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.
[1] 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 and Ricky Gianco as well as international musicians such as Bob Dylan and The Beatles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In September 1975, the singer explained some of this thinking in an article in the weekly Italian music magazine, Ciao 2001: "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.
The choice of the name refers to the work of the great Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, but for Gaetano, Aida is the embodiment of all women and of Italy itself.
[9] While on tour, Gaetano was joined by the emerging band, Crash, and he produced their album Exstasis and wrote their song "Marziani noi" (Us Martians).
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 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.
(Rino vive – Ma il cielo è sempre più blu, RAI 2, 2007) Bruno Franceschelli recalls the event: "The performance in Sanremo, from my point of view, was a demonstration of his talent as an artist.
On the same album is the now notorious "Nuntereggae più", and Gaetano was asked to discuss it because of the numerous political references and the long list of names in the lyrics.
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 title chosen is "Corta el rollo ya" (cut it out) and the singer adapts the text by inserting characters of Spanish politics and entertainment as Carrillo, Pirri and Susan Estrada.
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!
But the death of Rino Gaetano, too similar, in terms of modality, to the words of his unpublished song, almost seems like a signature left by some powerful secret organization that was ridiculed precisely in the lyrics of all his musical pieces.
For example, in the song "E Berta filava" ("And Bertha spun") Rino Gaetano spoke about Lockheed bribery scandals two years before its discovery, just as the apparently innocuous text of the song "Gianna" ("Johanna", is the female name of the then president of the Italian republic, Giovanni Leone, who resigned only three months after the presentation of the song) would not refer to the representation of the imaginary of the person with his own ideals and illusory ideologies, who, in order not to give up all the comforts that life allows, instead renounces his ideas, to his convictions, but would metaphorically denounce Italian politics made up of compromises, subterfuges, betrayals, lies, theft.
But even more explicit are the names contained in the list present in the song "Nuntereggaeppiù", all belonging to the secret Masonic lodge Propaganda Due, implicated in many scandals and unclear events in Italian politics (attempted coups in 1964 "Piano Solo" and 1970 "Golpe Borghese", secret financings from the CIA to Italian political parties, Strategy of tension, killing of inconvenient witnesses such as the bandit Salvatore Giuliano, the investigative journalist Mauro De Mauro, the poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wilma Montesi, the singer Luigi Tenco, or the manager Enrico Mattei, inconvenient witnesses who will be killed years after the song's publication such as Carmine Pecorelli, Roberto Calvi, Michele Sindona, and so on).
According to the author, the source of Gaetano's revelations would have been a very dear friend of his, Enrico Carnevali, an agent of the Italian secret services belonging to the "Operation Gladio" organization, who died a few months later in a road accident "which occurred at equal to Rino, on the Nomentana".