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Rating: They tell me I'm nostalgic, but it's not quite like that... Let's say I have a long processing time.
Sometimes it takes me weeks, months, or even years to realize the preciousness of a moment lived or an experience.
As for the films watched, the books read, the landscapes admired, or in this case, the music listened to, this has become the norm for me, and I'm no longer surprised if, during the day, while I'm working on the computer, my mind starts to wander to distant yet already known territories.
Today it happened with that distant concert, the first real one I ever attended (if we exclude the sad episode of that Gemboi and Cristina D'Avena concert in the Ipercoop parking lot a few years earlier...).
I was, for just a few hours more, 15 years old, and it was the summer after my freshman year in high school. I started listening to Davide Van De Sfroos at the age of 10, in 2001/02, after my father discovered him by chance while channel surfing on a Friday night and catching a special on the singer-songwriter on Rai 2. My father bought all the CDs released at the time, namely Breva e Tivan, ...E semm partii, the live double album Laiv, and the EP Per una poma, and I distinctly remember a Saturday afternoon, before going to catechism, when I would listen to Caino e Abele following the text translation closely in the booklet.
By 2007, I had known Davide for quite some time, and that time, with my father and brother, we reached nearby Bobbio to see him live for the first time.
The atmosphere was very relaxed, quite different from the elaborate organization I would perceive at another concert during the Yanez Tour in 2011.
The album Pica!, considered by many to be Van De Sfroos' masterpiece, would only be released in the following February, more than 6 months after that concert: the national fame he enjoyed had not yet reached the peak of mainstream but was still mainly due to word of mouth.
It was very easy for me to reach him then before the start of the concert, while he was talking to someone from his staff next to the merchandise stand, to shyly offer him the book Il mio nome è Herbert Fanucci he wrote and published in 2005, and ask him for an autograph before fleeing embarrassed.
I found him cold and brief, without the slightest smile or sign of interest towards me. Only a few years later, meeting him again, I would understand that his character was not the flamboyant and expansive one I was used to seeing in the videos of his concerts on YouTube: his introverted and shy nature, as a poet, was easily perceived by me as a lack of courtesy. As I would easily understand from my own experience, artists often wear masks to hide from the public their own bitterness, and only after years did I learn about his depression, which sometimes made him so cold and detached and other times prey to his own excessive emotion.
Back in my seat, only a few tens of minutes passed. Davide took the stage, and his harsh face changed, becoming immediately focused but serene.
He began by talking to the audience, far from crowded, about the formation on stage that evening: it would be a concert in "version quattro gatti," both for the presence of 3 other musicians with him on stage and for the modesty of the audience, that is, about a hundred people.
Sitting like us on his chair, he began to introduce the first song with his simple yet full of amusing details stories. From that moment, the intimacy that was created between the little band on stage and the small group of people in front of it made the evening filled with a particular atmosphere.
I don't have a precise setlist of the songs that were performed, but I remember well:
- the mandolin played by Angapiemage Galiano Persico, violinist and by then a historical travel companion of Davide, on the introduction of ...E semm partii;
- the long and amusing introduction of an unreleased Ballata del Cimino, with profuse laughter on the part where the protagonist of the song explains to the customs officers that if he is found in his underwear in a valley, it's because he was "practicing autoerotismo";
- the intrusive intervention of a couple of drunkards/punks loudly requesting Il duello (which Davide did not play);
- the performance of at least a couple of other unreleased tracks that would be published on Pica!;
- the notebooks under the chair and the box of 6 bottles of red wine opened during his stories.
At the end of the concert, I had the impression of having attended one of those evenings where you don't know the people present, but you feel welcomed anyway.
I still consider it one of the most engaging concerts I've ever attended, where the cantastorie del lago proved his storytelling and poetic skills when we were still "few" (a few tens of thousands?) in Italy who knew and appreciated him.
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