Dino Valenti
Dino Valente

"I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member." _{(Woody Allen)}

"(Dino) was like a brother to me. [...] But, if I'm honest, for the most part of the time we spent together I can't say I found him pleasant. He was his own worst enemy"
_{Gary Duncan (Quicksilver Messenger Service)}

So it will be yet another story of a talent burned by failure. Of an erratic genius who could have been a patron saint of folk-rock or emerging psychedelia, only if he were a less idiosyncratic subject, not to mention characteristically dysfunctional toward the human race (to be precise: male, because with the other half of the sky he seemed to relate very willingly and with excellent results...and who can blame him). But not only the failure, for that's the least, even if we're talking about a man born poor in a family of gypsy street performers who would die extremely poor (a merciful euphemism: in rags, which no doctor could mend to his heart and brain, both worn out by excesses beyond imagination).

Although rock chronicles speak of a talent praised by all during the brief folk scene of Greenwich Village; of someone who upon arriving in California almost joined the Byrds, then the Great Society/future Jefferson Airplane; who entered the early Quicksilver Messenger Service only to abandon them at the height of success, taking the road of local jails for possession of stuff - too much and too good, what wounds more is that on his name (which one?...now I'll tell you) an inexplicable oblivion has settled. In life, but also posthumously. And then, since every now and then I nurture a healthy antipathy for the human race, I too, like the ants, get pissed off in my small way. Just like the one born as Chester Powers and who became in art (slightly) known in the group - those sad epitomes of themselves who were the last Quicksilver - as Jesse Oris Farrow and alone as Dino Valenti.

With similar premises, it won't be much of a surprise that the first and only artifact under our hero's solo name carries within itself the seeds of commercial failure. To begin with, its capricious author during recording demanded a blank slate, wanting to systematically dismantle the too "arranged" production of Bob Johnson, someone who brought to planetary success among others Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Simon & Garfunkel. Logical for the manager and those at Epic to take their silent and cold revenge. In two ways, one more wicked than the other: no promotion at all for the album once released and, on the cover, even the "disrespect" of the name distorted to "Dino Valente". It's showbiz, darling...

Should we lament this do it yourself hippie? Rather, thank him on bended knee and for eternity. Here the soul of classic folk is taken, combined with the psychedelic and ethnic ellipses of late Sixties Californian music, adding a touch of country and jazz lightly hinted at, even with a pinch of orchestral classicity and bringing it all, after forever leaving one of the many ghost towns of the old West, into the desert to spread the ashes near Joshua Tree. In short, an unrepeatable union of a Dylan deprived of Newport's electricity ("Me And My Uncle"), of a Fred Neil suspended between enchanted arpeggios and psychedelic magic ("Time"), of a Tim Buckley who discovers early on the depths of "Lorca" through an enchanting jazzy electric ("Something New") and then the interstellar journeys of "Starsailor", remarkably - the only legacy of what should have been and was not - accompanied by a landslide of strings that who knows why seem perfect here ("Tomorrow").

There is still room for a game of folk-jazzed vacuums and fills that incidentally also invents John Martyn ("My Friend"), for an enlightenment - ça va sans dire - less shadowy than Skip Spence ("Listen To Me"), to return to skiffle atmospheres where folk-blues flies in timeless spaces, in cotton fields as in English countrysides, and our heart with it ("Everything Is Gonna Be OK"), eventually surrendering to that apocryphal ghost of Bruce Palmer from "The Cycle Is Complete" that is the concluding, surreal "Test." And then, almost in the middle, those two songs that alone would suffice to justify a career: "New Wind Blowing", the most beautiful song Roy Harper never wrote and "Children of the sun", the most beautiful that Nick Drake never wrote. Do we deserve so much?

Really, better this way, Dino. On that deserted island we always talk about and where sometimes we might really want to go, free from this annoying and stupid being that is man, you and your album will certainly not be missing to keep me company.