Квазимодо

Up until I was 16 I lived a completely calm life. That is, without music. Almost. It all ended when Borka put on Kino's "Gruppa Krovi" in history class. And it all began when my sister gave me a "Legenda №0…" cassette recorder with a "record" button.

Lyokha and I really became friends in 10th grade. He sat at the same desk as the now not-unknown Yu. Bernikov, and the three of us amused ourselves in class by writing each other little poem-dialogues… Things like: "oh you, damned Belarus, I'll pull out your lying moustache!", or: "and I, drowning knee-deep in water…" and so on.

Romantics need to develop. And it came with the "record" button, a child's mini-guitar, 2-3 pots, plus an unclaimed toilet seat lid that turned out to be good for rhythm. The "Legenda" also had another button, "1-3". In position "3" the tape sped up to "Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers" level, and the songs actually started to sound decent.

We sang about everything: "fourth day with centimes", "I'm looking at Klava", "an arhat coming down the mountain"… At the same time Andron taught us yard chords, and it felt like "nothing can stop us now!"…

But all that's just fluff, backstory… We had plenty of confidence in ourselves. And then my cousin - a classmate of Andron's and Varik's who'd brilliantly ended up at Vocational School No. 38 - let slip one day that in his group there was some guy who "fools around" on real drums accompanying guitars and bass. "Hm…," Andron and Varik and I thought, and got hold of two bottles of vodka. We drank one meeting Oleg, and brought the other along to their rehearsal. Where, for the first time, right in front of us, on the edge of real respect, stood the Daugavpils rock band "Lom" ("Scrap Metal"). The room those guys jammed in was unbelievably small… and in it stood: drums with a pillow in the kick, two guitarists, a bassist, and a serious, dominant type with a rock guitar.

I don't remember exactly what we did with the vodka, but I remember their first hits, "Werewolf" and something about "light in the window comes to me"…

The sheer scale of it, the mere fact that there was an underground rock band in our "new development" neighborhood, amazed me. BUT. We knew we had a couple of heartfelt tunes of our own to sing… so out came the acoustics. We played "Ни слова о любви" ("Not a Word About Love"). And their bandleader, Goblin, said something like "well hell…" and immediately reworked the song on his guitar in his own masterly way. That's how we learned there was such a thing as a guitar, and a lead guitar, and, in principle, a bass too.

We parted as friends. How else, really! We were basically in the same line of work, right? At the same time, everyone in Kvazi realized it was time to figure out all this lead-rhythm-bass business - we'd already been calling ourselves Kvazimodo back in the toilet-seat-and-3rd-speed days, but now different times were coming…

We were already getting pretty good at sliding our fingers from A minor to a barred G major, when we took to hanging around an empty one-room place with a wood stove in the archway by the Pedagogical Institute. My father, for good reason, liked to keep a canister or two of spirit there, which we'd occasionally take an interest in. We lovingly named the place the Pit ("Yama"). And for that whole period we called ourselves the homo-yamos, said "yaarghr" to each other, and shook hands in a particularly hooked way. Once we invited two ridiculous girls named Marinka from the Pervomaika neighborhood into the Pit and took turns slow-dancing with them to our own acoustic songs.

Varik, meanwhile, was passionately in love with a girl from his own courtyard - who also sang. And not just anywhere, but in our Pervomaika, under a man who ran a club specifically for that… So we got the acoustics out again…

I remember Ianson stepping over to the window and listening with an unreadable expression. I remember something like: "remarkable - here come three young men like this, and they perform something like 'I'm sitting, just sitting normally…', and, interestingly enough - I like it."

Ianson took us on with real heart.

There were no lectures about arrangement theory or anything like that. It went like this: "you, Varik, play 'boom-pum', you, Andryusha - 'trapa-ti-tu-ti-ua', and you, Sasha… well, just strum your chords…" He'd sit down at the kit himself and keep it nice and steady for us. And we were IN HEAVEN!

Our first, trial concert took place at "Torgovka", either for New Year or Christmas, where the three of us went out in black jeans and black turtlenecks with acoustics. And we didn't mess it up. Though now I understand most of the cooks and waiters had no idea what we were doing… whatever, a step had been taken. Then came a rock concert at Varpa with all sorts of veterans like "Overnight Sensation", the young guys of "Dvinsk", the angry "Neisseria", and the unlucky "Kamchatka". Plus some malt beer and hippie girls, seen for the first time in Daugavpils! I came home, my mother came out into the hallway with a poorly disguised intention of checking my blood alcohol, asked "well, how was it?", I said "success" and passed out in the hallway, arms spread wide. Like I said - some kind of malt beer.

What we called our first album, "Проникни в мой сад" ("Get Into My Garden"), was recorded in one evening, with no overdubs, straight to reel, right there at Ianson's in Yaunība. And! It's only now that I fully appreciate Andron's heroics - within just a year he was playing lead guitar and singing at the same time! Varik kept relentlessly building up his bass fingers, and I kept writing songs, each newer than the last. We got past the first album and "Kvazimodo" acquired (not without Goblin's help) its own dedicated drummer - Andris Zelch. Usually, over a whole rehearsal, he'd say one or two sentences. Either he was sizing things up and weighing every word, or he just preferred to keep his thoughts to himself. Two things in his favor - he got the humor, and he kept steady time.

At a certain point, to take some of the load of singing off Andron's solo work, Lyokha was brought back in to sing - by then a history student at DPU. Unfortunately, the happiness didn't last long: after a concert at the railway technical school, where, incidentally, we first ran into M-Spirit on the stairs getting beer, Lyokha lost interest in a rock-vocalist career. Possibly because of an article about us that included the line: "and Kvazimodo's singer screeched so loud it could be heard at the tram stop by LRZ." Damn it!

The next singer was Shura Nekrofil, who fit the Kvazimodo mold in every way and got the vibe. But then rotten fate got the better of us. Two guys fell in love with the same girl. And it turned out one left with the wife, and the other left with Kvazimodo… And the moment Andron disappeared from Kvazimodo, Kvazimodo itself disappeared with him. But we OF COURSE still tried to keep it going. The rock band "Dvinsk" had either broken up or fallen apart, and Kuzya was known to be available… so we brought him in.

It was very hard for me to hear his "hard and heavy" guitar solos over our own native lyrics… It just needed work, another year put into it, folding Kuzya into the "aesthetic". It was needed, needed to actually get a second album made… BUT I'd already stopped caring about it by then, new songs were pushing at me. I didn't make the second album, "Твоё радио лжёт" ("Your Radio Is Lying") - at the time it felt like the right call. Now I know - I was wrong, I should've pushed through, and pushed Kuzya too, he was sharp, he'd have kept up… But I said screw it and started another project, "Стельки Бетонщика" ("The Concrete Layer's Insoles"), which absorbed some of the Kvazi songs. The guys finished the album on their own. I couldn't listen to it for a while, and then I understood - they deserve a "thank you" for finishing what had actually matured… That's all just the uncompromising arrogance of youth, damn it. If it weren't for that recording of Kuzya's, there would've been nothing at all.