"Get up, my soul, give me the power/Set your clothes on fire/Set your organs on fire/Let it shake like a black spirit/Our terrible speech": as if the voice of Dionysis Savvopoulos, who never ceased to stir us up, to provoke us, to accompany the upheavals, the doubts, the strange walks in the orchard of our own sky, the Greekness that held it high – and even if he had seen deeply all our contradictions, still sounds stentorian in our ears from up there.
Born, as he himself said, on the eve of the Civil War, on December 2, 1944, he did not come to wartime Greece to submit to his fate but to overcome it – or rather, to shape our own different path guided by his songs. From an early age, in his teenage bed in a neighborhood of Thessaloniki, Nionios scribbles verses, just as he does when he falls in love, when he feels despair in the detention centers during the Junta era or in the army, where, in order not to go crazy, he translates Dylan's "Wicked Messenger", which became the famous song "Angel-Exangelo".
All of his songs, after all, twirl between extreme reality and the most dreamy imagination, becoming guides to a strange geography that accommodates rock and Tsitsanis, folk and island music, electronic music and the most beautiful melodic verses: it is the Greece that he himself managed to imagine before he even had time to go through its most intense post-civil war phases with "castles blowing, boats in the light", with sparklers and choirs and "with the crowd seeing visions".
If anyone asked him where he found a crutch to endure, he would say it was his strength to create strange worlds, to jump around with balls, Karagiozides and countless Nefeligeretes, to define, as his autobiographical song "I was born in Saloniki" commanded, his own paths, like the one he took, leaving everything behind and moving to Athens, following his dream.
It is just before he turns twenty when he decides, after dropping out of the Law School of Thessaloniki, to forge his own path: he knows that singing is his destiny and he does not resist it. After sleeping wherever he can in friendly houses and even on the floor of offices, where they illegally set up placards for demonstrations with the Bertrand Russell peace group, he works as a day laborer from a painter to a porter - he even managed to become a model at the School of Fine Arts! At the same time, however, he tries his luck at singing with various appearances in nightclubs while coming into contact with all the great composers of the time, who realize his talent very early on.
It is the era of uprising and general anxiety and he himself remains always politicized, but never tolerates the party pulling him by the sleeve, as he will later write in one of his most beautiful songs, "The Loneliness of Alexis Aslanis", which can be heard in the nightclubs of the time: he takes to the streets with the Lambrakides, demonstrates against the war in Vietnam, loves the songwriter Bob Dylan who becomes his guide, as well as Tsitsanis, is burning for the overthrow and burns even more for love: because "when evening falls, what can I say/I remember you in the green coat" and the loves until he meets the woman of his life, Aspa, do not always have a beautiful ending.
It is the mid-60s and the songwriter Savvopoulos has already begun to respond to the restless urban audience and achieves recognition through his first album, released the day after Valentine's Day in 1965: not by chance since in the most politicized period in Greece, he chooses for his debut songs such as "Don't talk any more about love" and the unsurpassed "A small sea", a hymn to love, when everyone is talking about manifestos. In November 66, "Fortigo" is released, based on previous material but enriched with new songs that give the impression of what will follow. In the dilemma of invincible love or political uprising, he is with life and love because he knows that what will remain, when everything has fallen apart, will only be the power of moments, what remains of the dream, when everyone has woken up.
And this is what makes him stand out from other New Wave songwriters and performers: the fact that he knows that small moments have much greater weight than the melodious descriptions of eternal feelings. He embraces the anguish of Jacques Prévert, who sees life in the center of Paris as a living festival that passes, he listens to the irony of Brassens, he likes the humor of Hadjidakis more than the revolutionary projects of Theodorakis. Deep down, he knows that he is a poet and this statutory position becomes a guide in his life: as if he sees the muse leading him through the fog of the National Highway, the blind Homer beckoning to him through the mist of history: “thanks to words, I lived a second life, a parallel life, many times more real than this one here,” he writes characteristically in his autobiographical book “Why the Years Fly by”.
He did not write his autobiography, recently published by Patakis Publications, to talk about his great career, but as a farewell gift, commemorating the poets of his heart, his old loves, even himself when he was a restless child of Fokionos Negri and Patision, confessing that he was always changing, because he was always testing whether he could stand the various roles he adopted at different moments in his life. During the Junta era, he could not stand the censorship and, after various incidents of interrogation and censorship, he considered moving to the City of Light. Far from his country, in Paris, he wrote the famous "Ode to Che Guevara" in his favorite haunt Saint-Claude, which he transformed into "Ode to Karaiskakis" in order to get it past the censorship. It's the same hangout where he played pinball with the "unrivaled", as he says, Fasianos. "For five months in Paris I wrote songs and played pinball". It is obvious that depression does not leave much room for reaction. While he was thinking of giving up songs and embarking on ships, it is his acquaintance with Aspa, in 1967, that keeps him in the forefront. "She was so beautiful, that at night she glowed", he wrote about her. "But I was still staggering at that time, and sometimes with the buffoons, sometimes with the disappointments, I did not understand the role that this creature would play in my life".
But this was Savvopoulos: he never pretended to be a revolutionary but a descendant of the ideal afterlife of the French poet Villon who equally loved Greek songs and that cunning Karagiozis, who adored the fairy tales his grandparents told him in Thessaloniki and decided to transfer them himself, modified in his festive meters, to our own chthonic meters. He took daoulia and zurnades, borrowed all the mannerisms of the theater and the dreamy depth of Aristophanes – see the ideals of Acharnis that he dedicated to the 'birthland' of Koun and Hadjidakis – and was left to observe all our dreams and weaknesses. He also kept the beautiful images of the crowds he observed, as always, on the street or in the verses of Jacques Prévert, "where the beautiful day pulls the worker by his clothes", which inspired "Red Sun, leader", from which, however, he removed, due to censorship, the revolutionary red, which we later saw become the party that pulls by the sleeve, an ironic overview of the coercion of the Left, which put him in the black books. Because of this verse, the KKE will break harmonious ties with him and the conflict with the world of the Left will begin. But he had forever sided with Aristophanes and with the madmen - like that Don Quixote who chased windmills and had hidden in his own remote castles. "What I wrote is a stutter, I think. This is music to me: the divine song that a clumsy child says, stumbling, having in his heart the impossible melody of a longing for perfection from a creature that does not have it," he writes in one of his most beautiful descriptions, which we find in his autobiography.
In Paris, nothing is easy and nothing is possible: he knows that the city of poets has nothing left to give him when the great demonstrations of May 68 begin. He decides to leave on the day of the great counter-demonstration of De Gaulle, without money and without knowing how to get to Athens: he hitchhikes, with Aspa pregnant with their first son, Cornelius. They arrive in Athens via Milan, where he begins to think about his next album. There was no dilemma, however: he had to return to Greece, to this “Orchard of the Madman”, as the album he wrote shortly after his return and after the birth of his eldest son was called, with Savvopoulos adorning the subversive, hippie cover with his guitar and a colorful bird on his head. Some of his most beautiful songs are on this album that marks his strongest, rock phase: it is the era of alternative rock, of Tasos Falireas, of the wild night, of those legendary appearances in Kyttaros that wrote an era with him experimenting with all forms, seeing Karagiozis singing at his side and the other exponent of a strange Greekness and lively folk, Lakis Papastathis, filming his visions. He sees with him Theophilos, Karaiskakis and the folk narratives, painting, music, poetic tradition and imagination. But at the same time he knows how to respect the old fighters, for whom he feels intense nostalgia – he dedicates “Happy Day” to them, talking about the days in Makronissos.
His great "Rezerva" was released in 1979, opening the 80s in the most dynamic way, which would be marked by his great concert at the Palais des Sports, with which he returned to his homeland of Thessaloniki, in 1983. With "Trapezakia Ekho" (Small Tables Outside), released the same year, Nyonios would show that he was well aware of the compromises made by the Left on the altar of the new power. His songs, moreover, were adopted by the "Rigades" of the time who found a way to respond to the hard-core directives of the communist path. The conflicts with the Left were difficult, even more difficult were the moments of his disapproval during the "Haircut" period, about which he writes characteristically: "With the Haircut I made a turn towards the Right, embittered by the pseudo-progressivism of the era and its arrogance. It was a progressivism that was nebulous, counterproductive, very cultural and completely anti-intellectual. Unfortunately, the Left allowed itself to be carried away by that cheap progressivism. Old leftists who, justifiably, hated the Right, because it once humiliated them and forced them to sign statements of repentance, but the unspoken anger towards their own Left that got them involved then never left them, as soon as PASOK emerged, they moved en masse. PASOK became the refuge of every wounded egotism. And leave its populism. It was so much so that it had a detrimental effect on the entire political system, almost all the parties. A lot of fanaticism.”
Despite the difficulties he had with the political system and the open feud he had with certain people, he did not renounce any phase of his life. In his confessional Autobiography, he apologized to people he wronged, such as Thanos Mikroutsikos and especially to his wife for his indiscretions, he spoke honestly about his weaknesses and showed that beneath his colorful personas he remained, despite appearances, a vulnerable mortal. In the last chapter of his prophetic book, where he sees himself sick, wetting his pajamas in front of the tender gaze of the nurse, we see the confession of a mortality of a man who we still cannot believe has passed away. The raised hands - for joy, festival or prayer - in a strange but unique world that he colored with countless images, music and caresses, is the only image we keep from the wandering theater of his life. "How you dance with your hands raised/as if searching for an invisible staircase/and your hips gently waving/and you are sometimes close and sometimes far/you enter and exit a space that for sun/turns only towards the reservoir/and with dark glasses turns again/to the dark side of love". Savvopoulos will live, after all, forever, through these, the most beautiful and glorifying gestures of our lives and from a world that is at the same time incredibly large and sometimes frighteningly small-but is certainly ours. Only he, after all, understood it better than anyone.
Source: protothema.gr
