The Roman singer-songwriter celebrates half a century since his most beloved album by playing it in its entirety in theaters and arenas. It is not a tribute, but an artistic gesture. It is up to us to treasure and remember it, finally bringing it to school
Francesco De Gregori is about to go back on tour with Rimmelfifty years after its release. He will take an essential piece of our author’s music around Italy, playing the entire album – something increasingly rare – with a fidelity that is not nostalgia, but respect for the original form, after many artistic deviations. Each De Gregori tour has been an experimentation: rereadings, inversions, new arrangements, improvisations that bring him closer to his declared master, Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, De Gregori knows that the song is a mobile material, which lives only if rewritten over time, at the cost of not making the paying public hum, as has often happened in his concerts and as will not happen this time. It will be a show that is more like an artistic gesture than a concert: a work that comes alive over time, still capable of teaching. In this choice, which this time will please those who want to be moved, there is the artistic coherence of an author who, in half a century of career, has never stopped searching, but there is also the late De Gregori, more available to the public and more blunt in his ways with those who treat him, describe him and perhaps wait for him outside the theaters as if he were the new Homer, in search of a very commercial selfies instead of having a chat, as would be appropriate.
De Gregori, in the wake of Dylan in terms of production, style and inspiration, therefore, and Dylan himself, with his Pulitzer (2008) and his Nobel (2016), opened a path and led to the recognition that songwriters fully inhabit the republic of letters: they write in metric, they take care of aesthetics and sound, they choose every word – in the words of Ezra Pound – loading it to the highest degree of meaning: they are scientists of sound and researchers of meaning. Each song, written with artistic intentionality, is a linguistic and poetic laboratory.
This is why we should take an extra step: if De Gregori brings Rimmel in the theatres, we should take De Gregori to school. Not as a musical parenthesis, or an in-depth analysis to be done in a spare time, but as an author capable of describing Italy and its feelings with the same rigor as a writer. In his songs there are rhetorical figures and Italian history at the end of the century, there are elaborate syntactic constructions and references to the most burning issues of the Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s: there are themes, registers and symbols that fully belong to literature.
Probably, if De Gregori read these lines, he would rebel. He would shield himself, he would be ironic, he would claim other territories for his writing and his production. He has reasons, because a singer-songwriter has dual citizenship, musical and literary, but it is precisely this reluctance that confirms his greatness: truly literary authors never aspire to be so, and for this very reason they become so.
Bringing De Gregori – and his singer-songwriter brothers – to school means recognizing that literature does not end up in manuals, it is not just made up of ancient books, it is not a dated discipline by definition, but continues to live in the measured words that we choose to tell ourselves. And that certain verses – like certain songs – resist time because they are already born in dialogue with it, they analyze it, synthesize it and represent it.
Fifty years later, Rimmel continues to speak to us about love and disenchantment, with a true language. Anyone who wants to listen to him live will find a band on stage that is now a family: the ringleader Guido Guglielminetti on bass and musical direction, Paolo Giovenchi and Alessandro Valle on guitars, Carlo Gaudiello on keyboards, Primiano Di Biase on organ, Simone Talone on percussion and Francesca La Colla on backing vocals. Musicians who embroider a collective art form in which the word meets the sound and the song returns to being, as for Demodoco – singer-songwriter ante litteram Homeric – poetry in music.
