Chapter 5, Part 1: Andrey Tropillo records the band "Oblachny Krai". — "Two Liters of Cinzano".

…By the spring of 1984, the situation for our group had become quite bleak. We had visited every cultural institution in Arkhangelsk in search of a space for recording and rehearsing, but to no avail. Having been rejected everywhere, we grew despondent. Concert performances by Oblachny Krai were out of the question. My friends had already started to drift away from musical life: Lyskovsky was finishing school and taking his exams, while Rautkin was moving into his second year at the Kharkov Institute of Physical Education, having transferred to Ukraine. We had the material, but nowhere to record it, and on top of that, I was left essentially on my own.

The rock scene in Arkhangelsk had completely withered—our local Muses were mostly comprised of students from three universities: medical, pedagogical, and forestry. It was enough to simply summon them to the right office and threaten them with expulsion for them to hastily stash their guitars in their briefcases alongside their notebooks and get haircuts. Having already served in the army, I worked at a factory, so such threats didn't frighten me. Not wanting to get my friends in trouble, I decided to let them go their separate ways for a while—to study and get their own lives in order. That was when I remembered Leningrad and Andrey Tropillo's offer to record in a proper studio.

Rumors were already circulating in our northern circle that things were much easier in Leningrad when it came to this sort of thing. They said a certain Rock Club had even been formed, under whose roof practically all Leningrad rock musicians had united, giving them the official opportunity to perform. The police didn't even break up their shows, and the authorities took no action against the musicians. A free city, in short. I found Andrey's number and gave him a call.

– "Come on, gather your guys and come over," – Tropillo didn't hesitate. He worked at the House of Young Technicians, teaching in an Acoustics and Sound Recording club, and since all the Young Pioneers were away on summer break, the studio was free. Relatively free, I should say, since there were many bands in Leningrad, but Tropillo, at that time, was the only one of his kind. I warned him that no one but me would be able to come; Andrey reassured me that Leningrad had plenty of great musicians, and if that was the case, it wouldn't be hard to find people to play both the keyboards and the drums.

I took a few days off, some unpaid, bought a plane ticket for 19 rubles, and flew out. I was nervous: previously, I had only ever visited Leningrad with my mom, but here I was all alone, having arrived in an unfamiliar place, and to be honest, I had no idea how I would go about recording with unfamiliar musicians in such an unfamiliar setting... but the moment I set foot on the ground, half of my phobias simply melted away. I caught a cab and headed to Okhta.

The closer we got to the studio, the fewer doubts I had. Tropillo actually came out into the street to meet me—just as I was pulling up. We headed up to the third floor where Andrey's club was located, and the moment I crossed the threshold and took in the room and everything in it, I gasped. What I saw exceeded my wildest fantasies. I used to think our studio at the Red Smithy was a major breakthrough in studio construction—but compared to this one, it was strictly child's play. Two large rooms separated by a big double window, massive studio reel-to-reel tape recorders in the control room, and a huge mixing console nestled under the window frame.

My ecstatic contemplation of all this wealth was interrupted by Andrey, who asked in an embarrassed tone, "So, Seryoga, how are things looking financially?" I asked what the problem was, and Andrey hinted that it was already 12 o'clock, and as the saying goes, "it's time to take a shit, and we haven't even eaten yet"...

My finances were actually looking quite good: I was heading to Leningrad right after payday, and my salary was that of a proper Soviet proletarian—250 rubles—not like some ordinary Soviet teacher. Besides, shortly before flying to Leningrad, I had bought a Sportloto ticket, guessed four out of five numbers, and won a whopping 168 rubles. Andrey took me on a tour of the nearby shops, which completely blew my mind with their abundance of various foods; compared to Arkhangelsk, Leningrad was an absolute food and drink paradise.

We filled two large grocery bags with rather tasty and premium items that I had previously only seen on TV: sausages, a couple of types of deli meats, soft and hard cheeses, and most importantly!... in one of the Okhta grocery stores, there was a "Grocery" section, and in it... I saw in real life what had previously been available to me only on the silver screen—the Italian drink "Cinzano" from the movie *The Return of the Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe*. I immediately grabbed two whole one-liter bottles of my teenage dream. Tropillo tried to talk me out of it, saying something like, "Look, here's some normal stuff, just a ruble seventy, Portuguese wine bottled in Leningrad." To which I objected that I could theoretically find that in Arkhangelsk, but I had never even dreamed of Cinzano—I had only ever seen it in the movies.

We hauled all of this into the studio, spread it out on the table, and decided not to get down to work on the day of our arrival, but to properly celebrate the beginning of a new stage in our relationship. Andrey had dug up two faceted glasses somewhere, and we raised them to that great and bright future awaiting us, to hoping nothing would knock us off the path we had chosen for ourselves—the path that meant more to us than anything else in life.

Just half an hour later, it felt like we had known each other for three hundred years. Andrey was rattling off all sorts of obscure technical terms and previously unheard phrases; I listened, trying to look smart and nodding knowingly. Trophillo was also pleased to be talking to someone so technically savvy—after all, I had been doing similar work for a few years prior, the results of which had won high praise from Andrey and the musicians of the band "Aquarium." I'm referring to our first album and the Leningraders' initial visit to Arkhangelsk. Although the equipment I had to work with back then was far more modest than what was available here, we interacted practically as equals, which was undoubtedly flattering to me. I became increasingly convinced that I hadn't dropped everything and come here for nothing.

At one point during our conversation, Andrey warned me that, despite the apparent freedom here compared to Arkhangelsk, we needed to keep our ears open, remember what country we lived in, and not let our guard down. Our band had already been added to the list of banned groups, so Andrey advised me not to mention Arkhangelsk to any of the Palace of Young Pioneers staff who might wander in, and never to say the name of our group out loud. I swore to keep my mouth tightly shut, but we slipped up within literally an hour. One of the palace staff members who popped his head in—the very instructor Trophillo suspected of being an informant—cast a passing glance at the two "Cinzano" bags sitting on the table, which bore the large-lettered slogan "Arkhangelsk – 400 Years," and asked with a knowing squint: "From the North?" I tried to deny it, making up a subway station I was supposedly from, but the man just smirked, nodded at my bags, and departed in peace.

Toward evening, the question of a place to stay arose, and Andrey had already thought everything through. A year prior, I had been corresponding with his student Lesha Vishnya, who lived on Bolshoy Okhtinsky Avenue, just a few minutes' walk from the studio. He lived alone in a massive apartment—his parents spent the summers at their dacha.

Lesha deserves a special mention altogether—I was completely surprised when I received his letter. He wrote that he attended a circle led by Andrey Tropillo, and that our album, which I had sent to Leningrad a year earlier, Tropillo used in his classes as didactic material—a visual aid for amateur home recording, serving as an example of creating "something out of nothing." Alexey was deeply inspired by this idea and decided to build a sort of makeshift studio in his own home, which was exactly what he wrote to me about in his letter.

Every single line practically oozed such disarming sincerity and genuine enthusiasm. Vishnya was eager to dive into the very thing that interested me the most: recording self-composed music onto magnetic tape. It is worth noting that, for Vishnya, the recording process was always more important than the performance—he began recording himself long before he had any actual material to record.

Alexey had this wonderful, spacious apartment entirely to himself—which was an incredibly rare and valuable thing. It meant he could pursue his passion not in some damp basement, an old garage, or a converted warehouse, but in a comfortable apartment where neither parents nor neighbors were constantly on his case. Given that Vishnya was a sociable guy with a great sense of humor, his place became a favorite cult spot for Leningrad's best musicians—a kind of cultural center. Eventually, once we finished our Cinzano, the need to sleep in an actual bed arose, and Tropillo and I headed over to Alexey's. We stopped at a little shop and picked up a couple of bottles and some food.

A few minutes later, a large man with a kind smile on his face opened the door. Tropillo introduced us, and right from the threshold, Vishnya began showing off his home studio. I was struck by its sheer technical perfection for that era. Once again, I thought about the immense difference between Arkhangelsk and Leningrad, and my lingering doubts about the wisdom of my trip evaporated into the smoke of Lesha's cigarettes. In a single day, I had visited two recording studios, the likes of which I could only dream of, never imagining that such magnificent equipment could be privately owned in our country. It turned out that it could—provided it belonged to the kind of people I was lucky enough to quickly hit it off with.

Our conversation dragged on; as it was already getting dark, Tropillo hurried home to his family, so we put him in a taxi and went to sleep. But there was no stopping—Vishnya kept playing me recordings by various Leningrad and Moscow bands, introducing me to a phenomenon previously unknown to me: "underground Russian-language rock."

Of course, I couldn't have heard anything like this in Arkhangelsk—if any of our local performers had taken the stage and sung "I am I, the people have chosen me, so blah blah blah fuck you in the mouth" in the style of the Moscow band "DK," they would undoubtedly have been "shot on the spot." I felt as if I had visited some other country. The realization that the closer you got to the center, the more freedom there was, was completely mind-blowing. In Moscow, the capital, where the Politburo and the Central Committee were right next door, there was also "DK"... In a way, listening to "DK" at that moment really liberated me, and our lyrics became harsher. And since I always write everything right at the "workstation"—during recording—this influence immediately made itself felt on "Ubluzhya Dolya" ("Bullshit Fate").

I didn't want to sleep at all; I wanted to grab the guitars right then and there and record something. However, by around seven in the morning, Alexei made up a bed for me in a spacious bedroom, and I spent a long time trying to fall asleep. The overwhelming impressions of my first day in Leningrad drove sleep away, yet when I finally managed to drift off into nothingness, I dreamt something muddled, chaotic, and impossible to describe.

Waking up close to noon, I went out to the kitchen, where the next knockout blow of fate awaited me: standing in a stack were several bottles of beer, which for Arkhangelsk was absolutely extraordinary. The hospitable host had already managed to run to the store that morning, and by the time I woke up, something was already sizzling in his frying pan. Even though I didn't have a bad hangover, it was still very pleasant to start the day with such feelings. And right then Tropillo called—he said the bugle was calling, so I started getting ready.

I began packing my guitars—a "Ural" from the Sverdlovsk Musical Instrument Factory, and a homemade three-string bass that I had built myself, cutting the necessary parts at my factory. It only had three strings because either I had chosen material that was too flimsy, or I simply miscalculated—when I tuned the fourth string, the guitar neck would bend into an arc, turning the instrument into the shape of a bow. It could somehow still hold three strings, which was quite enough for me. Nobody could tell the difference on the recording anyway, because, as they say, our little houses didn't tilt for that reason, and with a certain level of skill, you could play almost any bass part decently on three strings, which is exactly what I did. Besides these guitars, I brought my fuzz box unit, which I had soldered together myself back in 1980 and hadn't changed for anything since, because it was thanks to this specific piece of gear that we had such a unique, one-of-a-kind guitar sound.

With all this gear in tow, I headed to the studio. There were already a few musicians there from the bands "Piknik" and "Tamburin," and when I unpacked my entire collection of instruments, the rockers formed a semicircle around my stuff and started cracking up, pointing at it. To the question, "How can you possibly make music on such junk?" I didn't answer, thinking to myself, "You just need to know how to play, that's all..." A little while later, Tropillo cleared out all the bystanders, placed a reel of wide tape the size of an LP onto an AMPEX tape recorder the size of a refrigerator, and we began recording.

I didn't have a drummer with me since I had come alone, without a band, so it was decided to use a recording technology with a metronome that was completely unknown to me until then. Andrey had a Soviet "Lel" drum machine; its sound was absolutely atrocious, but it could serve perfectly well as a metronome, although its own mechanical noise was only slightly quieter than the sound it produced. We picked a tempo, recorded the metronome onto the very first track, and that was how I began recording all the material step by step—song after song, as usual, finalizing the parts in my head right at the moment of recording. I spent two hours recording the rhythm guitar and bass for the first song—I was very nervous and getting used to the tape recorder. After that, things went a bit faster.

I liked multitrack recording so much; I realized that all our experiments with consumer tape recorders were irreversibly a thing of the past, and new horizons lay ahead of us. My admiration for Andrey Tropillo grew—the man had risked his job to build this operation with his own hands, under such partisan, underground conditions... Amidst all this euphoria, I was suddenly overcome by a terrible frustration that my friends, Kolya and Oleg, couldn't see any of it.

While I was recording the guitars during the first week, Tropillo was looking for a drummer, which turned out to be not a simple task at all, since music of this style was played rather rarely. Finally, by the time the guitars and bass were recorded, the drummer for the band "Tamburin," Sasha Petelin, showed up. We knew nothing about each other, but he had responded to Andrey's offer to play in the studio.

After listening to the material, he perked up: "Psh, what's there to play? It's easier than pie. I thought it would actually be something difficult..." But here, I must say, he got a bit ahead of himself, because after a few trial takes, it turned out he had never played this kind of music before and that it was harder than what he used to play in the Tambourine band. He played a few songs, of which only one made it onto the album—"Suck on It"—and he played that one really well, so we kept it. But that evening, while listening back to the recorded material, we decided that Petelin wasn't the best fit for our project and that we needed to find someone else—someone tougher, more technical, aggressive, and energetic.

Tropillo remembered he had a drummer who could pull off such a task—especially since I already knew him—Zhenya Guberman. He had come to Arkhangelsk with Aquarium, which I had already written about. When Zhenya sat down and started playing right off the bat, I was simply blown away. I had never interacted with musicians of that caliber before. Besides, I really love drums; they are one of my favorite musical instruments. And when I heard such drum kit playing, with that kind of technique and imagination, layered over my guitar music—I was just overwhelmed with delight, surprise, and all the emotions that washed over me! Moreover, Zhenya turned out to be such a down-to-earth and pleasant guy in conversation, which was quite surprising. It was flattering that a true professional musician, unlike us backyard amateurs, and a musician of that stature had agreed to play with us. Another thing that surprised me was that Zhenya never drank at all—believe it or not—no wine, no vodka, and he even ignored beer, which seemed to me like something from an entirely different stratosphere. Nevertheless, it was true.

Recorded by Alexei Vishnya
For Special Radio