Red Canzian, my 70 years as an album to tell

  (ANSA) - ROME, NOV 26 - "My years are the ones I lived and as long as I am on the front line and have the freedom of my dreams, their number will not be conditioning for me". Red Canzian, the Pooh on bass for almost a lifetime - even if the definition is reductive - is ready to blow out the 70 candles.

    He will do it on November 30th, on a cake that "my friend pastry chef Ernst Knam has promised to give me as a gift" and with a party that is a bit surprising and a bit no. "My wife is organizing it, I don't even know who will be there. But I trust her and I know it will be a party with friends and relatives as I like it, without embarrassment. I don't like big things, that's why there are concerts and the stadium lights, I like to be able to talk, discuss, experience the emotions with those in front of me ".

    The passing of time worries him up to a certain point also because the round figures, he explains on the phone with ANSA from his Treviso, leave the time they find. "I have an anomalous relationship with numbers, I remember but then I don't care to keep track.

    Neither of the money needed, nor of the years that require commitment.

    The important thing is to be self-aware". The others remind him that this time there are 70 (he was born on November 30, 1951 in Quinto di Treviso) and, for better or for worse, they are still to be celebrated. "My life is like an album to be told", is his amused synthesis. After all, he grew up on bread and seven notes.

    "At 12, with the acoustic guitar that my father had given me, I already knew I wanted to be a rock star, indeed I was convinced I was: I just had to convince others too". And it didn't take long: at the age of 20 - with a surveyor's diploma in his pocket to please his father Giovanni - he played with Capsicum Red (with which he also participated in the Festivalbar) and released his first singles and then in 1972 a record progressive.

    The following year, in 1973, the Pooh called him to replace Riccardo Fogli, who left the group to pursue a solo career. "That's the best thing that could have happened to me", admits Red candidly (Bruno, in the registry office). And that he is an integral part of the professional Canzian, as a multi-instrumentalist, singer, author, is demonstrated by the fact that speaking of himself and of what he has been, Red often speaks in the plural. "Having regrets for a career like ours would be ungrateful of life." Looking back, today he would have evaluated one thing differently: "With the Poohs, at the beginning of the Eighties, we missed the train abroad. Out of provincialism, out of fear, for the children who were young, we preferred the Italian market. But you know,the safe roads are those already traveled. "Everything, he says, can be done better," but I have always acted with care, love and attention in respect of those around me. "Both professionally and personally, he is keen to specify.

    The musician, he continues, is the first thing that "I did well, and I continued to do so. If this hadn't been the way, I know I would have done something artistic anyway: I would have painted or written. the surveyor. In some way I would have communicated, I designed the Pooh logo together with a friend, I would have been in contact with the public, because that's what excites me the most ". And he reveals how at the beginning Luchino Visconti had called him for an audition for Death in Venice. "Ron was there too and we talked all the time about music, Visconti, perhaps annoyed by our attitude, chose another one".

    Pooh, despite having disbanded in 2016, remain a milestone in the history of Italian music. But no second thoughts and no reunion on the horizon. "Especially after the death of Stefano D'Orazio, who devastated me. He was not just a friend but an accomplice. With his disappearance a chapter is definitively closed. When they ask us to do a tribute concert or something like that, we don't I understand the meaning and it makes me sick. Stefano wouldn't give a damn about a live show in his honor, he is certainly happier with the association that bears his name. Without him, the Pooh would be like a table without a leg, it wouldn't be standing". And then he attacks: "I didn't like at all that the Rolling Stones went on tour two minutes after Charlie Watts died. We always put thefriendship at work and not the other way around ".

    No Pooh in the future, but projects, yes, and many.

"I have in mind a new book and a record of unpublished works, linked together. Ideas make their way into my head and turn into projects. But first Casanova Opera Pop has to be brought to the stage".

    The show he has been working on - also due to the covid that delayed its realization - with the whole family (his wife Bea, his son Philipp, his daughter Chiara) for 3 years and which will debut on 21 January in Venice, before going on tour in Italy and then abroad.

"It will happen, I am sure. Italy can no longer afford to close. And we need beauty, a new Renaissance. The pandemic has left us with so much pain and pain does not make us better. Beauty will save the world".

(HANDLE).