Vasco Rossi

I was a self-taught kid from Zocca who learned to sing while herding sheep to pasture

Ten, ten, ten. All tens. A hundred points out of a hundred. Vasco, just like Nadia. The survivor remembers the wonder child with the smile that has bewitched generations of fans, as different from one another as the Sanremo crowd is from the social-media one. “He used to wander around backstage in trousers too baggy and a jacket too long.” It's the image that captures the origins of the man who remains Italy's most beloved rocker, and all too often, excessively debated one. Pepsy Romanoff's docufilm (“Il Supervissuto”, Netflix) starts from his origins and his friendship with Floriano Fini: from novelty songs to real depth, Vasco Rossi is the “cursed” rockstar next door.

Damnation and loyalty. Drugs and bread. We travel on the frequencies of a finally free radio to reach the first attempts at breaking into a music scene that had, up to that point, never seen a rocker so utterly himself: all guts, heart and whores. If there's one criticism that can never be levelled at Vasco Rossi, it's that he ever aped anyone; this beyond the riffs and a style that borrows the stylistic devices of Anglo-Saxon rock (what else, after all?) and Italian singer-songwriter tradition, sure, but stripping both of their seriousness behind the counter of the Roxy Bar. Starting with Enzo Jannacci, to whom Vasco is proudly indebted. "Ogni volta", his masterpiece, his miracle, his peak and his sherpa, is precisely one of those songs born out of a Jannacci-esque vision of life and music. The narrative synthesis is, to close the circle with the Milanese singer-songwriter, the gift Vasco knows he has. And in Romanoff's images it emerges very accurately, between a memory, a narrow escape and a newfound clarity.

Unlike documentaries that claim to describe without ever digging into either the man or the musician, sloppily relying on unlikely friends and token "intellectuals", like "Il coraggio di essere Franco", a tribute to Battiato who would probably have cursed every Tibetan monk had he heard narrator Alessandro Preziosi trying his hand at the pomposity of a real-estate agent from Rome's eastern suburbs (or any other big Italian periphery of your choosing), "Il Supervissuto" steers clear of any gushing sentimentality, in short of all "these things here", to put it in Vasco's own words. At the centre of it all is the house of the man who came down from the hill to challenge and then embrace a city steeped in the Tondelli-esque Emilia of the late Seventies. There are, and plenty of them, his truest friends, his most die-hard fans, like those from the Eighties who affectionately call him "an animal, a beast", to praise his sheer drive. While the Salvalaggios of the world misread his lyrics, in one of the most sanctimonious reviews in history.

Inevitably, there's the rockstar who thinks he'll die young. So amphetamines appear (and cocaine "in a can"). And there's Gaetano Curreri saying "I'll do anything to stay here with you": he's the Uccio who sorts everything out behind the scenes. In this first wave of anecdotes from Vasco Rossi's life, there also resurfaces the not-giving-a-damn attitude, right up until "songs like Toffee are born". Then there's Celso Valli, who recounts how Mina asked the Emilian rocker for a song after seeing him at Sanremo.

He doesn't talk because he doesn't give a damn.

He doesn't need to talk

(Guido Elmi)

The strung-out Vasco who chases away the amphetamine, who demands the "radio" back in "Ti taglio la gola", one of those songs that today would be censored by political correctness and the media axe, is the protagonist of an astonishing third episode, with the Steve Rogers Band driving the outbursts of a musician reborn but still shattered by his arrest. "I didn't even know where I'd put my money," Vasco recalls at one point. Yet he'll soon reveal himself to be a professional with the nerve to cut his trusted Guido Elmi down to size, and even to walk away from his beloved gang, who by then had let the success about to hit charts and stadiums go a little too much to their heads. This is the point at which Laura arrives. The seventeen-year-old who will later become his wife, and who reveals herself, right in the middle of the whole story, to be a seductive, strong, funny, quick-witted, understanding, rare woman, capable of holding up both the man and the musician over the years. Romanoff lets the footage, the fragments, the improvisations do the talking ("Can we swear?" Laura Schmidt asks at one point).

It's a love that begins with insults, on the fringes of the best moment of Vasco Rossi's career. Here the private clashes come out too, the friction with those who didn't want Laura around. "I had Yoko Ono syndrome," Vasco recalls, amused. And again: "She was perfect, because she only knew me as a man." Vasco Rossi often appears in a room, sometimes playing guitar, remembering, remembering, remembering.

The biggest act of rebellion I could pull off in the late Eighties was starting a family

The first part ends with a beaming Vasco Rossi who has finally found his own balance, lost in his private studio deep in the countryside, where songs like "Vivere una favola" were born. It's remarkable how the record-breaking Vasco, the one filling stadiums in 1990, the energetic rocker still seemingly "damned", is also the same reclusive man, far from the world, happy as can be alongside Laura and his son. Romanoff thus leans into this duality, letting the protagonists and the near-endless trove of rare footage hint at the contrasts.

The forest welcomes the man training the stage animal. "I was waging war on stage, and meanwhile Luca was being born." Blasco effectively "dies" in 1993, with the last fully successful album of his career. And with his "passing" comes, alas, the "Komandante" Vasco, who will begin to coast artistically on past glories. His fans will change too, the "people of Vasco", as everyone now calls them. This second phase of the Zocca musician's career inevitably weighs on Romanoff's film as well, forced to draw a comparison with Valentino Rossi, who is necessarily similar to Vasco, albeit humanly more predatory, a "gentle tyrant", to borrow the title of a fine book about the Tavullia champion by Neapolitan writer Marco Ciriello.

So it goes on, with the legend returning to Sanremo like a Roman general who has conquered everything there was left to annex to the empire. And we arrive at the 2011 patient who resigns as a rockstar and loses a bit of his "reason" on Facebook, the "Vas(c)o Komunicatore" fighting between life and death as he faces "the bacterium", as he himself calls it. It's the most human part of a documentary that, towards the end, can't help but turn a little cloying or Maravenieri-esque, to use a fittingly playful adjective. Let's put it this way: it's the price to pay when telling the arc of a musician by lining up song and private life.

Sure, it would have been nice to hear Vasco explain the songs he "loves least", or the legendary "Ciao ma'", the forgotten film by Giandomenico Curi, which in 1987 staged the Vasco Rossi phenomenon like no one else ever has. But the simplicity that defined the lives and the love of the paninaro fans of those years would, we all know, clash too much today with the special effects of the giants cashing in on the "Komandante" and his new "soldiers" to the tune of millions. And that's fine (that's fine) as it is.

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