Gergely Nagy: Loud! Infosheet

1 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 2 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. 3 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 4 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.” 5 “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.

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