Books, like records, need to be lived.
My favorite vinyl records have half-destroyed covers, they crackle and skip, and from time to time they halt the needle, which refuses to proceed further.
Books, their covers are more or less preserved, but the pages bear the indelible marks of repeated readings in different times and places: tears and dog-ears, underlinings and subsequent erasures and underlinings again, notes in the margins, assorted traces of pencils (those big ones with a blue tip at one end and red at the other), pens, and highlighters, whiteouts against the most indelible notes.
Sometimes, books and records go hand in hand.
Such as with the «Encyclopedia of Psychedelic Rock», an agile volume curated by Cesare Rizzi and Claudio Sorge, published in 1986 by Arcana, where 60s psychedelia and 80s neo-psychedelia were passionately discussed, along with everything that came with it.
Roughly half of my record collection emerges from those crumpled and multicolored pages.
The first cornerstone I still remember, «Inside Out» by the Miracle Workers, a chic striped purple vinyl.
The last one too, «Crawdaddy Express» by the Crawdaddys, paradoxically, because that record was the birth act of the legendary Voxx at the dawn of the Eighties: I should have bought it first and instead it was the last, as they say, ending on a high note.
The chapter where Crawdaddys and Miracle Workers nested was my favorite, it was titled «It’s a Voxx Voxx World»; the one I more or less memorized, like the chants of «Divina commedia» that my Italian teacher forced me to always learn by heart during my high school years.
In a few pages, Claudio Sorge unfolded an entire world – that of the garage revival at its peak – and introduced the cult of bands that were not prophetic in their homeland, let alone in other countries.
Introduction to the scene and concise profiles dedicated to the most representative groups: this was the scheme adopted in each chapter.
The profile told you who played in the band and where the group came from, who they were inspired by, what they had done, what they were doing, and what they were about to do in that distant 1986.
In short, an encyclopedia in the ancient and noble sense of the term.
Now, one must clarify what an encyclopedia is.
Today, you say encyclopedia, someone else translates wikipedia, and the encyclopedia is all set, all inside an emotionless microchip.
Yesterday, you said encyclopedia and the serious one indeed – Utet, Treccani – was something indescribable, at least twenty volumes of a thousand pages each, containing all human knowledge; and to read them, you couldn’t hold them, oh no, they had to be rested on a desk or bed and you leaned over them and underlined, underlined, underlined everything you thought indispensable; but then, what you underlined had to be erased, with moderate zeal, because the encyclopedia was a family treasure, a heritage to be passed down, and it had to be kept as new.
The encyclopedia, above all and foremost, was synonymous with reliability: the serious ones, always relied on the work of great minds, they were not free, they were not written by the first random person you encountered on the street under your house.
For example, I wouldn’t have been allowed to write even a line in the «Encyclopedia of Psychedelic Rock», while today I find myself giving my opinion on the «Encyclopedia of Psychedelic Rock», and between "in the" and "on the" lies all the difference in the world; whether it’s a good or bad thing, I have not the faintest semblance of an idea.
Now, does this book have the right to bear the title of “encyclopedia”?
Of course it does, because when it came to psychedelic music, especially in its garage sense, then there could be no doubts: if you wanted the opinion of the expert, you followed Greg Shaw or Claudio Sorge: Greg Shaw didn’t seem to write books of this kind, but he wrote all kinds on his fanzines; Claudio Sorge, besides fanzines and magazines that maintained the fanzine spirit, wrote an encyclopedia, this one here.
So, when on my seventeenth birthday my big brother asked me about a gift, I had no doubts and shot the response without hesitation: Miracle Workers, «Inside Out», Sorge writes highly of it in the encyclopedia.
Sorge earned his reputation entirely and with great merit with Rockerilla and the Electric Eye, the tricolored Greg Shaw.
This encyclopedia, then, was inevitably a child of Rockerilla and the Electric Eye, but without making it weigh; because, then, when the chapter about the Italian scene came in, it’s almost obvious that that scene found itself all at Hause Sorge, but it wasn’t flaunted with pompous emphasis, on the contrary, I dare to remember that in those few lines – two pages – the Electric Eye was mentioned a couple of times and no more, and in the rest of the volume not even a mention.
For clarity, at the time I bought the encyclopedia because I was reading Rockerilla and had brought home «Eighties Colours», not the other way round.
Secondly, the encyclopedia in the good old days was synonymous with asepticity, as well as with authoritativeness; and here’s the rub.
Because, on the other hand, the «Encyclopedia of Psychedelic Rock», despite the effort of synthesis that distinguished it, shouted loudly line after line the passionate fervor of Rizzi and Sorge for that music; who, then, being also journalists of a mold already lost at the time, expressed that passion with extreme simplicity, you understood it perhaps from an adjective perfectly placed; and that adjective told you that “those”, just “those”, were the group and the album that would shock your life with pleasure.
So, if the hours spent underlining the Utet encyclopedia were supremely formative, those spent underlining the Rizzi/Sorge were likewise delightful.
And the dog-ears and tears, the underlinings, the erasures, and the whiteouts, traces of pens and multicolored highlighters are still all there to remind me.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………............................................................................................................................................
Then if this page seems too long, someone has managed to synthesize it into one line.
«It’s a Good book, precise information, complete ... Shame it only talks about musical groups».
Loading comments slowly
