Procession of bards – Culture – Kommersant

Just a couple of months after the Aquarium album House of All Saints, on the last day of 2022, Boris Grebenshchikov’s album Songs of the Bards will be released, composed of the works of the brightest representatives of the national art song. Listen to the new release recommends Boris Barabanov.

In the 80s, when underground rock in Russian began to rapidly gain popularity in the USSR, it seemed to be something opposite not only to the official Soviet stage, but also to the author’s song popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Strictly speaking, no one forbade it, the records of the bards were released by the Melodiya company, and when groups with loud drums and electric guitars sounded from the tapes, the songs of the bards began to seem like something completely toothless and herbivorous.

The leader of the Aquarium group, Boris Grebenshchikov, grew into this subculture as a child, since Yevgeny Klyachkin was a friend of his family, and the young BG could listen to bard songs directly performed by one of the luminaries of the genre.

The influence of the Soviet bard song on Grebenshchikov is undeniable, and no matter how rock and roll he is, the most common image of him is a seated man with an acoustic guitar.

He not only listened to Klyachkin and Okudzhava, but also sang, that is, in fact, he learned the first chords from their songs. Hence his statement on the eve of the release of the album “Songs of the Bards”: “Singing these songs made me who I am now.”

For 12 years, Boris Grebenshchikov recorded the works of his senior comrades – masters of the author’s song, mainly for himself, without intending to publish them. “At the origins of the author’s song stood Bulat Okudzhava. He was wise and all-seeing,” says Boris Grebenshchikov in a special edition of his Aerostat radio program dedicated to the new album. At one time, he had already expressed his attitude towards one of the leaders of the movement, having recorded an entire album, “Songs of Bulat Okudzhava.”

And yet, the album “Songs of the Bards” includes eight more creations of the Arbat bard, including “Sign” – a song about the cycle of war in nature, which BG actively performed at concerts in the past year.

Seven more songs belong to the authorship of Evgeny Klyachkin, and two of them, “The Romance of Prince Myshkin” and “Devil”, were written to the verses of Joseph Brodsky from the “Procession” cycle. Now the works of the Nobel laureate are actively set to music, but it is known that the poet himself did not like this. And yet, from the point of view of Grebenshchikov, Klyachkin and Brodsky are “a marriage arranged by heaven.”

“The songs of Zhenya Klyachkin became the most unbearable St. Petersburg psychedelia that took out the heart,” says BG. In 2022, in the song “Farewell to the Motherland”, which the bard once dedicated to the poet Valery Molot, one can hear not only St. Petersburg psychedelia, but also an emigrant theme that stirs the soul: “And on me, the earth, there is no guilt. I’m not your worst son. If the light is like a wedge on you, let me decide for myself that the light is a wedge. “Emigration” is something different now than what it was called in 1973, when the song was written (Kommersant wrote about this on November 24 in the text about the new émigré lyrics).

However, the text of “Farewell to the Motherland” is easy to try on new relocators, including Grebenshchikov himself, whose foot has not touched his native soil since February.

If you set a goal, almost every one of the “Songs of the Bards” can be found in common with the current circumstances. The album begins with Alexander Gorodnitsky’s song “September makes flocks” (“Free means outlawed — how simple this truth is!”) and continues with three songs by Bulat Okudzhava about the war, but not about the specific one, like “We will not stand up for the price” , but about war as a phenomenon and state. For all that, Grebenshchikov certainly did not set the goal of illustrating new times with old songs. Over the years of work on the record, he has developed something like a museum of intellectual resistance from samples of a classical author’s song. You can even boldly say – intelligent.

It becomes even more interesting when the songs of the 60s and 70s suddenly reveal techniques or motifs that Boris Grebenshchikov himself used later, generating his own poetic style. It is unlikely that Grebenshchikov’s “Ivanov” could have been born if something like Yuri Vizbor’s song “Get Up, Count” had not been in the air. The sweetness of the Soviet everyday, intertwined with the sublime bookish and even mythical, is one of the favorite tricks of BG.

All material is recorded to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar, in this sense, all works sound exceptionally authentic. However, the musician forces the most dramatic moments vocally, quite in a rock manner.

It is generally accepted that the Soviet author’s song was “not sexy”, and in this sense, Russian-language rock and roll was its opposite. So: on the album “Songs of the Bards” there are clear refutations of this. These are “On a Quiet Port Street” by Bulat Okudzhava, “A Girl Walks Through Moscow at Night” by Yevgeny Klyachkin, and, finally, Klyachkin’s “Sad Song about City Lovers” – pure sex and at the same time, in the words of the author of the album, an escape doomed to failure into illegal love.

The album’s most unexpected plot twists are Gennady Shpalikov’s “The Horse Had a Angina Pectoris”, Alexander Galich’s song “About the Painters, the Stoker and the Theory of Relativity”, also known by Vladimir Vysotsky, and “She said: ‘I don’t love'” by Vysotsky himself. For the author of these lines, the “City” (“Mountains are distant, mountains are foggy …”) by Yuri Kukin turned out to be a complete surprise. This song, in many people’s memory, is firmly connected with the tradition of a tourist song, with the romance of bonfires and ice axes. But Grebenshchikov’s manner and Grebenshchikov’s poetics turn the song about “the city is not for everyone” into something from a completely different galaxy. So one myth takes on another, and everyone is happy.