A poet without a face

Cristina Valenti

translation Enrico Massetti

His face almost no one knows. No girl fell in love with him. Nobody dressed like De André. Yet his words in rhyme ...

The songs of Fabrizio De André, for many of us moments of awareness, as we have steered through the maze of intemperance of youth by helping to nurture awareness that generational rebellion in the seventies would have taken many faces and many colors. Some of his songs have become real flags, other considerations have accompanied most intimate moments of personal discovery. It was not true that we were cloning Fabrizio De André poems, I found myself explaining to a teenager: in his songs there were things I already thought, but that I was never able to express. Confusing the enthusiasm of accession with the thrill of discovery, in Fabrizio De André I found the language to translate, and finally express the urgency of our position on the world.
To all this he mingled and evaded. Unlike those who imposed a strong personal image, De André did not broadcast anything else but music and atmosphere rhyming words. A songwriter who accompanied the rebellion for more than a generation and never acted as a model, never gave examples, tips, trail to follow. No girl fells in love from afar, as was frequent (or was it already?) for stars of rock, pop music or film. His face almost no one knows. There was a picture that was (or at least seemed to) the same on the covers of his first album, a photo sideways, his face almost indistinguishable behind a long tuft of hair, and later the better informed explained that they hid from the eye eyelid too low. Nobody has ever dressed the way of De André nor challenged the guitar like him, simply because there were no pictures of him.
A real anomaly, if you think that his first thirty LPs sold hundreds of thousands of copies, placed at the top of the charts when the uncontested domain belonged to forty-five disks. Fabrizio De André conquered the market (or rather invented it, as has been noted, because a market for songwriters before him did not exist in Italy) requiring persons before requiring an audience. The public would come much later, with the first (few) concerts, joining those who already knew about and acknowledged in his songs, his poetic world, in its human and social sketches.

From Dostoevskij to Brassen

The anomaly making up his artistic career was that of a star without a face, that was not "fashionable" but kept his records at the top of the charts for several consecutive years. Only in recent times, since he died, the images had the upper hand, paradoxically, rebounding from a television service to another and risking his life to make us forget that we felt close to him in the absence of images and anecdotes.
About him we knew little or nothing. We knew of his activities as chansonnier on the alternative scene of the Borsa di Arlecchino in Genoa, and his predilection for wandering life stories true, populated by figures of nerds and losers: some images of existentialism maudit, which could appear dated in the years when the policy was putting the social antagonism in the middle of the working class. And on the other hand the characters of his songs did not belong to a certain shared landscape, camping on the horizon rather than a universal human story in a way that De André was modeled after the suggestions of the classic on which it was formed, Dostoevskij , Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, and to whom he had married the themes and atmospheres of Brassens, Brel, Ferre.
In 1991 Fabrizio De André told himself to Cesare G. Roman, a journalist friend of long standing, and agreed that the outcome of their talks became a book, Amico fragile.
The "mediated" formula of the autobiography, which portrays the story that the first-person transmission, corresponds well to the strategy of discretion that the singer has rigorously applied to his personal and artistic life.
The story begins in December '79: the prisoner Hotel Supramonte prisoners released from the reserve, Sardinian shepherds or Sioux. The reappearance in the world and to remember again, after months in which it was too painful to do so. The white man's journey to freedom runs through the past fades into the distance, the promise of the story inevitably disappointing. De André tricks condescendingly generous with the interviewer: The life story unfolds in stages, and significant figures indelible: the war, the father partisan, Genoa, "Gypsy" life of childhood studies, the discovery of sex, the street companions, women and men of the "alleyways", then the music, friends, songwriters, and then the artist's work record production, the few concerts, to the occupation of farmer. Irregular outlines of figures, fellow travelers sometimes cursed at times simply marginal and ambiguous mercenary love, mischief among the collegiate and the picaresque. It presents us with characters we can not forget for all that we are not told and we would rather say: the blind poet who committed suicide as the characters of the Ballata degli impiccati (The Hanging ballade) of which he is co-author, Terry's friend who dies of cirrhosis, hookers first of amorous experiences, generosity and humanity to be preferred to girls of his class. But I just mentioned portraits, which reveal intimate secrets and implications, in effect, stopping on the threshold of real life, pain and feelings. Nothing could be closer to the figures carved in the round of his songs: the player Jones, fisherman, soldier Piero, the prisoner Miché, the heart patient, the judge, the Fool, Bocca di Rosa, Marinella, the girl who knows the 'love and deception in the Legend of Christmas, the whores of Via del Campo, Jamin-a, Franziska, the servant pastor, fragile friend ...
The story is far from revealing the songwriter, but rather the songs are used just to throw flares on a personal story that, while you put in a position to reveal, is even more secret. It's from De André poet who has been able to cast an eye over proud, angry and chilling on the things that he decided to tell: on conformity, on flattery, on power, corruption, violence, however, of a world that has never ceased to painting with poetry, to project beyond the gallons and gallons of coral that separated him from his Utopia.
There is a passage which remains secret, and that is the mystery of the creative process: the narrow pass through which experiences, readings, techniques, circle of contacts, appointments, stirrings of anger, inspiration, desire, to be opera, musical composition, poetry. Conditions are prepared for a long time and then lit and burned as a candle burning is consumed, but transforms the reality of matter in the light texture of the art. Sometimes the story just brings us closer to this mysterious threshold: when Tenco dies, and De Andrè composed Amico fragile in one night, my time to compose with De Gregori in a particular state of productive fervor, alternating moments of concentration, expansion and other creative with the past few months just to work the fields, read the news in the newspapers of the world, without thinking about the music, and then when the writing is necessary and urgent. But of all this there are only short passages of the story, almost oversights, including one episode to another, rather than the intention to convey the facts, we believe - as you know - "most interesting".

Where are the flowers born

Explicit in expressing opinions but it is instructive to declare his think tank, the universe of authors that have inspired him, the great literary classics from the fathers of anarchism. Many citations, although no claim of exposed organic style (a style of thought that has made his own, after the prosecution not to be "organic" was conveyed to him in high school). Deeper in the ways of the creative process leaves aside the technical issues, rather than asserting what can not help but have to dial the "strong ideas" around which he builds every disc. His records them as "concept album" because "they keep their individual songs completely independent of each other, but they turn around [...] a basic concept, to be exhausted gradually, from a song to another. "
Says about Nuvole (Clouds): - "I tried to tell players and aspects of both worlds, the power and the people, by not telling myself that I'm becoming an interpreter supporting roles, I give voice to different characters. And this is the novelty of this album but it turned out harder and more tense, I believe, than others, and I have lived, even sang with emotion and anxiety maybe different." With extraordinary foresight speaks of his anger "for this world without anger," that "prepares to be governed by a single world power" and that "politics has taken hold of any human expression." It regrets that he and all the artists would "have to stimulate more, this protest." Perhaps here lies the real reason for the reluctance of De Andrè, who held his face in shadow to get through other stories, to speak through himself the protest of his characters, his world of outsiders and outcasts, but also hopeless heroes, carriers of simple and often excessive feelings, an unpredictable and fragile beauty, like the one unearthed in the middle of "manure" from which "the flowers are born." Complaints vibrate, anger and indignation, but also the hot and painful feelings of participation, De André was able to merge them into characters, stories and situations, drama, so to speak, and for this to show them in a way never sententious nor rhetoric, but to reveal the wave and experience from within.
About his vocation as an artist, the first of the reasons that have committed songwriter, says: "I was pretty clear that my work had to walk on two tracks: the anxiety about social justice does not yet exist, and the illusion of being able to participate in some way, in a different world, "then the disillusionment," the second [the illusion] crumbled early on, before [the desire for justice] does. " And this anxiety to bring together what he called "saints without God" of anarchism: Errico Malatesta in the first place.

Where utopias become reality

In another place, again, on his first vocation, Fabrizio De Andrè writes: "But the music was also a necessity. In my house all expressed themselves in a non-rigged, fully consistent with the choices of each: advocacy , management, politics, education. I was not able to express myself at those levels, with a mixture of genuine and vocation, they say today, of professionalism. And so I chose the prestidigitation [...]. And then I discovered that if I took the guitar, I played better than anyone, and the otherrs were amazed more than with a theme in the classroom. And I was relieved of their ceremonial, because no one accuses a musician of being a rough type, closed in on itself, or to eat with your hands. A lawyer or a teacher, yes."
Music as an expression of genuine need, not wearing makeup, and art as a place where you can transform reality [acquired the art of "prestidigitation"] and give their own rules, creating an alternate universe.
By stopping the story indirectly, De Andre wrote in his first person the fragile Epilogue to the Friend: "I will wait until tomorrow and maybe even a hundred years until Mrs. Liberty and Miss Anarchy will be considered by the majority of my fellow men as the best possible form of civil society, not forgetting that in Europe about the middle of the eighteenth century, the republican institutions were regarded as utopian. And I remember with pride and regret the happy and such a short experience of libertarian Kronstadt, an episode of brotherhood and egalitarianism suddenly that got gunned down by Mr Trotsky. "

rivista anarchica
anno 29 n.252
marzo 1999