Enrico Ruggeri
La giostra della memoria

I was fortunate, like many, to enter the world of music through the main door, which is not any elected genre (Progressive, Psychedelia, Punk, Kraut, what I would flaunt today), no prestigious subsection, it's not classical music, but it's what everyone more or less listens to: fundamentally what plays on the radio. Only by starting there, in my humble opinion, can you subsequently afford to dig into the most disparate subgenres.

My father, with "Innuendo," listened to countless times during trips in his second-hand brown Mercedes with a Varese license plate, made me realize that there is a paradise to explore; the door to that paradise was next door to my house, in the immense collection of duplicated audiocassettes of my cousin Davide, meticulously stacked in strict alphabetical order, small columns of white bricks on which always, and I mean always, the content was written in black pen with possible doodles filling the white spaces, and always on their spine were annotated the titles of the tracks. Where space allowed, there were repeated tracks, because it was unthinkable for him, and then for me, to waste tape: today I realize it's an unknown concept but until recently if you had to copy an album that lasted 52 minutes you only had 60, 74, or longer cassettes available (the 54s came later), and you couldn't leave 8 minutes of annoying hiss that forced you to press "Forward" to make the cassette turn and start over. No, it didn't exist: if 8 minutes remained, some tracks were re-proposed, usually the favorites like in a whole encore of our own, other times just those that fit in terms of duration, all annotated with "(RIP.)" at the end of the title.

From my cousin Davide, I inherited the horror vacui and understood the beauty of meticulous collecting; for me it is still unthinkable to like a song without knowing its title, author, album of first publication, and sometimes, its history. From my cousin Davide I got the key to open the doors of the musical universe, when in a thousand afternoons I climbed onto his bed covered by a light blue pillowcase until my twelve-year-old hand reached his shaky cream-colored shelf, on which everything from which it is obligatory to start was cataloged: I found Antonello Venditti and the Shadows, Franco Battiato and Mia Martini, Mick Jagger in one of his lesser-known solo albums and Guns'N'Roses, Abba and Frank Sinatra, Renato Zero and Gino Paoli, Dire Straits and Jon Bon Jovi. There was the galactic guide to beginner's music. Not everything was liked by Davide, he drew and conserved, his favorite source was Silverado Records which gave you a maximum of two albums on free loan for a few days before some law had it closed; he would return from Silverado and, whether he liked it or not, recorded, cataloged, wrote the song titles in his notebooks; he couldn't stand the Queen but on his cream-colored shelf you found their Greatest Hits, he despised Pooh but I'm sure there was a double album of theirs there, two cassette tapes minutely bound with adhesive tape, abandoned under the letter P.

At twelve, I liked "Mistero" by Enrico Ruggeri, it had won Sanremo the previous year, just as I liked "Vaffanculo" by Masini. At twelve, on any given afternoon, I took "La giostra della memoria" from Davide's shelf after making sure "Mistero" was among the titles written in pen. It was there. I brought it home, next door, and copied it. And here's the flash, the one that makes you realize that your passions must follow a direction; I would have liked to become a director because I saw the Star Wars trilogy, I wanted to be an archaeologist because I thought they were all like Indiana Jones, I wanted to draw comics because unfortunately I read Dylan Dog, I wanted to be a writer after digesting Crichton's books, I wanted to become someone who can be on stage after listening to "Innuendo" and "La giostra della memoria", because if Freddie Mercury made me realize how much enthusiasm I would need to be happy in the world and then leave happy, then Enrico Ruggeri, in the early years of my ear's development, gave me the gift of nostalgia without which music shouldn't exist. From there I started collecting various newspaper clippings, magazines on the newsstands, TV specials to understand what had happened in that world of notes before 1994, from there I understood that everything originated with Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and died with Kurt Cobain. What a terrible mistake. I knew three names of guitarists: Jimi Hendrix, Brian May, and Luigi Schiavone, I learned the term "Fender" which for me at the time was synonymous with electric guitar, the instrument of wonders. So in countless afternoons of middle school, I sat at the glass table in my living room, in splendid domestic solitude, doing homework for the next day; beside me, I had a CantaTu stereo in which "La giostra della memoria" played to exhaustion.

The album in question is a collection of those roughly compiled, made not just to make a couple of bucks but to show that there's much more beyond what has been heard so far: four unreleased tracks, various live ones, few faithfully reproduced to the studio version. "Mistero" is well-known, enough, then the title-track that still moves today and "Bianca balena", I was already dreaming of having a band with a pianist while hearing "Contessa" which still belongs to the Decibel period, "Vivo da re" and "Polvere" were a deadly one-two punch that makes you realize that maybe your path could be that of writing songs, and at twelve it could, now at thirty it can't, so I'm glad I realized it in '94. My best friends back then didn't appreciate "Il mare d'inverno", now I don't know how many would eat their heart out, but it was "Che temperamento", "Peter Pan" and "Ti avrò" that I considered the pearls of an album to be consumed, they contained the first ideas of rhyme, melody, stories to tell. Some aspects now are surpassed while others aren't, on others now, in 2012, I still agree, especially if I happen to think that this is still an album to be consumed. "Prima del temporale" and "Il portiere di notte" I understood and loved later, when in the fog of high school I searched for that twelve-year-old with all his enthusiasm, when I realized that I was about to enroll in driving school and I would drive a brown Mercedes myself one day. Everyday music is the one I often run from today, but if you don't start from there you remain a snob. This is Enrico's penultimate roar before he cut his hair to follow Ronaldo's late '90s fashion, before the eternal youth syndrome hit him. You grow, you age, Enrico. "Nessuno tocchi Caino" is the only notable episode I remember after the following "Fango e stelle", but it is also true that I have distanced myself a lot, so maybe I speak out of ignorance.

However, I'm sure of one thing, and I leave it as a Post-Scriptum to follow the trend of this album: Davide, I never thought, not even for a second, that you were an idiot.