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Gergely Nagy

LOUD! Basszus! – zene és szöveg

Novel (Új Palatinus), 2003, 196 pages

“your band’s got to have four heads, four explosive, dangerous heads”

Based loosely on Nagy’s own experiences, this semi-autobiographical novel traces the progress of a young bass guitarist through Budapest’s musical underground: his growing awareness of the world beyond Hungary’s borders, and, especially, his obsession with western music. As the story unfolds, he forms a band, wins a recording contract, learns to navigate Hungary’s club scene, and eventually – perhaps inevitably – grows disillusioned. In the beginning, the narrator of this novel is too young to understand the political situation around him and is too naive to act cautiously. Having seen the iconic cover of London Calling by The Clash, he wants to to play his instrument as loudly as possible, to smash it to pieces, and thus shatter the existing order around him. His band simply wants a hearing. (And of course a shot at the pretty girls in their school.)

The political climate changes, however – and the more successful his band becomes, the less there is to hold them together. What began as an experiment in punk anarchism ends up looking like a bitter marriage. The band makes records, tours, and makes some money – only to lose it just as quickly. Signed up by a multinational record company, they confront the ways of the Western music industry at a time when popular culture in their own country is changing by the hour, and music (and everything music stands for) is growing less vital and important.

Ironic, exhuberant, and authentically Eastern European, the tone of the novel is as fast and forceful as the music the main character plays, this fastness also reflected in the brief chapters of the book that can also be read as individual short stories. Its voice embodies the voice of a changing era but is deeply rooted in a specific time

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and place. It embraces the language of punk rock, political proclamations, Soviet-era advertising, street slang, and the obscure (and often hilarious) mannerisms adopted by Hungary’s music press under Communism. It also presents a fractured and fabulous view of Western pop culture, as filtered through an East-European sensibility.

Imagined encounters with his teenage idol punctuate the narrative: Paul Simonon, the bass guitarist of The Clash, has arrived in Budapest in search of the perfect bass sound and the perfect bass guitar. The narrator and Paul never meet, and while they eventually end up in the same place, it is never certain that they inhabit the same period in time. As the narrative unfolds, however, it becomes clearer and clearer that, spiritually, musically, and politically, they travel along parallel lines, adding layers of depth and meaning to each other’s experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gergely Nagy was born in 1969 in Budapest. Studied drama history, creative writing, script and play writing at the University of Theatre and Film Studies, graduating in 1992. Worked for several theatres throughout Hungary as well as for the public service television (Magyar Televízió). Since his graduation he writes fiction. He has three books published, two volumes of short stories (Give me a point 1999, Loud! 2003) and a novel (Angst 2007). Since 1999 he works as a journalist an editor. From his teenage years he has been involved in Budapest’s music scene. Currently he plays the bass for a band named ‘Eat me’.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ANGST (Novel, Ulpius Ház, 2007, 384 pages)

Set in the Budapest of the near future where skyscrapers transform the urban landscape and five metro lines cross under the city, this cyber-punkish tour de force tells the rise and fall of a talented comics writer who after the exorbitant success of his comics series Angst gets stuck in a day-job working for a media emporium, loses friends and loved ones one by one, and even gets involved in the underground world of media anarchism.

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LOUD!

EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVEL

(Intro)

The first person I identified as a bass guitarist was Paul Simonon of the Clash. Please select a role model, paste his picture on cardboard, and explain your choice. Well, that’s not exactly how it happened. First, I was flummoxed by the guitars — what was the difference between the lead guitar and the rhythm guitar? I had the sneaking suspicion that the difference between them lay in the function rather than in the instruments themselves. But the bass guitar is visibly different than the others — it has four strings and a long neck. Recognizably different. In the same way, the bass guitarist is recognizably different than the rest of the band. There are the front men — the singer and lead guitarist — and then there are the back up guys — the drummer, a keyboardist maybe, and the bass player. He hovers off to the side, toward the back, closer to the drummer than the singer. He’s something of an outsider. His speakers and amplifier are bigger than anyone else’s. You need a big

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speaker because it would seem that lower sounds need a larger surface area — to resonate off of, that is. A bass guitarist can outblast the whole band, he could blow them off the stage, but doesn’t want to. The bass guitarist is a humble man. He doesn’t stand out, but you’d miss him if he weren’t there. That said, there are bands without a bass guitar…but there are never bands without a drummer. That would just be wrong. Rock music is about the drum, not the guitar. Maybe a bass guitarist is just good enough to do what he does. That’s pretty much what Paul Simonon was like; he’s not good for anything else. He couldn’t even get his part right on the early tracks. But then his sound, licks, and look became emblematic. He had perfect proportions to be a bass guitarist — his instrument hung down low, over his thighs, feet planted wide apart, head down. In both his posture and mannerisms, he was the evolution of the double bass player from the traditional rock and roll trio. Paul was perfect in the role. But that’s not all. There’s his picture on the best album cover in the history of mankind, London Calling (1979): shot in the act of smashing his bass guitar to pieces. Many musicians have broken many guitars in any number of ways before Paul Simonon and many have since — but no one did it like him. This is nothing less than the perfect way to smash a guitar. And more than just smashing a guitar. Smashing everything. Smashing the recording industry, pop music, electric everything — with the rage of a Luddite — breaking the machine. Smashing the mother-fuckers. Smashing the existing order. But I couldn’t bring myself to wholeheartedly condone this act. A Fender Precision bass guitar (the one in the picture being destroyed against the stage at the Palladium in New York City) is very expensive. You couldn’t even get one where I come from. My bass guitar cost 1500 forints; it was a Jolana. Made in Czechoslovakia. I would have been a fool to think I’d ever be able to get anything better. At the same time, I easily had as many good reasons to smash it as my colleague in London. For which, I think it would have been more appropriate if rather than smashing it to pieces, Paul Simonon had sent his bass guitar to Eastern Europe — to the young musicians struggling to break free of the Soviet chains through rock music. He could have sent it to me. To Gergö in Budapest. Concert over, backstage at Brixton Academy, exhausted and sweat drenched, a can of Coke in his hand, he could have called over one of his roadies and said, “Hey, can you take this guitar and send it to that guy in Budapest.”

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“Bucharest?” asks the roadie.

“No, they’re two entirely different cities. Recognizably different,” says Paul.

“Right.”

“Hold on,” Paul calls after him. He holds out a torn ticket from the concert. “Stick this in the case with the guitar.” And he jots down a few lines: Hi! Paul, from the Clash here. This guitar is for you. Please don’t smash it to bits, please. Just plug it into an amplifier. I’m not going to send you an amplifier, so you better find one for yourself somehow. Turn up the volume and just strum, let it vibrate. It’ll be great. You’ll see. You just need to get a band together. The roadie puts the instrument into an elegant guitar case with brass reinforcements on the corners, pastes a fragile sticker onto it and sends it off, air mail. Paul leans back in his chair, clutches a snow- white towel in his hands, and reflects for a few moments about having passed on the torch.

Now, this isn’t exactly what happened. The time anyone tried to sell me a Fender was in 1984, in the same block of apartments where the old couple had the tropical fish store — and this is how two childhood passions came together. (But while one after the other the fish in my aquarium would die, I kept on playing the guitar.) The fraud was quickly exposed: it was a fake! A real Fender has a number of identifying features: a serial number on the head, a letter for its decade (“S” for the seventies… “E” for the eighties), and then, either below the pickguard, or where the body and neck meet, there is the quality control expert’s seal and the date of manufacture. My guitar said: “Jones, 78. January, 1”; which led me to believe that Leo Fender was hard on his employees, not even letting them relax with a hangover on New Years Day. Of course, he might not have still been the boss by then, these were the same years when he sold his factory and brand in order to start Music Man. You can tell from the name that he was leaving no room for doubt. Music. Man. No way to misunderstand that. Music Man would become the best bass guitar in the world. I have a Music Man amplifier — with electron tubes. It is a sturdy, nuclear- blast-resistant companion for my solitary journeys. I bought from the same guy I eventually got my guitar from. I guess he was black market. He was a very

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goodhearted guy; so he’s doomed.

“We’re renovating,” he explained as he showed me around his apartment on a public housing block. Torn wallpaper was hanging off the walls. The apartment was completely empty except for granny sitting on a chair, dead center in the middle of the room. Sad. For about a year and a half, I was a regular visitor. In that time, one of the rooms gradually filled with musical instruments. The apartment was always in the process of being renovated, and the granny was always sitting in her chair. I started getting worried that the customs agents would find me and want to know where I’d gotten my gear. I could have gotten it anywhere. Fenders have been known to turn up in attics in remote villages. There was a time when Fenders had no value. Today it’s hard to find an old one. But back then they were just lying around, waiting to be found. Legend had it that in 1985, there was a black Fender that was making the rounds from one person to another but that everyone who owned it mysteriously died soon after. I don’t know where mine came from. It’s not black. But I think it may be from Germany. That’s where we get most things. Whatever they don’t want anymore in Germany ends up here. Before the Fender, I had a guitar called Melody, which was an Italian brand assembled in Romania. Its neck was slightly but continuously warped. I also had a Yamaha, which — they say — was part of a barter package with Japan for agricultural products by the Hungarian state toys and musical instruments company, Triál. It was made of ash and heavy as hell. But it had a relatively good sound and Gazsi, the most talented bass guitarist in Budapest, put in an active pickup. He trained for playing the way rock climbers do for climbing. He had special finger strengthening exercises. Now Gazsi has become a Hare Krishna and plays in a Krishna hardcore band. The lyrics are the same for every track. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama, Rama, Hare, Hare. He’d like to meet the guy who wrote the words.

(Thing)

It was called “Marlboro” and it wasn’t a cigarette. The cigarettes were Bond Streets; that was what the keyboardist smoked. He was two years older than us. And he’s still our keyboardist. He drank beer and had a girlfriend. He brought Bond

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Streets to a rehearsal and we all shared one. We even wrote a track called “American Cigarette.” I got the Marlboro gear through a girl singer who went by the name Donut. Shortly before we met her she had a part in the movie Love to The First Blood that made her famous all over the country. It was the bass guitarist of her band, DoppinG, who sold me his equipment — Marlboro gear. An amplifier head and a speaker. I should stop to explain the term head. I wasn’t familiar with this terminology, despite the fact that it is quite logical: anything at the top is the head. Although the speaker, which is below the head, is not called the body. Nothing is called the body — except the body of the guitar, which is called the body. A guitar is a weapon with the body of woman — according to the Communist Youth Organization’s weekly magazine. That was a claim they made in that period, though it never caught on, maybe because it seemed to be referring to the rock music of the GDR, Communist Germany, where they had the nude beaches or maybe more specifically to Dean Reed, the only American ever to have fled to the GDR. There were a number of other confusing terms, words with obscure meanings, such as output level, monitor box, cluster cable, intelligent lamp, bass box — but even the ones that seemed more self evident, like frontline and backline needed clarification. But we’ll come back to that. For the moment the bass guitarist was waiting tables and found it — with his family’s full support — more tenable than playing the bass. He assumed a world-weary air in order to mask his disappointment. He’d simply given up on the idea of being in a band and playing the bass. He not longer gave a damn about Donut and about achieving nationwide fame. Was he a loser? I don’t know. All I cared about was the fact that I would at long last have an amplifier. It must have even had some original parts in it. I mean original parts of some description. Because there was no brand name Marlboro known in professional circles — except for the cigarette. But the device did resemble an amplifier and in its own way the black plastic cover was elegant. The musician’s cigarettes had left small, yellow-brownish nicks on it, evoking in me a true and unadulterated feeling of concert. This was the nonchalant gesture of a bass guitarist — resting his cigarette on the top of the amplifier while playing away. It was impressively large, came up to my waist. Mind you, bass sounds require a very large surface area to resonate off of. So, all in all, I felt that my problems had been solved. My amplifier problems, that is,

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which started with an old Videoton radio and then became into a robust, make-shift metal …thing, made by the brother of a drummer named Vásárhelyi. That problem was temporarily resolved when a Vermona Combo was purchased (the band all chipped in), and then reemerged — just, of course, as our needs expanded to include volume, tuning, a higher degree of professionalism, which meant that each member of the band had to have his own channel — and so the problem became a burning issue again. Vásárhelyi’s older brother, by the way, was also a bassist, and he knew even more about it all than I did. Streetcar was the only means we had for transporting the heavy metal box. There was no other way. The first time I took a cab was when I had a double bass with me and the driver thought he could fit the instrument into his Lada, claiming that he frequently drove around the Young Gypsies’ Orchestra. Vásárhelyi’s brother lives far far away, where the rules of urban logistics fail, where railways get messed up, and where no person really in his right mind would choose to live. We walked our city streets hungrily, our senses on alert, scanning shop windows of the few stores where there was at least some hope of finding secondhand amplifiers. And there were those who were eager to profit from our hunger, the Komor-types, the merchants. Komor sold and bought whatever there was demand for. And, of course, he hid all the quality items at the bottom of his pile. He was small fry, a miserable cheapskate. He drove a Wartburg station wagon and a Wartburg station wagon is not the kind of car you’d screw your mother over for, is it, now? No. Not unless you’re a Komor-type.

You need an amplifier. You have to have one because the sound needs to be amplified, the signal needs to resonate and carry through and electronic circuit. Otherwise they won’t hear you and you won’t split eardrums and you can’t nuke the world. And it can’t be that you can’t. If you have electricity you have everything. If you have electricity you have rock and roll. Our eyes get sore, all dried up in the basements where we rehearse, we pound the pavement, beat and broke, facing whatever we have to face. Punk will not conquer Hungary — not in the foreseeable future. Videoton makes peoples’ hearts start pounding: Videoton, not the radio, but the soccer team, hosting Real Madrid at a home game. Komor knew what we were after and he was prepared for us. He set his bait in the shop window. The boxes

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were there, all black, their knobs gleaming. But we refused to give him our money — our mothers’ money, our fathers’ money — more mothers’ than fathers’.

If there is a guitar, drums and an amplifier, nothing can keep you from giving a concert. We got a drum too, a Dubán. The other brand of drum available in town was Finkey. Rock music is about the drum, not the guitar. I’m convinced that the name Dubán has some kind of meaning. Finkey may not. I can’t think of a more perfect name for a small drum manufacturer than Dubán. Maybe it’s a stage name, and the original name was, say, Zamecsnik or Greifenstein. But Dubán sounds forth with a gentle, soft drum, sounds forth from the grubby 8th district where his store was. Some said that Dubán was a crook, that his drums were made of low-quality plywood. I don’t know, and I couldn’t then and I will not now take a position on this debate as plywood is not my field of expertise, and neither are drums. If the drummer had ever let me play his drums I’d be in trouble. I can’t beat drums properly. It’s not a question of force so much as the combination of technique and force. Drums seem like a hopelessly complicated instrument, with all those independent hand and foot movements, a rhythmic sport, gymnastics, noisemaking, rainmaking.

The drummer is in full control. To the naked eye it would seem he’s only holding drumsticks in his hands. But in fact, he holds the entire band in his hands. I mean it. The entire band. You can only ever be as good as your drummer is. “I am not your drummer,” Charlie Watts said to Mick Jagger. “You are my singer,” and he punched him in the face. So, you don’t have a drummer, your drummer has you. That even goes for the Rolling Stones, and all the more so for us, or for you. A good band with a mediocre drummer will sound mediocre (footnote: like The Talking Heads), while a mediocre band with a good drummer will sound quite good. Drum machines sucked in the eighties. Now it’s not even an issue any more. They lack character. The machines snuck in. And we legitimize this evolution. And we don’t care if keeps evolving.

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(Give me a chance)

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! What’s the rush anyway? There are so many things to speak of. Csepei’s book Introduction the Guitar is a piece of shit. Muszty-Dobai’s Guitar Lessons are not even worth mentioning. All guitar books are just a compendium of mis-instruction. One simply does not play the guitar the way they teach it — all such manuals are misleading. And then there are the video cassettes; they’re even worse. Only heavy metalists watch them because those kinds of cassettes are made by heavy metalists for heavy metalists. Many people try to study classical guitar, which is not misleading but is different. Music theory is useful, even if noone uses scores anymore. We use tabs instead, where the harmonies are marked with letters, nothing else. The double bass was somehow a natural choice for me. But I never really wanted to practice, I’d rather play the bass guitar than practice pieces for the double bass and do finger exercises, run scales or read scores. The bass guitar is more revelatory than anything, more revelatory even than the woman sunbathing naked on the balcony across the street. She’s a mother but she’s still in good shape, in perfect shape, I would say, and I never really cared to guess how old she might be and what shape she’d be in if she wasn’t in the shape I saw her in. She even makes her infant baby sunbathe, and her fashionably sheared poodle too. She must have been aware of the fact that she could be seen when she sunbathed naked on the balcony, even if there was a stone banister, because there are holes all along the stone banister, or rather, it might be more accurate to call them loop-holes. All right, let’s call them peepholes. The bass guitar is more interesting.

Many years later this same woman signed my payroll slip at the accounting department of the Hungarian public service television station. We knew everything about each other. There are many women, and there are more than enough naked women too, but there is only one instrument. Women yield, but instruments just won’t. You have to sweat to learn how to play them. I knew nothing. Dots were points of reference on the neck, double dots marked the octaves. Finding dots on women is exciting too, by the way. But regarding dots on an instrument, or rather the sounds it would make when I played, even the great Kodály would have given up

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on me despite the fact that he never gave up on anybody. I’m not sure how he would have judged me with respect to women. Anyway, the fact is that I was almost hopelessly untrained. Even Paul Simonon couldn’t have started off worse. Or Sid Vicious. Paul, on the other hand, seems to have learned something from Sid. He didn’t learn how to play music because Sid didn’t excelle at music but in image making. Disheveled, spiky hair, phlegmatic expression, lock and chain around his neck, black leather trousers and a red t-shirt, panther skin boots — which than made a second appearance on Keith Richards’s feet during the 1981 Stones tour — and guitar, hanging low on the thighs. I may have started out worse than Paul. However – and however immodest it may sound – I caught up with him fast.

Concert over, backstage at 100 Club on Oxford Street, the great Kodály turns to Sid Vicious, bass guitarist of the Sex Pistols, and says: “This music of yours and the fact that you reject all conventions of music history — is it an expression of youth revolt against the senselessness of life?”

“Aaah…yeah, well, I don’t know,” Sid says, a can of Heineken in his hand.

“Do you, my son, try to compensate for your musical illiteracy with volume?”

“Yeah, well, maybe,” Sid says, his eyelids heavy, as he takes a sip of beer.

“Tell me, my son, do you know solfége? Have you ever heard of my method? The Kodály System?”

“Aw…system sucks.”

We decide that we’ill do something for the band every day. Just a little thing. We’ll go to an instrument store and look around. Go to a cultural center to organize a concert. Try to find a place to rehearse. We will go to the Pop-eggs Emerging Artists Buro to see the agent Hevesi, or to Bem rakpart Cultural Center on the banks of the Danube to see Aranka. Or we’ll go somewhere. Or we won’t go anywhere — we’ll just listen to music and discuss it. We’ll learn to play a few songs. Or fool around, just for kicks. We’ll design the cover of our LP. Set the date for our album release.

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We don’t care about anything. Not even about the fact that the political situation doesn’t allow records to be released. Just release them. Such a damn simple thing — a bunch of people play music and it gets recorded and there are microphones, and other people mess around with the tracks a little to fix the sound and harmonies, and so forth, and then they start the record press in the city of Dorog, then the records get put into record jacket along with a users manual: this record can be played with a stereo as well as a mono pick up device. Nevertheless, some records do get released. That’s what makes the situation so confusing for us, but we don’t even attempt to understand it. At the same time, it’s absolutely clear to us what we won’t do. Whatever they want us to do we just won’t. No. We just won’t. Of course there’s hardly anyone who would actually want anything from us. Not yet, but maybe later they will. Everybody will want something from us and then we’ll have to be very careful. We write a song called “Death Dreams” in which we express our political views. We write a song called “Rock and Roll Star” that expresses our opinions about stardom. We write a whole bunch of bad songs, too, though at this point we don’t know yet that they are bad. We decide to drop the song “Oh, How Happy You Are” from our repertoire because although half a year earlier, it quite accurately reflected our political views, we’ve come to think that it’s over-simplified. Someone whose opinion we don’t give a shit about said the lyrics were good, so we drop it even more. People used to like it when we played it live, but still… Which reminds me that we’ve had some concerts already. We don’t even know how many. Three, four, five? We’ve already had our debut. Yes, we’ve been there. We are now veteran stage men. We’re not counting the concert at Ilonka’s apartment. That wasn’t a concert; it wasn’t Wembley Stadium. It wasn’t the Vasas Club, where we played with Kyrie Leison and the Floating Islands. But that was already something. We’d been hanging around there since four in the afternoon and were totally exhausted by the time we got on stage at nine. And the next day we had to go to school. (It was our front man who determined that you should never turn up at a venue when the organizers tell you to. I still haven’t figured that out.) We were half-conscious when we played and our classmates were there and the girls too. Then, there was the distinctly concert-like concert at the Ujlaki. The Ujlaki wasn’t built to last forever. Maybe the MacDonalds that’s been built there now won’t last

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forever either. I have no idea what they’ll put in the place of that MacDonalds.

I simply couldn’t understand why, despite my vast stage experience, my legs were shaking like that. They were shaking so much I worried the audience would think I was trying to move like Chuck Berry or Angus Young. I was sure I’d fall to the ground at some point during the performance — and not out of ecstasy either. But I stood my ground to the end. A heavy metal band was up before us and for some mysterious reason they were wearing brightly colored dresses and playing brightly colored guitars, and all their girlfriends had brightly coloured hair. They posed like pictures they’d probably seen in the West German magazine Bravo of the Scorpions, gods of deutschmetal, and they sang “Andi, you are so good (good good good)”. They were horrible. We were not. We were fucking great. Even though the Blues Gmk, who were on after the heavy metal kids did had a virtuoso guitarist. It wasn’t our handling of the instruments that made us great — we knew that didn’t count back then. What counted was the way we acted, the impression we made. Our attitude. We’d learn how to play the instruments later. We could convince everyone that we were great. (We did it! We did it!, we said happily to each other, but at the same time, we kept coming up with all sorts of theories about why we sucked.)

It’s all in the essence. It’s not about the songs themselves — no one, not us, or our public, could have explained what they even ment. It’s all about the way four guys who stand up together stand. The way the drummer’s head, the bass guitarist, the lead guitarist and the singer all fit together. Not like in a photograph. But like in real life. Because the stage is real life. When you are there, it is your life — an hour and a half of your life and you have to live it in order to make all the people watching you live it too. Something has to happen up there. And it doesn’t take wearing brightly colored clothes (that’s where those heavy metal guys fucked up), it doesn’t take virtuosic playing (which is how those blues guys fucked up) — all that: tawdry ornament. It takes four heads, four bombs that go off right then and right there. Detonation. It can be silent, but it has to happen. And it has to inescapable. Nothing happens until that. It’s all born from the falling debris after detonation. A lot of people will certainly hate you for it, and you will often find yourself hating it all too. The boos, the laughter, the fans and enemies, analyzing every smallest detail of your

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performance, comparing you to other bands more important than you and then remarking that you don’t stand up to the comparison. Makes you feel that you’re not important enough and that what other bands are doing, saying, performing, representing right at this moment is much more important, more interesting than what you do, say, perform and represent. And it may as well be true. Or rather, it’s utterly true in a way. But, your band’s got to have four heads, four explosive, dangerous heads.

Translation by Zsolt Kozma and Minna Proctor