Popular music gained increasing cultural relevance in Italy during the Sessantotto (’68) — a tumultuous period essentially extending over a decade, until about 1977. Because of the ideological baggage that performance acquired in those turbulent times, representing performing musicians and the social bodies interacting with them in live contexts became a key challenge for audio/visual media such as cinema, television, radio, and the recording industry. This article attempts an intermedia approach to liveness in mediatized popular music performance by cross-examining the concurrent ways in which two of the above-mentioned media practices — namely film and record production — dealt with the increasing significance and presence of popular music performance in Italian culture at that time. The agency of media as relational frames between performers and the public was strategic in determining the affordance of new popular music genres among young Italian audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. We wish to suggest that the impact of these genres on Italian young audiences reverberated across different media, generating a set of recognizable patterns.
application/pdf
2036-461X
16215
31
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices around ’68
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
19
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2018-10-01
2021-09-03
2018-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Maurizio Corbella
2018/10/01
Università degli Studi di Milano
2036-461X
31
en
This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices around ’68
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16215/16936
19
This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in
Italian Media Practices around ’68
Alessandro Bratus, Università degli Studi di Pavia
Maurizio Corbella, Università degli Studi di Milano

    Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella




    Abstract

     Popular music gained increasing cultural relevance in Italy during the Sessantotto
     (’68) — a tumultuous period essentially extending over a decade, until about
     1977. Because of the ideological baggage that performance acquired in those
     turbulent times, representing performing musicians and the social bodies
     interacting with them in live contexts became a key challenge for audio/visual
     media such as cinema, television, radio, and the recording industry. This article
     attempts an intermedia approach to liveness in mediatized popular music
     performance by cross-examining the concurrent ways in which two of the above-
     mentioned media practices — namely film and record production — dealt
     with the increasing significance and presence of popular music performance in
     Italian culture at that time. The agency of media as relational frames between
     performers and the public was strategic in determining the affordance of new
     popular music genres among young Italian audiences in the 1960s and 1970s.
     We wish to suggest that the impact of these genres on Italian young audiences
     reverberated across different media, generating a set of recognizable patterns.


    Introduction

   Popular music gained increasing cultural relevance in Italy during the
Sessantotto (’68) — a tumultuous period essentially extending over a decade,
until about 1977.1 Similarly to what happened in other countries, new trends
in popular music genres and performance practices went hand in hand with
political and generational protest movements, especially — but not uniquely
— the reception of rock-related styles ‘as a sort of lingua franca of opposition



1
 On this historical periodization, see Antonella Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence,
and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), pp. 31–3.

                                                         Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 31, Fall 2018
                             Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella


culture the world over’.2 Because of the ideological baggage that performance
acquired in those turbulent times, representing performing musicians and the
social bodies interacting with them in live contexts became a key challenge
for audio/visual media such as cinema, television, radio, and the recording
industry. Umberto Fiori has commented extensively on the cultural “shock”
that the importation and revisiting of popular music from abroad provoked
in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, especially concerning the sharp contrast
between the exuberant style of rock’n’roll and beat performers, and the local
tradition of Italian popular song:

         The music’s success, then, was on the level of a very intense and very individual
     aesthetic experience, one to be contrasted with that offered by the Italian songs of the
     time. Above all else, what created interest and made the greatest impression was the
     self-confidence and exuberance of the performers, together with their modern and
     distant world.3

  Implied in this assessment is that the impact of performance was to a great
extent prepared and shaped by the media:

         Clothing and fashion associated with rock were more widespread than the music
     itself, mainly because they were spread by the press and above all the cinema, which
     had a far more effective distribution network for transatlantic products.4

   This article attempts an intermedia approach to liveness in mediatized
popular music performance by cross-examining the concurrent ways in which
two of the above-mentioned media practices — namely film and record
production — dealt with the increasing significance and presence of popular
music performance in Italian culture at that time. We shall expand on how
these two media promoted divergent and fragmented, yet deeply intertwined
ideas of liveness.
   In addressing such a culturally and geo-historically shifting category as
liveness, we propose to tackle the notion of ‘staging’, theorized by Simon
Zagorski-Thomas in relation to music recording. For Zagorski-Thomas,
‘staging’ refers to ‘aspects of the “event” that are external to the performances
and yet contribute to the meaning we perceive’.5 It thus includes all of those
‘para-performative’ elements that surround a music act and ‘allow the listener a
sense of participating in a specific performance and a vicarious relationship to


2
  Gianmario Borio, ‘Music as a Plea for Political Action: The Presence of Musicians in Italian
Protest Movements Around 1968’, in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. by Beate Kutsche and Barley
Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 29–45 (p. 41).
3
  Umberto Fiori, ‘Rock Music and Politics in Italy’, Popular Music, 4 (1984), 261–77 (p. 263).
4
  Ibid.
5
   Simon Zagorski-Thomas, The Musicology of Record Production (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), p. 73.

32
    This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices


the audience for that performance not accessible through studio productions’.6
Analysing how “media stagings” evoke a live performative space — that is,
the site of co-presence where ‘the aesthetic and the political coincide’7 — can
be a valuable testbed for examining the respective attitudes of records and
films. By understanding the two as representational practices infused with
different values and ideas of fidelity to a posited originating event,8 we aim
to assess not so much the extent to which a performative space is “faithfully”
recovered by its mediatization, but rather how the intermedia ‘debt’,9 which
any “staged” recorded sound or image owes to reality, becomes a trigger for
cultural engagement. Following Steve Wurtzler, ‘any representation can be
thought to consist of the moment of representing, the absent event posited by
the representation, and a consumer’s encounter with both’.10
   The element of space is central to us in a twofold way. On the one hand, the
spatial dimension acts as a catalyst for discursive configurations of narrative,
formal, and symbolic elements of performance within both cinema and record
production, where the reciprocal roles of performers and audiences are linked
to their positioning within the aurally or visually represented venues. On
the other hand, a spatial relationship between media and their interpellated
audiences can also be highlighted.11 The agency of media as relational frames
between performers and the public was strategic in determining the affordance
of new popular music genres among young Italian audiences in the 1960s and
1970s. We want to suggest that the impact of these genres on young Italian
audiences reverberated across different media, generating a set of recognizable
patterns. In our brief, introductory survey, we shall however limit ourselves to
sketch a preliminary framework that will serve as a starting ground for further
investigations. We aim to account for the variety of the modes of performance
representation, intending them as hints at broader cultural trends in Italian
popular culture of 1968 and its aftermath. For this reason, our article privileges
the close reading of a set of case studies and resists the temptation to produce
a coherent, if premature generalization.




6
   Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York:
Routledge, 2008), p. 60.
7
   Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetic (London and
New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 51.
8
  For a thorough discussion of these issues, and their consequences in terms of the creation of different
types of subjectivities in mediatized performance, see Steve Wurtzler, ‘“She Sang Live, But the
Microphone Was Turned Off:” The Live, the Recorded and the Subject of Representation’, in Sound
Theory/Sound Practice, ed. by Rick Altman (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 87–103.
9
   Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. Perlustrare, testimoniare, rifigurare il mondo
visibile (Bari: Laterza, 2014), p. xii.
10
   Wurtzler, ‘The Microphone Was Turned Off’, p. 88.
11
   For a discussion of Jean Comolli’s notion of ‘interpellation’, see Wurtzler, ‘The Microphone Was
Turned Off’, pp. 98–9.

                                                                                                      33
                             Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella


     Live(less)ness in Filmed Popular Music Performance before ’68

   Two classic musical sequences featured, respectively, in Fellini’s La dolce vita
(1960) and Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) exemplify one significant aspect of the
phenomenology of popular music performance in 1960s Italian cinema. Both
involve real performers — namely Adriano Celentano and The Yardbirds — and
both seem to exploit pop music performance to activate cinematic dimensions
that deliberately move away from realism. Furthermore, both feature a temporary
interruption of the performance’s flow to mark what Amy Herzog would term
as moments of ‘excess, rupture, fluidity, and the dissolution of the space-time
continuum that orders the reality of everyday experience’.12
   Celentano’s performance of Little Richard’s hit ‘Ready Teddy’ at the Baths
of Caracalla in La dolce vita (00:37:25–00:39:56)13 starts in a relatively realistic
fashion — if one excludes the evidently imperfect lip-syncing resulting from
the post-synchronization of the audio-track (Fig. 1a). However, as soon as the
performer falls off the stage as a result of his exaggeratedly “springy” rock ’n’
roll moves, the performance takes an odd turn: at first, the flow of the music
breaks down, as though the off-frame musicians had (realistically) stopped
playing, owing to the incident that had occurred to their frontman; yet, when
the music starts up again, neither Celentano nor his band perform it on stage:
instead, they begin to dance in a circle with their audience, in time with the
rhythm of the music, so that the gig ends in an oneiric, typically Fellinesque
procession-dance (Fig. 1b).




12
   Amy Herzog, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 7.
13
   Timecodes refer to the DVD release issued by Medusa (Cinema Forever – The Mediaset
Collection, 2003).

34
       This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices




Figure 1a-b: Film stills of Adriano Celentano performing ‘Ready Teddy’ in La dolce vita
                                     (Fellini, 1960)

   Antonioni’s treatment of The Yardbirds’ hit ‘Stroll On’ is even more daring
(1:29:50–1:33:08).14 On the one hand he places the British wonder band in a
studio mockup of the Ricky Tick — a famous club in Windsor, Berkshire, which
featured a wealth of pop acts at the time (Fig. 2a); on the other, he has the extras
playing the audience stand still throughout most of the performance, looking
almost unaffected by the engaging groove of the song (Fig. 2b). The uncanniness
of the situation is further emphasized when the crowd suddenly gets animated as
Jeff Beck throws the neck of his smashed guitar at them.




14
     Timecodes refer to the DVD release issued by Warner Home Video (2004).

                                                                                              35
                            Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella




       Figure 2a–b: Film stills of The Yardbirds performing ‘Stroll On’ in Blow-
                                  Up (Antonioni, 1966)

   Both sequences problematize liveness for different expressive purposes; most
significantly for our argument, they do so not so much by directly intervening
in the musical content of the performance, but rather through sabotaging its
“natural” staging. It is the relational bond between the performers and their
audience that is put into crisis. In both examples, eschewing conventional
representations of performance may be understood as a sign of the underlaying
scepticism the two directors exhibited toward the music rituals of a younger
generation they struggled to comprehend. Both Fellini and Antonioni seem to
exhort the viewers to not believe the supposed cathartic effects these performative
styles were expected to produce. More overt in Antonioni is the denial of the
supposedly disruptive political significance of the performance act: deprived of
its spontaneity, the act unwinds as alienated nonsense, whose effects are limited
in their extent and scope by the physical disconnection of the performance space
from the outside world.15
   Rather than standing out — because of their supposed authorial legitimacy —
as exceptional cases, the two examples just mentioned may be seen as signalling
a broader attitude toward music performance similar to that found in more
popular strands of Italian cinema in the 1960s, typically represented by the
successful genre of the musicarello — roughly comparable to an Italian version
of the American juke-box film musical. All in all, performance in musicarelli
functions rather like a “performance of the record”, in the sense that the singer’s
presence, lip-syncing to his or her own hit, more often than not serves as a mere



 In passing, it is worth noting how Antonioni’s attitude toward the younger generation and its
15

musical values evolved from Blow-Up to his next film, Zabriskie Point (1970).

36
      This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices




     Figure 3: Film still of Gianni Morandi performing ‘I ragazzi dello shake’ in Highest
                                    Pressure (Trapani, 1965)


doubling of the audio track, if not as a cumbersome redundancy; this is especially
the case when — as frequently happens — the lip-syncing is poorly realized.
In general, musicarelli show little or no concern about evoking a performative
“here and now”, preferring instead to conjure up idealized performative spaces,
‘pseudo-events’16 which exhibit a very tenuous connection, if any at all, with live
performing experiences.
   In Highest Pressure (Altissima pressione, Enzo Trapani, 1965), Gianni
Morandi’s performance of ‘I ragazzi dello shake’ (00:25:58–00:28:03)17 is inserted
into a neutral, almost sanitized space, something in between a TV studio and
a provincial movie theatre (Fig. 3). While the presence of loudspeakers and a
microphone on stage may at first glance evoke a live setting, the microphone
is actually never used by the singer, but only by the announcer to introduce
the musical guest. Remarkably, the interaction between the performer and the
audience appears highly unnatural and artificially “staged”. The fans resemble
a television audience that is instructed to cheer at given times, regardless of the
actual performance. There seems to be no effort to disguise the fact that Morandi
is actually lip-synching to the song in playback (the track even ends with a fade
out, as several other song acts do in this film).
   The identification of the performance act with the record functions in such
a way that the record stands out as the “original” and performance its “copy”.


 Wurtzler, ‘The Microphone Was Turned Off’, p. 96.
16

 Timecodes refer to the authorized online streaming release of the film, licensed by Under The
17

Milky Way on YouTube <https://youtu.be/Zy8wXOEJQdY>.

                                                                                             37
                             Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella


Consequently, the spatial core of music-making representation in musicarelli
becomes the studio, rather than the live venue. This is confirmed by the
comparably higher care with which musicarelli tend to portray the recording
studio with its wealth of technological equipment. Settings such as the singer
recording his or her vocals — this time, in front of a microphone — and facing
the sound personnel in their white gowns separated by a glass in the mixing
room, are anything but rare in films such as the Italian release of Go, Johnny, Go!
(Paul Landres, 1959),18 Highest Pressure, I ragazzi di Bandiera Gialla (The Kids
of Bandiera Gialla, Mariano Laurenti, 1967), and several others. Even in these
cases, however, we should not confuse these films’ care for visual details with
their substantial disregard of the sonic aspects of the recording experience: like
the “live” acts described above, the studio performances as well are sonically,
for the most part, nothing more than playback versions of the published record.
   The centrality of the record as an idealized performative experience, detached
from a clear correspondence with reality, resonates with Fiori’s description of ‘a
peculiar distancing effect’ that characterized the reception of rock-related styles
in Italy and was charged ‘with [a] potential for both criticism and action, which
was probably unknown to the English or American public’. ‘The only way of
participating actively in this music’, Fiori continued, ‘was through possession of
records, without even the illusion of a more dynamic relationship with the source
of music’.19


     The Live Album as Intermedium: The Club and the Televisual Mode of Reception

   As an object aimed at reproducing a past musical event, the live album frames
the live experience within discursive boundaries that are both genre- and event-
specific. It relies in the first place on linking the concert experience to other types
of mediatized experiences of performance in order to maximize the affective
stance at the core of the liveness effect.20 While cinematic representations of the
time problematized liveness by staging performance in unbelievable or unlikely
guises, as we have seen, live albums from the same period seem rather to be
concerned with referencing recognizable typologies of performing venue and
suggesting prominent links with other media, such as for instance television in
the case we are about to consider.
   Mina alla Bussola dal vivo (Mina Live at La Bussola, PDU, 1968 — recorded
during the show on 14 April in the same year) was the first live album to be
released by a highly popular Italian performer and media personality during the
decade. Here, the performance is presented as an exclusive event in an indoor


18
   The Italian release of the film (Dai! Johnny, dai!, 1960) was screened with an added prologue in
which Celentano performs ‘Impazzivo per te’.
19
   Fiori, ‘Rock Music and Politics in Italy’, p. 267.
20
   Auslander, Liveness, p. 60.

38
     This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices


space. Despite her ubiquitous presence on television, as well as in musicarelli, in
commercials and elsewhere,21 Mina’s media presence was always characterized
by an emphasis on her exceptional qualities: as a virtuoso performer and
outstanding vocalist, as an emancipated woman, as an “independent” singer
who produced her own records. In the same vein, her live show is here also
framed as an event whose access is restricted to a limited group of people. In
an attempt to emphasize the uniqueness of the live album experience, only half
the songs featured in this record were subsequently released as studio versions,
thus displaying a specific taste catering to a group of connoisseurs assumed to
be the target listeners of this record and — at the same time — distinct from
her mainstream audience. Finally, the environment of the club creates an aural
space where the listening experience is staged as a private — almost intimate
— experience; the songs are arranged with marked dynamic contrasts between
pianissimo and fortissimo, and the use of vocal techniques such as crooning and
whispering is frequent.22
   Other mainstream performers who saw their live gigs in clubs and similar
venues released on record in the following decade — e.g. Franco Califano
(Recital, 1977), Domenico Modugno (Dal vivo alla Bussoladomani, 1977) and
Luciano Tajoli (Bussoladomani. Dal vivo, 1978) — occupy a similar position to
Mina’s: all of them exploited the recorded live show to present a rearranged and
refined version of their songs in terms of instrumentation (though not in terms
of the formal structure), while in none of their albums does the live performance
seek to be a faithful rendition of the studio recording. What is also noticeable
in all of these is the limited emphasis they place on depicting the relationship
between the performer and the audience: despite the small venues in which the
live show is taking place, the performers are rarely heard addressing the audience,
even to introduce the musicians or the songs. The space reserved for the aural
perception of the performers/audience interaction is limited to the clapping
and cheering, in what may be described a hierarchical relative positioning of
the audience as subjugated to the performers. When some occasional dialogue
is audible, it involves the singer and the musicians on stage, and thus stresses the
performers’ separation from the public, rather than the inclusion of the latter
as a real co-protagonist of the show. Such a presentation of the relative roles
of performers and audiences highlights a symbolic distance between the realms
of artistic production and the everyday listener’s experience, thus strengthening
existing social structures and boundaries.


21
   For a summary account of Mina’s career, see Paolo Prato, ‘Virtuosity and Populism. The
Everlasting Appeal of Mina and Celentano’, in Made in Italy. Studies in Popular Music, ed. by
Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 162-71.
22
   Such a performative style is also consistent with other examples of Mina’s presence on
contemporary television, where she presented her own songs and lots of covers in orchestral
arrangements, most of which were not subsequently recorded in the studio and released on record.
See Rachel Haworth, ‘Making a Star on the Small Screen: The Case of Mina and RAI’, Journal of
Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 3.1 (2015), pp. 27–41.

                                                                                             39
                               Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella


   The mediatization of the live show, then, builds its own system of meanings
‘as a multi-layered communication medium dispositif that connects the stage
event of a theatrical production with a wider range of processes and procedures,
and which also incorporates media for technical reproduction like sheet music
or commercial records’.23 A crucial element in the staging of this first type of
recorded live show is thus the “vertical” — meaning non-reciprocal and non-
inclusive — relationship between the performer and the audience, which stresses
the exceptional nature of the former and rewards each individual listener with a
self-appointed sense of his/her good taste.
   On the whole, what Mina’s live album suggests through its “aural staging” is that
the listener is allowed to take part in a restricted community, a community that allows
each individual an opportunity to distinguish him/herself from the undifferentiated
mass of the “mainstream” audience. Such an attempt to offer a sort of “elevated”
entertainment can be seen as cohering with the modes of consumption afforded by
a certain idea of televisual edutainment, which was widespread in the policies of
Italian national broadcasting at the time. Public television in the post-war era was
characterized by what media historians have labelled as a project of “pedagogic
enlightenment” aimed at the creation of a modern, post-fascist, cohesive image
of the national popular culture.24 This conception was based on the notion that
television was solipsistic yet democratic at one and the same time, capable of
guaranteeing access to everyone but also of satisfying the needs of those who were
cultivated enough to appreciate certain subtleties. On the one hand, in positioning
herself at the “high-brow of the low-brow”, in this album Mina provides a
connection with her audience which is strengthened by the sense of distinction
that the very appreciation of her own music affords. Moreover, the reaction of the
live audience itself follows a predictable “script”; her fans can be heard not only in
between the songs, but also at the climactic moments of the arrangements (the first
occurrence of the hook and its repetition, the reprise of the chorus, particularly
danceable instrumental or virtuoso passages). The overall impression is that the
audience responds to the act while being disciplined by the structure of the songs
itself, as in a carefully scripted situation-comedy.
   In its connection with the televisual mode of reception, the live show as presented
on record can be considered a specific sort of phonographic artefact in which the
staging has the effect of realizing an ‘intermedium’,25 connecting different forms


23
   Nils Grosch – Carolin Stahrenberg, ‘The Transculturality of Stage, Song and Other Media:
Intermediality in Popular Musical Theatre’, in Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin:
1890–1939, ed. by Len Platt, Tobias Becker and David Linton (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), pp. 187–200.
24
   See, for example, Gianfranco Bettetini, ‘L’Italia televisiva chiama davvero l’Europa?’, in Le
televisioni in Europa Vol. 1. Storia e prospettive della televisione nella Repubblica Federale Tedesca,
in Gran Bretagna, Francia e Italia, ed. by Claus-Dieter Rath et al. (Torino: Edizioni della Fondazione
Giovanni Agnelli, 1990), pp. 247–82.
25
   Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction. A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).

40
     This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices


of artistic expression through a series of widespread cultural conventions related
to a particular performative experience. The reference established by this group
of records with specific performative circumstances also confirms the mentioned
link with television: all the live concerts quoted above took place in a famous club,
La Bussola, located in a renowned vacation site in the northern coast of Tuscany,
a music venue that acquired national relevance for its being frequently elected as
a broadcasting location for TV programmes by the RAI.


     Staging Large Venues: The Public Pop Concert and Its Media Paradigms

   Large-sized concerts and festivals went through a tormented history in Italy in
the aftermath of 1968. After the infamous attempt to import the psychedelic vibe
of the Monterey Pop Festival to a free event of the Rome Pop Festival in May 1968
at the PalaEUR, with an international cast of soon-to-be superstars,26 the number
of public pop concerts increased gradually until the early 1970s. This included
events such as Palermo Pop (which took place three times between 1970 and
1972), the free pop festival at the Caracalla Baths in Rome (October 1970), and
the Festival della Musica d’Avanguardia e Nuove Tendenze (Festival of Avant-
garde Music and New Trends), first held in Viareggio (May–June 1971), before
being moved to Rome and Naples in the following years. After these experiments
with big crowds, the Italian underground scene took on a series of lower profile,
highly politicized and self-financed rallies, such as the series of public concerts
promoted by the underground magazine Re Nudo that culminated in the large
public concert at Parco Lambro in Milan on 26 June 1976.
   By the mid-1970s, the tense socio-political context surrounding pop and
rock music in Italy had made it extremely difficult to find safe concert venues
where the security of performers and audiences could be guaranteed. On the
one hand, the left-wing radical “free music” movement proclaimed the so-
called auto-riduzione (self-reduction) of ticket prices,27 while on the other, some
popular music performers — especially singer-songwriters — were publicly
“prosecuted” on stage by audience members and accused of being “not political
enough” in their songs and performances.28 All these circumstances led to the
widespread assumption that Italy was an unsafe place for live music in those


26
   Among others, Julie Driscoll & The Brian Auger Trinity, Donovan, Captain Beefheart, Ten Years
After, Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, and the Italians I Giganti and Camaleonti were involved. The
festival, poorly received by a sparse yet rowdy audience was interrupted on its fourth day (of seven)
due to public disorder. See Matteo Guarnaccia, Re Nudo Pop & altri festival. Il sogno di Woodstock
in Italia 1968–1976 (Milano: Vololibero, 2011), pp. 23–7. Claudio Pescetelli, Roma beat. I duemila
giorni che cambiarono la città eterna (Genova: Editrice Zona, 2015), pp. 156–69.
27
   See Fiori, ‘Rock Music and Politics’, p. 266.
28
   One of the most infamous “public trials” happened at the Palalido in Milan, at the end of the
show held on 2 April 1967 by Francesco De Gregori. For an account, see Enrico De Regibus,
Quello che non so, lo so cantare: storia di Francesco De Gregori (Firenze: Giunti, 2003), pp. 90–2.

                                                                                                  41
                             Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella


years. Fiori pointed out how much the link between music and politics in Italy
laid its foundations on a fundamental ambivalence:

         The taste for a kind of music was seen as a collective political choice and indeed
     this latter was often seen as more important than the music itself. This is to say that
     the choice was made less on the basis of the immediacy of personal taste and more
     according to the continually debated criteria of an affinity between a common political
     and social ideal and a particular artist or record.29

   What was the role of film and records in this context? In general, all of the
above-mentioned events were poorly documented, with the exception of the
Caracalla Pop festival, which was broadcast on radio and became the site of a
curious filmic remediation we will return to shortly, and the second edition of the
Festival della Musica d’Avanguardia e Nuove Tendenze (1972), which was telecast
by the RAI. The inaugural edition of this festival also led to a compilation album
called Al Festival Pop Viareggio 1971 (At Viareggio Pop Festival, Ariston Records,
1971); this, however, featured only studio tracks by Nuova Idea, Stormy Six and
Top 4. The first properly cinematic attempt to document a massive countercultural
event was Alberto Grifi’s unreleased footage of the 1976 Parco Lambro festival.
Because of the cinéma-vérité style of Grifi’s operation, which deliberately refused
to take on the shape of a finished film, this work may be seen as the closest attempt
in Italy to react expressively and politically to the concert movie aesthetics that had
by that time crystallized in Anglo-American documentary production.30
   Apart from this example, Italy struggled to develop a self-standing concert-
movie genre. The releases of Banana Republic (Ottavio Fabbri, 1979), documenting
Lucio Dalla and Francesco De Gregori’s 1979 tour, and Concerto (Luisa Zappa
Branduardi, 1980), documenting Angelo Branduardi’s European tour La Carovana
del Mediterraneo (The Mediterranean Caravan, 1978–1979), arguably count
among the first proper concert movies in Italian film production. Notably in both
cases, the contemporary release of the homonymous live albums (Banana Republic,
RCA, 1979; Concerto, Polydor, 1980), which became all-time best-sellers, largely
overshadowed the films’ fame. Reasons for this Italian peculiarity may well have
been technological: for one thing, Italy had for many years been devoid of the
technical basis for direct cinema, that is, direct live sound itself. Not only did
dubbing imbue every facet of film production practice, it had also developed into
an artistic resource in auteur cinema. It is plausible that the late and generally
weak emergence of the music documentary genre in the 1980s was a belated side-
consequence of the diffusion of the large-sized concert practice in the country. In
other words, it was only after the live performance started being perceived as a
participative, transformational collective experience and the record industry had


 Fiori, ‘Rock Music and Politics’, p. 269.
29
30
  For direct cinema’s aesthetic linkage to rock music, see Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema:
Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London: Wallflower Press, 2007).

42
   This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices


                                                                          Figure 4: Film
                                                                          still of Freedom
                                                                          performing
                                                                          ‘The Game
                                                                          Is Over’ in
                                                                          Attraction
                                                                          (Brass, 1969)




                                                            Figure 5: Film still of the
                                                            New Trolls performing ‘Il
                                                          nulla e la luce’ in Terzo Canale
                                                            – Avventura a Montecarlo
                                                                  (Paradisi, 1970)




established the live album as a successful marketable format (see the next section)
that the necessity for suitable audiovisual means started to be manifest.
   One would assume that the arrival of progressive rock on to the Italian music
scene from the late 1960s might have affected the modes of live staging in film.
This is true only in part. The inclusion of progressive rock bands in musical films
certainly brought a new kind of psychedelic imagery to performance stagings
and a mutation of the musicarello framework, but this rarely translated into an
emphasis on liveness — quite the contrary, in fact. The increasing importance of
the LP album format favoured ingenious visual depictions of performance that
ventured into psychedelic “places of the mind”, as evinced by the visionary settings
of Freedom’s diegetically performed soundtrack in Attraction (Nerosubianco,
Tinto Brass, 1979) (Fig. 4). Likewise, the performative space of the New Trolls’
soundtrack in the film Terzo canale. Avventura a Montecarlo (Third Channel:
Adventure in Montecarlo, Giulio Paradisi, 1970), is highly conceptual: the band
performs the original soundtrack of the film from a visualized “somewhere-else”,

                                                                                          43
                            Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella




       Figure 6: Film stills of Freedom performing ‘The Better Side’ in Attraction
                                      (Brass, 1969)




     Figure 7: Film stills of The Trip performing ‘Travellin’ Soul’ in Terzo Canale –
                         Avventura a Montecarlo (Paradisi, 1970)


separate from the film’s diegesis, halfway in-between an Andy Warhol-influenced,
live multimedia setting and the Cinebox aesthetics (Fig. 5).31
   Still, in contrast with what had happened before 1968, performance is no
longer treated as an autonomous entity detached from the films’ story-world but
is rather intertwined with it. Often set in public, open spaces, performance takes
on a symbolic force in which a community recognizes itself desiring for new
kinds of existential experiences. This is all the more apparent when the open-air
staging is imaginative, evidently aimed at upending the usual order of everyday
life.32 In Attraction, Freedom play in the bucolic setting of Hyde Park while the
main female character pursues her free-love fantasies (Fig. 6), while in Terzo
Canale The Trip play in their uncovered van while driving around the streets of
Rome (Fig. 7).
   Terzo canale deserves further attention for its deep connection to a historical
concert like the Caracalla Pop festival. Eddie Ponti’s recollection provides
a precious testimony of the literally cross-media origins of the Caracalla Pop


 The Cinebox was the Italian video-jukebox concurrent of the Scopitone.
31

 The influence of psychedelic films such as The Magical Mystery Tour (Bernard Knowles and The
32

Beatles, 1967) is self-evident in both these examples.

44
      This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices


festival, in which the film is not (just) a document of the live event but constitutes
the actual pretext around which the event itself was set up:

         Meanwhile we had made a deal with Radio Montecarlo, with a very famous record
     company and an equally famous film company to produce a film which would include
     all of us: Trip (the main characters), Four Kents, Jody Clark, New Trolls, Primitives,
     Mal, Sheyla, Ricchi e Poveri and your humble servant. In order to set up the exterior
     shooting with an oceanic crowd we endorsed the idea of a guy who at the time looked
     rather crazy to us but who would later reveal to be the cleverest: Giovanni Cipriani.
     This way the first open-air Italian festival was born: a massive gathering of people at
     the Caracalla Baths, and us performing on a trailer truck (we could not even imagine
     those pharaonic stages that would later become the norm).33

   Terzo canale consists of a sort of pastiche of a musicarello, a psychedelic
promotional movie and a concert movie – all combined with references to the
Italian poliziottesco genre, road movies, underground culture, and (perhaps
too much) more. The film’s odd storyline revolves around an adventurous and
unlikely road trip to Montecarlo, where The Trip are expected to perform.
Incidentally, the location where the band ends up is none other than the
Caracalla Pop Festival (while Montecarlo is, of course, the name of the radio
station that originally broadcast the event). In this chaotic mishmash there is
room for both a parody of and a sincere homage to the concert movie genre.
When the band arrives at the concert venue for the sound-check, the off-frame
sound of the microphone-tester’s voice — a direct quotation of the sound-check
scene from the Woodstock film (Michael Wadleigh, 1970) — can be heard as a
caricature of a psychedelic experiment with tape delay. On the other hand, the
post-synchronization between the visual footage of the Caracalla concert and
The Trip’s album track ‘Fantasia’ stands out as a genuine attempt to conjure
up an effect of liveness that was indebted to the contemporary explosion of the
concert film genre abroad. The (post-synchronized) Caracalla live set dominates
the final part of the film (Fig. 8); the carefree irony that pervaded the whole first
part of the movie is no longer allowed: the prog-rock live experience has become
the performative core of the cinematic experience. This film aptly testifies how
the cultural imagery of the rock event — having reached Italy cinematically, via
the contemporary Anglo-American concert movie genre — was inextricably
blended with the rise of a live concert culture in the country.




 Eddie Ponti, from Nuovo Sound 11 (March 1975), as quoted in Pescetelli, Roma beat, p. 236. For
33

more on the Caracalla Pop Festival, see ivi, pp. 236–49. English translation by the authors.

                                                                                             45
                               Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella




     Figure 8: Film stills of The Trip performing ‘Fantasia’ at the Caracalla Pop Festival in
                    Terzo Canale – Avventura a Montecarlo (Paradisi, 1970)


  Hearing the Crowds: The Audience as Co-protagonist in the Live Outdoor
Concert Album

   One of the first examples of a live album set in an outdoor space ever released
in Italy is Dal vivo. Bologna 2 settembre 1974 (RCA International, 1975),
documenting the performances of singer-songwriters Lucio Dalla, Francesco De
Gregori, Maria Monti and Antonello Venditti at the national annual meeting of
the Italian Communist Party (Festival Nazionale dell’Unità). The cover of the
album, showing a filtered picture of the crowd attending the event, already calls
our attention to the concert as an opportunity for collective empowerment, a
moment in which popular music stars are ‘elevated to the position of avatars and
spokesmen of the counterculture’.34 As already noted at the end of the previous
section with reference to the close of Terzo Canale, in this album too the imagery
of the live event is mediated first of all by a string of concert films that were
produced in the Anglo-American market in the second half of the 1960s, and
which provided a model for the social and cultural reception of the rock concert.
   By evoking a wide-open space, Dal vivo. Bologna 2 settembre 1974 testifies to
the sheer physicality of the performers facing thousands of people, transforming
the concert into an act of symbolic engagement in socio-political causes. Large
spaces and crowds do not easily allow for rarefaction and subtleties in the strictly
musical delivery of the performance; instead they call for violent contrasts and
unexpected turns in the action, even at the risk of seeming raw and unrefined.
Improvisation, also in its symbolic valence of extemporaneous collaboration
between a performer and the audience, is another key component in such
kinds of aural representation of the live show. In the first track of Dal vivo.
Bologna 2 settembre 1974, Lucio Dalla’s ‘Abcdefg’, the sparse scatting of the


34
  Norma Coates, ‘If Anything, Blame Woodstock. The Rolling Stones: Altamont, December 1969’,
in Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time, ed. by Ian Inglis (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006), p. 59.

46
       This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices


singer in the song’s central part literally emerges from the crowd’s buzz; thus
begins the process that transforms a track lasting less than three minutes in its
studio recording into an exercise of virtuosity and collective improvisation of
more than eight minutes. The feel of participation in the act of music-making
is aurally and symbolically acknowledged in a rendition of the live performance
in which the hierarchical distinction between the performer and the audience is
programmatically disrupted.
   A second example is ‘Caos (II parte)’, from Area’s Event ’76, released by
Cramps in 1979, but recorded during a concert at the University of Milan on
27 October 1976. The same track was released on the LP Maledetti [Damned]
(Cramps, 1976) in a much shorter studio performance: the live version was
actually split between the two sides of the LP and has a total duration of more
than thirty minutes. As the liner notes written by the band’s vocalist Demetrio
Stratos clarify, ‘Caos (II parte)’ is a highly structured form of chance process
in which ‘every 90” the improvisation is forcefully varied following the change
in the emotional state that each musician has chosen and is trying to interpret.
[...] the basic function is therefore totally liberating, it does not aim to teach
or demonstrate anything, but tries to overcome the differences between music
and life’.35 In the live version of the same track the same structure takes on a
process of expansion: as heard on the first side of Event ’76 the track flows
through a very similar sequence of improvisational situations with respect to
the record, but their individual duration is nearly doubled, with the result that
the first part of the track lasts about 20 minutes. At the end of this sequence,
the audience claps as if the performance of the “song” has reached its end, but
the track continues on the second side of the record for another 9 minutes; this
second part of the piece consists of three different improvisational situations
based on elements not previously heard on the studio recording. Improvisation
in public performative situations requires more time to be developed and to
grow from the shared “vibes” of the musicians and the audience. The growing
duration of the songs in the live show also works as a critique of mass culture
embedded in the record as a product of the recording studio: ‘The “live”
album frequently is judged positively if the increased “presence” signified by
it is perceived as invigorating the studio-produced original or approximating
the “aura” of non-mediated performance’.36 The more the live performance
departs from the studio track, the more the experience of the live show is
valued for its uniqueness and acknowledges the contribution of the audience
in the act of music-making.
   The interaction between performers and audiences became a key feature in
live albums documenting concerts in non-mainstream genres such as progressive
rock, singer-songwriters and avant-garde, improvised music. Even though they
do not always present live shows in outdoor spaces, they nevertheless evoke the

35
     English translation by the authors.
36
     Wurtzler, ‘The Microphone Was Turned Off’, p. 94.

                                                                                              47
                        Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella


same atmosphere and the sense of collective engagement highlighted above.
This is especially evident when the recordings include a spoken introduction
to the songs by the main singer (or his/her thanking the audience at the end
of each song), a detail that, as we noted above, was lacking in records set in
indoor spaces, such as clubs. These introductory fragments of conversation
often expand on the background or the context of the songs, or just include
some small talk between the performers onstage and the (collective) entity of the
audience, creating a sense of intimacy and inclusion that would be unthinkable
when listening to the albums analysed in the second section of this article. By
recovering another “para-performative” aspect of the live show, such details also
convey the impression of listening “on location”.
   Some other examples of this kind can be heard in the above-mentioned Dal
vivo. Bologna 2 settembre 1974, as well as in Premiata Forneria Marconi’s Live
in U.S.A. (Numero Uno, 1974), New Trolls’ Live (Magma, 1976), Francesco
Guccini and Nomadi’s Album Concerto (EMI, 1979). In the latter example,
each song is preceded by a short presentation by the lead singers, interspersing
the show with short stories about their life on tour, their choices regarding the
set list, and occasional puns and jokes. The fact that the album documents two
shows in venues that are very close to the home towns of Francesco Guccini
and most of the Nomadi (respectively the Club 77 in Pavana and the Kiwi
Club in Modena, Emilia Romagna) favoured their framing as particularly
“authentic” examples of live shows in which the audience’s participation and
real-time feedback acquire a special flavour. The connection between the
band on stage and the crowd in the pit acquires a political valence, first of all,
where this relationship was instead programmatically downplayed, favouring
a participative approach to a collective effort towards the reconfiguration of
established social roles. At the same time, the collaboration with the crowd in
the moment of music-making, and its inclusion within the performative space
aurally represented in the record, emphasize the potential for the performance
to be a transformative experience for those who attend the live show. Since
such transformation takes place in a public space, it opens up symbolic spaces
for the catharsis of society as a whole.

     Conclusion

   Our focus on staging has stressed the relevance of spatial and relational
configurations of performance as symbolic nodes for social and ideological
debate. The critique of mass culture or the celebration of the status quo, the
detachment or absorption of everyday life within art, the private or public
nature of the performative venue, the hierarchical or collaborative attitude in
the relationship between the performers and the audience are the main axes
along which the representation of live performance developed in Italy in the
scrutinized period. A crucial role in the “staging” of the para-performative
elements of the live events portrayed in cinema and on record is played by

48
     This Must Be the Stage: Staging Popular Music Performance in Italian Media Practices


the ‘performance registers’37 involving the performer, the audience and
the technology at the moment of the performance; in this respect, sets of
conventions related to the divide between mainstream and non-mainstream
acts, their associated performative venues and spaces, and the specific kinds of
intermedia experience they afford, can be fleshed out.
   The examples we covered highlight how a “liveless media culture” and a
“culture of mediatized liveness” — though subjected to different agendas
according to the specific audiences targeted and individual authorial attitudes
— were highly intertwined in Italy in the 1960s and the 1970s, with a prevalence
of the former in the pre-1968 period and a strengthening of the latter in the post-
1968 period. Over this watershed, the pop recording industry started to explore
the market of live albums with increasing attention: the number of live albums
grew considerably between 1968 and 1979, according to a trend that did not
seem to privilege specific music genre patterns over others.38 As for television —
though the majority of music programmes continued to be based on playback
(with the famous exception of the Festival di Sanremo) — a cautious inclusion of
live music acts can be detected in those years, especially in such programmes as
the pioneering Senza rete,39 in the growing broadcast of summer music contexts
such as Cantagiro and in the above-mentioned rare broadcasts of independent
free festivals. At the other end of the liveness spectrum, cinema seems to have
allowed for a timid transformation of the status of live performance at the turn
of 1968. In staying anchored to post-synchronization techniques (for obvious
technological reasons), it still transitioned from a clear neutralization of musical
performance to a more ideologically loaded treatment of rock music acts.
   Emerging from this initial survey is the status of youth culture in Italy at that
time as a contested field of cultural production where antagonistic images of the
political, the social, the present and future state of the nation were proposed,



37
   Jem Kelly, ‘Pop Music, Multimedia, and Live Performance’. In Music, Sound and Multimedia.
From the Live to the Virtual, ed. by Jamie Sexton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007),
pp. 105–20 (p. 112).
38
   According to the statistics extracted from the Discogs database for this research, during the
1960s and the 1970s the number of live recording releases on the Italian market proportionally
far outnumbered even that of US/UK record production. While in the latter national contexts,
the presence of live records peaked in the 1960s and remained steady during the 1970s, in
Mediterranean Europe (France, Spain and Italy) the trend continued to grow at a remarkable rate
also in later decades.
39
   The audience was encouraged to understand the title of the show, literally meaning “without net”,
as “without the safety-net of playback”. The programming of the show followed a monographic
criterium: each episode featured one or in some cases two pop artists or bands accompanied by
the resident TV-studio orchestra. Curiously, the first director of Senza Rete was the same Enzo
Trapani who had directed the film Highest Pressure just a few years before; the film itself was a
spin-off of the TV programme Alta pressione (High Pressure), directed by Trapani in 1962. The
transformation of this influential TV director’s attitude toward liveness over the space of only a few
years, as reflected in these three different audiovisual artefacts, is a subject that would be worth
considering in greater depth in its own right.

                                                                                                   49
                           Alessandro Bratus, Maurizio Corbella


negotiated and exploited for public consumption.40 It is our hope that pinpointing
popular music performance as a cultural node in a specific socio-political context
may constitute a way to interrelate separate investigations into different media
and reciprocally illuminate their respective agencies.


     Endnote

   This article brings together two independent papers presented by the authors
at the one-day symposium ‘To Each Their Own Pop’ (Università Cattolica del
Sacro Cuore, Milan) on 23 October 2017. The two papers respectively dealt
with popular music performance in Italian record production (Bratus) and film
(Corbella). The authors are equally responsible for the overall conception and
outcome of this article and co-wrote each part of it. For the purposes of research
evaluation, the credit for each section may be ascribed as follows: Introduction
(Corbella – Bratus); Live(less)ness in Filmed Popular Music Performance before
’68 (Corbella); The Live Album as Intermedium (Bratus); Staging Large Venues
(Corbella); Hearing the Crowds (Bratus); Conclusion (Bratus – Corbella).




40
  Concerning this topic, a thorough account of the relationship between mass culture and the
Communist Party in the Italian cinema industry can be found in Stephen Gundle, Between
Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

50
