Palalido di Milano, 1976: trial of Venditti. The exclusive video
There was a period in which being a singer -songwriter meant being in the trenches. Those who stood on stage was not harmless, and the audience was not even under. Although often on the same side – that of young people who dreamed of a new world and organized their assault on the sky – the disputes abounded, even scared. The trial of Francesco De Gregori at the Palalido in Milan, 2 April 1976, a trauma that removed him from the scenes, but never remembers the Palalido of Antonello Venditti, accompanied by Ivan Graziani and faced on November 30 of the same year, therefore after the fact of De Gregori, despite the fact of De Gregori, is well known.
Venditti today turns 76 and we wish him wishes finally showing some movements in the movement of what happened at that concert, contested by self -reflectors. They are extracted from a video that lasts hours, kindly granted by the Alberto Grifi social promotion association (www.albertogrifi.com), which catalogs, digitizes and protects the artistic heritage of our most visionary and experimental director of, From the 1950s to the first 2000. The document is in fact doubly exceptional, because to turn it directly, assisted by Claudio Caligari (“Toxic Love”, “The smell of the night”, “not to be bad”) and Franco Barbero, is Alberto Grifi, the craftsman filmmaker, independent to the bone, who resumed life, author of the film-cult “Anna”, of “The uncertain verification” (which inspired “Blob”) and much more. In the archive, for example, they are kept live recordings of Parco Lambro (Don Cherry, Eugenio Finardi, Area, Napoli Centrale), the Dodi Moscati concert at the Folk Studio, the music by Paolo Fresu for the film “Traveling with Patrizia”, a lot of material waiting for funds to be restored.
We make the concert at Palalido tells him directly by Antonello Venditti, who dedicates a couple of chapters to him in his latest book “Out of focus” (published by Rizzoli – the cover at the end of the page):
«I was prepared to be attacked. They had not spared Francesco, nor De André, the Led Zeppelin nor Lou Reed, let alone me, that I was even more commercial. Anyone who met, advised against introducing me to the Palalido live. “They will tear you apart,” they said unanimously. “If you accept, you’re finished”, “fake to feel bad and removed from this impriticcio”. I kept a casual face, out of fire I burned. I was afraid? Many. My son was in the cradle and I asked him: “I have to go there or not?” He laughed everything. With the lips, with the eyes, with the fugogy, and with the unreasonable trust that babies have. He laughed and replied: “It means that I have to be annà.” Incidentally, with myself I speak in Romano. I would have gone for me, for him, to demonstrate courage and, perhaps, presumption, breaking a kind of curse that risked giving us all and had already landed there.
The concert was organized by the free radio channel 96, close to the avant -garde worker. I went for them, the same ones who would contest me asking “the verification” of my positions. “700 lire instead of 1500! We died to protest the cost of the ticket, too high for young proletarians, and against the contents that Venditti carries on in the songs! ” The girl screams with the megaphone, in the pouring rain. A partner of his grasses the same Tyritera like a crow. Malaugurio in Dirotto comes down. The storm awaits me inside.
Ivan Graziani, with me live, takes courage and with the acoustic guitar does “the field of the fair”. Various objects fly on stage. No attention to my guitarist.
About ten people go up, each appropriates the microphone: “I invite the dormitory sold not to play,” says a guy. Another tears the microphone: «Venditti composed the anthem of Rome. This is enough to understand how it behaves ». Another moves him in weight: «Comrades! I read three press releases! ».
I let it do. I sit on the piano, and whistles and coins rain. Attilate “Attila and the star”, and applause rains. Difficult to interpret this audience. I continue with “The wounded ibex”, explaining that the ibex represents the industrialist, the class enemy, who has the cups to end at the end of the porcelain, the son to the English college and forty billions hidden in the roof, while the poacher is the one who wants to shoot him and aim, but for pity he cannot press the trigger. In the end, it is the hunter of Frodo who killed killed, at the hands of the police. I make the song, which cannot be defined as a comrade, and the cries start: «Borghese! Bourgeois!”.
They whistle and whistle broken amplifiers. A great mess. A boy reaches the microphone: “Culture must start from the neighborhood young people, not by the shit songwriters who define themselves part of the movement!”. And again: “Venditti wears the mask of the partner.” I listen, then I reply: «The language became sterile, we should only play. I go ahead and apologize to the sound, accept it for what it is ». Applause.
A new relay to the microphone starts. «Comrades, the concert is done here. And then the political position of Venditti will be discussed ». At this point, all my Romanity, including forced side, comes out, that of the “I understand and provide”, sincere, which has not been the same counterattack. The Roman nun is. With a word he ammazza because everyone understands his language but only he knows how to use it. I reply lapidary: «Guys, maybe you are wrong. I didn’t come to suffer a process. I respect the minorities, but I am for the majority, because I know a democrat ». I am still interrupted. Then I decide: “The concert is over, do what you see”.
One of Canale 96 runs for cover. At the microphone he insists: «Antonello! I ask you to sing. Please Ivan, can you stop that guitar? ». Because in all this, Graziani continued to make note to create a background. He was frightened, but since he seemed to be in a film, and since he never knew how to detach his fingers from the ropes, he was improvising a surrealist soundtrack.
The type of channel 96 resumes: «We don’t care to divide four thousand people because of another hundred. The goal of us young people is to have a mass sequel. Raise your hand who wants to sell singing … and then discuss it ». It is not exactly conceivable to sing and I go under the endoscopic exams. But I’m Roman, and I’m Toshiro. I reply, I claim the right to talk about what I want, also of Rome, if it is part of my life.
I put my fingers on the plane and start “Maria Maddalena”, interrupted by a bang. Someone detached the cables, others invade the stage. In the chaos, a boy shouts: “Is there a doctor in the room?”.
One of those who invaded the stage is a blood mask. I pass alongside me with red, I don’t know if he was injured in the fight, if he split his head against the piano in an attempt to defend me or catch me. They pull him down and take him away.
By accepting that concert, I lent myself to getting my contradictions burst, and above all the contradictions of the movement. They argued among them, among the youth circles, I was the pretext. I understood their instances, they were the same as mine, but I did not share the ways. They were screwing themselves on concepts and words. They asked for freedom and in the meantime they suffocated it. The mask of his partner Venditti was more impressed that the blood mask of a peer, and this alarmed me, because they were losing sight of people.
In “The injured ibex” my poacher, with all his reasons to shoot, had spared the industrialist. In reality I feared would not go like this. Someone would have pressed the trigger. I felt a double sorrow: for the violence in store and for the waste of beauty. I had never seen, and I have not seen it since then, such an interest in the common thing, such a trust in collective force, cascade ideas, from the “prevents” on the antipsychiatry to transmissions for homosexual liberation, free radio, counter -information, a great desire to speak, to share, not to leave anyone behind.
There have been prodigious and heavy years. We think of the singer -songwriter as a mild and acclaimed minstrel, and it was not so. That day I sang, because in the face of a hundred protesters, thousands of other boys were there to listen to me. I was not interested in success, but consent yes. Sortit was angry aware of moving in the same direction, for the same goal. We songwriters wanted to show a democratic way to reach the same goals, perhaps for this reason, from many sides, we were hindered.
And it didn’t end there. While I was going from Palalido, overwhelmed, upset, but also raised for how I defended myself, who is it I see? Lucio Dalla. I see it and the vomiting on the shoulder. He had not witnessed the media, he had come to me all happy for the performance, and I threw him on the shoulder for the accumulated tension. Not long after, while playing at the Castello Sforzesco, on his stage they would not have pulled coins but a Molotov bomb ».
