Rino Gaetano

Later discussing his performance at Sanremo, Gaetano remarked: "The festival is a walkway and like all walkways, it gives you three minutes to make a speech that you would normally do in a two hour show. So you have to find a way. For my part, I have chosen the way of paradox, a bit like Carmelo Bene." (Rino vive – Ma il cielo è sempre più blu, RAI 2, 2007)

The first book on his life, also the first official biography, was published in 2001, 20 years after his death.

On 31 May 1981 Gaetano made his last appearance on TV singing E io ci sto.

The career and life of Gaetano were interrupted on 2 June 1981, at the age of thirty, as a result of a car accident. He had already been in a traffic accident earlier that year on 8 January, when a Jeep had driven the wrong way along the road and pushed Gaetano's Volvo against the guardrail: the singer was unharmed while his car was completely destroyed.

In recent years, the lyrics of the unpublished song "La ballata di Renzo" (The Ballad of Renzo) has drawn a lot of attention – a song written by Rino more than ten years before his death. This song tells the story of a boy named Renzo, who died under similar circumstances. Renzo is hit by a car and dies after being rejected by many hospitals in Rome for lack of space, while his friends are at the bar. The song even references three of the hospitals that refused to treat Gaetano on 2 June 1981 due to lack of beds: General Hospital, San Giovanni and San Camillo. This is a topic of popular discussion. Gaetano's death was discussed on 27 November 2007 in a short radio program broadcast on Radio DeeJay by Carlo Lucarelli, who uses a writer-documentary narrative form to reconstruct unsolved crimes related to the world of music.

In 1980, he recorded his final album E io ci sto [it] noted for its serious tone and rock sound. In 1981, RCA organised a tour, from which the live Q Concert [it] album was created. In 1981, he also played the role of the Fox from Pinocchio in a movie directed by Carmelo Bene and filmed in Rome.

1979 sees the release of Gaetano's fifth studio album, Resta vile maschio, dove vai? [it] and his first with RCA. Rino took part in his first Festivalbar and then, in October, he attended the Discoestate in Rieti. On this occasion, in protest at having to sing along to playback, when the music starts, instead of pretending to sing, he decides to act indifferent and smokes a cigarette.

Also in 1979, during a concert on the beach in Capocotta (in fact also mentioned in the lyrics), before singing Nuntereggae più, Gaetano is said: "There's someone who wants to put a gag on me! I do not fear them! They will not succeed! I feel that, in the future, my songs will be sung by future generations, that, thanks to mass communication, they will understand what I mean tonight! They will understand and open their eyes, rather than having them full of salt! And you wonder what happened on the beach Capocotta." Gaetano was referring to the murder of Wilma Montesi.

Although not generally recognised outside of Italy, the Sanremo Music Festival is a popular annual song contest. Due to its pop music roots and pop culture positioning, it was not felt to be a route for a serious musician. However, pressure from RCA encouraged Gaetano to take part. He chose his new song Nuntereggae più/E cantava le canzoni [it] . It was a highly innovative half-sung/ half-spoken proto-rap against several Italian sportsmen, politicians and other high-profile figures. However, the producers of the show forced him to drop the song, due to its now famous list of prominent Italians which it criticised, and swap the song with Gianna/Visto che mi vuoi lasciare [it] On 26 January 1978, Gaetano appeared on stage at Sanremo wearing a top hat, evening dress featuring medals, red and white sneakers and bearing a ukulele. The performance of Gianna, also included the first time the word 'sex' was used onstage at Sanremo. Towards the end of the song, the band Pandemonium [it] appeared unexpectedly onstage to sing the chorus.

In that year Gaetano participated in a tour and some evening events, the most famous of these is definitely Discomare '78 and specifically the final night held in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento on 23 August 1978. The singer was supposed to sing Nuntereggae more, but Rai tries to stop him and Rino in protest leaves the event. In October Rino goes to Madrid to record the Spanish version of the 45 Nuntereggae more. The title chosen is "Corta el rollo ya" (cut it short) and the singer adapts the text by inserting characters of Spanish politics and entertainment as Carrillo , Pirri and Susan Estrada. The album will be released in the spring and get some success.

In 1976 Gaetano recorded his second album, Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is an Only Child). With this album, he tries to capture the listener's attention with dramatic narratives, especially loneliness and alienation, the main themes of the album. On the album, Gaetano began to explore new sounds and instruments including the sitar, the banjo and the mandolin, enabling him to obtain a more complex and mature album. In a review published by Ciao 2001 shortly after the album's release, it states that:

Success for Gaetano came the following year with the 45 rpm hit record "Ma il cielo è sempre più blu [it] " ("But the sky is always bluer"), perhaps now the most famous and instantly recognisable of his songs. Unusually, the 45 contained only one song, but it was split into two. In this song Gaetano offers several pictures of everyday life, with irony, clichés and contradictions. In September 1975, the singer explained some of this thinking in an article in the weekly Italian music magazine, Ciao 2001 [it] : "These pictures are sad, never happy, because I wanted to emphasise that nowadays there are few cheerful things and it is for this reason that I take into account those who die at work. Even the verse "who plays Sanremo" is sad and negative, because anyone who plays Sanremo, doesn't think of those who "live in barracks".

In 1974, he published his first album, Ingresso libero [it] . The LP featured many of the themes that would characterise his work, such as issues of isolation, marginalisation and exclusion, as well as his lively style and intelligent, witty lyrics. His songs began to be played on radio stations and in the same year, through record company RCA, Gaetano wrote three songs for Nicola Di Bari "Prova a chiamarmi amore", "Questo amore così grande" and "Ad esempio a me piace... il Sud", included in the album Ti fa bella l'amore. The Spanish version of "Ad esempio a me piace... il Sud", "Por ejemplo", achieved success in Latin America.

In addition to his performing, Gaetano studied accountancy, encouraged by his father to pursue a secure career in banking. Gaetano asked for one more year to break into music and in 1972, he recorded his first 45 rpm record with the Milan-based Produttori Associati containing the songs "Jacqueline" and "La ballata di Renzo", a song which features lyrics that echo details of his own death. The disc was not printed and Gaetano signed with Vincenzo Micocci, releasing his first single in 1973, I Love You Maryanna/Jaqueline [it] (with "Jaqueline" on the B-side) produced by RosVeMon, the surnames of Aurelio Rossitto, Antonello Venditti and Piero Montanari. In this song, Gaetano exhibits his multicultural education, singing in four languages – English, Italian, German and French. Rino decided to release the single under the pseudonym of Kammamuri's as tribute to a character in Pirates of Malaysia by Emilio Salgari. According to Micocci the choice of using a pseudonym was a sign of shyness and insecurity of Gaetano:

However, Gaetano was a multi-talented performer and during the early 1970s, in addition to gigging, he performed in cabarets and took part in several plays including playing the role of Estragon in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the Fox in a production of Pinocchio by Italian director Carmelo Bene and reciting poetry by Majakovsky.

Gaetano was an accomplished actor and it was through his theatre experience that he developed much of his subsequent stage style and writing technique. He was inspired by German kabarett, a form of theatre that excels in political satire. Wikipedia describes this as "unlike comedians who make fun of all kind of things, Kabarett artists (German: Kabarettisten) pride themselves as dedicated almost completely to political and social topics of more serious nature which they criticize using techniques like cynicism, sarcasm and irony." They were able to deal with social themes and political developments through their acts, something that inspired Gaetano and can be seen in many of his concepts and staging, for example, in his song Aida/Spendi spandi effendi [it] regarding the oil crisis of the 1970s. It enabled him to make political observations while avoiding censorship. Gaetano cited Ionesco as his favourite playwright, one of the foremost writers of Theatre of the Absurd, saying that he explored the usual problem of the inability to truly communicate, isolation and exclusion. He developed a comedy act with his friend Bruno Francelleschi, 'Ad esempio a me piace...' (For example, I like...), as a mixture of theatre and music.

In 1969, Gaetano approached Folkstudio, a well-known club in Rome for promoting young artists. His style proved to be very different from that of the other musicians. His strong use of irony caused concerns for the club managers, as he recounted:

Salvatore Antonio Gaetano was born in Crotone, Calabria. In March 1960, at the age of ten, his family moved to Rome, where he would spend the rest of his life. In 1961, he was sent to study at the seminary Piccola Opera del Sacro Cuore of Narni, in the province of Terni, where under the guidance of his teacher Renato Simeoni, he began to show his flair for writing poetry. By 1967 he had finished school and living back in Rome, he created a quartet with a group of friends called Krounks, who would mainly play cover songs. They were inspired by Italian artists such as Enzo Jannacci, Fabrizio De André, Adriano Celentano, I Gufi, Gian Pieretti [it] and Ricky Gianco as well as international musicians such as Bob Dylan and The Beatles.

Salvatore Antonio "Rino" Gaetano (29 October 1950 – 2 June 1981) was an Italian musician and singer-songwriter. He is famous for his satirical songs and oblique yet incisive political commentary. He is remembered for his rough voice, for the heavily ironic lyrics of his songs and his social protests. He died in a car accident at age 30. He was a popular and influential figure, widely re-evaluated by 2000s music.