the piano class. He was not only the leader of The Kristall but also the Captain of the CJR team from the prestigious School 11 who beat us that year.
Besides participation in the concerts at Loony, they were also "playing trash", that is providing live music at weddings, birthdays and all sorts of parties with their 1 organ, 2 guitars, and the drum set. On the opposite side, there were 4 of us. We didn't know a damn thing about the music theory (except for Chuba who had attended the Music School for 4 years in the class of button-accordion) , but we were backed by Club, the unalienable part of the Settlement.
While our khutta served the base for technical empowering of The Orpheuses, Club provided means for our musical education. (Once again leaving aside Chuba and his button-accordion which let him easily master the bass guitar parts, because they, generally, coincide with those played by the musician with his left hand in the bass section of the accordion.)
That’s why, the concert of Classical Guitar in Club, advertised by a modest poster about the classical guitar performer Zverev from the Kiev Philharmonic, was attended by only two Orpheuses – Vladya and me because Skully did not feel like attending as long as he was the drummer at our VIA, not a guitar-player…
The lobby of Club was unusually crowded, and so was the landing at the auditorium entrance, young guys for the most part. Who would have thought that the Settlement youth were so much fond of the guitar classics, eh?
So, we stood up there in the crowd when from below, along the wide steps of the stair as well as from among the dudes around us, there rose the rustle of the low-voiced announcement to each other, like a gust of wind rushing in front of the thunderstorm: "Wafflisters! Wafflisters are coming!"
From the first floor, 2 girls were ascending the wide stairs. On their reaching the stairhead, the stares of all present were riveted to them in tense deafening silence. I was struck with the purity of the milk-white skin in the girls’ faces. Encapsulated with the wall of goggling silence, they turned right, to the mirrored gym of the Ballet Studio where that evening the seminarians from GPTU-4 had their party…
And we, Vladya and I, split from the crowd on the landing and turned to the left, to join a handful of those who attended the concert of the Guitarist Laureate in his classic three-piece black suit and thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses.
A couple of front rows were more than enough to accommodate the listeners who were seated giving a wide berth to each other. He sat above us in a chair at the edge of the feebly illuminated stage, announced the music pieces and then played them on his acoustic guitar. But that was more than what we considered guitar playing! Something unimaginable! Unattainable…
After the concert, Vladya and I knocked on the door of the room in the first floor, where he was folding his black suit to pack it into the hard black case of his guitar. We introduced ourselves as guys willing to learn the guitar playing. What’s to be done? How to begin?
And he gave us a free consultation. He took out his instrument from under the suit in his case and showed some tricky picks. Then he packed everything back and went to the Station to go elsewhere thru the dark of night. Yet, before leaving the room, he advised us to get some Polish music magazines where they were printing a lot of music with tablature above the lyrics. However, at the newsstands of Konotop, they never heard of such magazines…
After applying for the VIA contest, we came to the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich. We made it clear that for holding aloft the honor of Club at the City Contest we wanted a mere trifle, really, those couple of black speakers from the portable movie projector, together with their amplifier, because we had no place for rehearsals, nor a single item of the drum set.
Flaring his already flushed face under the crisp curls of a natural merchant, Pavel Mitrofanovich blared out that for the guys from the Settlement, Club would do all and everything and then everything and all over again. That is the meaning of slotting negotiations in the appropriate moment of a person's daily schedule.
Director ordered Club House Manager, Stepan, to pass us the room of the Variety Ensemble until after the contest. The Ensemble musicians led by their Head, Aksyonov, moved their instruments from the room, including the double bass and saxophone, to an unknown destination. For an indefinite interval, Aksyonov stopped appearing in Club at all. In the room, there remained only a giant desk, a piano and "the kitchen"—a drum set made up of a kicker, a snare, a hat, and two tom-toms under a wide crash. The clickety-clak, taps, dubs, bangs, clangs of the kitchen filled the room and the outside corridor for hours because Skully was practicing to give out the rock beat with all of his hands and feet.
The technique of beating the beat was shown to him by Anatoly Melai, a Settlement dude recently demobilized from the army who, before he was drafted, played the horn at the Variety Ensemble. Besides, he showed us the chords to "The Yellow River" by the rock group Christie. That song topped most of the European music charts then. We knew about the fact from the station "The Radio-Sweden" who were broadcasting in Russian one hour a week, on Sundays, and the ours did not block it with the usual static noise because they talked exclusively about rock music omitting any anti-Soviet propaganda.
Anatoly even knew the Russian adaptation of the lyrics in "The Yellow River":
"We roamed at the Yellow RiverThe flowers blossomed all 'round usBy the river of my dream –Alloverida!"
And then there followed the chorus which oddly enough avoided rendering into Russian:
"Alloverida! Alloverida!Yuza mom-ma! Yuza mom-ma!"
We started to rehearse