Carlo Massarini

Tales of an Absolute Beginner

by Marco Bercella

We had a long conversation with Carlo Massarini, on the occasion of the release of his second book “Absolute Beginners”, which we already covered extensively elsewhere. What emerged were some previously unpublished behind-the-scenes insights into his working methods and his next editorial project, as well as an in-depth discussion of rock's “originators”, especially in light of the ongoing process of historicization affecting popular music. You'll also find an analysis of the musical paths taken by Black artists inside and outside rock, a look at the affinities and differences between two historic British bands who owe much to the blues, and even a brief return to the story of “Ghiaccio Bollente“. And even a football-flavored digression.

Carlo, seven years have passed since your first book, “Dear Mr Fantasy“. What drew you to this literary dimension, and why did it take so long this time around?

As for the long gaps between projects, I'll give you the same answer that Jackson Browne or Peter Gabriel gave when asked this: I write when I really feel like it, and I also have other projects to carry forward. For me writing is fairly demanding, partly because I write relatively slowly, and partly because I love doing things properly: I'm a lazy perfectionist. I realize that's a bit of an oxymoron, but that's how it is. And I write when there's a good idea behind it: the first book was much more autobiographical, whereas this one is more historical. That's a dimension that interests me, because I believe I belong to a generation in Italy that lived through musical events firsthand, that saw them happen and still remembers them. Of course you can always dig deeper into everything, but my memory is still fresh, so it seems right to leave behind what Americans call a legacy — a kind of inheritance of what I've known, which can be useful both to those who were there at the time, but above all to young people who don't know what came before: personally, I'm not interested in the last few minutes of a film, even if that's maybe where you find the resolution — I like watching the whole film from start to finish. In this moment of historicization, much more is known than was known at the time, because back then there were only a couple of music magazines — I didn't read the English ones since they were too fanatical — so I relied on American ones like Rolling Stone, which was sort of my guide: literature applied to music, the idea that music was art and not simply entertainment. And so this process of historicization — which by now has extended to films, documentaries, biopics, DVDs, reissues with new liner notes, on top of magazines that have come out in the meantime, like Mojo and Uncut, which have one foot in the present and one in the past — lets you discover all sorts of things even if you were there at the time. It's interesting to rediscover these stories, because in the end I'm no longer really working as a music critic…

…though nothing about the book's tone suggests that either, but even just the choices you made imply some kind of critical operation, don't they?

No, it's an act of popularization by someone who has a certain taste. You know, being a critic means sitting down and saying "this album was better than the previous one" and things like that… I know the line between a popularizer and a critic is thin, but in my view what I do is more storytelling than music criticism.

If in “Dear Mr. Fantasy” you told the story of your own experience inside the world of rock — essentially your professional history — with “Absolute Beginners” you took on the role of listener and popularizer. In which role did you feel more at ease?

Well, I had more fun telling my personal story, because I brought in a whole series of memories that meant a great deal to me, involving people whose lives crossed mine, as well as musical experiences. “Dear Mr Fantasy” was never meant to be a complete picture of the music of the Seventies and Eighties, but more simply a portrait of the people I had met and photographed. The intention was more to tell the story of a generation, and how that generation had in turn been transformed by music. This book, on the other hand, also covers a period I didn't fully experience firsthand — at least the Thirties, Forties and Fifties — although by the end of the Fifties I was actually in Canada, and there are some pieces drawn from my parents' record collection, like “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio, which I included in the chapter devoted to folk. But broadly speaking, the idea was to put together a compendium of songs that represented the truly innovative moments in music, so you shouldn't expect a greatest hits. Even though many of these songs topped the charts, the point wasn't to draw up a list of the best songs of those years, but rather of the ones that turned a corner, that changed something compared to what had come before.

“Absolute Beginners” is, unsurprisingly, an offshoot of a radio show you hosted on Virgin Radio. Did you already have the idea of turning a radio programme into a book, or did it come to you in progress? And what kind of work did you have to do to pull off that transformation?

No, look, the problem is that if in the Seventies or Eighties you did one thing, now you have to do three, and since I'm fairly lazy, I get just the right amount of sleep, and I enjoy doing other things besides writing, when you think about a project you have to approach it with a multimedia mindset, so that it can also be turned into something else. So you try to think from the very start about a radio programme that then becomes a book, that then becomes a TV programme, that then becomes an exhibition: basically, I think in multimedia terms, as a marketing idea for a product that then gets repurposed in different ways. It's the only thing you can do these days, because if you chase after every single product separately, you don't have the time, you don't have the energy, and you don't even get an adequate financial return. It doesn't always work out that way, though — for instance, “Ghiaccio Bollente” never became a book…

It still could, though: it would be great to write a book about the whole “Ghiaccio Bollente” affair…

Yes, a white paper, to tell things as they really were… But I'm not particularly the type to hold grudges; even the idea of the petition — for which I still thank OndaRock for how it supported it — came about spontaneously, it was the idea of a friend of mine on Facebook. I've always walked away calmly from professional situations where I was no longer wanted, or was no longer part of a project, because once something is over you can argue about it, you can maybe squeeze some financial advantage out of it, but if it's over, it's over. Many people still come up to me today and ask, “So what about it? Ghiaccio Bollente?”, and I say, “No, Ghiaccio Bollente is finished…”, although you never know, because as Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. And anyway, I think I'm also at an age where I'd still like to do a few important things and then retire to enjoy life and take the trips I haven't been able to take for twenty years, which is what I miss most. Looking back, though, I tell myself that programme was something I did, and did well, even if Rai never understood how important it was, especially for a certain kind of audience, even if not a majority one. In that sense, the system has changed… if you make programmes that are a bit high-quality, a bit refined, you automatically can't reach a wide audience.

Tell me about it…

The system won't let you, not because it's being unkind to you, but because it has settled into a different shape, so you can only offer a certain kind of entertainment in proportion to the number of people listening to you. The kind of music that “Ghiaccio Bollente” talked about was something niche, built around a late-night slot, on a channel like Rai 5 that has only a few tens of thousands of viewers. And when you find yourself in that kind of situation, you know your listener base is relatively small, and your bargaining power is just as small. So all you can do is enjoy doing it.

Carlo, who are the absolute beginners?

The absolute beginners are the originators, the ones who invent something, who colonize new territory, who have an intuition and also the courage to see it through. They're not necessarily the very biggest names, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — who were obviously absolute beginners too, just like Presley and Muddy Waters — but also the “one shot” acts, the bands who made just one record that nevertheless left its mark. The perfect example is the Kingsmen with “Louie Louie”, who coined the perfect riff of scrappy, garage rock'n'roll, and shot to number one thanks to the aura of mystery the FBI wrapped around them: they were worried the lyrics were about drugs and communism, since you can't make out the words. But, as you know, nothing attracts kids more than a record that gets banned. Yet the Kingsmen basically never did anything else, and even so we're talking about a riff that became basic to rock'n'roll: the Kinks made a fortune out of it, but so did Lou Reed and plenty of others who drew on that sort of proto-punk. So very often you don't have some major absolute beginner writing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or “Satisfaction”, but there's a lot of lesser-known music that also laid its own small brick. There are 280 of these stories here, some vaguely known or legendary, but many still to be discovered, because they're about artists that, especially in Italy, few people know.

The records I talk about tell the stories of these figures who invented things that hadn't existed before, who slowly shaped, in a thousand different directions, each in their own way, the rock music we know today. And I find these to be fantastic stories, because these people were innovative, transgressive, brazen, and above all had no idea that they were producing something that would become art, or that would influence the lives of millions of people. We're talking about a handful of kids, like Mick Jagger or Pete Townshend, who thought things would last only a short while, just like the rockers of the Fifties, who were having fun, picking up girls, making a bit of money, and figured it would all be over before long. There was no sense of what they were actually doing, just as there wasn't in so many other artists of the last century, who were breaking conventions by doing things that changed the social paradigm as well as the musical one.

Was there any song or musician you had to leave out against your will?

The Beatles' "Help" had to be in there, just like "Jumpin' Jack Flash" or "Street Fighting Man" by the Stones, but in the end the Beatles already had six tracks... instead I had to considerably expand the section dedicated to blues and the one on singer-songwriters, because Virgin Radio doesn't play those genres, apart from Bob Dylan and a few others... although at the start they did let me play a bit, to be honest. So compared to the radio show, it's much richer. Initially I wrote in a more radio-friendly format, then at a certain point I found this format of a size-14 Word page and carried on that way. It was actually a huge job, it took me a year and a half, the same time it took for "Dear Mr. Fantasy", even though they were two very different kinds of work.

Flicking through the book, I couldn't help but notice a phenomenon I'd call "whitening". If in the first part mentions of Black musicians were the rule, in the second they've become the exception (Ike & Tina, Jimi Hendrix). To what extent did rock end up becoming a white man's game?

It's actually pretty strange that it did become that, but it wasn't down to white musicians, it was down to Black musicians, because at a certain point the African-American tradition headed in a different direction. Black musicians started first, back when white musicians knew nothing about it and didn't want to know, then at a certain point, in 1954, along comes Presley, who fuses country melodies and fingerpicking with rhythm'n'blues, which first becomes rockabilly and then rock'n'roll. Except Black musicians had already been making that rhythm and that dance-music idea for five, if not ten years, and so, rather than carry on doing that rhythm'n'blues so close to rock'n'roll, they headed in another direction we'd call soul, which didn't have much to do with rock. Or rather, culturally there's definitely a connection, but stylistically they drifted further and further apart, because then along comes Isaac Hayes, the second wave of Stax/Atlantic, the Motown story continues... well, that's not rock. Rock is different, it starts from electric blues and moves in an ever more electric direction, while Black music takes a curve and heads in another direction, the one from which, starting in the late '70s, hip-hop is also born. It really does seem like there are relatively few Black musicians interested in making rock, and in fact if you think about it, you can count them on one hand: there's Jimi Hendrix, Living Colour, Lenny Kravitz...

But then there was also George Clinton...

He's a bit of a special case, he's the father of funk, like James Brown if you like. James Brown's electricity has something rock in it, but it isn't rock. In the end, the place where the most intense music of all ever came from is the American South, where things get mixed together in what they call roots music, where you've got country - and I'm talking about Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans - but also folk, gospel, rhythm'n'blues, soul, funk. And among those musicians there were also white ones, I'm thinking for instance of the Allman Brothers and Creedence Clearwater Revival (even though they were from San Francisco), who made that kind of music. And then of course, but that's a topic for the next book, the Rolling Stones, who'd been listening to Muddy Waters since they were in diapers and made tracks that are genuine gospel-rock. All in all, I think the most beautiful American music comes from that area...

Besides the Stones, Led Zeppelin drew on it too, with Jimmy Page, who were even accused of plagiarism...

...sometimes rightly so, I'd say!

That's true up to a point, in the sense that blues is built on standards, and their reinterpretation had a strong stylistic signature... and after all, few people have Robert Plant on vocals and that way of recording and arranging songs...

...or Jimmy Page on guitar, for that matter. But that's an argument Zucchero also uses, namely that blues is by definition a music that copies itself... even though in his case he says it in a somewhat cheeky way. Look, what you're saying is true, but it's also true that this happened among Black musicians at a time when the market didn't exist, just as copyright basically didn't exist either, and it was something of a convention that they'd copy each other. But once records start charting on Billboard, the rules of copyright change too. You can't take Willie Dixon's "You Shook Me" and redo it, even if Robert Plant is singing it. That's where the rules of the game change, and in fact Led Zeppelin made quite a few out-of-court settlements with those musicians. Paradoxically, Led Zeppelin copied more than the Rolling Stones did, because the latter were more honest: they said they adored that kind of music, they did covers and declared them as such, while Zeppelin claimed to be making their own music. Yeah, sure, but yours is copied! It's all fine, but you have to give proper credit: the Stones did some pretty serious work spreading that music, and even financially generous work, in the sense that when they flew to America, they went to B.B. King and to Ike & Tina and took them on tour with them, opening them up to a different market, changing their lives. They've always bowed down, even now, before masters like Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. Just think, Keith Richards even took a punch in the face from Chuck Berry just to keep hanging around him. It's really a very different attitude from that of Page & co.

I knew that among your vast audience of admirers there are quite a few unexpected ones, but I have to confess that Pablito Rossi - the man who, along with "Miami" by Krisma straight from "Mister Fantasy", made the summer of '82 unique and unrepeatable for me - was one I really didn't expect. And it was your book launch itself that revealed it to me.

I've never thrown a party where I could invite Krisma and Pablito at the same time, but I would have loved to see them together!

That would have been fantastic. The idea that, while he was scoring his hat-trick against Brazil, he was watching "Mister Fantasy" just like me really struck me, it's the kind of association that doesn't exactly come naturally. How did you find out about the great esteem he has for you?

Our respective wives are very close friends, because they're both from Perugia, then Roberta had the misfortune of marrying me, while Federica is Paolo's wife. So we ran into each other on many occasions and it's clear he holds me in high regard: anyway, just so you know, I didn't write that introduction myself, eh...! (laughs). Staying on a football theme, Gianni Rivera came to the Rome launch of "Absolute Beginners", and on that note I'd like to point out that my previous book was dedicated to a lot of AC Milan fans.

In your opinion, which musicians featured in the book would, if they came out today, be flatly rejected by record labels, and which ones, on the contrary, would still manage to make their way today?

That's a tough question, because it's true that today's market is more conservative than it was in the '60s, but it's also true that, compared to that market, today there are lots of niches, and in fact it's made up of hundreds of niches, and as such it's more fragmented than it was back then. Today, thanks partly to the web, we have a reach that manages to go global, whereas before that wasn't possible: so there are pros and cons. The Velvet Underground would be fairly acceptable now, because today our ears are used to dozens of bands who took inspiration from them, but if we think about how powerful their music was, and so calibrating things to today's standards, I think they'd still run into difficulties. If something proportionally as disruptive, provocative and sexually ambiguous as the Velvets came out today, it probably wouldn't be accepted, and so it would be relegated to the margins. Innovation as a concept stays innovation even fifty years later, even though in the meantime all sorts of things have happened. Even now there are things that are only accepted in certain niches, but perceived as uncomfortable for a wider market. There's still an underground even now, and then look, the difference is that while back then radio would play certain things - the twenty-minute Pink Floyd or Genesis tracks, or Zappa - now they won't let you play that anymore: it's not so much the music that's changed, it's the media that's changed. This global pop, which is the indistinct sum total of so many things, has really gained such dominance over the market that it shuts out the spread of a lot of other, certainly interesting, releases that just don't seduce the masses. The music that disturbed people back then still disturbs people now, but just as it was beautiful at the time, it still is today. But if "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" by Procol Harum or "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the Beatles came out today they'd still work, whereas the songs of Lou Reed, which tell of things people don't want to see or want to be told about, didn't reach the masses back then and wouldn't reach them now either.

The choice of the title “Absolute Beginners” is very Bowie-esque. You managed to sneak Bowie in right at the wire with “Space Oddity”, which dates from 1969, but it's undeniable that his central role as an originator really took shape from the '70s onward. Does the title then imply that we should expect a second volume of this book?

Absolutely, yes – in fact, while I was driving here, an “absolute beginner” came on Virgin Radio, and it happened to be “Hunky Dory” by Bowie. Now that I've finished the outline of the new book and I'm nearly halfway through writing it, I can tell you that Bowie features more prominently there than the Beatles do in this volume. There's “The Man Who Sold The World”, “Hunky Dory”, then “Ziggy…”, then “Young Americans”, “Station To Station”, “Low” and finally “Heroes“: seven albums, against six for the Beatles. So yes, he's one of the dominant figures of the '70s alongside Springsteen and Joni Mitchell – you can imagine the rest of the names, or you'll see them when the book comes out.

(Photo by Alessandro Martino)