Translated material
Bells
Alexander Bashlachev as a justification for Russian rock
On that February evening in 1988, everyone was traveling to St. Petersburg - at the station I ran into Ryzhenko and Tsoi, and in St. Petersburg Butusov was walking towards us. It was impossible to breathe in the rock club in the evening watching Rubinstein. Everyone was silent or singing. BG sang “Black Raven”, Butusov - “Diamond Roads”, Shevchuk... I don’t remember what Shevchuk sang. I remember how he cried.Twenty years ago, Alexander Bashlachev passed away.
An archetypal fate: leaving work at the newspaper “Kommunist” with a guitar behind him, from Cherepovets to Sverdlovsk, from there to Moscow and St. Petersburg, “from city to city, from house to house in the apartments of other people’s friends.” Two years of incredible productivity, the last year - intense concerts in cities and towns, meeting iconic people and at the same time monstrous unsettled life. I remember the apartment owner at the Airport: I tried to interview him - he refused and went back to the room to sing. As always, he tapped his foot to the rhythm, and bells beat on his wrist. My own rock band: bassist, guitarist, drummer.
It is commonly said that in terms of his inner drive he was a real rock musician - yes, perhaps, just like, say, Vysotsky, or even to a lesser extent. It’s just that in Russia the traditional English-language term singer-songwriter leans either towards KSP, or towards blatote, which for some reason we call chanson - and Bashlachev, like Vysotsky, cannot be classified in any of these categories. Alexander Lipnitsky, critic, journalist, once a member of “Zvukov Mu”, at whose dacha the album “Eternal Post” was recorded, said that Bashlachev did not allow any outside influence on the recording - “he was very jealous of his songs for anyone and did not I wanted to trust them to no one, either at concerts or in the studio.” Someone said that SashBash “played the buffoon” - nonsense, he never played anything. But he was not a buffoon either - he did not clown around, did not suffer from idiotic epilepsy, he was extremely serious and sincere in every song, from a satirical sketch to an epic poem - maybe even too serious.
He is called a “genius poet,” which is, of course, an exaggeration. Moreover, in comparison with, say, another rock and roll icon, Doors leader Jim Morrison, Bashlachev is indeed a poet, although Morrison has more powerful potential. But the “genius of self-destruction” has only hints, phrases, lines, sparks (from which a flame could have flared up, but it didn’t), while SashBash has cast, chased stanzas. Yes, stanzas are complete, often complex in form poems, which - a rare case in the so-called Russian rock - easily fit on a sheet of paper and are read aloud. Bashlachev played with forms, meanings, alliterations, archetypes, even if not always skillfully, sometimes very straightforwardly, but incredibly talented. About five years ago I discovered his “Lullaby” in a first-grader’s anthology, brought home from school by my son, and was amazed at how much more serious this poem was than the neighboring creations of “professionals” - and how much more mature it was.
...Autumn '87, concert at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute Palace of Culture. A string breaks on stage, SashBash instinctively covers his face with his hand, he is caught by the lens of photographer Sasha Pigarev - and here he is, a ready-made portrait of, if not a generation, then a Poet, trying to shield himself from the cruel and senseless world around him. It was that evening that I heard from someone, it seems from Ilya Smirnov, that SashBash no longer writes songs.
There was a lot after his death, but one cannot help but recall the concert at Luzhniki, dedicated to his memory and which, as has been noted many times, became the last “general gathering” of all the forces of Russian rock. It was there that “Kalinov Most” for the first and only time in its entire history began to play in such a way that it seemed that Russian rock was simply becoming real rock - it played freely, freely and very branded. And it was then that the last performance of the concert - the Kino group - somehow naturally separated itself from everything else. It became clear - here they are, superstars, and the public reacts precisely to Tsoi, and not to the portrait behind him, which could have been completely dispensed with; in general, the era of “we are together!” ended. The fact that this happened at the Bashlachevsky memorial can be considered symbolic, or it can be considered accidental. However, was it not he who told me during an unsuccessful attempt to interview me, forcing me to turn off the recorder: “What to talk about? What conclusions should we draw? We are all islands in the ocean, me, Kinchev, BG... there is nothing in common between us.”
I don’t listen to his songs again, except, perhaps, for one - “Griboedov’s Waltz”, which for some reason is more expensive to me than the epic “Vanyusha” and “Egorkina Bylina”, more important than the terrible “Absolute Watchman”, more tender than “Train”. None of his songs expresses the collision of illusions and reality, dreams and existence so accurately and so poetically. And the unfortunate water carrier with a literary name, who for a second suddenly became Napoleon and returned back, “to the spit-stained stage of the district club,” is one of those images that justify for me the existence of Russian rock.
If, of course, we count Bashlachev among him.