Mimmo Franzinelli
Rock & servizi segreti

LA RECENSIONE

We are all familiar with the World’s Greatest Democracy. The one where everything runs smoothly and, if a war needs to be waged to straighten out some wrong at the four corners of the Planet, it doesn’t hesitate to strain its poor military-industrial complex to drop on us a good load of bombs. Then, like magic, on that fertile humus made of dust & ashes, something will be born, perhaps a more decent political regime. When their generals tried in Vietnam, many young Americans rebelled and in Berkeley, often with Dylan’s songs on their lips, they shouted in unison their outrage, as Muhammad Ali would later do in front of the cameras, paying a high price for his choices. But this magnificent book, which concludes with a case study on Fabrizio De André (listed by our Anti-terrorism as a “supporter of the BR”), allows us to delve into the musical forefront in particular. Among the charismatic leaders of that generation, on the opposite front from Nixon’s most petty informant, such Elvis Presley, we find singers like Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Grace Slick, and many others “monitored” by the FBI. Historian Mimmo Franzinelli, perhaps the best Italian expert on fascism, thanks to declassified documents, can thoroughly reconstruct many of these stories. Take Lenny Bruce. Destroyed by Hoover’s persecutions, he died in August 1966 from a morphine overdose; Zappa was always convinced that, in the end, it was the Bureau's fault. The pacifist Phil Ochs, also persecuted through silent phone calls at home and blatant tailing, already struggling with singing after an assault by unknown robbers in Tanzania (they had tried to strangle him) in '73, fell into a dissociative syndrome and ended up hanging himself in April 1976, two years after the great concert he organized at Madison Square Garden to commemorate the martyrdom of Allende. Joan Baez, who refused to pay the percentage of taxes intended for armaments, ended up on trial repeatedly. Grace Slick, a real volunteer to put it in her own words, suspected of supporting leftist extremists, was caught in the grip of federal investigations and continuously tailed for years. Jimi Hendrix, the “notorious negro entertainer” (as the documents stated) close to the Black Panthers, and Janis Joplin, arrested after a concert for accusations aimed at the police and fined for profanity at the station, fared slightly better, but we can say that never before did the existence of a System behind the appearances of democracy prove to be the opposite of a conspiracy theory fantasy or the fairy tale of the skeptics: it took shape, became intolerably oppressive for every manifestation of criticism, and tried with all its might to anesthetize the protest even by following the paranoid trail of subliminal messages where clearly there were none. The war then ended, but the defeat of American democracy, reading Franzinelli’s pages, today more than ever seems to have indeed been both home and in Indochina.