Gino Paoli
La Luna e il Sig. Hyde

For any rational creature, but inevitably sensitive and prone to the inner turmoils of the soul, there comes a time to start leaving behind that archaic rage, that slight manifestation of being "anti-something" by tendency, sometimes acquired or often instinctive, and to develop a process of spiritual reconstruction, not necessarily linked to any god or presumed supernatural entities. Thus is generated, with a stimulating naturalness, like a butterfly from a caterpillar, like an unexpected warm breeze during the coldest days of winter, along a more linear and flat path, between a clear and fresh April morning trail, that sensation of emotional calm, of abandoning affliction, of declining existential dismay.

The story of Gino Paoli certainly has an unusual aspect, a singer-songwriter of Friulian origin, naturalized in Genoa, and a cornerstone of the glorious school of Tenco, De André, Endrigo, Lauzi, and Bindi, who in the season of his half-century (autumn 1984), emerges from the depths of a crisis that seemed to have already decreed his creative requiem. Like his beloved cats, he claws back the tangled thread of a story that had become knotted twenty years before, celebrating from that moment an artistic and human renaissance.
He grabs it and mends it with a sweet-sour inner peace that he is slowly consolidating with his own self, after having spent the leaden decade in silence and forgotten by the "scene," flirting with professional implosion, among countless collections demanded by record companies, anticipating an "already arrived" artist, singing and exalting a certain discomfort and intimate insecurity, more personal than social, not perceived by the young masses, channeling it into a spiral of undeserved discographic failures ("I Semafori Rossi Non Sono Dio," a tribute to Spanish singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat, "Ciao, Salutime Un Po' Zena," an interesting dialect homage to the Ligurian capital, and "Il Mio Mestiere," his only double LP so far, ambitious, twilight, fascinating, and in my opinion, his most beautiful, real, and personified album), misadventures that did not happen to other renowned colleagues who were ideologically idolized. We can assert that these chaotic "seventies" of Paoli closed in 1980 with the tribute album to Piero Ciampi "Ha Tutte Le Carte In Regola," an unrepeatable counterartist, angry, embittered, and misunderstood.
Such moods seemed irreparably to hover around the consecrated author of "Il cielo in una stanza" and "Sapore di sale", who after exhausting the "committed" chapter, risked being permanently relegated to a second-rate songster, and remembered for centuries as a summer strummer by the "beach bonfire," a true Italian beach style, like Rita Pavone, Edoardo Vianello or Piero Focaccia, if he hadn't courageously pulled out the weapons that have always represented and identified him: refinement and a certain poetic structure that, amalgamated with a consolidated maturity, elegant experience, and an honest advertising promotion worthy of his fame, allowed him to generate a new cycle of fortunate works, inaugurated with the album "La Luna E Il Sig. Hyde," adding to his most illustrious repertoire, clear and more current gems that in the following years, would cement among his classics.

And how could we not mention "Una lunga storia d'amore" and "Averti addosso", awarded with the Targa Tenco as best song of 1984 and already published in a four-track EP a few months earlier (another famous Genoese won that year, with "Creuza De Mà," the "best album" and the "best dialect work," while the ever-present friend Ornella Vanoni, "best interpreter"), pure and gentle songs of love and infatuation, supported by other small, significant and inspired compositions, highlighting a sought-after solitude that Gino demands and promises himself to preserve; "Come un lupo", "Nel branco", and "La luna e il signor Hyde" still reveal his most introspective, dualistic side, the thinking animal that purely for biological reasons seeks company, but the joy spawned bothers him. He loves inner enthusiasm, doesn't externalize it, and doesn't mingle with his dissimilar-likes, maybe he shares their similar ideas, but once forced to fight, he starts with his head down with his own tools.

We don't have the perfect record in the speakers, what every songwriter would have aspired to write. It's an honest, sincere, and spontaneous product that with simple but well-structured melodies manages on several occasions to pluck the emotional strings and without any hesitation, is a fundamentally robust link in Paoli's star-studded discography. "Dalla parte di lei," "Ninna no," "Fotografie", other brief droplets of Gino that spread, shining on the floor of truly lived time or that dreamt a little ephemeral; they are immediate phrases, genuine words, conveyed by that faint tone, with a hint of roughness, words dressed by the loose and expert touches along the piano keys, words veiled by yet another lit cigarette that scenographically impregnates the air, words soaked by a glass of whiskey resting on the ground during a solo, words glimpsed propagating in elevation, traced from two tiny blue eyes, protected by a pair of teardrop glasses, above that thinning hair, already advanced to inevitable whitening, of a second half just begun, summarized in a play of expressions, with a melancholic and reflective air, often spontaneously marked and at slight bursts wisely sly, impressed along an imaginary 35mm on the cover.

Words that like a bullet pierce directly through the heart. But they pierce delicately. A bullet that no longer gives any torment.

A dedication to the Paolean DeUser "GattoMatto"