Roberto Vecchioni
Montecristo

I wait for the moka to regurgitate coffee; I think.

Outside it's cold, but the clear sky promises a beautiful late January day. Sitting at the Formica table in my kitchen, I try to string together a few sentences while thinking that I should study; but after all, what's thirty minutes?

Thoughts run wild, traversing countless paths weaving together like spaghetti on a plate or like a woman's hair blowing in the wind. In the sea of hair, however, a man in a rowboat can be seen: wearing only trousers and smoking a cigar. The city without women isn't a place for him. 'This time I'm really leaving, with a gentle wind blowing at my back; you sleep well your sleep, where I'm going only the stars know,' he said, and then he left. Away from the madding crowd.

The man is the likable Roberto Vecchioni, or rather his cartoonish projection, encapsulated in the yellowing cardboard; it's worth recounting his story. I close this cardboard vision and resume where it all begins, between the battlements of walls jutting out over the sea; the walls of Montecristo.

 

The year is nineteen eighty, the Milanese singer-songwriter boldly presents an ironic and well-crafted work, starting with the exquisite art work, with some 128.2 dm3 available (a future-professional deformation) to the good Andrea Pazienza for his surreal drawings, even forgiving the nude pendulum on the cover. "Montecristo" is an album perhaps lacking in immediately impactful songs, as was the case in the seventies and as it will be for many subsequent works, starting with the beautiful "Paris (o dear)". However, it appears to be a solid and convincing work, as well as well-arranged, supported by a handful of solid and vaguely ironic tracks, completed with poetic flourishes.

One of these opens the LP and is a touching song, passionately performed by the professor. "The City Without Women" is a tribute to the woman, the quintessential muse for the artist. The tone is disenchanted, the mind clear, the memory painful.

'Love too close, love that is only a year and a day away; you're like a shadow on the heart, silent and light, but I'll get used to it.'

"Pendant" is a long and surreal track narrating the "deeds" of an unspecified man and a her, whose presence, a new Peter Pan's crocodile, is announced by a gold pendant at the ankle.

'And then he took very good aim because he was an enthusiast, and he did it at the precise moment of lowering the pasta. [...] And if anyone spoke to him, and if anyone disappointed him, it's not me.'

"Montecristo" bursts through with its marked arrangement, supported by the pulsating drums of the good Walter Calloni and Mauro Paoluzzi's guitar (I name them for all; the session musicians are a wagonload); it’s an excellent track, with lyrics still very surreal seasoned with various references of a sexual nature and not necessarily of a couple kind. In the background vocals, in the lamenting chorus, two famous names: Eugenio Finardi and Antonello Venditti.
The first side closes with the short "Reginella (Cinquecento Catenelle D'Oro)", in which Vecchioni and Finardi tie together folk songs from the south and Tuscany to create a joyful effect that much resembles a lullaby.

"The Year That's Come" is the drawn-out and pessimistic response to Lucio Dalla's famous song where, among De Gregoriano quotes ("Rimmel") and not-so-veiled female appreciations, the disheartened singer-songwriter looks with disillusionment and thinly-veiled pain at the end of a story.

'Dear friend, don't write to me, I'm leaving; from tonight, I don't live in my house: the disorder reaches already up to the roof, staying here means going mad. [...] I leave like a true gentleman, and, thinking about it, perhaps I don't love her.'

"Song from Afar" is instead a delicate ballad that tells of a man far away who has entrusted his beloved to the care of a friendly army of animals. Said like this, it seems like a folly, yet it's a beautiful piece, a sweet tear-jerker with perhaps a somewhat dated sound but with great charm.

"The sparrow will follow you; you won't always be small, always small, but it will follow you, it will follow you.
The hawk will defend you; you won't always be weak, always weak, but it will defend you, it will defend you."

Following is "The Witch", a track turned towards harder sounds also thanks to the great work of the rhythm section. In this likable musical cauldron emerges the fairy-tale side of the good Roberto, where the characters are, however, extracted from their environment and thrown into the problems of real life (which for Vecchioni of the period essentially means "heartaches").

'Princess, it's okay that being a woman is beautiful, but my bed is different from your castle. Don't prick yourself again with the spindle, don't drink, don't eat the apples.'

The beautiful "Mother" is a moving and wonderful letter, directed to the one who knows, more than anyone else, how to love a man.

'Maybe you should have made me be born old, so I could slowly become a child: I would have had fewer shadows to fear at night and more desire to wait for the morning. Maybe... Or maybe you should have made me be born every time, every time you made love.'

Those terms, "every time", were good prophets: later, a popular Italian singer-songwriter would draw a lot of inspiration from this beautiful track (frankly I don't know if this was consented to or not, but that's how it is). Certainly the most moving track of an excellent album, a small gem.

The LP closes with Sandro Centofanti's piano and the sweet notes of "The City Without Women (Finale)", fading away from Montecristo in a sad wind of a thousand thoughts, among long entangled hair.

 

'That's all', as the likable yet know-it-all Bugs Bunny would say.

 

'Do you see the end if you see it?'

 

 

Dedicated to my dad and a special friend, although "Montecribbio" never was quite digested.