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Rating: Oh Riccardo, you were born on March 21, 1952, the day rock'n'roll saw the light...
And March 21 is a perfect day... the warm wind, the flowers in the fields, the sweetness of the sun, spring in short...
But not only...
That March 21 is the day when the sweetness (and the abyss) of Pisces mix with the blind (and obtuse) energy of Aries...
That's what it takes for the world to see something new: sweetness, abyss, and energy...
Well, I'll tell you something: I was born on March 21 too... and maybe, just at the moment when, in a little street in New York, or in an attic, or only between the mists of fantasy, a magical meeting took place...
It had to be night, because I was born at night, and exactly the uncertain hour where the extreme cusp appears, and where opposites attract.
It was then that a curly-haired sprite with tense nerves and flaming eyes met a ghost...
Now, encountering a ghost, in itself, is not such an extraordinary thing and I imagine it has happened to all of you... once, twice, a million times...
The ghost of that night, however, was not just any ghost, but that of a French poet, one who as a boy had invented, only to bitterly regret it, the art of the centuries to come.
What those two said to each other remains one of the great mysteries of rock history...
I believe, but obviously it's just a hypothesis, that theirs was a back-and-forth dialogue, back the curly-haired sprite, forth the ghost... Oh yes, yes, no more than an exchange of words, for ghosts don't waste words, not even those with great imagination.
I've spent my whole life thinking about that electrifying dialogue and trying to imagine it... But I've been unable to figure it out all my life...
Maybe I will solve the enigma only when I too have become a ghost...
Be that as it may, from then on our curly-haired sprite began his personal season in hell,
"Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands" was the extreme limit of that season, the point beyond which it was advisable not to go. Better to return to the previous archetypes, better to shut oneself up in a pink house with a group of friends and pluck old songs, inventing something new for the umpteenth time...
Because our hero, deep down, knew that despite the dowsing fury and the sure instinct of the gold seeker, the most glittering specks were those songs (and those singers) he had mythologized when he was a folk child...
He knew that around (and within) that world, in a sort of eternal exercise of creative meditation, he would continue to build his own, stuffing in there all those little figures we know: outlaws, dream women, thieves, prophets, boxers, street poets, old defeated heroes...
But let's talk about "Sad-eyed lady..."
Ah, here we are truly beyond space and time: a concentric and infinite rhythm, an absolute sweetness soiled (and enriched) by an iron voice, a riff that returns stubbornly to itself, the "modern Sumerian" of the words...
Not by chance is it the track that closes the last album of a sensational trilogy... "Bringing" the first, the tension between old and new, "Highway," the second, urgency and fire...
"Blonde on blonde," is more relaxed and visionary, because there's a road and that road is flooded with sunlight and there's an energy and all images are born from there. I'm not crazy, it's the curly-haired sprite who said something like that, perhaps with more eloquence.
And I know it's true, I remember certain alleys of Bologna in the morning, and I know it's true... And I know how images are born... and I know the energy you feel when they are born... I just know it...
Then of course there would also be the matter of betrayal, the clattering guitars, the mad organ, electricity dirtying the folk measure... all fantastic, even if he wouldn't have needed them much, listen to him in the '66 live, just voice and guitar, with that psychedelic harmonica more than anything else to come...
But we were talking about "Sad-eyed lady," about how it's outside of space and time... Here folk understood as otherworldly (or magical) melody becomes one with the psychedelic expansion. I challenge anyone not to fall into it and never come out again...
I think I listened to it for whole afternoons, emerging not inflamed, not weary, but merry and serene like a cherub at a tavern...
"Not surprising because it enchanted" someone said about someone else... Well, this song does exactly the same effect... it does not surprise but enchants...
But, be careful, it's an enchantment that risks slipping away, a butterfly with a flight so light you almost don't notice... The first time it doesn't have a big effect, the second you're lost...
The dilation, we were saying... It seems that the musicians in the studio were dazed, incredulous to accompany a song that seemed to always end and never did...
The dilation... the dilation is also in the unconscious flow (and as if by accumulation) of the words so that the music mimicking a sort of infinite calls up an infinite of images... ah, that ghost had not spoken in vain...
"The eyes like smoke" "the prayers like rhymes" "the visions of trams on the grass" "the gypsy hymns" "the songs written on matchboxes" "The face of a saint and a specter's soul"... these are the fabulous images that the music welcomes and embraces to compose an endless ode to the lady with sad eyes and the unreachable beauty...
That, deep down, even with a brand new language, the words continue to evoke something ancient...
That it almost seems like hearing a Provençal poet, a time-out Cavalcanti...
The ancient that plays the game of modernity happily incongruous, madly out of time...
Or maybe they're just two kids one-upping with every image being always more, always more, always more...
And the words when touched send sparks, yet somehow manage to stay together...
And then of course the harmonica that closes and opens the track, two minimal flights to enclose the enchantment...
But let's get back to the ghost... Because right now an intuition comes to me...
It wasn't a French ghost, but only pretended to be... Maybe it was just a thief who had taken over a mask... One of those thieves who "steals what he loves and loves what he steals"...
That thief would appear again to the curly-haired sprite, but with other fabulous identities...
The same thief with a thousand different masks... or maybe just a face reflected in a mirror...
Oh yes, maybe on that March 21, 1963, that curly sprite was just looking at himself in the mirror...
That strange mirror where the extreme cusp appears and where opposites attract.
Trallallà...
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