Every time I read about DeB and Battiato (I confess I do this rarely), it always makes me smile a bit to think that the listens that generated the pages referring to most of his best records (from a certain point on, it’s a manner, increasingly boring for me) are far post-dated, with the corollary of considerations and attempts (completely understandable, ça va sans dire) at contextualizations, often veiled by tones more or less conscious of reverence, which the beaked profile of the ascetic Sicilian tends to evoke. To say, "La cura" is, for me, a bad song, but I avoid saying it to prevent starting useless disputes. - A little personal reminiscence: I meet Battiato in '75, behind the stage he left due to protests from part of the audience (I know some of them, workers from Mirafiori who adhere to Lotta Continua). I am almost 16, I own all his records, including Clic, and I love "Da Oriente a Occidente." I sing it, better than him, more than him, even in the stairwell, which has the best acoustics in the world for that piece. I am there to convince him to return to the stage and not give in to the boors. I won't succeed. We'll be sitting in what seems to me to be a Peugeot or a Renault SW, parked behind the stage in the Palasport, surrounded by 2 or 3 freakish girls from his entourage. He seems quite shaken, very sweaty, and rather smelly, I am stoned and perhaps also at the end of a trip... I don’t remember much, except for a pleasant, relaxed half-hour and his peremptory statement regarding the decision never to participate in these damn concerts to fund newspapers or extraparliamentary organizations... (I never checked whether he kept to that resolution) - A few years pass and I discover that Francuzzo is back, with an album of songs. I pre-order it and on the day of release, I stop by the local store and pick up one of the first copies of Cinghiale: I cheer for him immediately, for that elitist and courageous choice to burst into the market of little songs with that record, and I tell the irreducible experimenters to go fuck themselves (let them experiment with an original way to get there, to fuck). A few years later, I am in the front row of chairs in front of his stage, coincidentally dressed like him, same black suit and tie, realizing that I cheered for a winning player, the moment "Up Patriots to Arms" starts. - A couple of years later, I am in the army, in a punitive barracks, and surprisingly, I manage to spread "La voce del padrone," which gets duplicated on dozens of cassettes and is one of the records heard most often in the barracks. - From here on, it’s over, in the sense that he no longer needed small fans like me and I had exhausted every residue of fandom for anyone. After all, he was a successful pop singer, and with Sgalambro's collaboration, also an almost untouchable intellectual icon, it's fine... -
@Woodstock: good Enea really believes he knows a bit more (and just to understand more). Well, let him have this illusion. :) - And yes, we know more than the author because the record is a product, and we don't give a damn about what the author’s struggles or later evaluations are, the product is that, it speaks for itself, incontrovertibly, even despite who made it.
@noveccentrico: nice the flipping of the omelette. Your pages are always beautiful.
