Poems as a musician

Marco Pandin

translation Enrico Massetti

Rebel with all hypocrisy, Fabrizio De André has tried to shed light on the dark side of things. Against the myths and the dangers of moralism.

"... The first big test hardship the man at the time of birth, when passing from water to air. The second, when he realizes that his destiny is to die. Some of them, then they are going through a third party: the discomfort of isolation ...".
(Fabrizio De Andrè at the press conference for the presentation of "saved souls", Milan 1997)

Fabrizio De André was born in Genoa, the son of the town wealthy middle class , and he would have reached seventy years February 18, 2010. At the outbreak of the war, his family took refuge in the countryside of Asti, while his father, who was wanted by the Fascists, went into hiding.

"... The campaign of Asti had a thousand voices, wind, birds, a continuous poem of interjections and noise. And none of those voices was able to say where he was, that the fascists hunted and what they would have desire and need ...".
(Fabrizio De Andrè from "Amico fragile", ed. Sperling & Kupfer, 1991)

Already ahead with the studies, he interrupts them (black sheep), a few tests before graduation to follow what was once the passion of his life: music. He studied the violin and the guitar, translates chansonniers and proposed the first songs written by himself.
Fabrizio told of the young in a way not common things uncommonly, in Italy ye-ye of the economic boom of the sixties: he could make a very personal way in the new French chanson (Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, Leo Ferre), and with a strong social conscience and politically, be compared to what would be coming soon to mature in the new minstrels and imports from overseas.
At eighteen the first disc, and in 1966 his first album, a collection of songs published until then.

"... For years, his records were a" finesse from high school, "the stuff of underground circuit. Something strange and fascinating, where scholars lived together references, ancient music, protest, demystification and words like" bitch whore"..." .
(M. Fegiz Luzzatto, the liner notes of "The Journey")

His has never been a tepid protest. Rebel to any hypocrisy in his songs Fabrizio De Andrè from the beginning has always sought to shed light on the dark side of things, the other side, the "unsaid" and the "unseen" on which he paused to reflect.
He sang the suggestion of the murky, depicted the dignity of life of the little outcast, the feelings of the past: so say the priests, interested in discovering the angel Lucifer who could sing in a god on a human scale so far away from the altars and ... and the gold from them.
Out of the conditioning, he found the words to describe sharp and desperate with the myths and the dangers of bourgeois morality, society that marginalizes starvation of conformity, silence and safety.
Louder than words, that no one can pretend not to understand, he always answered, without mediation or compromise, a vast and heterogeneous audience, despite the inevitable boycott of the powerful.

The first songs of Fabrizio De Andrè were shot down by bureaucrats in large part excluded from the national broadcasting and programming (more space were given to him by Vatican Radio ...): they were able to spread issues involved without looking like the meetings, and the censors did not like the "strong" words and the less formal tone with which they faced difficult issues and hot topics like death, prostitution, war and power.
Some songs, like "War of Peter" - a anti-militarist and pacifist anthem - could be delivered only after an appropriate introduction to critical readings compiled by the Directorate General of RAI, the Italian State television, the only one broadcasting at the time.

"I was arrested a day for women and wine: they did not have laws to punish blasphemy. I was killed the lot, but two guards sanctimonious: I tried the soul by dint of blows ... And if they were two guards stop your life, right here on earth and the forbidden fruit. and not God, but someone who has invented for us, compels us to dream in an enchanted garden ...".
(From "Un blasfemo - A blasphemer", 1971)

The characters described in his lyrics have a real human depth and are totally revolutionary (think of the bestiary of the flag song, full of young mothers of slain soldiers to the country, of mazurkas and dance, rhymes heart / love ...), which puts them - then as now - in a position that can undermine the bourgeois mentality tied to the concept of "consumption" of music: from Piero, the soldier who does not want to shoot, to the transsexual Princesa, Geordie the thief from hunger at the "apparently dead" incapable of resigning to the fate of the protagonist' his last written text, remained without a melody.

Being "just men"

"... I have written them so, as I have been attacked. To irrepressible emergence of memory. Usually the news that struck me was passed through a process of metabolism: maybe enough for two days, sometimes a few months. A memory I to arrived already distorted, and then, just as I wanted. Otherwise, I would serve for a news story. Sometimes I remember I came from afar: from a small stage in the countryside of Asti's dances of the fifties, where a pair of lips smeared purple, sewing a silk stocking that disappeared into the "promised land", the painted green balcony of my grandmother's house became the details of a different and more recent memory, from the lips of "Bocca di Rosa" desperate attraction to the darkened room of "Via del Campo"... "
(From the afterword to "The language sung", edited by L. Serianni G. and Borgna, ed. Garamond)

Fabrizio De Andrè's discography isn’t vast: a dozen discs in forty years of activity. A short number , but full of masterpieces that cross our contemporary history (and that it reflect the scazzi and triumphs, the massacres and celebrations), a search that continues as it unfolds - slowly but surely - has become increasingly contours of a defense of the irreducible core values of being "just men."
Fabrizio De Andrè did not preach: he did point at the moon. It told of his deep belief in humanity full of values, but without laws or tethers, but rich in spirituality without clergy or processions.

"I can not think of your as a child of God, but a son of man, even my brother. Somebody tried to imitate him: if he failed he was excused, he was forgiven. Because we do not imitate a god: a god has to be feared and praised ...".
(From "Laudate hominem", 1970)

Each record of the works of Fabrizio De Andrè is a waypoint, a mountain pass where our recent past has stopped a moment to rest, to think and reflect. The old songs, before the explosion of success that brought him the "Marinella's Song" in the interpretation of Mina, are each a portrait or a landscape painting with a few essentials but merciless: the "Ballad of the hero," says the anonymous disaster and the emptiness of death in war (return on these roads to tell of "Andrea", killed by shrapnel in the mountains of Trento, and Stan with his heart covered with flies in "Remember, Joe?"), the smell stronger than life in the slums near the sea and far from the sun of "Old Town" and "Via del Campo", the suicide of a desperate sentenced to twenty years in prison in "The Rime of the Miché".
Those poems who came later are all dressed in music: a popular and vital dress, full of forgotten sounds of the market trends.
Gypsy clothes made of rags sewn together in a wonderfully pungent aroma of fantasy: camphor mothballs and old coats stored in the closet, garlic and herbs that accompany the Mediterranean fish, the smell of burning leaves in it ' air rifle shots.

"You who have sung on stilts and knees, with pianos shoulder, dressed as Pinocchio, you who sang for the Lombards and the headquarters, to the Amazon and in the pecuniary palastilisti and Marist, you had powerful voices ant tongues trained to beat the drum. You had powerful voices: suitable for fuck ...".
("Sunday of remains," 1990)

Fabrizio De Andrè has never pulled stones or bombs hiding his arm but was able to offer consistently and generously, in his whole work an anarchist vision and simple existence.
His was a dream when he put in a furious debate poisoning hierarchies and power of their own poison: well aware, just as Pablo Neruda (from his writings when they railed against Nixon and the American intelligence, assassinations of Allende and the dream of Unidad Popular) its role as a poet from the front line in his songs mentioned names and surnames.
In live performances, his "Via della Poverta'" was known to transform from a beautiful translation of Dylan into a teeming painting in style of Bosch of the protagonists of national politics. The same, and shouted the names are distinguishable in the "Masquerade" and "Sunday of remains."

At the same time, Fabrizio De Andrè was able to express a poetic sensibility of the novel at all other contemporary issues in dealing with a great and spiritual interpretations of the apocryphal gospels of "Good News" (Dario Fo and Franca Rame have achieved results as admirable, but through a different way) they are exciting because the Zen reflections on the transience of earthly life, "Dear love," the "Love Lost" and "Love Come, love go", the "Steps and Steps time "of" saved souls "...
And how to restrain the outrage at the endless despair that tears up the habit of "Father O'Brien" ("... I asked and they gave me a fifth of the treasure wasted in a long war: a fifth was enough to remove the pain from the leprosy of the earth ...")?
How not to have respect and sympathy for the mysticism of "Joan of Arc" for the "Testament of Titus" (according to some right-thinking people, now as of that time, more than a love song this is a long and frightening blasphemy ... common destiny, after all, to that of other anarchists engaged in music).

Still travel far

When death calls me nobody in the world will realize that a man died without speaking, without knowing the truth, that a man died without escaping the burden of praying for mercy.

Dear brothers and sisters on the other side we sang in the choir here on earth we loved all the same woman, set off in a thousand for the same war. This memory will not comfort you, when you die you die alone ...
(From "The Testament", 1969)

Fabrizio De Andrè is gone, yet he is still here. His teaching we can see in the inspiration that moves in the footsteps of many younger artists. He did not leave a will, but a great legacy. We can often find her breath in the work of Gang, Revolution, Stefano Giaccone, Soledad Brothers, finding the courage and boldness to make a handful of names.
And I am sure, his hand has led to Lalli and face the test of "Famous blue raincoat" by Leonard Cohen.
I still remember and imagine this: his sly smile and weird look, guitar in hand to suck the smoke from a Marlboro in the other verse, his eyes so full of the great sea of Sardinia, Liguria, Rimini.
His head was traveling far, in my ears the echo of a hundred languages.
And yet Fabrizio travels far, mostly away from the press releases mileage of those who steal another minute on his behalf on television and radio, taking it away to one of his songs. Away from the parade and berluschifi melandrone from Bertinotti and Cossutta suddenly and officially saddened in front of the microphones and cameras, mournful procession in celebration of the secret cancer that has silenced the voice of an anarchist poet who has never been afraid to call him their real names. And send them to fuck off, they, the powerful and the owners: no chance of escape.

Marco Pandin

rivista anarchica
anno 29 n.252
marzo 1999