Lucio Battisti
Il tempo di morire

Can a guitar riff enter the collective imagination and memory as much as an entire song?

Yes, because, at least for those of my generation, there was no possible doubt about where it was heading if one heard that zam-zam zazazam-zam repeated...

And those, like me, who played, when learning the first chords, the riffs were always those: "Smoke On The Water", "Stairway To Heaven" (apparently in a music store there was a sign with a high level of banter that prohibited trying it...) and indeed the Battisti's "Il Tempo Di Morire" and "Canzoni del sole". And, often, stuff for beginners is actually good stuff. Forgive me the usual wine comparisons, but if you have to initiate someone into the necessary love for the bottle, better to start with a good little bonarda, not too strong and well-vinified, rather than a Barolo or an Amarone that perhaps they might not fully appreciate... right?

Back to us: once again (he would have done it again...) our dear Lucio was able to make young Italy fall in love, still beautiful although normally colonized.

And it took little, or a lot, depending on how you think and how you see it.

Is writing a song like "Il Tempo Di Morire" easy? A debate already faced elsewhere and that could last millennia.

On paper, yes: the harmonic progression is a classic "inverted blues" with the third chord, so to speak, instead of the second. Simple stuff, that you learn immediately and play well. The lyrics, devoid of particularly strong poetic or literary images, are simple, and might have even been put down in ten minutes.

Yet.

Yet many such songs are written and few succeed. The classic doughnuts with a hole.

All of this is exacerbated (or mitigated, as you prefer) by an evident and embarrassing in-studio improvisation. Certainly a live recording: towards the end, you distinctly hear Lucio telling the musicians "finale!", indicating, precisely, that the blues, by its nature meant to last ad libitum, and especially ad libbidinem, was coming to an end.

These were not times for very long tracks (just as they aren't now), especially if one aspired to end up in the charts.

But they were beautiful times, in which a genius surrounded by friends who could play, with a friend by his side who could write (no imperfect tense is so appropriate...), could throw down a small masterpiece of rock-blues colonization, which we would all sing and play. So far, forever.