A single “so sweet to drink” evening won’t be enough, four will be needed. And those who will pass will not be “one hundred thousand in one stadium” but twice as many, paraphrasing excessively Lucio Dalla, “timeless giant” of whom Vasco Rossi feels (in his words) “a disciple”.
Bari in the wake of Milan, the San Nicola just one step below the Meazza, once San Siro, which in its old meaning plays into this parallel of contemporary saints who have become, against their will, the owners of football arenas, often lent to the Rock God.
In seven Milanese dates, all sold out, the Komandante reached the monstrous quota of 400 thousand paying spectators. For the four dates in Bari, which have been sold out since last year – the first is tonight, the other three are scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday – a charge of 200,000 is expected. This is also a record.
There are those who have been camping out since last Friday to secure a place under the stage. In front of the entrance to San Nicola there was a flourish of igloo tents, despite the hot days. For Blasco, who recently talked about himself on Netflix with a series he defined as “a five-hour long selfie”, it is a return two years later to the stage of the world’s “magical nights”. A place that he has frequented since 1993 and which, on occasion, he has alternated with the old Vittoria Stadium. But in reality Vasco has been stopping in Puglia for forty years.
His first appearances date back to the summer of 1983, the year he participated in the Sanremo Festival with Vita spericolata, which on this tour is at the bottom of the setlist, just before Canzone. It is the inevitable tribute to Massimo Riva, the guitarist who has been gone for twenty-five years and who Vasco considered a brother. In the series of songs there are almost all the great successes of a stratospheric career, from Bollicine to Sally, from C’è chi dice no to Rewind, from Siamo solo noi to Albachiara, which has now become the closing piece of the evening on every tour.
There will be two and three quarter hours of music, which the 72-year-old rocker from Zocca has carefully prepared in his Apulian “buen retiro” in Castellaneta Marina, with a rehearsal room set up inside the Cromie, the nightclub which in 2012 became the place of rebirth. With an unforgettable acoustic concert, Vasco marked his return to live performances one year after the health problems that had led him to announce his retirement from the stage. And precisely for having chosen this land, the then President of the Region Nichi Vendola appointed him an honorary citizen of Puglia in 2014. A few months later, Vasco reciprocated by presenting his new album I’m innocent in Bari, for Medimex, which the year before had awarded him with the prize for the best tour, the «Live Kom 2013».
Tonight, and in the next few days, it will be a great show. The maxi-stage set up at San Nicola is 86 meters wide and accompanying Vasco is a superband in which the presence of solo guitarist Stef Burns stands out, also adopted for a period in Puglia, until his marriage with the former Salento showgirl Maddalena Corvaglia. Meanwhile, the concerts at San Siro have brought in Vasco in the Top 20 of the most listened to artists on Spotify Italy, with 32 million listens in the last month and an average of one million streams per dayto. Now it’s up to Bari to continue to guarantee the standard.
Here is the concert lineup:
