Only once did I allow myself a relaxing outing: Zhenya Guberman took me to see a legendary, absolutely iconic figure—Kolya Vasin. When I saw all of that... but after a while, this house began to oppress me. It was all about the Beatles, surrounding the Beatles, and nothing but the Beatles... The hardest moment came when I realized that for the host of this apartment, neither I nor my music, nor any music at all—except for the Beatles and their singing wives—existed. And what's more, it shouldn't and had no right to ever exist.
And despite the fact that I loved the Beatles, and the first music I ever heard was the Beatles, when Zhenya asked if I "wanted to see some rare Beatles photo albums," I firmly answered, "No." Kolya Vasin's beard somehow jutted forward, and he hissed through his teeth at Zhenya: "Evidently, the kid isn't from our camp." "What are you doing? Everyone dreams of getting into this house," Zhenya felt awkward, but I suggested we immediately leave a place where such an unfriendly atmosphere reigned.
Remarkably high-quality material was taking shape: clearer and clearer with each passing day. The question arose – who was going to lay down vocals over this beauty? Who would sing? Was Tropillo really going to have to find a vocalist for our album? What would come of that? Would it really be “Oblachny Krai” if a Leningrad vocalist sang on it?
Pushing aside all these murky thoughts, I kept thinking about Rautkin, who was in Kharkov at the time; after all, no one but him could sing our parts, and I was so used to his vivid performance style that I couldn't imagine who could possibly replace him. I had no choice but to scratch my head, and very hard at that. Andrey eventually made me a few casting suggestions: they were, generally speaking, decent vocalists, but they clearly weren't suited for our music. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that only one person could help me – my old friend Vova Budnik from the Arkhangelsk band “Svyataya Luiza”, who had already sung on our “Selkhoz-rock” album once before. And even though his voice was quite different from Rautkin's, I really liked it; I liked his delivery – in terms of energy, he was in no way inferior to Oleg.
The situation needed to be saved. I could still somehow sing a couple of songs, which is exactly what I did, but high notes were beyond my reach. Tropillo supported my idea of going to Arkhangelsk to get Budnik, although I had my doubts about whether we'd be able to bring him back – at the time, Vova was heavily into literally anything that was soluble. I bought a ticket and headed to my hometown, with the firm intention of delivering a vocalist to the recording session in whatever state he might be in.
I arrived in the morning, around 9 a.m., and went straight from the bus to Budnik's place, though I realized that the outcome of visiting him at such an hour was clearly unpredictable. Usually, at this early hour, Vova was just coming down from a long sleep... His mother opened the door and rather ungraciously suggested I try to bring him around myself. Stepping into his room, I immediately sensed that this wasn't going to be easy.
I fought my way over to him through mountains of empty bottles and an axe-thick wall of booze breath in the air, and started shaking him by the shoulder, screaming right into his ear. My comrade's sleep wasn't just deep—it was downright impenetrable! I applied every bit of my knowledge of civil defense to him—short of giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—and he finally stirred, mumbled something, and stared at me blankly, not recognizing who I was. Finally, his heroic slumber began to slowly recede:
– "What? You? What are you? You went to Leningrad, what the hell..."
– "Yes, I came back, I'm telling you, and I came for you, Vova."
– "What's going on?" he stared at me uncomprehendingly, "where is it you came for me?"
– "Over there—remember, you promised me that if I ever needed a vocalist's help, you'd help me?"
– "Ah, yeah, I remember, sure thing, for real, so what do we gotta do?"
– "Nothing special, we just need to grab our stuff right now, get on a plane, and head to Leningrad, to the studio."
– "Ah, okay, I got it. When do we need to leave?"
– "Not 'when,' but right this second. There's still a flight today, we'll get on it and fly to the studio, to Leningrad."
Budnik was famous for being always ready to go; he obediently handed me his passport so I could buy the tickets, only asking me to get him a "wee one" to nurse his health a bit. He warned me he had absolutely no money, and I reassured him, saying that since I was the one inviting him, the financial side of things was on me. I ran to the Aeroflot ticket counter, bought the ticket, and the "wee one" for Budnik. Vova downed it in a single gulp, and chased it with a sniff of his well-worn sweater sleeve. Literally before my eyes, in the span of a minute and a half, the man transformed; his crazed, enormous eyes began to shine.
We went outside, got on a bus, and headed to the airport. Almost missing check-in, we successfully boarded the plane and—we were off! Vova slept the entire way, and upon arrival, I practically had to drag him by the shoulder to the parking lot and load him into a taxi. Along the way, we had to make a stop—Vova asked me to buy him a little bottle of beer... we had arrived. As per my prior agreement with Tropillo, I first went into the studio alone; Budnik waited around the corner. None of the staff were supposed to see him.
– "Did you bring him?" Andrey asked.
– "I brought him!" I answered.
– "Well, bring him over, let's see him"—Tropillo and I stepped outside. Around the corner, Vova Budnik was shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. Andrey looked him over carefully, pulled his hood down over his long hair, and said he'd pass for a Young Pioneer. Just like that, chatting away, we walked past the cloakroom attendant, said hello, and she stared at us very intently. Vova was a very short guy, and only his swollen face gave him away as someone who had long since outgrown the Pioneer age.
To shorten the session time and avoid flashing before the management's eyes unnecessarily, Tropillo postponed all the parallel recordings taking place at the studio and decided to work, as they say, to the point of exhaustion, only occasionally stepping out of the studio to get some fresh air and take a walk. They put Budnik at the mic, played him the backing tracks to warm up his vocal cords, and I headed to the grocery store for our daily bread—our "flesh and blood," which was equally essential for us. Without that, any talk of productive work was simply out of the question.
Since my trips past the receptionist also had to be kept to an absolute minimum, I bought exactly as much as I could carry. Everything was ready for the recording, and Volodya, just an hour or an hour and a half later, announced he was fully ready. There was no need to memorize the lyrics—this wasn't a concert, after all—so I wrote out the first song, "Union of Composers," for him in large block letters. This was how we decided to record the tracks: in the exact order they would appear on the album. Tropillo was pleasantly surprised that, despite his frail appearance, Budnik sang louder and more powerfully as he warmed up—and finally, a sheer force erupted from him such as Petersburg had never heard before.
For the sake of variety and simply to expand the sonic palette, we decided that we would perform some songs together—Vovka would sing a few lines, then I would sing a few, and we would layer the chorus parts together. We had never tried doing it this way before; it was always either me or Rautkin singing. Vova's and my timbres complemented each other perfectly—his voice was high, while mine was low and growling—together, it sounded great!
Anyway, after a few hours of work, any doubts I had about the wisdom of that morning's mad dash left me. Even on the plane, while Vovan slept soundly on my shoulder, I hadn't been entirely sure if I'd made the right decision. Now, however, it was obvious just how much Vova was genuinely enjoying working in a proper studio—recording vocals onto a separate channel and being able to hear his own voice clearly. Besides, Budnik had never before had the opportunity to lay down vocals over music of such high quality.
Overall, the atmosphere in the studio was conducive to meticulous work, despite the dread circling like a black raven over our heads in the form of an informant who had accidentally wandered into the studio... The anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that in the studio's "waiting room" there was an armory under round-the-clock armed guard. The alarm was so sensitive that the slightest lean or prop of our bodies against that door threatened the immediate arrival of a SWAT team, who would be very interested to know why there were unshaven, booze-reeking men in an educational institution. For us, of course, such an event posed no real threat, but Tropillo would undoubtedly have been fired, and our recording, as well as all the other bands' recordings, would have been scrapped or postponed indefinitely.
And so, without noticing, evening fell. Thoroughly exhausted from the tension, we had a good few drinks, and moving around in space became quite a challenge. Tropillo brought out some rags rolled up into bundles and instrument cases – we decided to just camp out here until morning. We woke up early, looked at ourselves, and decided to hit the bathhouse on Srednekhtinsky Avenue. An old St. Petersburg bathhouse made of dark brick.
Generally speaking, Okhta is full of rare historic sites: a bathhouse, a fire tower, a hemp factory, the Polyustrovo spring... We walked through Okhta, unshaven and reeking, each lost in his own thoughts. I was thinking about Tropillo and how he didn't just need a bathhouse, but a laundromat too. He had a habit (one he never grew out of): no matter what he ate—smoked smelt, juicy ham, or jellied meat served on wax paper—he would invariably wipe his hands on his pants, his jacket, or his own hair. Untrimmed, greasy locks, a lopsided mustache of indeterminate shape, dressed in god-knows-what, and whatever it was reflected the sunlight with its greasy stains... Marginal and cynical on the inside, he had subjugated his entire life to completely different laws—outside of time, outside of social norms. The most important thing for him was always his work. Not working with kids, of course—Andrey was engaged in capturing, or to put it better, creating something that perhaps the world had never seen before him.
Overall, Leningrad absolutely blew me away. The difference from Arkhangelsk was glaring, and not just in the grocery stores... I couldn't imagine people back home walking around in what they casually strolled around in here. That kind of stunt wouldn't fly with us.
I remember Vova Budnik and Andrey Bulychev—my late bassist—getting drunk, turning two army sheepskin coats inside out with the fur on the outside, and walking on foot toward the city center like that. They didn't get far like that before a police paddy wagon caught up to them and started shoving them inside without any unnecessary questions... but they resisted and yelled: "Farewell, we are from the New Freedom organization, farewell!" The whole city talked about it afterwards, and I even wrote a song about it, which Vova Budnik ended up singing.
But here in Leningrad... I was staying at Vishnya's place, and such people would come visit him, they wouldn't have made it a single block in Arkhangelsk. Take Pig, for instance—Andrey Panov, also deceased now—well, if he had decided to fly over to us, he would've been nabbed right off the plane ramp. Torn leather jeans, a toxic-colored oilcloth jacket painted with acrylics, and a red leather tie. No, I simply couldn't comprehend how something like this could happen in our country, and in the cradle of three revolutions, no less.
…We were approaching the mixing stage. Although at the time I didn't yet fully grasp what it was. Theoretically, of course, I knew, but I lacked the experience. The tension in Tropillo had reached its peak; I couldn't understand when he slept—he was constantly on his feet, day and night. But the moment Andrey sat down for even a minute, he'd instantly fall asleep. There were four of us gathered for the mixing—the host, Budnik, Guberman, and myself. Zhenya found the process incredibly fascinating—it turned out he was playing this kind of music for the first time too; back then, he was playing in Aquarium.
The mixing took place at night, starting in the evening once all the administrators and instructors had gone home. We sat on chairs lined up right behind one another so we'd all be in the stereo sweet spot; from a distance, it looked like the seating arrangement of rowers in a kayak. The first track we mixed was the album's intro. It isn't listed separately but is spliced onto the song "Union of Composers" with tape. By the second section, Andrey's head was drifting closer and closer to the console—he was falling asleep on his feet. Budnik had settled into the farthest, most secluded corner.
A short time later, Tropillo quickly showed me what absolutely must not be done to avoid accidentally erasing anything, and asked if he could lie down for a bit. "I won't sleep, I'll hear everything, and if you do something wrong, I'll catch it immediately and tell you." With these assurances, Andrey settled in beside Budnik and seemed to fall asleep before his head even touched the support. Occasionally, he would start mumbling in his sleep; we'd ask him if we were doing everything right, he'd mumble that everything was fine, and fall back asleep.
In the end, today I would have scrapped the majority of the mixing we did back then. But we seemed to like it well enough. Budnik woke up around eight o'clock—said it was great, awesome; Tropillo didn't really understand it either. "Do you like it?" he asked me. But I didn't know... I was so exhausted that my senses were completely dulled, and I couldn't make heads or tails of anything anymore...
I have this quirk—if I haven't fallen asleep by four or five in the morning, I catch a "second wind" by dawn, and there's no forcing myself into bed—the sleepiness passes, and I cheerfully power through the next day. We felt the urge to somehow celebrate the end of the session. But it was 1984—the stores didn't open until eleven. We had three hours to kill, and during that time we made a cassette copy for each of us on Type II tape, and I made one extra for Vishnya.
I must say, Alexey and I grew very close spiritually; I never had a friend like him back in Arkhangelsk, and I still don't. He understood everything half-word, and we tried recording some things together too, and the amazing thing is... Vishnya remains to this day the only person in my life whom I am not just willing to forgive for his musical dissent. Under his spell, even I, a strict devotee of heavy rock, could play absolutely poppy riffs without feeling sick to my stomach—in fact, it was actually kind of fun, at times. It was probably our shared sense of humor that brought us together. For this quality, which Vishnya had perfected, I was ready to forgive him even for having a complete collection of Boney M records on his shelf. I never experienced that kind of mutual understanding with anyone else. Even though we were completely different people... although today I realize what truly unites us: both of us, essentially, spent our whole lives doing the exact same thing—turning shit into candy. We always worked on God-knows-what, yet we unfailingly produced a final product. Both back then, and these days...
I sent Budnik to the airport in a taxi, then headed over to Vishnya's, bringing him the first copy and lamenting that my friends—my comrades—had missed out on such an adventure. Undoubtedly, the album would have turned out better if Rautkin and Lyskovsky had been there; just having them present during the recording and mixing would have made things much easier for me. Incidentally, later on, when they all heard it, they strictly forbade me from going without them for the next recording...
I didn't have a ticket. I handed the tape to Alexey, but there was no time left to listen to it together—I packed up the instruments and rushed to the airport, hoping to pick up a canceled booking. But it was the end of August; there were about thirty people standing in line at the ticket counters, all with children. So I ended up hanging around the ticket counters for about a day with those guitars, which I completely cursed by the end. It was impossible to step away from the counters during all that time—I had to be ready to "catch" the moment they announced standby seats and released two or three tickets for a flight. Those twenty-four hours became a real ordeal for me... The tapes for my friends were burning a hole in my mind—I couldn't wait to show them off, to tell them everything, and to give them a good ribbing: "You're idiots, absolute idiots! You missed out on such an adventure..."
My friend Alexey Bulygin from the band "Autodafe" listened to the album and drew the magnificent artwork that, a few years later, graced the OK "Ubluzhya Dolya" vinyl record released by the Melodiya label. But by that point, I already realized that the recording approach we had mastered in Arkhangelsk was hopelessly outdated. I had mixed feelings—on one hand, an insane joy at reaching a whole new qualitative level, and on the other hand, I realized I had become a hostage to it: because working the old-fashioned way back home was simply no longer interesting.
Recorded by Alexey Vishnya
For Special Radio
March 2005
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Original article: https://specialradio.ru/art/id92/
