We're just back from a couple of weeks in Italy. I first visited the country back in 1975 as a high school exchange student. I returned in 1978-79 to spend a year studying at the University of Florence. To date, I've spent nearly eight years living and working in Italy. I hope I can squeeze in a couple more years before I'm done.
Being in Italy as a high school and college student made quite an impression on me. I fell for everything about the country -- the history, the art, the culture, the food, the wine, and not least, Italian pop music. Though Italy had a burgeoning rock music scene in the 1960s, for me the golden age of Italian rock was the 1970s. Specifically, this was the time that cantautori (singer songwriters) like Lucio Dalla, Francesco De Gregori, Lucio Battisti, Frabrizio De Andre, Francesco Guccini and Eduardo Bennato, were turning out thoughtful, beautifully-crafted albums, seemingly one after the other.
Anyhoo, since we hadn't been to Italy for a number of years, on this trip I planned to hit a few used records stores. We were visiting Florence and Venice, but as it turned out, I ended up only going to a couple of stores in Florence, both of which were terrific.
The Twisted Jazz Shop
The first, in the Oltrarno (across the Arno River) near the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, was the Twisted Jazz Shop. Most of their stock is new, and as you might surmise, the store specializes in jazz LPs, of which they have a fabulous selection. They also have a good number of new popular and classical titles, as well as bins of used LPs under the main tables. To be honest, except for some outstanding but hard-to-find Italian jazz artists, it doesn't make much sense to buy classic jazz albums in Italy. In nearly all cases, they are much cheaper and easier to find in the U.S. So I spent my time going through the bins of used Italian pop albums. They thoughtfully provide kiddie-sized chairs to use while rummaging through the bins. I found 8-10 titles that I couldn't pass up, including a couple of 1980s albums by Eduardo Bennato and Antonello Venditti, and a couple of new pressings of LPs by Paolo Conte. While Conte doesn't quite fit into the "rock" category, he is a singular figure in Italian popular music. A former lawyer who turned 70 this year, Conte is a painter, poet, songwriter, and gravelly-voiced pianist whose music is a unique blend of pop, chanson, jazz and a bunch of other stuff. His songs often have a pastiche of Italian, French and English lyrics. He's some kind of a cross between Jacques Brel, Mose Allison, and Tom Waits, to include Waits' caustic sense of humor. Well worth seeking out.
Rock Bottom Records
A few days later I had a chance to visit Rock Bottom Records, which is just around the corner from the Bargello Museum in Florence's historic center. Rock Bottom may be the best organized record store I've ever been in. Every one of their thousands of records, whether new or used, has a printed sheet with details about the LP's condition and pressing history, as well as information about the specific release and the artist. A helpful note on each used album states that the record has been cleaned with a Keith Monk Record Cleaning Machine. Impressive. After checking the condition of a few albums, I stopped looking, because it was clear that the folks running this store know their business. Take my word for it, if they say the record is in NM condition, it is. Perhaps as a result of the meticulous care they take of all their stock, and the fact that they seem to only carry used LPs in top condition, the prices are on the high end. And somewhat surprisingly, they seemed to have more U.S. and U.K. pressings than Italian. In fact, they had one of the best selections of original Allman Brothers albums that I've seen anywhere. However, in their small but well-curated selection of classic Italian pop, I managed to find a few gems, including a beautiful copy of Vol. 2 of a live concert by Fabrizio De Andre from 1979 that I've been looking for for quite some time because I was at the concert! The albums (Vol. 1 and 2) were recorded at shows in Florence and Bologna. The cover of the LP (below) shows a photo of the crowd in Florence, and I've spent time with a magnifying glass trying to find myself and my friends. Unfortunately, the photo is a little too fuzzy (and we may have been further back), so I haven't been able to spot us. Before the show they had announced that the concert was being recorded for an album, and (speaking of the Allman Brothers) my friends and I yelled "Whipping Post" a few times between songs, hoping that it would make it onto the album. Sadly, they edited us out.
As great as they are, classic pop albums by Italian singer songwriters don't have a very wide audience outside of Italy. (Although I do have a few recordings by Italian pop artists singing in English that were clearly an attempt to increase their fan base.) But the artists, in their own way, were every bit as important to Italy as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and James Taylor were to the U.S. And it's fascinating to consider how the local rock scene in so many other countries in Europe (and elsewhere) played such an important role in the cultural life of those countries. If you stumble across any Italian or French or German pop albums in the used bins, I'd urge you to give them a shot.
Godetevi la musica! (Enjoy the music!)
