Ask a room of Italian prog listeners for the single greatest record their country made and this is the one that wins the argument, or comes second to Banco and refuses to accept it. Forty minutes, five men from the Ligurian coast, a twenty-minute suite on Nietzsche, and more Mellotron than the budget can possibly have allowed. It sold almost nothing. The band was finished within months of releasing it, for reasons that had very little to do with the music and everything to do with a photograph on the front cover. Nearly everything about Zarathustra is a disaster except the album itself, which is close to perfect.

The short version

Their debut, released in 1973 on Ricordi, just under forty minutes. Side one is the Zarathustra suite, about twenty-one minutes in five linked parts; side two is three songs that continue the same argument. Stefano "Lupo" Galifi sings; Enzo Merogno plays guitar and sings; Pit Corradi plays Mellotron, Hammond, Farfisa electric piano and vibraphone; Alberto Moreno plays bass and piano; Giancarlo Golzi plays drums and percussion. The music is Moreno’s, essentially all of it. The words are by Mauro La Luce, an outside lyricist who had already written for Delirium, working from Moreno’s reading of Nietzsche.

Bordighera, 1971

Two local bands from the Sanremo stretch of the Riviera — La Quinta Strada and Il Sistema — merged into one and called themselves Inaugurazione Museo Rosenbach, which is German for a rose stream and means nothing in particular. Personnel moved through: Leonardo Lagorio, later of Celeste, was there early on horns. By the end of 1971 it had settled into the five men who made the record. Angelo Vaggi, a talent scout at Ricordi, heard them, realised they already had an album written, and signed them on the condition that the name lost its first word. They cut it at the Ricordi studios in 1972 and did their own arrangements. Ricordi put real money behind it, including a showcase at the Sanremo festival in early 1973.

The sound

Keyboards first, and specifically Mellotron — this is the great Italian Mellotron album, thick and grey and constantly present, with Hammond underneath it and vibraphone for the light. Merogno’s guitar is heavier than the scene generally allowed, closer to hard rock than to the pastoral English model, and Golzi and Moreno play with a punch that most RPI rhythm sections did not have. The whole thing is dark, slow-moving, and physically heavy in a way Italian symphonic prog rarely was. And then there is Galifi, who does not sing so much as declaim: a huge, gravelled, unbeautiful voice that arrives like weather. It is the sound everyone has been trying to reproduce for fifty years.

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The songs

The suite runs L’ultimo uomo, Il re di ieri, Al di la del bene e del male, Superuomo, Il tempio delle clessidre — the last man, the king of yesterday, beyond good and evil, the superman, the temple of hourglasses — and it moves through them without ever sounding like five pieces glued together, which is the thing to listen for. Il re di ieri is where most people fall in; Superuomo is the peak. Side two keeps the theme and shortens the form: Degli uomini, then Della natura at over eight minutes, then Dell’eterno ritorno to close. Nietzsche’s book is a frame, not a lecture; the lyrics are about power, freedom, and what people do to each other, and they work as poetry whether or not you have read the source.

The cover, and what it cost

The sleeve is a black field with a human head built out of a collage in the manner of Arcimboldo — images assembled into a face. Among the fragments, on the jaw, is a small bust of Mussolini. Set that next to a title taken from Nietzsche, in Italy in 1973, and the record was read as a political statement almost instantly. RAI would not touch it; a couple of broadcasters played it anyway, Carlo Massarini and Caterina Caselli among them, but the scene itself — overwhelmingly of the left — closed ranks, and an album that had a major label behind it simply could not move. The band always rejected the reading: Moreno has said for decades that the collage was about prisons and poverty and oppression, that Francesco Guccini was a friend who had opened for them, and that nothing was further from their minds. The suite’s own text, read plainly, is an argument against the last man rather than a salute to anyone. It made no difference at the time. Museo Rosenbach played a few concerts through the summer and stopped; Golzi went off to help found Matia Bazar. What the boycott could not do was kill the record, which came back through collectors, then through the Mellow reissues of the early nineties, and now sits at or near the top of every list of the genre it belongs to.

The verdict

Essential, and one of the two or three records to hear first if you are starting Italian prog at all. Play it whole, side one without interruption, loud, and let Galifi do the work. Then Banco’s Darwin! and Il Balletto di Bronzo’s Ys, which are the company it keeps, and Locanda delle Fate for the other end of the same scene. The band eventually came back — Exit in 2000 without Galifi, then Barbarica in 2013 with him — but they were always going to be measured against this, and they knew it. One album, one summer, and fifty years of afterlife.

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