Vasco, Alfredo and that song that he couldn’t rewrite today
The fault, in reality, was Andrea’s. But in the lyrics of the song Vasco was writing, “Andrea” sounded bad. “I missed another good opportunity tonight / she went home with the black man, the slut / I got distracted for a moment… / Andrea’s fault”: maybe it’s because those lines have now become iconic and we can’t imagine them with other words, but in reality “Andrea” didn’t fit very well in that verse. And so Andrea was renamed Alfredo. And it became Alfredo’s fault. Andrea Giacobazzi For his entire life in Zocca he heard himself called by a name that wasn’t his: the one that his friend Vasco, who would soon become the most loved rock star in Italy, decided to give him in 1980.
He died today, at the age of 66, from post-operative complications. The news was reported by some local newspapers and was then confirmed by the rocker himself with a post shared on his official social channels: like this.Another piece of Vasco Rossi’s epic story is goneafter the tour manager Maurizio Lolli, “the younger brother” Massimo Riva, the historic producer Guido Elmi.
“Dear Ciciui, I will miss you very much. You will always be alive inside my heart. Long live Andrea Giacobazzi (colpa d’Alfredo),” Vasco wrote on Instagram, sharing the video of the live version of “Colpa d’Alfredo” played in 2017 in Modena Park, the record-breaking concert-event with which he celebrated his forty-year career in front of over 220 thousand spectators. “Andrea was always on my side even when many turned their backs on me. They pretended not to know me. They didn’t believe in what I was doing. He, together with Marengo in Modena, have always been close to me. I would like to remember this because I know he cared about it. Last but not least, he was among the first to have the ‘vision’ of what later became ‘Modena Park’.
When Vasco Rossi wrote “Colpa d’Alfredo”, at the end of 1979, already had two albums under his belt, “…But what do you want a song to be…” from 1978 and “We’re not the Americans!”. “Albachiara” had begun to circulate her name even outside Emilia-Romagna, but Rossi was not yet the pop star who would conquer the whole of Italy after participating in the 1983 Sanremo Festival with “Vita spericolata”, destined to become a generational manifesto. In “Alfredo’s Guilt” he recounted his (mis)adventures in the Emilian province: “‘Colpa d’Alfredo’, the song, was my photograph of Modena Saturday night fever, I told what had happened to me one evening at the Terminal, where I worked as a DJ.
I was playing UFO video games with a friend, and the girl goes off with the local hot guy (actually his name was Santino, very cute and not black at all). I told the story the next morning to Massimo Riva, I joked about it and he laughed like crazy: that’s how the song was born. .It was the fault of a friend who started conversations at the most important or delicate moments (someone who stayed in the club until three every evening and who I continue to see)“, Vasco told in the book “The young Vasco – My rock fable”, in 2017. The friend was, in fact, Andrea Giacobazzi.
Initially chosen as the lead single for the singer-songwriter’s third album, with the homonymous title, “Colpa d’Alfredo” was censored because of the line “the slut went home with the nigger” and for the promotion it was proposed, as an alternative, “You didn’t understand it”. Vasco explained on several occasions that the term nigger did not refer to a black person but indicated a particular physical characteristic. Today “Colpa d’Alfredo” would overcome the ax of censorship – much worse things are heard on the radio – but not that of politically correct. It was he himself who recognized it, with his usual irony: “If I wrote ‘Alfredo’s fault’ today they would arrest me”.
