October 13, 2021 2:34 pm
Before the harmonica riff that opens It was your fault, of the satirical re-readings and for the use and consumption of all of Pinocchio and Peter Pan, of Long live mom e An Italian summer, Edoardo Bennato was above all The Tower of Babel. It was for only one year, 1976, as the following summer would come Wireless puppet, to which Italy would have associated for a long time his identity as an anarchic, ironic, fairy-tale songwriter. But enough, anyway, not to mention a minor album.
Thanks to those songs, in fact, he developed his own style of writing, while for the first time the public really noticed him. And these are reasons that, forty-five years later, are worth a reissue with remastered original tapes and various extras. “Even if”, he admits on the phone, “it’s more of an operation decided by the record companies than anything else”. He says it hastily, on the sidelines of a more thoughtful speech. He is sincere: “I’m interested in the future, not the past”. However? “But the concept of the album is very current: our babel of ideas and conflicts is even more exasperated than the years of lead ”.
The biblical metaphor, in fact, tells the Italy of the time, those of the bombs, the student movements and the armed struggle. When he began to write the songs, Bennato had thirty years of experiments behind him, a childhood in the Bagnoli district, an industrial suburb of Naples with “multi-ethnic condominiums with one hundred families each”, some exams at the faculty of architecture and a career still opaque as a songwriter. “In 1973 after the debut of Don’t drop your arms“, He says,” my label, Ricordi, tells me to change jobs: I have an awkward voice, the radios are not willing to broadcast me. But without that refusal The Tower of Babel would not have been born “. And he probably wouldn’t be the one we know. Rather than smoothing the corners, in fact, it sharpens them. He discovers punk, he begins to perform in the street and fill the songs with verses, screams, sarcastic allusions and melodies imported from blues and twist, between Bob Dylan (from which he takes the use of the harmonica), American rock and colleagues such as Fabrizio De André. He finds his own identity, with two other break-in albums which correspond to a growing, albeit still small, success. But 1976 was now the time for songwriters, with the public disinterested in “the great stars of the songs” looking for ideas elsewhere. And so when she finally turned his attention to him, he was ready.
But he was different from his colleagues, Bennato, and The Tower of Babel he distanced himself from the songwriting of the time. “Like all my songs, it was the son of being an architect, urban planner, sociologist and at the same time crazy“, explains. Translated: he was the son of an artist capable of playing on several levels, drawing captivating and light melodies that actually hide bitter, social messages. Already from the cover, designed by himself with “a tower different from that of the biblical tradition, in which on each floor there are weapons patented by man following the evolutionary line”. From club to missiles. “For millennia we have cultivated the perversion of killing ourselves,” he says. “We are in conflict, always. And an agreement would not be difficult: it would be enough to preserve the indisputable truth of science, and then open up to dialogue. But the world is divided into factions and supporters. I have never been within this scheme, at the cost of being accused of indifference ”.
And indeed The Tower of Babel he is so anarchic on the musical level, between melancholic ballads and entertainment dancers, American influences and Mediterranean tradition, how difficult it is to frame on the ideological one. He espouses precise values - closeness to the least, contempt for power, anti-racism, pacifism – but is proud not to take sides on either side of the fence. “This is a political but not a militant album”, summarizes Bennato. If anything, he says, the strength of the work is in the irony of the lyrics, in their opposition to the music. A little heresy, in the age of commitment.
Long live war for example it is a paroxysmal hymn already from the title, How many good people a restless and sarcastic blues, while Eaa it starts as a seemingly light rockabilly, recounting the carefree trip of a schoolchildren on a bus with broken brakes and the driver aware of the breakdown, ready to dive out, alone, just before the crash. A sort of small-scale Titanic. And then there is Franz is my name, a ballad covered in sequins born from a trip to divided Berlin, a Berlin “prison on the contrary, in which one is free only near the Wall, while further on the lies of East and West dominate”. Franz, the protagonist, sells dreams to exiles from the east, but the promised land does not await them in the west, “rather just showcase consumerism”. The same that regulates the anxiety of the dylaniana I will sell, perhaps the most famous piece of the lot, with a text by his brother Eugenio. He sings: “I will sell my diploma to the masters of progress, to build a new automaton that will give them more wealth and me success”. And again: “Everything has its price, but no one will know how much my freedom costs”. Yeah, how much? “Being considered a renegade by many intellectual circles. And I’m proud of it ”.
Yet, despite the proclamations of independence, with the success Bennato was really “bought by the system”. Or at least that’s how the Autiduttori accused him, a movement close to the extra-parliamentary left for which music and concerts had to be free. They interrupted the live shows, whistled the artists, subjected them to trials in front of the spectators. It happened to songwriters like De Gregori, Antonello Venditti and Lucio Dalla, accused of getting rich by singing about those themes dear to the socialists, it happened to international names like Lou Reed and Led Zeppelin. “And think that I had also imposed the symbolic price of a thousand lire”, smiles Bennato remembering when the protests arrived under his stage, in September 1977 in Pesaro. Some excerpts from that show can be found in the reissue of The Tower of Babel, and they convey the same climate of tension.
“They accused me of being a sellout, when in fact in a piece like Songwriter, also from 1976, I invited everyone not to take me seriously, not to divinize me ”. It wasn’t enough. “The Auto-Reducers broke into the sports hall thinking they were facing a star of the song, at most a staid intellectual. Instead they found me, exhausted from an exhausting tour and with a leg in plaster. I’ve never had managers and similar figures: I’ve always shot with friends from the courtyard, the ones I grew up with in Bagnoli. People little inclined to provocations. We tried not to answer the whistles. But when the situation escalated we interrupted the concert. He ended up in a fight. Other than trial “.
Little aligned to the context even in this, Bennato today defines them as “bourgeois who played the revolution”, but still reveals a bit of nostalgia for those times when music was perceived and experienced as a commitment, rather than “as a pose “. Compared to the seventies, he says, he has not changed: he has remained alternative, “counter-current and full of doubts”, despite the popularity that would come from 1977 – in 1980 he will be the first Italian artist to perform at the San Siro stadium, a few weeks later Bob Marley. But he doesn’t think he was prophetic with the Babel tower. “The story that the Bible tells is that of men who challenge God, nature, and are punished by superior forces, which plunge them into chaos. I think it’s a coincidence, but I see parallels with today’s world, with the pandemic. We are in total Babylon, the record still speaks to us ”.
And if the bus of Eaa continues to slide down with broken brakes towards tragedy, without anyone noticing, while the shop windows of I will sell are on – “the wars follow the same script of 1976 and the last ones are still last” – the irony and the characters of The Tower of Babel they are also a compass for 2021.
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