Music
behind the green door, the roots •
Guccini: a figure who stands apart from the bourgeois pantheon of Italian singer-songwriters
A mountain man who knew he had already bid farewell to the small town of the bourgeois ’68 movement. He was something else, “of my own kind”
Photo: Lapresse
He probably left, closing the green door behind him. That mountain door, just like so many other house doors that serve as points of memory. The green door from the first verse of ‘Amerigo’, probably his perfect song. The progenitor of a gallery of solitary, tough men, profiles carved from the chestnut wood of the Apennines, who are just like his father, his fellow villagers, and himself. ‘Amerigo’, ‘Van Loon’, dedicated to his father, his friend Piero, ‘Il Pensionato’. Which, together with so many other questioning and sorrowful portraits, form a cornerstone of his songs. ‘Il Frate’, ‘Filemazio di Bisanzio’, ‘Cirano’, ‘Gulliver’. The human and poetic world (he was keen to emphasise that behind Amerigo and Van Loon lay literature and culture) of an artist who, by 1972, had already turned his back – in spirit – on the small town (that wretched place) to return to a very, truly different way of life. One that has often been simplistically described as anti-modern. But it was simply ‘another place’. The well-established myth of Pàvana.
In the pantheon of Italy’s finest singer-songwriters, Francesco Guccini has always occupied – and staked a claim to – a place of his own. Leaning against the doorframe of the family mill, as in so many photos, or at most sitting at a table in a Bolognese tavern. He was different, “of my own kind”. Different from his colleagues and friends in that group from a different social background. Perhaps the one most like him was Dalla, not just because he was from Bologna.
De André, son of Genoa’s upper middle class; De Gregori, son of Roman middle-class humanists – not coincidentally ‘the Prince’; Vecchioni, a classicist and secondary school teacher in Milan. Paolo Conte, a provincial solicitor. Guccini, whose stature, voice and accent spoke another language all of their own; he came along and told of another world, with less psychological analysis and less politically engaged posturing; not just ‘the provinces’, but a human disposition, a daily struggle that had little to do with the torments of the well-bred artists who set the tone for their peers during the decades of the economic boom and social activism (‘old blue jeans and a few lire’ were not just a pose). It is no small matter that he also forged an emotional bond with a couple of generations of young people across the board, transcending the posturing of an era, from the 1970s through to the early 1980s – the years usually summarised under the label of the ‘political decade’. ’68. (“The revolt was finally breaking out / or perhaps I’d simply had enough”, he’d sensed this long beforehand).
In the illustrious pantheon of Italian singer-songwriters – which, as well as being a unique musical experiment, also served as the finest social commentary on two decades of Italian life, far surpassing cinema – Guccini stood out as an eccentric figure and narrative, defying trends, styles, and ideological and cultural quirks. In some ways reminiscent of Pasolini, certain of his stories, landscapes, judgements and detachments were not always met with applause. With a melancholy and existential quest of his own that was never bookish or affected. As a true mountain man and a cultured reader, he detested ‘the intellectual stammering and aphasia’ of those who, instead of striving in direct engagement with life, preferred to write poetry ‘but confusing journeys with their parody’.
The fact that he was, despite all this, the most successful singer-songwriter of the politician’s generation – before going on to become a rapidly revered yet reclusive master, with a handful of magnificent non-chart-topping albums and ever fewer concerts – is an aspect that also calls for reflection, if not political, then generational and social. He was a star of that generation, but also an existential guide, a companion and, for many fans, a friend and brother. A role that was largely involuntary, and one of some significance (“And who have I been in the fantasies you live? / A poet or a drunk in the stories you tell your friends”).
By then, people were singing ‘La Locomotiva’ with their lighters alight (smartphone torches hadn’t been invented yet), just like at Pooh concerts. But beyond that collective ritual, he never dabbled in political rhetoric. The Festival dell’Unità, yes; a few healthy rants against ‘ambitious politicians’, yes. But "Canzone delle osterie di fuori porta" dates from September 1972, and was already a farewell to the defunct ’68 movement (“they fall like leaves or drunks on the streets they have chosen / of ancient rages, all that remains is a phrase or a few gestures”). On a Sunday in September 1978, Eskimo had already laid to rest even the cloying generational nostalgia.
With his feet firmly planted in the clay and marl of the mountains, his eyes scanning the mist-shrouded heights of the Apennines, Francesco Guccini’s second artistic life – books at last! – beginning with the debut of "Cronìche Epafàniche", a magnificent linguistic and narrative pastiche, or legendary undertakings such as the compilation of "Pàvana’s Dictionary of Delight" – has increasingly marked his distance from a musical, sociological and cultural pantheon that was not his own. Right up to the beautiful tribute to the folk music of yesteryear in "Canzoni da intorto", his farewell to the recording studio. He had bid farewell to life many times before, without looking back, just like Amerigo. In "L’ultima Thule", his final album of original songs, there is the true farewell in verse, written in 2012, without any fear of facing life head-on: “When was that last time / they sold you those new sandals / at the market, with your shorts on / and the hope of summer just around the corner”.
It’s impossible to put together the set list for the concert you’d love to hear all over again. But it would certainly include ‘Amerigo’ and ‘Van Loon’, ‘Canzone delle osterie di fuori porta’, ‘Canzone per Piero’, ‘Inutile’, ‘Autogrill’ and ‘Canzone di notte numero 3’ (“if you die just a little, who cares?”). The one that isn’t. And finally, the encore that has accompanied the coming-of-age stories of two generations, "Un altro giorno è andato" (its music has come to an end).
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