A rainbow arches over Italy's Lake Como. Photo by Sam Sherwood.
“You can’t live without water or music. You can’t live without ’em.” — Quincy Jones
I sometimes puzzle over that quote from one of America’s great musical geniuses. Surely he knew he was leaving out a few other staples of survival. But it expresses the vital importance of music’s ebb and flow, and how, like water and life itself, music can never quite be grasped as it immerses us.
This story begins, appropriately enough, at a headwater. Through sheer serendipity, I found myself in the Italian village of Nobiallo. It felt a bit like living by the sea. Boats sailed past the window; there were even batelraces, in the traditional hooped skiffs of the region. Bells rang a block away, from the Santuario di Santa Anna, built over a stream flowing from mountains far above the town. You could fill a canteen with that spring water, straight from a pipe in the church walls, before picking up the trail of L’Antica Strada Regina, the Old Queen’s Road, built by the Romans in the last years of the empire. Following its path, you could turn from the hills and see the spring’s destination stretching before you: the serene blue expanse of Lake Como.
A fresco detail from a church in the Italian village of Gravedona.
Rains came and went, time stood still, the waters lapped at the shore. I strummed the guitar that lay on the couch, playing “Volare,” telling friends about that reluctant son of Memphis, Alex Chilton. Soon I’d be joining my wife to continue traveling together, two streams joining. Everything had been set in motion; all we needed to do was show up. If your daughter has a chance to study dance in a Northern Italian vineyard and school, don’t you rush to the chaperone sign-up sheet? Having just paid down some credit card debt, we thought we’d best get busy building it right back up. And so we signed on. But we had a secret weapon to soften the financial blow: rock-and-roll!
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The Yachtklub in Frankfurt carried a Hellcats show poster.
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Lorette Velvette waits with her guitar and suitcase in Frankfurt.
To explain: my wife and I spent our twenties traipsing around Europe as troubadours, at the behest of a record label that hitched its fate to our star. Fickle we were, putting our star in a barn when our children were born. Yet as domesticated years flew by we kept at our guitars, and, barring broken strings, held them at the ready. This year, still young at heart, we leapt once more into the fray. In plainer terms, we booked a rock tour to help finance our daughter’s dance education.
Or was it just to pay for those tastes of Europe we enjoyed while waiting for her to finish her studies? Simply grateful we could manage such a journey at all, it didn’t matter. Yes, we had arranged to work during our time in Germany and Italy, but it was work we loved. And we would be seeing long-lost European friends. The human distance across the Atlantic need not be so great. We put out calls, and our journey fell into shape around our friends’ lives.
Before I met her, my wife, Lorette Velvette, started a rock band in Memphis with some fellow feisty twentysomething women. Now we had a chance to reunite with two of them, Misty White and Giovanna Pizzorno, who had come to live in the Old Country. And while reuniting, why not make a bit of coin? Transcontinental set lists flew via satellite between Memphis, Toulouse, and Rome. Three hellcats, who once played in a band going by that very name, making one last heist! I was recruited to be the bassist. Contacts were called. Musical tracks were played, loudly, and dates were booked. Other old friends awaited us as well.
When people speculate as to why Memphis produces so much quality music, many will offer up that it’s “the water.” I reflected on this a moment, as I reclined near springs above Como, clear water running from the rocks. Further up the mountain, that same water was being readied for shipping at the Chiarella bottling plant. We say “that same water” because of its provenance, of course, though we know every drop is unique; centuries of local tradition have kept that same water clean. In my Memphis home, such stewardship doesn’t have as much momentum. I idly wondered how much longer my family and I could still imbibe from “that same water” that Memphis has been drinking for generations.
Spring water still flows in Nobiallo.
A 1613 map shows the canals of Munich.
Suddenly, my wife and I were flying over the Alps to rendezvous with our fellow bandmates in Frankfurt am Main. We were still tied to the water, which knew no boundaries. Here, over the centuries, the Main River had made Frankfurt a cultural crossroads. Some even liken it to New York: “Mainhattan,” they call it. Like the Hudson, the Main is far from pristine. But the congregation of cultures keeps on, and our little band was one example of it. Half a century ago, a band of American GIs, the Monks, had made musical history in that cradle of diversity. The Old World was forever looking to the New. And the old rock sound we had absorbed was still in high demand across the pond, as we were about to find out.
Through some charmed serendipity, the club we were playing that night was a boat. The Yachtklub had nothing to do with yachts, really, but as covered barges-cum-restaurants go, it was warm and inviting. It got even warmer as the crowd packed in, first to see the openers, Blackout Beauties, who comported themselves in an appropriately trashy manner. They packed in even closer to hear us. Did the club bounce on the waters as the audience began to gyrate? I was distracted. Afterward, as I hauled our gear out to the van, I found the Main generated a subtle, noxious smell, but somehow it fit our ragged-but-right jungle guitar noise to a T.
The next night was in Munich, a city braided through with canals. Its earlier centuries were powered by them, and though some were filled in over the decades, many still thread through the city. The Alpine water of the Isar River tumbles down and fans out through the town in scattered splinters, most prominently in the Eisbach branch, around which the luxurious Englischer Garten is built. Yet I always hear the Beach Boys in my head when visiting the Eisbach; with its gigantic wave machine, it’s a popular destination for surfers.
Disembarking at the train station, we hurried over to ride a different kind of wave, those of Bayerischer Rundfunk, the “Bavarian Broadcasting” public radio station. We hellcats were overwhelmed by the show of friends and fans in Munich. Being interviewed by DJs with happy memories of Lorette Velvette from the last century, and performing her music live in the studio, was the clearest sign yet that we weren’t crazy for touring. Our past had lived on right here, while we were busy with time flowing by. It was even clearer once we brought our Memphis beat to the club that night, playing to a packed house and talking with friends deep into the night. “This is an interesting club,” said one friend, gesturing to the brick around us. “It has an underground spring flowing through these walls.”
The Memphis Hellcats perform at Club Milla in Munich.
Soon we were tumbling back for a beaker full of the warm South, flying into Rome. But that wasn’t where we’d be playing. As Giovanna informed us, “No one plays Rome in the summer. It’s too hot.” In July, Roman revelers head for the hills, such as the town of Anguillara Sabazia, on the shores of Lago di Bracciano. Cool breezes blew off the waters and into the thousand corners and angles of the ancient town. A thunderstorm rolled over the lake and then was gone. Our show, in the cobblestone courtyard of the Granfà cafe, echoed up and down those jumbled stone walls, and soon we had new Italian fans cheering the murky blues-rock of Lorette, the Jonathan Richman-like wit and simplicity of Misty, and the exotic rumba of Giovanna.
All of us in the band were taking our past songs into a new territory, having never toured Italy together before. Beyond that, simply playing them in the present meant taking them into another kind of new land. Now even the original, raw insolence of Lorette’s “God Forsaken Town” took on qualities of resignation and rage. Now, Misty’s country love song to a convict carried a deeper, truer grief over the love of her life’s sudden death. And Giovanna, her Anguillara nest now empty of children who had grown into adulthood, found herself reviving a decades-old conceit of a Memphis motorcycle gang, here on the very shores of her domestic life.
It was enough to make your heart burst. Yet to these ears, the true musical revelation was the band that played the night before.
“The 1960s didn’t really come to Italy until the ’70s.” —Federico Laterza
We hellcats were lounging at Granfà, anticipating our show the next evening, when a band struck up suddenly with some of the finest Brazilian music you could imagine. Closing your eyes, you were transported over the Atlantic to the perfect synthesis of the Old World and the New. Pianist Federico Laterza, who led the band, has achieved some renown, but it’s unlikely you’ve heard of him in the U.S. Nonetheless, he’s the living embodiment of the exploratory essence of jazz and its fusion of worlds.
Born in Bari, Italy, he married a Brazilian woman many decades ago, splitting the years since between Brazil and his home on Bracciano. We were lucky enough to encounter him during an extended foray back to his homeland, accompanied by Brazilian colleagues Mel Freire, Berval Moraes, and Kleberson Caetano. Hearing them, you might have thought yourself at Corcovado. Beyond Freire’s spring-clear voice, or the rhythms of Moraes and Caetano, Laterza’s playing was both idiom-appropriate and absolutely free, his solos taking the ear on unexpected journeys.
Between sets, Laterza took us aside, rolled up a jazz cigarette, and offered wide-ranging conversation, as befits a virtuoso who has taken his art around the globe. “The 1960s didn’t really come to Italy until the ’70s,” he quipped. A diehard fan of minimalist composers, he recounted a gathering of Italian hippies in that era, nodding out one by one to Terry Riley’s live performance of “In C,” and reliving the wonder of seeing Pink Floyd at Pompeii in 1972. Such memories were bittersweet to him: Shortly after, having been roundly beaten by members of the Red Brigade because his flat was in a wealthy part of town, Laterza left and “never lived in Rome again.”
But none of these stories matched the passion with which he described his most prized album: a double LP by Memphis Slim. As we talked rare vinyl, his fervent desire to play the record on his home stereo for us was palpable. Alas, we had to rehearse our own music, play our show, and then head off to Rome.
Lago di Bracciano. Photograph by Lori Greene.
On the train, Giovanna described the importance of Lago di Bracciano. Laws prohibiting motorboats have helped keep it clean, and its waters, since the time of the first Roman aqueducts, have supplied the fountains of Rome. Last year, due to the worst drought to hit the region in a quarter-century, the lake dipped to dangerously low levels. Agricultural production dropped precipitously, and Pope Francis famously turned off the fountains in Vatican City for the summer.
One year on, the fountains were flowing again. We were able to see why Rome is known as “La Regina dell’Acqua,” the Queen of Water. We’d fill our bottles at the public drinking fountains known as “Nasoni,” or “Big Noses,” for their shape. And even the decorative fountains freshened the burning summer heat. All thanks to Lago di Bracciano, but for how long?
Thoroughly hydrated, we would have still more music to play, namely at the Beta Bar, in the small city of Terranuova Bracciolini. Exploring such non-touristy corners was a perk of building an itinerary out of serendipity — highly recommended as a traveling method. We were just upstream from Florence on the Arno River, in the lush lands of Tuscany. Historically, the Arno played no small role in the growth of Florence and the Renaissance, providing both power for its mills and a shipping lane to the sea, and it still dominates the landscape. Our show was just downhill from the village of Loro Ciuffenna, where Tuscany’s oldest working water wheel is still used in the production of chestnut flour.
Though the summer heat was almost as oppressive as in Rome (or Memphis), sunset brought an immediate cooling and a throng of visitors to the public park where our stage was set. And, though we’d never played there before, this final show had perhaps the most inspiring listeners. They were young regulars, just testing their independence, and more familiar with Lorde, or her Italian equivalent, than American garage rock springing from the 1980s. But as we played, we saw a minor miracle: They pressed close to the stage, drawn by the Southern grooves, and I reckon we won over fans with whole lifetimes ahead of them.
It’s another quality of music’s flow between people, as we carried to these Tuscan youth the sounds and rhythms that we in turn had learned from Memphis Minnie and others. Would this music create reverberations in their souls, as they tumbled through life into the future? I thought of our daughter, whom we would soon gather back to our bosoms for the home trek, relishing for a time the beauty of dance. That passion could lead her on like our own life streams, gathering momentum for half a century, accumulating ever-growing force as we somehow fell through the world. Now it was almost time to resume our lives over the Memphis Sand Aquifer, back home, and ponder our fates.
Salvatore Quasimodo's tribute to Dr. King. Photograph by Lori Greene.
But one last journey remained. A friend — an academic comrade, a central character from a long-closed chapter in my life — honored her ancestry and heritage as very few do, thanks to her Italian-American family’s devotion to their Sicilian relatives. This ebb and flow of language and ritual, across continents and generations, led her to purchase a home there, in the modest city of Modica. The main thoroughfare of the town was once a flowing river, which had long ago cut the area’s gorges and valleys. The Irminio Bridge, Sicily’s highest, spans them. Now the river is nigh invisible, having been paved over a century ago. But the water still flows below, and the steep hillsides of the town are a testament to its power. You clamber up and down the city’s steps every time you need groceries.
Views from the hilltop homes there are inspiring, and perhaps that led one son of Modica, Salvatore Quasimodo, to write poetry of a caliber that earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature. Touring his childhood home, one can see desks, notebooks, mementos, and photos of his muse and second wife, the dancer Maria Cumani. But turning a corner, I was shocked to see an image from the American South in a place of honor: a first-edition copy of Quasimodo’s Discorso su Martin Luther King, written shortly after the civil rights leader’s assassination.
Having just honored Dr. King this spring in Memphis, the book was a startling reminder to us of the visionary’s global impact, and how rebellious Americans can inspire a hunger for justice across vast distances. And it was a little call from home, reminding us of work yet to be done. Later, we all took a short ride to the beach, and it felt as if our journey was complete. The same water that splashed down from the headwaters, connecting and separating in a thousand different rivulets, had led us to the sea. As the poet might observe, it was not unlike clear mountain water tumbling under its own momentum, growing salty with tears and bawdy wisdom in its journey to the great common pool.
I stumbled over the sand and into the brine, leaving my friends and loved ones on the shore, then floated prone over the waves, imagining what had come before: our small life aspirations, taking us zigzagging through the world, leading to unforeseen connections. The world’s ambitions, even those of antiquity’s seafarers bound for nearby Syracuse, came crashing into each other there, as did the Old World and the New. Somehow we were caught up in reverberations starting centuries ago, as influences and tastes flowed “over the pond,” from surfing on the Main to Modica’s renowned Mexican-style chocolate, from an Italian pianist’s love of Memphis Slim to our own ragged-but-right songs resonating with Old World ears.
The great span of the Atlantic, so often seen as an obstacle, is also a conduit, a channel bearing those two great necessities of life, water and music, from shore to shore.
