Francesco De Gregori
Bufalo Bill

In 1976, the year this album was released, Francesco De Gregori was fresh from the enormous commercial success of "Rimmel," published the previous year. A success that opened him to criticism from part of his "early hour" audience and even some intellectuals of the extra-parliamentary left, who accused him of having commercialized himself too much and thus having sold out, leading the author to later state: "'Bufalo Bill' is this cross and delight of mine: well, if I could, I would probably redo it with better attention to sounds and arrangements. I did it that way, bare and essential, to punish myself for having made 'Rimmel,' which had sold too much... crazy stuff!"

After all, those were years of great protests, even at concerts, and all this would soon lead to the now-famous "trial of De Gregori": on April second, 1976, at the Palalido in Milan, right during a date of the tour that was supposed to support the release of the album in question (published about a month later), some spectators attacked him first on stage and then even inside his dressing room, accusing him, among other things, of charging fees too high for his shows, of not allocating at least part of them to the "comrades" cause, and not providing an adequate contribution to the "revolution," of being on their side only in words and not in actions considering the beautiful and luxurious life he led and, last but not least, invited him to leave the entire proceeds of that evening there and to commit suicide like Mayakovsky. Years later, recalling that heavy episode in which he was the protagonist despite himself, Francesco would say: "All that was missing was the castor oil..."! In 1987, another singer-songwriter, Edoardo Bennato, would recall those events in his "Era una festa," from the album "Ok Italia": «It was a party and it looked like a war. No songs, tonight a trial of celebrity is on stage! Whoever is on stage is a performer or a poet, let's expose his vanity! Francesco perhaps did not expect it, he saw around him only guys like him. They say: "Comrade, you are wrong, your adventure now ends, we instead go forward and will never stop!"».

So this "Bufalo Bill" was born in response to "Rimmel" with sounds and arrangements that are sparse, perhaps even too much, except for some slightly more lively episodes where different musical registers peek through, as in the title track, in "Ipercarmela," and, to a lesser extent, in "Giovane esploratore Tobia." It is certainly one of his strangest, most hermetic, and cryptic albums ever. Even the voice seems different compared to his previous works, more "nasal." Not that his previous albums weren't cryptic and hermetic themselves (including the multi-award-winning and multi-selling "Rimmel"), but here perhaps the peak is reached. Thus the texts are, as said, among the most hermetic, cryptic, and strange of his entire production, and it would be insane to try to understand what each one individually was supposed to mean, so...

It starts off at a hundred per hour with the title track, dedicated to William Frederick Cody, alias Buffalo Bill. In practice, the song is a monologue of the same Buffalo, and it narrates, inspired by the film "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" by Sam Peckinpah, the transition from the buffalo to the locomotive in the vast American prairies, when even the horse was replaced by the prevailing optimism of the American Dream, symbolized in the song by the now-mythical friend of the protagonist "Culodigomma, a famous mechanic, on the edge of a road to contemplate America: decreasing of horses, increasing of optimism." And so Our Bill finds himself at fifty signing a contract with the circus "Pace e bene" to tour Europe and, ultimately, become a sideshow attraction. After all, "if I could have chosen between life and death, I would have chosen America." Note also the device with which the author reveals the protagonist of the song only at the end, with the closure "And I signed with my name, and I signed, and my name was Buffalo Bill": simply a fantastic piece! In "Il giovane esploratore Tobia," we meet a young 15-year-old scout with "a hygienically perfect childhood behind him: measles, sadness, and no other disease." Regarding this piece, De Gregori stated: "What scares us about young explorers is their inconclusiveness; they learn to make fires. I've emblemized the scout character: to be clear, the scout who in jokes has to do his good daily deed" to feel at peace with conscience. In this case, the good daily deed is the following: "he turns his head and sees a wagon burning, pulls the alarm, and saves the railway." If I had done something like that in reality, I'd feel like some kind of hero, but I don't think it's appropriate to nitpick. The music for this track was written in collaboration with Lucio Dalla, and at one point it picks up "In the summertime" by Mungo Jerry.

In "L'uccisione di Babbo Natale," the two protagonists "Dolly of the deep sea, daughter of miners" and "the son of the flower's child" take the "usual road to the cricket's corpse, while the frightened moon watches them pass and the stars are pinpoints." At one point in this place, "Father Christmas arrives, loaded with iron and coal. The son of the flower's child kills him with a knife and a stick": a clear (?) metaphor of the transition from the innocence of adolescence to the "guilt" (if not worse) of adulthood, but perhaps also of the abrupt transition from the time of "quiet" to the time of terrorism, given the reference to "flower's child." In "Air Disaster on the Sicily Channel," after the premise that "even in the climate of détente, a possible attack on Arab countries sees Italy in first position," it narrates, in addition to "the story of the plane lost off the Tunisian coasts," that "the widow's factory was flying at ten thousand meters above the Sicilian land...and ten thousand kilometers under brooms and cement two steps from the sea and popular houses built on the sand (any reference to illegal construction is purely intentional), "nothing else to report, only the grave of a journalist still difficult to find." De Gregori, regarding this piece, later stated he composed it after reading an article by Lotta Continua discussing some exorbitant purchases by Italy of military airplanes. "The widow's factory" (specifically "widow maker") is the nickname given to the F104 military airplane after the death of 116 pilots. Meanwhile, in the same interview, Francesco stated that "the journalist's grave" was a reference to journalist Mauro De Mauro, who, after investigating the Mattei case and publicly (and incautiously) declared that he had information that would shake Italy, disappeared into thin air and was never heard from again, eventually being assumed murdered, probably by the mafia. Reflecting on what will happen four years later in the skies of Ustica, this song also has something sinister and prophetic.

"Ninetto e la colonia,” according to its author, is inspired by the 1970 novel “Rulli di tamburo per Rancas” by Peruvian writer and politician Manuel Scorza, which in turn was inspired by the “Masacre de las bananeras” on December 5, 1928, in the city of Ciénaga, near Santa Marta, Colombia: the striking workers of the “United Fruit Company” were massacred by machine-gunning. This episode was also recounted by Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967). Again according to De Gregori, we learn that the piece "tells the sad story of a child in a cinema at the moment marines enter, line everyone against the wall, and shoot them, including Ninetto. After the marines, the Chiquita bosses arrive to collect the bananas that belonged to Ninetto and his friends." And he adds, "I don’t think anyone thought the song was about multinational companies": so it's not only cryptic and hermetic but also deceptive: excellent! In hindsight, some clues could have been drawn from the title, which speaks of "colony," from the line "chi mi manda non parla questa lingua" and, especially, from the ending "E dietro un fondale di stelle gli impiegati della compagnia rubarono tutta la frutta dagli alberi e la portarono via." But in hindsight, everything is easier, as we know! In "Atlantide," it speaks of a man who "now lives in Atlantis" (but also in California, in the third ray, and in the sky of Naples) and seems to refer to the irreparability of a love now lost forever or that was not known or wanted to wait, a bit like it was in the previous "Rimmel" (1975) and will be in the subsequent "Renoir" (1978). Some phrases are among the strangest but also among the most original and fascinating ever composed in Italian music: «E stravede per una donna chiamata Lisa. Quando le dice: "Tu sei quella con cui vivere" gli si forma una