Bologna was still shocked by the enormous bomb that had decimated women, men and children at the station. Bologna remained naive, still not knowing what "the strategy of tension" was, set up by those who said they were with us but we were dying.

 

Carmelo, "mortally wounded" (by the Lilliputians of a certain press who, out of inertia or design, wanted to muzzle him) dedicated that evening "not to the dead, but to the wounded of the horrendous massacre", offering a memorable verbal solution to the enigma of that massacre. [On which, 36 years later, there are many theories but few certainties: including one of the condemned who had always professed innocence, also adding: "If this country does not seek the truth, it is another reason to remain silent".]

 

Bene placed himself at the top of the Asinelli Tower a year later, to mark Dante in a temporal dimension of a crazy, sticky metronome, and a knowledge of the pre-16th century text that allowed him to screw much of the well-known Dantean metrics, mortally wounding instead of homini the hendecasyllables and the syllables with acciaccaturas, changes in tone, curling, minimal lengthening ("fiinnnn nel Marocco"; "unna monnntagnna bruuna").

 

And through that death generate a "brave new world" of freedom such as the one we would have liked to see born from those deaths, from that August Holocaust that could have, in pain, made utility arise from smoking-rubble-and-screams and in its place saw subjugation and contumacious culprits.

 

In these verses, power is returned to the sound that - as always in Carmelo - was the only, undisputed, non-semantic all-round winner of his musical works (called theatrical: you can listen to them without looking at them, but you cannot look at them without listening to them). A Good beyond any temporal power.

 

You can imagine yourselves Uzbeks and leave the grammatical, syntactic, historical - in short textual - dimension and let yourself be transported by the beauty of the sound alone, the syncopations, the gutturals, a helter skelter with register jumps that garland the syllables and the deafening clamor of distorted trumpets and flutes, which envelop the beginning of each Canto with unheard-of violence.

 

Or admire the constant, meticulous intellectual abstraction - as a mythical craftsman of the sound of the soul - aimed at dividing every space in such original ways. How good it is to slow down words - to give more meaning - that break down very famous phrases ("Amor... ch'a nullo... amato... amar perdona..."), marking them out or entering into micro-sounding labyrinths ("assai t'en priego e ripriego che 'l priego vaglia mille") or removing punctuation and entrusting oneself his own feelings.

 

And shouted or sinusoidal crescendos to make one understand why today we don't do theater anymore, or almost, that even research is sponsored by the fashionable slipper. And how - not European! but - Mediterranean this voluptuousness sounds in turning over in phonemes, as when we wake up on a cold winter morning we love to roll over in a warm downy quilt.

 

They were Canti rightly so: because we are talking about voices, souls and Notes of the Spheres ("Si che m'inebriava il dolce canto ciò ch'io vedeva mi sembiava un riso... [pause] ... dell'Universo"). The Songs must be sung and Carmelo does this: subtly, as a Lacanian aware of the devastating power of the word; revolutionary, or conformist depending on taste.

 

Sparkling with intelligence and irony as an excellent musician as he was, he read from the text. It was Music. He could be listened to at a very low volume, but playing him louder, you get to listen to all the harmonics of that dry or salivated voice. And appreciate the silences, which as Miles has always said, are more important.

 

Carmelo is the only true undisputed Italian rock'n'roll star even if he never played an instrument - my fave music mag, BlowUp, said so already ten years ago. But today is time to double up: Bene is one of the greatest Italian musicians of the twentieth century: a voice raising to heaven, an astonishing technical control, the marriage with the amplified technical means as an amplification of possibilities, constant improvisation.

 

And let them not say that the voice alone is not enough to create music or (let alone!) His is old rubbish: because find me another one like him, today. Yet I went to Salento last summer, right near Cesarea, and among the young people no one knew who he was, to ask him point-blank... and Lord, why?

 

A living human show, Bene always kept you awake and took you back to understanding the human voice is really the first and last instrument; and that culture is its crutch.

 

The concept is made clear in the film "Nostra Signora de' Turchi" where the viewer navigates an artistic world of poetry, sound, vaudeville and psychedelic deliriums. [In it the image of Carmelo crushed to the ground was so stunning that it got kindly re-used by Bowie in the "Lodger" cover photo: this thesis is mine and mine only; but I'd say it gets reinforced by the presence of a bandaged hand in both artists' photos. It almost looks like an hommage. See pictures above.]