FROM THE HISTORY OF THE BAND 'OBLACHNY KRAI'. CHAPTER 19: BOGAEV FOREVER

Gena welcomed me warmly and commented on my appearance: my cheek was blazing red, resembling the tread mark of a winter tire. I told him about my fight, of course, and we decided to celebrate our miraculous escape from the chase. We had one drink, then a second, a fifth, a twentieth… and that’s how my birthday passed, without me even noticing. Then a week went by, then a second, and I fell into a deep binge. I didn’t even bother to call my family once to tell them I had arrived safely and settled in, as is our tradition. Back in Arkhangelsk, they were already mourning me: whenever Natalia called the studio, they would calmly reply: “Sergey isn’t here, he’s in Arkhangelsk.” She called all our friends, and even Gena, but his phone had been disconnected for non-payment. Seeing no other option, my wife went to the train station and to the police to file a missing person report. She gave them my details and was asked to wait. Within an hour, they had figured everything out and called Natasha:

“Are you sure your husband left for St. Petersburg?” the duty officer asked.

“Where else would he have gone? We bought the ticket together right near our house, at a travel agency,” Natasha said, utterly bewildered.

“Well, the thing is, your Sergey Ivanovich Bogaev safely got off the train in Vologda, bought a ticket to Yekaterinburg, and headed there. Does he know anyone there? Maybe he has another woman…”

The Arkhangelsk police contacted the Yekaterinburg police and found out that no Bogaev had gone missing in Yekaterinburg, and he probably hadn’t even shown up there. The new year of 2004 was approaching; somehow Gena and I managed to pay the phone bill, but we couldn’t get it turned back on until the end of the New Year holidays. For about three weeks, my wife felt like the widow of a missing man. In those days, Natasha got her first gray hairs. The police advised her to be strong, saying there are many such cases where a person vanishes without a trace in the vastness of Russia; apparently, something must have happened to him, and she should just move on. They declared me missing and told my wife to wait: no body, no case.

Around January 6th, I started coming to my senses because I had run out of money, and Gena was supposed to go back to work soon. I didn’t know what was happening at home, but I could guess, of course. And then I ran into another old friend of mine, Vanya, on the street; he lived nearby. I asked if I could come up to his place to make a phone call. We didn’t have a phone at home in Arkhangelsk either, so I called the neighbors and asked them to get Natasha. There’s probably no special point in retelling what I heard from her; it’s obvious enough. What Yekaterinburg and another woman had to do with anything, I honestly didn’t understand at first, but here’s the paradox! On that very same train, there was actually another Sergey Ivanovich Bogaev, whose ticket was to St. Petersburg, but something possessed him, and he got off the train halfway and indeed went to Yekaterinburg, but by a strange twist of fate, he never reached his destination either. What an absurd, mystical coincidence.

I talked to my wife and felt I simply had absolutely no strength left for any further action. Vanya took pity on me and let me stay until morning. He wasn’t planning to spend the night at home himself; he was going to a friend's place to celebrate Christmas. He told me where his secret stash was but strictly ordered me to leave his apartment by six in the morning because his wife and son were coming back, and he had to meet them, and I absolutely couldn’t be there by then. I spent the whole night watching TV and ended up falling asleep in an armchair. Gena called me around six, but his phone was quiet and in another room, so I didn’t even hear it. I woke up, and it was seven in the morning. I rushed to wash my face and started putting on my shoes, and then… the lock clicked, and a little boy, Vanya’s son, walked into the hallway. And there I was—unshaven for four weeks, with a bloated face, standing bewildered in the hall.

“Aaa-aaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaa,” the boy screamed hysterically, “aaa-aaaaa…”

“Don’t be afraid, little boy,” I said to him in the hoarse voice of a villain, “your dad gave me the key, I’m one of us, don’t be afraid.”

“Aaa-aaaaaaa,” the terrified child continued, running out onto the landing, still screaming.

From downstairs, I heard the voice of Vanya’s mom, asking what was wrong and telling her son to run to her. I shot out of the apartment like a bullet and dashed downstairs, past the screaming child, past his disheveled mother, and a pale-faced Vanya.

“Call the police, you idiot, the police, get in here!” I still heard the frantic screams of the frightened young woman as I was running away. I somehow made it to Gena’s—my appearance really was terrible, and police patrols could have easily picked me up. I knocked and knocked on his door, but to no avail: Gena didn’t hear me and didn’t open up. In that state, I set off on foot to the studio, from Turku Street to Tsvetochnaya. By some miracle, I managed to scrape together some change, just enough for a bottle of the cheapest port wine. Having bought the bottle, I couldn’t go any further. But I couldn’t just drink straight from the bottle on the street, so I decided I had to wake Gena up and resuscitate him too. I started ringing his doorbell persistently for a long time; I heard footsteps in the apartment, and felt relieved. But it was his mother who opened the door—she had also suddenly returned from her trip that day and was upset to see her son in such a state. And right there was I—buzzzzzzzzzzz at the door, wielding a bottle… His mom opened her mouth and started yelling at me, calling us scoundrels, bastards, boozers, damned freeloaders, wishing us the worst and so on. Vanya’s wife had just screamed at me, and now Gena’s mom was doing the exact same thing. It was just sheer horror, there’s no other way to put it.

So I set off to the studio on foot, taking occasional sips from the bottle. It took me about four hours to get there, and I even managed to carry most of the port wine. I sat down on the couch and tried to make sense of what had happened to me. The studio relaxed me; I rummaged through the corners and found an old stash from the previous year: a slightly opened bottle of vodka, a can of fish in tomato sauce, and a few pieces of rock-hard black bread. Do I even need to say what a gift that was! I realized: life goes on, and despite my chain of misadventures, fate inevitably leads to light, joy, and warmth.

I poured a full faceted glass of warm vodka; grace immediately spread through my body, through all my blood vessels. I picked up my guitar, hugged it, and kissed it. I plugged it into two medium-powered amps and started making magical sounds. My fingers began to dance on their own, generating new combinations of notes. It always happens like this after a long break—your muscle memory seems to settle itself. I recorded a few riffs and felt—and here’s a song! It just needed drums and bass laid down, plus vocals. It’s funny, but I actually managed to record the drums. I set them up rather roughly because the drum kit was in one room and the control room was in another, and there was no one to help me.

I layered the drums over the guitar—it sounded decent. Then I coaxed some organ-and-violin sound out of the electric piano standing in the studio and layered that on top. I played another guitar track in unison—it sounded even more convincing. I balanced everything as best I could, and from out of nowhere, lyrics started to form—first a couple of lines, then a couple of verses. I immediately wrote them down, had another fifty grams—the horizons before me expanded and cleared up even more. Some visual images appeared, things started surfacing in my memory; I even remembered things that hadn’t happened to me.

At that time, I was consumed by a fierce hatred for all those Western preachers who had flooded our newly opened market like wasps to jam. After Perestroika, when the borders of the collapsed USSR opened, there were more and more of them. I had noticed this even earlier, back when the studio was on the Petrograd Side; I watched the dumbfounded Soviet crowds leaving the stadium after those verbose sermons. Imagine a huge crowd of people silently trudging along Bolshoy Prospekt, like captive Germans—I was terrified to look at them every time, let alone approach them. And the exact same thing was all over TV: at night, no matter what channel you turned on—it was all sermons. Maybe it was fine, maybe our people needed it, but I, a person who is, to put it mildly, not exactly religious, would still prefer our own Orthodox teachings to what these Western life coaches were trying to sell us. What do they know about a half-empty bottle of vodka found in the back of a closet? What do they even know about us, and what are they trying to teach…

And that’s how I recorded “Aria of the Varangian Guests,” which became the starting point for the new album. The song is from the perspective of those very preachers who had gotten a full taste of Russian life, with all its bumps and potholes. When it was ready, I sat in silence for fifteen minutes, thinking about what the new album could be. There was still no one else in the studio; only the empty boxes stacked in the toilet reminded me that the new year of 2004 had recently arrived. I decided to rummage through the boxes—anything could happen. I shook one, moved another, and suddenly… a coveted glug-glug. I would have recognized that splashing sound among a thousand simultaneously playing sounds! Among the empty bottles, I found a full, sealed bottle of Flagman vodka! This unexpected find outlined my immediate prospects, and I flew into the control room to ponder and plan the rest of my life.

Aria of the Varangian Guests – Band Oblachny Krai.

FOR SPECIALRADIO.RU
Prepared by Alexey Vishnya
Summer 2008
Saint Petersburg

FROM THE HISTORY OF THE BAND 'OBLACHNY KRAI'. CHAPTER 18: MY COMPUTER