Eugenio Finardi
Sugo

Demetrio: «Listen Eugenio, we're not here to rinse our balls, but to make great music. Do you want to keep recording albums for kids?[1] or become like that other one? It's getting moldy here, I'm leaving. I've already spoken with Sassi».

I don't know what Eugenio was thinking in the midst of the crowd when Demetrio approached him. Lost among Persol screens, bell-bottom jeans, vests, sweat-stained shirts and more vests, sitting on a trunk with a pensive look in front of mixers and headphones, at some youth festival of the Re Nudo.

He was only twenty and how much he loved watching others play.

Eugenio was born in Milan, to a father from Bergamo and an American mother, the latter fact not to be underestimated as it would often lead him to travel to the States and make him a cultural hybrid. In a handful of years, he had already decided what to do, settle definitively in the Milanese capital. From America, he would import only two things: Blues and The Rolling Stones. Every night, he and his best friend Camerini roamed and colonized all the nightspots in Milan, a crowd of hopeful young bands and musicians hoping to get noticed, and Eugenio, with his strong build, long blond hair, and the inevitable red Eko guitar, succeeded. In those bustling and flourishing venues, he would meet Marino Marini, one of the great Italian talent scouts of the era.

Marini: «You're the first longhair with that damn electric guitar who doesn't get on my nerves, you're hired».

And so he signed his first recording contract with Numero 1, the label of the Battisti-Mogol duo near Via dei Chiostri, where were located many small identical apartments, the sequence was predetermined: piano, lyricist, and composer. A huge assembly line, so to speak. Inside, Eugenio had to dress in white and sing soul music. Why? “Because he had a black man's voice“. Those aseptic environments weren't right, and after just one 45 rpm single in English [2], he would follow in Demetrio's footsteps, always his mentor and teacher, and both would leave Numero 1 to join Gianni Sassi's Cramps Records.

In Renaissance Milan of the seventies, Gianni Sassi was the patron par excellence: farsighted, avant-garde, innovator, communicator, visionary, charismatic, cultured, producer, advertiser, lyricist, artistic director, entrepreneur, photographer. A man capable of bringing together at the same table Demetrio Stratos, John Cage, and workers from Alfa Romeo. From his small studio as an advertising graphic designer, there he was, working to fill entire galleries. Mirabilia of all kinds tied to the new that advanced (Skiantos, Area, Camerini, Battiato, Finardi). Behind it was a deeply radicalized ideological choice, leftist and counter-system, a radial and free sound, leaving maximum freedom to the movement's interpreters. In every production, there were -always by Sassi- meticulous decisions, even decreeing the font of each album cover, the only flaw was the payment of insignificant amounts to musicians and singers, the earnings were used to finance future works and, more or less, everyone was starving, without a penny. In those fertile symposia, the first collaborations were born and all the members of Cramps communicated with each other. In the first album of Finardi, entitled "Non gettare alcun oggetto fuori dai finestrini" [3] Franc Jonia [4] and Claudio Rocchi joined. The result was a clumsy and immature work. Sassi, however, saw potential and made three-quarters of the formation of the Area (then among the best jazz-rock musicians of the entire peninsula) available for his second album "Sugo".

The team was complete.

There was the sharp and pale Greek flavor of Demetrio, the stifling Brazilian humidity of Camerini, the benevolent Italo-American vehemence of Eugenio, the tight Calloni and Fariselli, the stormy Trinidadian bass of Bullen, the telluric double bass of Tavolazzi, and finally the hallucinogenic Bardi and Fabbri with mandolin and violin. Inside the recording studios, however, each one's identity faded, everything mixed, giving rise to absolute stylistic coherence: stateless people with a bubbling character scattered in sounds and notes, fingerings and vibrations the only territories touched, inhabitants of an idea, that of changing the world with music. And they were so determined, if only they had clearer ideas…[5]

They were only twenty and how much they loved dreaming.

At first, they would usually meet at Eugenio's house, preparing and discussing songs in a soundproofed room. Everything came naturally and the music flowed spontaneously and fluidly, the album's first track, "Musica Ribelle", ready in 1-2 takes during the first day of recording. Stylistically and musically there were precise choices, such as drawing from American rock, translating, and then transforming it, a robed rock with Italian settings and instruments. Thus adopting the attitude, the ideal of rock, and dressing it with the entry of the violin (instead of the standard electric guitar) and the bridge with the distorted mandolin passing through a Marshall 200 watt amp.

Between recording days, Eugenio was used to conducting several radio programs, one of which was "Su da Dio" at Radio Milano Centrale, one of the first free Italian radio stations of the period. He talked about music and analyzed it, passing from jazz, to funk, with interludes of bossa nova and ethnic music. The only problem was the theme song, a Sardinian folk piece difficult to understand [6]. He then decided to write a song for it, with the predictable title "La Radio", a country-western in Italian, universal for all the burgeoning free radios being born. In a few months, it would become the slogan of hundreds of radio stations.

«I love doing radio. It's perhaps the mass communication medium I prefer, it's intimate and sensual, and allows direct emotional contact, without filters. […] Sometimes, while the record is playing, I leave the microphone open so that my breath is felt subliminally. And then there are the calls that allow me to give a voice to all those I talk to, and you can imagine yourself in their homes, in their lives… Doing radio this way, sometimes, becomes art.»

For the rest of the album, just take a look at the cover, behind the photograph.

A galactic nucleus [7], an enormous black hole, positioned exactly in the center of the galaxy, capable of generating so much energy that it shatters everything around it… first, it consumes it, rips it, annihilates it, and finally makes it its own. And there they are, all the celestial bodies orbiting around it: Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Rolling Stones, Area traveling tossed and sped at lightning speed, capable of generating a blinding and eternal light like a thousand blacksmiths hammering iron intent on forging the purest weapon, then shooting away launched into the universe. Thus were born the ten stars of the album.

That single distilled drop is the result of intangible forging. That radiant drop is "Sugo".

The disc was ready, it just needed a bit of publicity.

«T'aspêto domàn a séia, ti l'arvi ti o conçèrto»

Palalido of Milan, 1975. Finardi and Fabbri would open the first tour of Fabrizio de André. Not even time for Fabrizio to start, the audience was already consumed. It was the first time "Musica Ribelle" was performed live, and if we then consider that pieces like "La radio" and "Voglio" [8] followed in the setlist, the audience found themselves exhausted and suffocated, drained of every fluid in the body. The success was immediate, Finardi especially liked by the young, and Fabrizio knew this (after having to fetch his son Cristiano for having occupied Eugenio's house for a few nights). Finardi disturbed and fascinated precisely thanks to the extreme simplicity of saying and doing things. The attitude and sincerity in singing were different from any other songwriter of that period, taking you by the hand with every song and explaining experiences and life like an older brother, to make you embark on a tortuous path but with all the means to smooth it, in a vital and bloody climate, turbulent and swirling made of intellectual deaths and generational massacres told without filters. His language truly penetrates the skin and makes the bones vibrate, like open-heart surgery bearing witness to candor and passion, caustic and necessary, on a horizontal asceticism with the aim of not looking far but within oneself.

Ninety dates would follow in less than four months, among incidents and protests, concerts in occupied spaces between autonomous and communes, joints, and heroin, they would sell out, people from all social classes were calling for something new. Eugenio thrust into your face with energy and violence anthem after anthem, capturing the everyday in every verse, extracting from the personal (political) then small extremely clear fragments. From criticism of rampant capitalism (“Soldi”) [9] to rehabilitation centers for drug addicts (“Oggi ho imparato a volare”) [10]. It was liberating, particularly useful and functional to the movement, devoid of any superstructure. Those evenings there was no room for poetry or misleading ruminations.

Life on the road, between joy and revolution. [11]

He was twenty and felt eternal.

Quality and success are directly proportional, among the unstoppable “Diesel” [12], the disillusioned “Blitz” [13] and the spent “Roccando Rollando [14], the partnership with Cramps Records would continue for another four years until 1979.

In that year Demetrio fell ill. He was diagnosed with aplastic anemia.

Gianni Sassi then decided to organize a concert [15] to support the high hospitalization expenses for Demetrio in New York. Stratos was the supporting pillar -physical and spiritual- upon which the avant-garde Cramps Sanctuary rested, without him the music was soon over. On that June 14, 1979, there were about sixty thousand spectators, and much of the Italian music scene was present, between classic songwriting and progressive rock bands. Among the many performances, one was different from all the others: Eugenio Finardi singing “Hold On” [16].

«I wanted to do a piece… we've been planning this concert for a month, it's an old gospel, a song from 70 years ago, a spiritual, and it's called “Hold On” and it means hang in there, probably since yesterday it has another meaning»

Exactly one day before the concert, Demetrio's body collapsed, he died on June 13, 1979.

The audience was stunned, Eugenio sat down, just guitar and voice, two instruments. He would give priority to the latter and start playing. The voice of a dog barking exhausted, of a plow that repeatedly tears the earth, marking it, and marking it again, of a lyre that shakes and resounds, keeping alive the chthonic deities. The Blues is the coppery dawn of every deserted churchyard.

Demetrio dies, Eugenio leaves Milan, and the Cramps Records label closes forever. The spring of twenty years is over.

«There is a date when the movement ends, the utopia of changing the world.»

Today more than 40 years have passed since the release of the aforementioned album and much has happened. The “vibrant” [17] Eugenio can no longer sing “Musica Ribelle”, physically he can't, and he continually clashes with the selfish and petulant requests of the public. He managed to represent a music-theater show at Teatro La Scala in Milan [18] thus realizing the dream of two lives, his and his mother's, the same who for many years was an opera teacher right in that theater, and who could never perform due to being visually impaired. Stepping on that stage will represent the closing of a circle, the highest point of his entire career. They've even dedicated an asteroid to him, the “79826 Finardi“. Who knows if he still desires a land all his own to start anew, there between Jupiter and Saturn [19], there, where the stars wait for them. [20]

Sugo has been and is an ongoing commitment and an endless war. Imparting in you the desire to play, do, face and change: likes as much as the things one likes, here, at twenty.

To Eugenio and Demetrio.