It's just an outstanding concert
(notes written after 1999 Fabrizio's funeral)

Mauro Macario

translation Enrico Massetti

"Crikey, but why do you go to the military, they are all crap, desert!"

If being an anarchist means to undress each network induced to dispose of the roles imposed the same obligation to refuse, then today to remember Fabrizio, in so few days after his death, I uprooted from any expectation, I reject that part of the critic, who tries with too much solicitude to sketch a portrait of the artist already historicizing with that odious sense of posthumous which oppose the other hand the sense of present and future and, as in a niche, I return to take over the size of his wild and pure that even penetrated in 'infinite respect and utopian yearning that has united us (unfortunately not in a relationship of long standing) prefers to dive into the chasm of his absence, an excavation emotional, existential and generational, cultural implications that it is difficult in a jargon-baked scheme of intellectual Euclidean or non-conformist.
Tenco committed suicide in 1967 when I was twenty. I was crossed by a state of mind I would call "feeling the orphan." But that pistol shot rang in me like the starter at the start: on my way in the race to the poets in music I met De André, a central presence and parallel throughout my life. On impulse I called Fabrizio whom did not know personally but who already loved him and asked him to meet him, perhaps to regain elective kinship with "the family of poets." Without hesitation he invited me at his home in Genoa, and made me listen to, even before it was engraved, "Prayer in January" a song dedicated to Luigi Tenco. Before leaving, excited and in awe, I told him I was going to do military service. He turned, looked at me sideways and thus exclaimed: "Crikey, but why do you go to the military, they are all crap, desert!" and concluded that, because of the panic, had never sung in public.

Fugitive emotions

I did not disert and luckily, after some years, he began to sing in public and for the youth a musical, poetic and utopian era began: after him from archaic times returned to the people the poet with music, poetry, leaving the elite living in Transylvania. The invocation of Leo Ferré came true: "The music and poetry in the streets ... and we will! do it" And in the case of Fabrizio, a poem that combines tenderness with outrage, sarcasm with the invective, the pity with love, the dream with anarchy. The poet in music, although rare (one is born every hundred years) in the contemporary world is the highest form of poetry and touching even though academics, those at the professor, do not digest this metamorphosis taking a dismissive attitude towards those who, to a language hermetic, enigmatic and icy, choose instead the greater community, the living, breathing, direct, conduct on the edge of emotion at a time when more and more fugitive dehydrated by inhuman social systems, idiotic and destructive.
In '94, twenty-seven years after the first meeting, I saw Fabrizio in a concert in Milan and brotherhood which is a spontaneous phenomenon inexplicable today blossomed into a moment making me regret not having visited him in all previous years. During an afternoon at his home in Milan, he said, even knowing of my friendship with Leo Ferre, he would like to sing "anarchists" and once pointed me on the phone. It was an unforgettable honor to have him in the audience to "Genovantasette", an international poetry festival which takes place every year in Genoa, and where on that occasion I gave a recital on Ferré together with Enrico Medail .
Also this year we met in Genoa, but on his last return. There were both young street musicians who sang, with fellow black flags and "A" circled in red, famous singers, the common people, middle-class regretting it. And Nannini strictly outside the church. And I was in church, a place not suitable for me or to Fabrizio.

Wearing three skirts

Among the "normal" people stationed acrobatic and absent a homeless person with three skirts worn one over the other for the cold and a plastic bag with her house built: a "real" character of the world of poetic Fabrizio was there for him. For him there were the authorities, those authorities that Fabrizio had always disliked and who had always regarded with suspicion and fear now the honor, including the priest who acknowledged that he had invented a new alphabet of love for the humble and dispossessed. The only difference was that Fabrizio's just wanted the last to be the first here on earth and not in heaven. The church metabolizes also who opponses them. But those black flags waving in the breeze freeze, yes those were the only shroud that wrapped Fabrizio and his dreams, the dreams of us all. It 's just an outstanding concert.

rivista anarchica
anno 29 n.252
marzo 1999