Rino Gaetano

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 raspy 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 the following teen generations.

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, and Ricky Gianco as well as international musicians such as Bob Dylan and The Beatles.

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:

"When I sang at Folkstudio, it was the centre of discussions....in fact they did not want me to do many of my pieces because they thought I wanted to make fun of everyone."

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 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 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, (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:

"He considered himself a writer, not a singer. He believed he didn't have a good voice, so that after the release of I Love You Marianna, when the time came to record his first album, he came and told me that it would be better to get someone else to sing the songs. I, of course, I laughed and sent him in the studio."

In 1974, he published his first album, .

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.

Success for Gaetano came the following year with the 45 rpm hit record "Ma il cielo è sempre più blu" ("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, : "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 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.