Vasco’s keyboard player: “This is how the intro to ‘Canzone’ was born”
For thirty-seven years he has been one of the regular presences of Vasco Rossi’s band. It was 1989 when Alberto Rocchetti, renamed “the Maremma wolf” by the rocker Zocca (the musician is originally from Montalto di Castro, near Viterbo, Maremma Lazio), joined the group of the voice of “Vita spericolata”. He has never left since then. If we exclude Claudio “il Gallo” Golinelli, the bassist alongside Vasco since 1979, who since 2019 has only participated in Rossi’s shows as a special guest, Rocchetti is the longest-serving member of the Blasco band. In concerts his moment has always coincided, in the collective memory of fans, with one of the key passages of the finale: the piano intro to “Canzone”. The song that Vasco wrote in 1982 inspired by his father who died prematurely, and which he often dedicated to his friend Massimo Riva, who passed away in 1999, opens the epilogue of the shows in the setlist, before “Albachiara” and “Vita spericolata” (which however this year Vasco chose to open the concerts with). Live, the performance of “Canzone” is preceded by a long prelude on the piano played by Alberto Rocchetti, who when he is not on tour with Vasco performs his projects live in clubs throughout Italy and on a recent evening he told the public the genesis of that prelude:
On my first tour (that of “Liberi liberi”, ed.) the concert ends and Vasco calls me to the dressing room. He tells me: “Go up and do two or three minutes of whatever you want before this song”. There were 30/40 thousand people outside. Inside I said: “But where am I going?”. And instead I went. This thing was born here, like this, in that moment. And so it remained for years.
Among the most famous performances of “Canzone” is the one in September 2008 at the Stadio Dall’Ara in Bologna during the tour of “Il mondo che would like”, also immortalized by the cameras of the DVD “Il mondo che would live 2008”: it was one of the times when, while singing the song, Vasco sent a thought to Massimo Riva. “You are always with us, long live Massimo Riva”.
There is a video, dating back to a concert held by the rocker at the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome (at the time called PalaEur, from the name of the area of the capital where the arena is located) during the 1987 tour of the album “C’è chi dice no”, which immortalizes Rossi and Massimo Riva himself while they sing “Canzone” together sitting on the edge of the stage. A moment of almost disarming sweetness, testifying to a friendship that to define as fraternal is an understatement: “When he died, I missed the figure, the person, not so much for the guitarist: there was a relationship of complicity between us that went beyond the show on stage”, Vasco would have said twenty years after his death, remembering him.
