22.11.2006

Two Guitars

Two guitars, ringing Mournfully sing out My old friend - is that you? How could I not recognize you? On you lies the mark of bujnoe drunkenness bitter joy What woe? Spit, then drink! Wind it up, wind it up In a ribbon, that woe Drown your sorrows in the sea One of my happiest memories is spending evenings with my friend Sergei, sitting on his screened-in porch, caterwauling old Russian songs out into the Vermont night. Sergei had been trying to quit smoking for the entire time that I knew him, and kept a disgusting Folger's can of half-smoked hand-rolled cigarette butts on the little table out there, from which he would draw a nearly-smoked stub whenever his resolve failed. Neither Sergei nor I were musically gifted and I think both of us were intimidated by the presence of his wife, a concert cellist, so we compensated for our lack of talent by working out a number of set pieces. If we couldn't play the songs well, at least we could play them consistently badly, and so we internalized the Song of the Volga Boatmen, the Tetris song (otherwise known as ...), 'black eyes' and other fine old classics, but the set piece was always the Gypsy romance called 'two guitars',

Two guitars, behind the wall Moournfully ring out

Sergei had painstakingly plotted out the intro, and while I dutifully played the chord progression, he plucked it out with eyes frowning deeply. The great advantage of the song is that you could actually play it with two guitars and make it sound ragged and passionate. Voices dewy with wine, we would

. every few weeks there would be a banya (sergei had built a beautiful russian banya out in the yard, and hockey players or various literature seminar students would come out to steam) and we would have our tiny moment of fame. But I liked the summer evenings best. 'Dve Gitary' belongs to that class of songs everybody knows. It and other Gypsy romances occupy the same niche in Russian popular culture that old-time country and the blues do in ours: It has some fun bits: I had a wife She loved me cheated on me only once and after that decided to cheat again, and once again and again anda Grigor'ev had his frustrations as a critic since he couldn't keep his ideas still long enough to nail them down, instead chasing after them through his essays like so many butterflies. But this same smoky mysticism came out nicely in his poems. one point his friend Dostoevski suggested he write under a pseudonym so people would bother to read his articles) Probably his most famous work got set to music as a gypsy romance. This b spun off into endles variants, from jazz all the way to surf[mp3] In this version [mp3] hear Yul Brynner, of all people, singing it in a heavily accented duet with Alyosha Dimitrievich, giving it the full schmaltz treatment. Brynner has a somewhat mysterious past, but part of it definitely involved growing up in Paris around Gypsy singers in the Russian emigrant community. and tehn vysotski came along and su looking a little bit like a Neanderthal Paul Simon, Vysotski is difficult to characterize. He was probably the coolest man who ever lived. In a society that did not allow dissent he walked a careful line. He was never repressed probably due to his massive popularity, but the authorities did everything they could to damp things down. His concerts were never publicized, no one filmed his famous stage performances, movies that he starred in would have his roles cut out of them without explanation. The recordings of him that survive fall into two categories - the small number of studio version with their Austin Powers backing, and the very numerous homemade recordings,, many of terrible quality Most of the recordings that survive are homemade and of terrible quality; they were copied like the samizdat novels of the time. Vysotski never seemed to have touched a guitar that didn't immediately go out of tune.

His voice is the most striking thing about someone who was striking in many ways. I've tried to describe it Angry Tom Waits is one way to put it, gravel truck falling over a cliff. Vysotski is the only singer I ever heard who would hold entire consonants - there are 'K's and 'N's in his songs that go on for three beats or range from sung to shouted and back without losing the melody. Though his singing style is often described as raw, Vysotski was a trained actor first and foremost, and so all of his songs were performed in the strict sense - he kept control over what he was doing. This powerful energy and control together are what make him so inimitable, and still generation after generation of young soulful men (the kind who would be learning 'Wish you were here' on guitar stateside) are broken against the reefs of wanting to sing like him, be like him.

I remember a particularly strange and magical camping trip out to upstate New York with Sergei and some other Russian friends. Russians in New York City had organized a camping weekend, taking over a little state park and filling it with tents and tents of Russians. Naturally there was a big musical evening every nithg, and I vividly remember the queue of morose-looking guys with not quite clean long hair who got up on stage to sing songs of their own writing, in a creaky attempt at either vysotski of either vysotski or (more daringly) okudzhava, the other great Russian bard. After an interminable night of these guys some enterprising brooklyn smartaleck finally got up to sing 'Cocaine Blues' in English and got the loudest cheers of the night.

he was recorded professionally several times, with mixed results. His first love was always the theater, and part of the magic of his songs is that he understood that you have always to sing them in character, a lesson lost on the endless stream of people who have sought to imitate him (in Russia you are likely to learn a Vysotski song rather than "Wish you were here" as your initiation into the guitar). Vysotski's own version of 'dve gitary' is not so much a cover as a complete rewrite, along the lines of Bob Dylan's refittings of popular folk melodies. The song is called "moya tsiganskaya" (my Gypsy song) and is incredibly bleak. Instead of the soap opera women and borderline maudin tears of grigor'evs poem, there's a disconnected, strangely botanical replacing the forlorn love and melodrama of the original with incredibly bleak lyric. The song is strange, strangely botanical - in four short verses we meet an alder, cherry, ivy, cornflowers, a mountain, road, river, those mysterious horses. The only living people are deacons and witches, and the singer and audience. And all sung in that voice of his, like a gravel truck falling over a cliff. There are several recordings of this song. My favorites are the studio recording and the much less professional version here closer to the spirit of the gypsy song. "I had a wife / She loved me" "Only cheated on me once / and then decided" "To do it again, and once again..." Part of the appeal of Vysotski is that whenever you wake up wishing you had stayed asleep, or nursing a hangover or , there's a song about it. The gypsy tradition filled the gap analagoud to the blues; the later bards sang about I remember flying home through a cleveland airport at one point several years ago now, moping over