Claudio Baglioni
Sabato pomeriggio

There should be a difficulty coefficient in reviews.

Just like in diving.

Forget DeRango.

You, for instance, come here, braggart, to review Deep Purple's Made in Japan or Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate?

Too easy. It’s like a cannonball dive, you better know that right away.

I half-close my eyes, and I see you. Balanced on the platform, the one at the Foro Italico, that forum with Mussolini’s name.

A bundle – literally - of nerves and concentration ten meters high. Your start is perfect, posture impeccable, water entry excellent. You enter, without a splash, better than a chronic sufferer of retrograde ejaculation.

All the flags rise in a plebiscite: 10-10-10-10-10-10…

No, wait. Christ. There’s the Croatian judge, the jerk, with a 9.5 waiting for you.

Curious,after all, that a Croatian has something waiting, but there you go…

Beautiful review, by the way. Touching, at times. You moved us, with that anecdote about Ian Gillan’s split ends...

Nevertheless, still a cannonball dive. And you get a difficulty coefficient of 1.0.

Now get out of the way, though.

Now, I’ll show you a so-called “Kamikaze” dive, back somersault, with a returned start, 6 twists, and 2 and a half somersaults.

Now, as God is my witness, whatever happens, I’m reviewing Baglioni on Debaser.

Difficulty coefficient, you ask?

Four point seventy, kid.

“And why not a round five?” you’ll ask.

Because a round five would be a review of Baglioni with a track-by-track.

I ascend to the platform.

The only thing I hear is my heartbeat and a voice saying, “Don’t do it, blessed boy...You've reviewed Shostakovich's latest quartet and Verdi's Falstaff...What are you thinking?”

Then the wind on my face. And my reckless, childlike feet approaching the edge.

Little quick steps towards the abyss of a tiny blue square, way down below me.

I turn around. For I may have already told you that mine is a backward dive.

I open my arms, close my eyes, and take deep breaths. Have you ever tried listening to Händel in this position? No, not Paolo... Georg Friedrich. Try. You don’t need a pool or a platform. Just a cassette player.

But now is not the time for Georg Friedrich. Now is the time for Claudio.

I take one deeper breath than the others.

And jump.

---

Saturday afternoon, for me, is Sabrina, a friend of a friend of a friend with whom I was already making progress, and one of those house parties, with the table against the wall, assorted sandwiches and fizzy drinks for thirst, the record player and the shutters down and parents in the other room.

The middle school exams are just ahead.

That day, at the record player, it was me and my fourteen years, choosing music and keeping the vibe warm.

It wasn’t difficult: there were ten 45s in all, a handful of guys, a few girls, and a quantity of hormones like in Dr. Agricola’s lab.

And Sabrina, as beautiful as a McEnroe passerby, approaches me and that embryonic console, tucking a lock of those shiny black hair behind her ear, as only certain women can do, and whispers to me, “Will you play Saturday afternoon for me?”

And I, ready: “I can't... Saturday afternoon I'm busy.”

I waited for her for years after that night. I just wanted to tell her it wasn’t a joke.

Not long ago, the friend of the friend told me she now lives in the Verbano-Cusio-Ossola province with Antonio, a guy who started a corrugated sheet metal company, always says “and whatnot” instead of “etcetera” and believes that CCCP is the acronym for Cucurrucucù Paloma.

I just wanted to tell you, Sabrina, that I’m still waiting to tell you it wasn’t a joke.

I, Saturday Afternoon, didn’t even know it. And if I did, I pretended not to.

Like the Verbano-Cusio-Ossola province. I discovered it now, a modern Columbus, thanks to Sabrina, my queen Isabella. And I imagine it there – the province, not Sabrina - lost in the rice paddy mists, born from the age-old clash between the central government of Novara and the Verbano Secessionist Movement, culminating in the Rice Revolt, where young Verbanese, dressed as Mohawks, boarded Novara vessels anchored in the Ticino and dumped the rice crates stored on the ships.

Thus, anyway, our older cousins taught us, those who were raised on Punk and English Progressive: Baglioni was boring. Period. If anything, some timid opening could be granted to Faust’O or Rovescio della Medaglia... But all other Italians, without exception, fell worse than in the Twelfth Battle of Isonzo:

• Look, it's easy, France’...You can't go wrong: Guccini is sad, Battisti is fascist, De André is communist. Sbadiglioni is dreary.
• And Dalla?
• Dalla is gay. Then better Sbadiglioni, you see....
• But there must be a good Italian, right...?
• Vincenzo Bellini.
• Vincenzo Bellini? And who is he...?!
• What do I know... But, if you're a musician and they put you on the five thousand lire, there must be a reason, right?!...Have you ever seen Baglioni on any banknote?

Simple people, my cousins.

I, too, in truth, can confirm it: I’d never seen Baglioni even on the five lire, let alone on banknotes. Rather than putting Baglioni there, they’d placed a dolphin and a helm on the five lire. Which, as a combination, is more debatable than Wess & Dori Ghezzi...

And they were not entirely wrong, the mints: He had really done everything to build such a reputation....

But then there's this strange thing: to know if you like something or not, you have to taste it. There's no way around it, no saints to pray to. I always tell my children when we're at the table: it’s not enough what your brother tells you, or smelling it, or licking it, or putting a minuscule part of it in your mouth… No. You really have to taste it. Put all prejudices aside and let that thing fill your mouth and conquer all your senses.

Only then can you say "I don't like it."

And so I muster the courage and decide to taste it, this thing called “Saturday Afternoon.”

With just one goal: "I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina, I must win back Sabrina."

My very own “The early bird gets the worm.”

And so, a prisoner of that Overlook Hotel which my room has become, I go down to “Ferruccio Records” and ask my Lloyd to serve me a bottle of Bourbon, with ice, and a bakelite copy of “Saturday afternoon.”

“Have you gone mad?!” says Ferruccio to me. “Today The Nightfly by Donald Fagen came out and you're asking me for Baglioni?! Have you lost your mind?”

“Listen, I must win back a girl, Ferru’...” I mumble.

Which, then, win back is just a way of speaking, given I never won her over to begin with...

“That's what they all say: I must win over a girl. They all start like this: with the belief they can stop whenever they want and with the sole aim of sliding under the sheets with someone who doesn't understand a thing about music but has a pair of tits to die for. No human being, male, sentient, minimally musically evolved, would listen to Baglioni if women didn’t exist. France’, trust me... Baglioni is like gonorrhea: a sexually transmitted disease.”

“I’ll listen to it just once, Ferru’, I swear...”

“Alright, do whatever the hell you want... Here.”

In no time, I barricade myself in my room and hear the needle sizzle as it hits the groove, and that rascal starts with “Little sparrow, I waited for you so long and now you’re here... Little sparrow, I sing your song, do re mi fa sol...And waiting, and waiting, and waiting...”

These words seem written for me...

Damn you, Baglioni. Ferruccio was right.

And to think, I read among the notes, that the album is arranged by Luis Bacalov...

I, a fourteen-year-old waiting for Sabrina in a sweltering Saturday afternoon in 1980s Rome, and a damn album that has only one fil rouge, Gennaro Ulivieri and Guido Pancaldi would say: that of waiting.

And that Saturday afternoon, within that “Saturday afternoon,” I discover a humanity that spends its time waiting for something, just like me. I wait for Sabrina, and others wait for the 9 prolonged, paradise, the spring, your smile, Santa Claus, medicine, promotion, another life, goodnight, the house keys, communion...

A multitude of stateless people whose only state of belonging is that of waiting. Zombies of the present time who staggering consume themselves, waiting for something that will never come.

Baglioni crystallizes everything and everyone, fossils trapped in the amber of waiting: the guy sitting idly, on a cold metro bench, with a poster someone has already scribbled on saying, “Come to Tunisia”, the grandmother waiting for her grandchildren's visit and consoling herself with a dust-covered box with a photo of her first boyfriend, a cavalry lieutenant, Giuseppe who knows his solitude is a lie to survive, wanting to return South while empties ashtrays.

Then the accountant waiting for a win at Totocalcio, he placed his bet and, once again, this evening he can hope... He hurries up the stairs, out of breath, four floors, there’s a smell of macaroni with ragù.

“1 X X 2 1 X 1 X 1 1 2 1 X.” This, for completeness, is Baglioni's sung bet slip. I know people who played it every Sunday God put on earth. I add, for further completeness, that it never hit, the perfect and concrete fulfillment of a wait that rose from the album and materialized in the days of who knows how many accountants...

Then the Catholics of the 15th century, waiting for a better Pope, recommending themselves to You, our Lord, someone who doesn’t like fire, someone who loves us, prays so much and lives little.

And yes, because this Sixtus V, from a simple conventual friar of a lost village in Marche, in just five years of pontificate, had become the terror of the entire city, between reforms and executions in public square. In the sacred reformer fire, he also reorganized the tax collection system, which he assigned to bloodthirsty patrols of his compatriots: the expression “Better a dead one in the house than a Marchigian at the door” is born from here.

“And before him all Rome trembled”, someone else could have said. Instead, Baglioni says: “Almost like it was winter, Sixtus makes fire and flames all around, almost like winter has already come, says he's preparing us for hell's heat.”

Then the wait for a Nordic legend. Nothing to do with Wotan, Flosshilde, Wellgunde, Grimgerde, and their Ikea chair names... None of this.

Lake Misurina tells us of a Cadore king, Sorapiss, who, for the love of his daughter, turns into a mountain, and his tears give life to two streams, which end up forming Lake Misurina, from the daughter's name.

Sorapiss closed his eyes and bowed his head, and waited day and night, until he turned to stone, and with tears that fell down, a green lake he formed, among firs and blue gentians.

And finally, a little girl at her first date with a boy who will never arrive. That cenotaph to waiting that is Osram lamp, a funeral monument to a feeling that today, with so little to expect, you no longer know how it's done, where to look for it, where are its remains, if you want to go there to say a prayer.

Osram lamp, he never came, footsteps on the pavement keep you company, and head down you go back to your house, “Ticket, folks’...” eight-thirty.

Osram lamp - I found out years later - is called that because, for the 1960 Olympics, a lamppost with an Osram Xeno lamp of 2,500,000 lumens and 75 kW of power, world record at the time for a single lamp, was installed in Rome in Piazza dei Cinquecento, in front of Termini Station. So much so that all Romans elected it as an ideal meeting place.

“...Where do we meet?”

“Under the Osram lamp, right?!”

Even my mother, she told me, waited there for my father. Only he, fortunately, came.

Then, all of a sudden, that adolescent's room disappeared. Swallowed up by forty years that seemed like just a few quarters of an hour. From the middle school exam, that boy found himself defending his university thesis, just like that.

Re-reading it now, it seems but a flashback.

Now there's a graying gentleman who long finished university, pushing a cart in the frozen food section of Esselunga and, when he hears someone say “my exam went poorly,” thinks about transaminases.

Then this gentleman sees her.

Sabrina, I mean.

Forty years have passed, but the gesture to fix the hair behind the ear has remained the same.

This gentleman flinches, more excited than Whitney’s math teacher when, homework in hand, he approached the still young singer and pronounced the famous phrase “Houston, we have a problem.”

He and she, forty years later, finally alone, two strangers between two wings of a crowd of beheaded cod, gutted cuttlefish, and cubed spinach.

• Sabrina, do you remember me...? I didn’t want to make a joke back then...
• Hi, Francesco... Of course, I remember. But that afternoon I realized you didn’t want to be with me...
• But I loved you...
• Oh really? Well, I thought not...
• What!? How not!? And even later...for all these years, I haven’t done anything but think about you...
• Well, I didn’t...
• Oh...
• I'm sorry, Francesco.... Ten years ago I married Antonio, I had two children, then the house, the work, the money was never enough... You must have had these problems too, right?
• Yes, naturally... But you know, I thought a great love was a great love...
• Oh yes, certainly... But by then they were past things... And then, since then, I loved Antonio...
• …
• What is it?
• Nothing. I just wanted to tell you that thanks to you I understood Baglioni...
• Really!? Remember how I told you? Baglioni is the Pascoli of Italian song...The singer of small things. It is not necessary to fly to the sun, after all, just crawl on the ground to a clean little spot where sometimes the sun appears and one can warm up a bit.
• But this is Kafka!
• Yes, it’s Kafka. But it’s also Baglioni...

I watched her walk away, like that, Sabrina.

I waited longer, to see her become a tiny dot, at the home goods aisle level.

She hadn't even left yet, and I was already waiting for her.

The wait is long, Sabrina, my dream of you is not ended, as Montale said.

Aside from “Sabrina.”