“I threw a disc of De Gregori out of the window.” Roberto Vecchioni's confession to “The version of Andrea”

“Many years ago I launched a record by Francesco De Gregori from the window, for envy”. With this surprising confession, reported by Ansa, Roberto Vecchioni caught attention during his participation in the radio program “The version of Andrea”, conducted by Andrea Delogu.
During the chat, the Milanese singer -songwriter and writer, today 81 years old, spoke of his relationship with some historical colleagues. He recalled the friendship with Francesco Guccini and with Lucio Dalla, affectionately bringing back one of the phrases that the latter often addressed him: “Roberto, you are good, write beautiful things … only that you don't understand a ca ** o!”.

Speaking of De Gregori, Vecchioni told an emblematic episode: “I don't remember if it were 'rimmel' or even 'buffalo bill', but as soon as I listened to it I took the record and I threw it down the window. I was a little out of my mind, at the time I also happened to drink too much. It happened a long time ago, then I stopped with certain follies. But I admit it: I did it. It should be there, but when you have young people it happens.

To the poetics of De Gregori, Vecchioni dedicated the essay “The language in song and the lexical, formal and theme revolution of Francesco De Gregori”, dispenses of the University of Turin-Dams, for the course of “forms of poetry for music”, academic year 2002-2003. According to Vecchioni, the verse of the Roman singer -songwriter does not chase the literary exercise as an end in itself, the artifice. It is “cryptopopolar”, or “an apparently cultured language, aesthetically sought after, often not immediate but with the same intent of the 'popular' to grasp through symbols, abstractions, translitters the sense of man, life, things”. But above all the effect that this use of the language is proposed is fundamental. “The transmedia language – explains Vecchioni – does not allow those who listen to to hear the escape and store an easy, recognized feeling comparable to their memory filter. No. No. you chains you to your immensity of sensations, forces your soul, if you are careful, to go from a stimulus, from one sting to the other and recognize yourself in what you are and do: it reconstructs you your person. For example, a direct photo, for example, is a love of a loved one. […] The word, the figure of thought, the communicating phrase is not monolic: it does not correspond to a single hasty referral to a single equally hasty feeling: it sweeps, enlarges, gives you a map, connects you to other close and distant maps, does not close the circuit, opens it and your own as long as you want. 'Evoc' is the exact verb for this way of communicating. […] Those who are not used to (by culture, absenteeism, laziness, boredom, ignorance) to evoke he remains at the pole, confuses with the already said, he turns around him and eats his tail. The evocation mechanism has a disproportionate of freedom; You can even get out of the song and go away for your own events (I think of Carroll in 'Alice'). To know how to evoke in others, a great natural gift and the natural inclination never stops never to stop at the first meaning of things is essential. Evoking in others is magic, beneficial magic. Who of the others, of those who listen, read, know how to grasp how in a code, in a book by Arcani (simple in truth) the signs on which to range fantasy also knows what it means to be a 360 degree man “.
Also according to Vecchioni, De Gregori makes no concessions to a merely intellectualistic lyricism, free from reality. It immerses his songs in the social and political substratum. Reproduces feelings and situations in which everyone can be reflected. Passionate and excites. It is therefore secondary that it does it by resorting to evocative, translated images, or even the “unspoken” rather than in clear letters. If anything, the difficulty must be sought in a “sonic” use of the verses that intimately intertwines word and musical expression. Still Vecchioni: “Its verbs, nouns, adjectives are completely understandable, 'medial', there is no search for the rare or precious. If it is ever the way to unite them which constitutes the big novelty because it is unusual, incalculable, even if with a well -read, however, logical. De Gregori does not care about using iati, flaking between notes and syllables or repetitions, and sees him with a boy, Without metric artifices. Bell), but to mitigate the unexpressiveness, rhetorical and harshness of a totally realistic language, for things in this way “. In short, it is not the language that is dark, but often the meaning, closely connected to the circumstance for which the text was composed.