Francesco De Gregori turns 70 on Sunday 4 April
, an important birthday that finds him in a very positive period of his career that recently saw him resume the thread of his ancient friendship with Antonello Venditti: the two are scheduled for a concert at the Olympic stadium in Rome on July 17.
The best hope that can be addressed to the author of "Rimmel", notoriously allergic to celebrations, is that that concert can really go on stage.
In just over a month, on May 24, Bob Dylan, his musical legend, will turn 80 and one thinks that that date will not fail to celebrate it.
Looking back we realize that the first steps in music De Gregori took them 50 years ago, in the legendary Folkstudio in Rome where he met Venditti and where that Roman School was born that remains one of the fundamental chapters of Italian music: it is precisely by referring to this new generation of authors that Vincenzo Micocci, the record company who first put them under contract, coined the term songwriters.
De Gregori has always preferred to be defined as an artist.
Half a century of music lived with coherence in which he contributed to giving the song a new and more culturally elevated value, as a form of autonomous expression, the songwriting, in fact, which remains one of the most original and fruitful products of the culture of the century last.
And it's funny to think that "Alice", the song from his solo debut, after "Theorius Campus" with Antonello Venditti, in 1973 came last at the Disco per l'Estate.
Like all great artists, Francesco De Gregori has founded a style, highly imitated but unattainable, he has undermined the rules of traditional composition and brought his culture into the texts, transfiguring the non-linear narration and the flow of history into poetic language.
An individualist who has always been open to collaborations, the one with Venditti, with De André, the historic one with Lucio Dalla who first in 1979 with "Banana Republic" brought the songwriting to stadiums for the first time and then in 2010 celebrated his career and the friendship of two brilliant friends with "Work in Progress", with Giovanna Marini and Ambrogio Sparagna, with whom she pays homage to her passion for Italian popular music, not to mention the long list of duets and pieces written together or for other great ones of Italian music.
Assuming that he feels like it, if he were to take stock of what has been done so far he could start from the certainty of having produced undisputed masterpieces, albums and songs that are in the imagination of entire generations, of having managed to avoid the risk of the cliché, of remaining trapped in formulas, in labels, even at the cost of challenging the public when live, just like Dylan did, he made his songs almost unrecognizable.
And he did well in 2015 to celebrate the forty years of "Rimmel", one of the "desert island" albums of Italian music, with a great celebratory concert at the Verona Arena.
Despite the great changes that have taken place in musical production in the last years of this decade, De Gregori remains very topical, especially now that generation Z has rediscovered the pleasure of music and text that is not just a sequence of bars dedicated to solipsistic discomfort.
From his attitude, it seems that the 70 years find him in a moment of serenity, always considering the moment we are living: in 2015 he finally gave body and music to his love for Dylan with the album dedicated to the Italian translation of eleven songs of the first Nobel Prize musician, now, just like at the beginning of his formidable career, he is ready to return to the stage with Antonello Venditti.
And we can bet that there is an entire country ready to wish him well.