29 Facts About Rino Gaetano

Salvatore Antonio "Rino" Gaetano was an Italian musician and singer-songwriter.

Rino Gaetano is famous for his satirical songs and oblique yet incisive political commentary.

Rino Gaetano is remembered for his raspy voice, for the heavily ironic lyrics of his songs and his social protests.

Rino Gaetano was a popular and influential figure, widely re-evaluated by the following teen generations.

In 1969, Gaetano approached Folkstudio, a well-known club in Rome for promoting young artists.

Rino Gaetano's style proved to be very different from that of the other musicians.

However, Rino Gaetano was a multi-talented performer and during the early 1970s, in addition to gigging, he performed in cabarets and took part in several plays including playing the role of Estragon in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the Fox in a production of Pinocchio by Italian director Carmelo Bene and reciting poetry by Majakovsky.

Rino Gaetano was an accomplished actor and it was through his theatre experience that he developed much of his subsequent stage style and writing technique.

Rino Gaetano was inspired by German kabarett, a form of theatre that excels in political satire.

Rino 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.

Rino Gaetano developed a comedy act with his friend Bruno Francelleschi, 'Ad esempio a me piace.

Rino Gaetano asked for one more year to break into music and in 1972, he recorded his first 45 rpm record with the Milan-based Produttori Associati containing the songs "Jacqueline" and "La ballata di Renzo", a song which features lyrics that echo details of his own death.

Rino Gaetano decided to release the single under the pseudonym of Kammamuri's as tribute to a character in Pirates of Malaysia by Emilio Salgari.

Rino Gaetano 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.

Success for Rino Gaetano came the following year with the 45 rpm hit record "Ma il cielo e sempre piu blu", perhaps now the most famous and instantly recognisable of his songs.

In 1976 Rino Gaetano recorded his second album, Mio fratello e figlio unico.

Rino Gaetano is an atypical figure: there is the difficulty of finding genres to fit him into, trends in which to place him, which is the best compliment that you can give.

The choice of the name refers to the work of the great Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, but for Rino Gaetano, Aida is the embodiment of all women and of Italy itself.

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, Rino Gaetano appeared on stage at Sanremo wearing a top hat, evening dress featuring medals, red and white sneakers and bearing a ukulele.

Rino Gaetano brought a new air, funny and irreverent, and demonstrated his free spirit, free to laugh and joke on the 'sacred soil' of Sanremo.

In that year Rino 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.

On 8 January 1981 Rino Gaetano was involved in a head-on collision when an off-road vehicle drove the wrong way along the road and pinned Rino Gaetano's Volvo 343 against the guardrail; the singer was unharmed while his car was completely destroyed.

Rino Gaetano then bought a new Volvo 343, in metallic gray.

When help arrived, Rino Gaetano was already in a coma and at the hospital, an x-ray showed a fracture at the base of the skull, various wounds to the forehead, a fractured right molar and a suspected fracture of the sternum.

Rino Gaetano contacted by phone St John, St Camillus, the CTO of Garbatella, the Policlinico Gemelli and San Filippo Neri, but could not get any assistance.

Rino Gaetano's funeral was attended by many relatives, friends, members of the music industry, RCA executives and fans.

Rino Gaetano's death was discussed on 27 November 2007 in a short radio program broadcast on Radio DeeJay by Carlo Lucarelli, who uses a writer-documentary narrative form to reconstruct unsolved crimes related to the world of music.

In one of his books, the criminal lawyer Bruno Mautone hypothesizes that the death of Rino Gaetano was not a random event at all, but that, on the contrary, it was a murder organized by the deviant Italian secret services, probably commissioned by US counterparts, as the songs of the Calabrian singer-songwriter listed names, and facts that should have remained secret.

Indeed, in one of his last songs "E io ci sto", Rino Gaetano explicitly speaks of the pressure they give him and heralds his own death and future re-evaluation of his songs.