Mysterious noon at Prajou. Breton counterra. Nothing but siesta. Gianni has been going on for hours, he has set his mind on recreating an irresistible sound created the day before. A circular bass line, he responds with echoes, a beautiful and penetrating sound which, however, when it's time to record, no longer comes out of him. He wants to avoid the artificial loop of cut and sew, which is too easy. Authenticity in command. The others are starting to get impatient, someone snorts, another yawns, there are those who are ready to utter a blasphemy in the form of a crooked, sharp chord. Giovanni doesn't even know that there is such a stall at home, he is at the seaside, he observes the wave motion. Then the short circuit of memory: Gianni remembers having stopped the strings with his hand covered by a fleece shirt like a Canadian lumberjack. Blessed grunge. He puts it back and finally that sound returns to him, soft and hypnotic, a warm current.
It is an unmissable invitation, the retained energy begins to overflow at dusk. Pino starts with a round and ritual pattern, a la Peter Gabriel, the others follow. And they follow well, so much so that the room swells with its own sound, swirling, concentric, up to the explosive and liberating part; an electric tide in which the guitars navigate, overlap each other while both maintaining their own identity. It must be consolidated, crystallized, held firm in the emotional wave of birth to fix it in memory and open it to the sung words.
In the morning he recovers, as if by magic the power is intact. The sound is so superb, almost apocalyptic, that it reaches all the way to the sea. There he finds Giovanni, who has no feet in the water because he is standing in front of a desert scene, and when the tide of sound reaches him he can only convey in words what the music only allows us to glimpse.
«That morning, thanks to the tide, you could see the sand. This play of tides, high water and beaches that are not always visible gratified me greatly and influenced my writing. I'll be fine here, I told myself, but even on the seashore the powerful volumes of the music reached me, the wind favored these gusts of notes so I began to tell what was happening to me: “At times I perceive clear details among the indistinct buzz” they were the first verses. And since it was a pure stream of consciousness, I couldn't do anything but offer it to them by singing it quickly, without rehearsing it, without paying attention to the score where there were no sea waves that I heard before. They were very good at preserving that initial sensation.”
It was born like this At times: the most representative episode of those days and of the future album for its genesis, the sound entity, the visibility of the parts fused together, the caliber of the text which fits perfectly for reasons that might seem arcane but are not so. The composition method is not purely singer-songwriter, text and music do not emerge in the harmony of a single jet of frontal breaths, mutual fillings and tiles that fit together. The first step is the creation of a musical block on which the lyrics are grafted, susceptible to labor limae: the CSI operate in the wake of the typical methods of classic rock groups, units which, net of leadership and protagonism, collectively construct their music . Without a score, together live in the studio, in a circle to look at each other and hear each other.
This implacable and raw rock, with a clearly electric structure without the worry of the supporting riff, the solo, the canonical management of the rock song, invites Giovanni to tell what his senses perceive. It is a debut – it will necessarily be the opening song – also for the words, autobiographical and characterized by an accumulation of images, by an adjective that serves to evoke a birth, an evolution. More than resignation, more than reaction, Giovanni gives voice to an arcane conservatism alien to a certain libertarian and progressive clamor of Italian rock: “Whoever is there is there and whoever isn't there isn't there” is not a call to gathered to demonstrate on a hot topic, “He who has been, and who has been, is not” is not a claim of presence and a value judgment, “Remembering that everything goes as it goes” is not a supine acceptance of what exists, they are philosophical insights on being summed up with instinctive simplicity, with the persuasive logic of the mountain punk thinker.
Also striking is his profession of detachment from idolatry, from the messianism that overwhelms the blessing rock singers, white lights pointed at him and the papal podium at the center of the stage. The era of dogmas, even in music, is over with the world. “Don't make an idol of me: I will burn myself. Turn me into a megaphone and I'll jam. I don't know what to do or not do” indicate precisely this burning desire, now explicit and declared, not to look at him as a lighthouse, it is no longer the time and above all it is not the case.
«Those verses served precisely to immediately put the cards on the table: I do not represent those who would like to be represented by me. The relationship between stage and audience is complicated, I don't know how to resolve it: I can only tolerate Ferretti, nothing else and nothing more, so if someone places expectations on me, when you make yourself an idol to whom you dedicate your life, no, I've had enough of mine. But it's an obvious truth, I can be Ferretti on stage, not the idol of those who come to hear Ferretti.”
It is the beginning of a solitary path, like when Bob Dylan refused to be considered the protesting voice of a generation, or when John Lennon faced the myth of the Beatles and turned away angrily. But as Giovanni underlines, it is a problem that cannot be solved, it is a fact of which he is aware. In the same way he is aware of the new timbre of his low voice, he still doesn't know how to manage it well so they suggest he sing in a different, less canonical way: he goes out into the garden, crouching with the microphone between his knees on a stone table to avoid the sound recesses that exist indoors.
Based on the book by Donato Zoppo CSI – It was once the world (Aliberti Editorial Company).