Automobili" comes out, in short, the Dalla-Roversi partnership is already in pieces. And yet, from this troubled gestation comes what is universally recognized as the most interesting and cohesive chapter of the trilogy, both lyrically and in terms of arrangements, entirely overseen by Dalla with the contribution, for the first time, of some musicians who, years later, would go on to form Stadio. It's also the record containing the longest tracks, true suites that bring to fruition the most brilliant progressive, jazz and folk intuitions found in the first two chapters.

What deeply inspires the two authors is precisely the record's strong central theme: a kind of concept album about the automobile, seen as the symbol of an unchecked modernity that advances by reshaping the landscape through asphalt, motorways and viaducts, sealing the death of rural civilisation. A perspective in which even the creation of a hero-champion like Nuvolari and the myth of the Mille Miglia served the purpose of post-war propaganda in favour of that industrial model.

The album's final track, which can work either as a prologue (in the reworked album version) or as an epilogue (as its author intended in "Il futuro dell’automobile"), is precisely the brilliant "Interview con l’Avvocato". If, for Dalla and Roversi, the future of industrial society is an immense black hole in which every question goes unanswered, then the media, too, can only produce empty chatter. Hence this surreal "interview" in which Gianni Agnelli explains the future of the automotive sector to a reporter from the Manchester Guardian. Dalla, accompanying himself on piano with a deliberately deflating gait, delivers it in inimitable cabaret style: he has the Fiat boss recite a comic pseudo-English grammelot, sings in scat, and pulls off a wild vocal "solo", closing with a question that is really meant as a bleak prophecy:

⟦Q6⟧

⟦Q7⟧

⟦Q8⟧

⟦Q9⟧

⟦Q10⟧

⟦Q11⟧

⟦Q12⟧

Like flashing on the sea

It won't turn out exactly like that, but in 1976 no one in Italy could have gotten away with such a jab at one of the country's most powerful men. And who knows what would have happened if other impertinent questions from Roversi hadn't been cut from the text at Rca's request, such as:

A child wrote

in a recent investigation

'Concentration camp in an Italian school':

'My father is poor and thin,

poor, thin and short'

But wouldn't the car have a future

if it could take for a ride

that father too, along with that child,

pulling them out of their fate?

From the Ekofisk field

spewing crude oil like machine-gun fire

up there in the North Sea

there's oil for Italy

An island a kilometre long

with tanks of concrete and steel

But doesn't the fire of this future too

burn only those at the bottom?

These are lines taken from the original manuscript, which can be read inside the aforementioned box set, along with all of Roversi's various annotations, some of which are also available on the website of his Archive www.robertoroversi.it/.

Too uncomfortable and touchy for its time, "Interview con l’Avvocato" would be censored by the media even more than Rca had censored it, condemning it to early obscurity. Yet its biting impertinence still resonates in today's Italy, where economic powers are no less privileged and where, in the age of electric cars and eco-friendly devices, the issue of pollution remains at the center of political debate.

After the troubled saga of "Automobili", there would be no more room for reconciliation between the Bolognese duo. Roversi would thus return to his work as a poet, while Dalla would decide to take the big leap: from then on, he would write the lyrics to his own songs himself. Starting with that masterpiece named "How Deep Is the Sea".

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22/03/2026