Today he would have turned 70 but his successes are immortal, even if Rino Gaetano has already left us for a long time.
It was the night of June 2, 1981 when a car accident on the Via Nomentana took him away, at the age of only 31.
In 1980 he recorded the album ‘Io non ci sto’, then he tried new paths collaborating with Riccardo Cocciante and New Perigeo. The accident prevented us from knowing what fruits the maturation of a truly singular talent could have yielded.
Rino Gaetano was born in Crotone on October 29, 1950 but at the age of ten he had already moved to Rome with his parents. The difficulties encountered at the beginning of his career are all attributable to his personality totally in contrast with the environment of Italian music of the time, which had recently absorbed the novelty of songwriters and which continued to be refractory to give space to characters difficult to label. Rino Gaetano in fact presented himself as a singer-songwriter but his humor and his unconventionality did not allow him to use the schemes hitherto adopted for his colleagues devoted to a serious declamatory and strongly ideological attitude.
Gaetano was one who, so to speak, threw her into laughter, who told about Italy inevitably ending up saying that the king was naked. Closer to Eduardo del ‘pernacchio’ than to ‘Rimmel”s De Gregori. His first 45, ‘I Love you Marianna’ was recorded under the Salgarian pseudonym of Kammamuri. To release his first album he had to wait two years: ‘Free entry’ was however ‘almost’ ignored by both the public and critics. Everything began to turn better in ’75 with ‘The sky is always bluer’, a song in which the nursery rhyme style that later made him popular is manifested. Then the album, ‘My brother is an only child’ was released, thanks to which, especially under the pressure of the song ‘Berta filava’, he began to make himself known. Indeed we can say that this is the beginning of his happiest period, the one between ’76 and ’78, a phase in which, thanks to his humor and his disenchanted attitude, he became a sort of musical clown. however capable of denouncing Italy’s flaws and defects without any hesitation.
To his discography are added ‘Aida’ and ‘Nuntereggaepiù’ whose success opens the doors of the Sanremo festival where he sings ‘Gianna’, a song that has long remained at the top of the hit parade and still today one of the most loved titles of his repertoire that in the meantime had been enriched by the album ‘Resta vile male dove vai’, made together with Mogol and remembered above all for the song ‘Ahi Maria’. Finally his tours get the desired results, after years in which he had to act as a shoulder for concerts by other artists in front of audiences who did not accept his humor and with whom he repeatedly engaged in violent verbal skirmishes.
Finally Rino Gaetano had managed to impose his style: it was no longer just a sort of ironic talking cricket of the song. Unfortunately, as often happens, only after his death did people begin to speak of him as a forerunner, even as a leader, given the influence he had on the new generations. The posthumous recognition resulted in the reissue of his albums, in tribute albums made by other artists who re-read his songs. Rino Gaetano was an outsider, a talent who conquered his space without mediation and concessions, an artist who, with a smile on his lips and a mockery in his words, never stopped telling the vices and defects of Italians.
–
