Vasco Rossi: Living It (Vasco Rossi: Il Supervissuto)

I survived the '70s.

Those were the Years of Lead,

with the Red Brigades, Continuous Struggle, and Workers' Power.

I was a Metropolitan Indian, trying to improve myself.

I was an anarchist.

The people who called themselves Workers' Power seemed crazy to me.

They were students who went home to their parents in the afternoon.

And their continuous struggle ended there. Yeah...

Then I survived the '80s,

the drinking years, the stupid years,

but also the greatest and most enjoyable years.

I survived by making rock music.

I started making rock in Italian.

I wrote generational anthems, provocative songs.

Then I survived the '90s, when I decided to have a family,

the most transgressive choice a rock star could make.

Leaving the "stupid hotel."

At the end of the millennium,

when all my friends started dying around me,

I fell into a depression.

But I kept going.

I faced the 2010s,

continuing to deliver extraordinary live concerts.

I survived three deadly illnesses in 2011,

when I fell into a coma three or four times.

I barely survived.

And in 2020, when this global catastrophe hit...

I think I'll survive this fucking virus, too.

Though you know what?

I might die of boredom during the lockdown.

I have to tell you something, though.

If I think about it, I'm not only a survivor,

I'm a "super-vivor."

LIVING IT

"I WANT A LIFE LIKE MINE"

Listen, the guitar is an instrument you have to play all the time.

It's all about practicing.

Here it is, the guitar.

It's an instrument you have to keep practicing.

It's been a while since I've really played,

but there was a time in my teenage years when it was my constant partner.

THE '50S CHILDHOOD

My childhood in Zocca was very happy.

My mother was very young.

She had a friend who was 15 at the time. Her name was Ivana.

They were basically having fun with me,

spinning me around like a doll.

They used to put my hair up,

and they enjoyed dressing me up.

They made me go around reciting poems.

I remember it as a very happy time,

and I was doing lots of things.

I was always up to something with Ivana and my mother.

I'd learn songs from Sanremo.

I used to sing them at parties or to my grandparents.

And then occasionally, I had to be a pageboy at weddings.

I was pretty cute, with my blue eyes.

There was this poem, "I am a beautiful boy with blue eyes, the color of the sea."

One day, the selectors for a new voices contest came to Zocca.

There were a lot of these contests. They were popular.

There was Lo zecchino d'oro in Bologna

and L'usignolo d'oro in Modena.

I participated just for fun. I was just a kid.

Maybe I was the only one who had been singing for a while.

Apart from Otello, also known as Otis.

My name is Otello Righetti. Otis to my friends. Otis to everyone.

CHILDHOOD FRIEND

There was a selection in Zocca at the Roma movie theater.

Now it's a bar called Bibap.

There was a live orchestra, and the stage is still there.

It's where we play cards in the summer now.

This is where the movie theater was.

It was the village movie theater, with the screen over there in the back.

And that's the stage, which was already there at the time.

That's where I sang for the first time

in the music contest L'usignolo d'oro .

A number of locals performed.

Vasco sang "Violino tzigano," and I sang "La paloma."

I still remember singing "La paloma."

Exactly. He hasn't changed. He still sings "La paloma" to this day.

...and so on.

Then, of course, only one usignolo , nightingale, remained,

the golden nightingale. Vasco.

I was defeated, of course, like everyone else.

"The star is born. 1960."

THE STAR IS BORN

So I won, and I got to the finals,

which took place in Modena, at the Teatro Comunale of Modena.

There was a jury of children.

I had yet to sing.

A little girl came up and got 99 votes.

So I thought, "Oh well..."

I sang my song, got offstage, and I heard, "Ten, ten, ten, ten..."

I was just waiting for a nine to come up.

All tens.

A hundred out of a hundred. An incredible victory.

I couldn't believe it. I was stunned.

I said, "Impossible. It's impossible that I've won."

An article came out in the Modena newspaper, saying,

"He was wandering around backstage in his baggy pants and oversized jacket."

"He is a self-taught kid from Zocca,

who learned to sing while tending his sheep."

People living in an area are divided into highlanders,

inpianzen , people of the plains,

and bassaioli , those who live in the lowest areas near the river Po.

The two extremes are always mocked. We were suffering because of it.

It was a way of marking people negatively,

and this affected the psyche, I can assure you.

There was this feeling

that if you came from the mountains, you were seen as inferior.

It was the start of a new chapter for me.

The following year, I traveled to various towns

where selections were being held.

I would show up as the winner of the previous year.

So I already felt like a star.

The song was called "Come nelle fiabe."

225,000 TICKETS SOLD

Forty years later, I wrote a song called "Come nelle favole."

Things had come full circle, in a way.

Vasco, is your first home in Zocca the one above the Trieste bar?

Yes. That was the first house I lived in.

I lived there until my father died.

This is Via Mauro Tesi.

VASCO'S FIRST HOME

This is the door

to my apartment.

Hi.

Saying hi to Pepito. I'll tell you later.

This door down here,

I'd usually leave it unlocked so I could just open it without a key.

I never used the key. I always just pushed it open.

Here is the entrance. Come.

This was the entrance and the first three steps.

Of course, I also kept my motorbike here sometimes.

There, too, the bicycle. That's how we lived here.

Then I'd climb the stairs in my special way. Two steps at a time.

I'd learned to do it at this speed. Go up a bit more. Like that.

You see? Then, holding here, I'd get to the top, practically flying.

That's how I'd get up there.

Annamaria lived here.

She was my first love. I was seven years old.

She was the daughter of the bar owners.

So pretty. She went to my school.

And when I met her on the stairs...

Back then, children would say, "I like you."

When you said, "I like you," and the other said, "I like you,"

then you were together.

You wouldn't say, "I love you." You'd say, "I like you."

So I used to ask her...

Every time I'd see her, I'd say, "Is it still the case?"

And she'd say, "Yes." And I'd be as happy as a clam.

Then one day, I asked her, "Is it still the case?"

She said, "No."

I said, "Why not?" My whole world crumbled.

She said, "No. I like someone else."

She liked another kid, a vacationer with longer pants

while ours were a little shorter...

That was my biggest disappointment in love.

I remember when she left, because her family was moving out,

the door had been left open.

I went inside to look around the whole apartment

to see if she had left something written somewhere that mentioned me.

There was nothing.

THE '70S YOUTH

There was the Olimpia bar

where he'd spend part of the day listening to songs from the jukebox,

because that was the only way.

I was always playing the guitar,

and one day I decided to try and write a song.

The first one, I remember, went like this.

Behind... Inside the waves of this sea

They blow slowly, full of salt...

I mean, this kind of nonsense.

I used to go and play it for my friends.

"I wrote a new song." And they had to listen to it.

Then he started to put together a group of friends

to play music together.

I had put together a group of friends in Zocca.

My first band, the Little Boys.

We did, I don't know, maybe three concerts.

Because we were only playing three songs.

Then I started gaining experience as a singer in a real band.

We traveled around, doing concerts in the mountains.

The band was called I Falchi, and I would sing Italian songs.

They also played the liscio. But when they played that, I would leave.

Because I was a young man. I wasn't...

I mean, I wasn't the local shepherd.

I was one of the cool guys, one of the more sophisticated ones.

In the summer, we used to work

to earn some money to go on vacation in September.

Picking cherries, things like that.

So I came up with this disco club idea.

We worked at the disco club.

And in September, we went on vacation with all the money we had made.

One year, we rented a pool. It was serious business.

We submitted a bid, and we got the pool and the bar.

Suddenly, one day when I was at the bar...

I was sitting there. I still remember it.

Marco Gherardi showed up.

"Do you know that in Milan there's an FM radio station?"