From Pooh to the theater: the career, dreams and Parsifal’s musical revolution
Camillo Facchinetti, called Roby, had great dreams as a child. And two tools to start creating them: the chorus of the parish and the accordion lessons of Maestro Luigi Ravasio. Immersed between the meadows and trees of the Astino Valley, one step away from the upper city of Bergamo, it could not imagine that when she great would have written the history of Italian music with the Pooh and that one day, at eighty, she would have published, as a soloist, her first progressive and symphonic rock work: Parsifal.
Like the title of the historic Pooh song of 1973: «There is obviously a red thread that connects that piece of ten minutes to today’s work, a dream that has become reality thanks to five years of hard work. So much has served to tell, put in music and arrange the deeds of the Wagnerian Knightless Knight. An album like this, in the death and escape discography today, is simply a madness, a revolutionary gesture, but on the other hand my motto is: if you fall in love with a project, never ask how much it costs, realize it. Now, the next dream is to bring Parsifal on stage »says remembering the two friends, who are no longer there today, Valerio Negrini (author of the Pooh texts) and Stefano D’Orazio (the group’s drummer). «Their contribution to Parsifal was fundamental, they put their souls … in recent times, aware of his health problems, I phoned Stefano every day. On a damned afternoon of November 2020, he tells me that he has just discovered that he is positive. I am terrified and he, perceiving my concern, says “Roby, don’t worry, apart from Covid all goes well”. Instead, everything was bad: he is hospitalized and intubated. A few hours later he leaves … Here, the extraordinary work he did on Parsifal’s texts is his artistic will »he explains.
It is a witness of the story Roby Facchinetti, a story made of stadiums and sports halls and, for one evening also of fear, tear me daring and daring escapes: «In 1971 we were part of the Cantagiro (a festivalbar ante litteram; ed). On July 5, the Led Zeppelin are invited to close the evening at Vigorelli in Milan. A golden occasion for the protesters and politicized self -reflectors who demanded music for free. As soon as the English band begins to play, it is chaos: thousands of them press on the gates to break through by launching stones and various objects towards the policemen who respond with tear gas. Inside Vigorelli is true fear: you don’t breathe anymore, tear eyes, stones and batons fly, the Led Zeppelins flee stunned in the dressing rooms after three songs, everyone runs desperately towards the exits dodging the posts of the police and flying objects. Dodi and I (battle, the pooh guitarist; ed) we can escape and we run like crazy for minutes and minutes with the heart in the throat until we see an open garage along the way. We go inside, close the shutters and wait for the end of the “war”. We went out at four in the morning, “he remembers.
Over three thousand concerts in Italy and in the world, twelve thousand hours, one more one less, on stage with the Pooh, millions of spectators, thousands of kilometers with any means, engraving rooms, adventures and encounters, some random, destined to remain forever: “A few months after the death of John Lennon, we go on pilgrimage to the Dakota Building in New York where he had been killed in pistol shots. We are in silence, moved, at the exact point where it was hit, and suddenly from the door, Yoko Ono leaves. “Are we an Italian band, can we take a photograph with you?” John and I always came here, under this tree, when we wanted to be happy. “Unforgettable.”
Now that Parsifal has come out as an album his name entirely made by him, with another ensemble of musicians, without the historic brand that accompanied him throughout his life, is the time of some consideration: «I am sure I spent more hours on the stage with the Pooh than with my family. I have five children and maybe I accompanied only one on the first day of school. I was not at home the first time they said mom and dad. I missed degrees and birthdays, but I witnessed everyone’s birth because that’s the moment that cannot be missed “he underlines.
“The Pooh were a totalizing experience, made of music but also of meetings on meetings with discussions even on and divergences. But every time it was as if the Pooh logo filed on our heads: whatever discussion was a grain of sand, dust compared to the importance of our history ».
And then the fans, a sea of faces and stories disseminated long years of his career: «One above all: yogi, a Bulgarian superfan. We were in Sofia in the late seventies, he wanted to meet us, but he knew that if they had caught him he would be arrested and sent to collect beets in some work fields. He made us have his address with a whirlwind of cards and Stefano and I (D’Orazio; editor’s note) reached him by taxi. He dreamed of Italy, we told him that it was not a good time for our country: the massacres, the kidnappings, the red brigades, the people killed on the street. “I know,” he said, “but don’t forget that you are free to go where you want, I don’t, I can’t move from here.” It came to cry. “
Still tears in Lapland, but for another reason: convinced by his son Francesco to participate in the television format 50 ways to get dad out, the Pooh voice finds himself in front of the reindeer who should have dragged him into the snow on the skis: «I try to caress it, but he is very pissed because they had tied it to a tree, so in a thousandth of second he raises his legs and frees a deadly one-due on my front. If I hadn’t had a hat of hair with a ten centimeter visor, I would have died there with the cranium uncovered »
