Rock historians in most of the countries usually fail to agree upon the most important band or record in their respective countries. In Romania, among fans and critics there seems to be wide agreement that the best Romanian record ever is “Cantafabule”, Phoenix’s third album closing their first Romanian period. It is a mature work of a mixture of hard rock and psychedelia using, along with the typical rock instrumentarium, blockfloete, celeste, church-sounding bells, piano and violin. A far cry from their beat, Beatles-inspired, charmingly naive beginnings documented on a couple of EPs, “Cantafabule” is also quite different from Phoenix’s first two LP’s which are both marked by strong folkloric influences.
How did Phoenix decide to change style and drop the British pop-rock influences in order to concentrate upon Romanian folklore?
In 1971 the Romanian dictator Ceausescu had returned from a China and North Korea trip where he fell hard for Kim Il Sung’s cult of personality. Kim Il Sung was then only General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of North Korea, becoming a president only in 1972, just like Ceausescu, who became a president in 1974. The Romanian cultural life, which in the late 60’s had experienced a degree of openness suddenly after July 1971 had to cope with imposed nationalist and neo-Stalinist measures detailed in the infamous July Theses.
It was a good moment to bring folkloric elements into pop and rock music but when Nicolae Covaci, the leader of Phoenix, told his colleagues about his idea of finding inspiration in folklore not only did they not find it inspiring, some leaving the band, but they didn’t realise that what was meant was “folklore with a difference”.
In Nicu Covaci’s own words: “If Ceausescu wants folklore, then we’ll give him folklore!”
Instead of crude renditions of Romanian folklore where the only difference from the originals was the use of electric instruments, in the style of Sincron, their first LP, “Cei ce ne-au dat nume” (“Those who gave us a/the name”), showcases a full side dedicated to a conceptual cycle referring to the four seasons as symbols for nature’s transformation, birth and rebirth. The original season’s songs are divided by short imitations of traditional songs and one of the percussionist members of the band and co-author of the LP cover together with his future wife (Valeriu Sepi and Elisabeth Lili Ochsenfeld) even built a giant wooden goat and several smaller ones in order to imitate the traditional village instruments. It is undeniable folklore but of a genuine archaic extraction.
Phoenix’s second album, “Mugur de fluier” is a conceptual album issued in 1974 (but already played in 1973) with a strong folkloric influence, and a step forward in the band’s development. The album comprises the only song composed by their vocalist, Mircea Baniciu, ”Andrii Popa”, dedicated to a “haiduc” (outlaw) and using as lyrics a poem from 1843. It has become the band’s most popular song, a fact which I personally witnessed in Poland, where meeting a prog fan whom I had sent several CDs, and after a very long and wet night spent on Pyotrkowska Street in Lodz, in the wee hours of the morning, my guest took out the Mugur de fluier CD from his remarkable collection, inserted it in the CD player and sang together with his friends in unison, verse by verse, “Andrii Popa”!
Only one year later, in 1975, Phoenix struck again with their magnum opus, the double LP Cantafabule, a trifecta of lyrics, music and graphic design. The lyrics by two extremely inspired poets, Andrei Ujica si Serban Foarta, previous collaborators on Phoenix’s second LP, take the Romanian listener into a world of fabulous animals of Roman, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern mythologies (basilisk, Calandrinon, Roc and Phoenix birds) described in mediaeval bestiaries, using an archaic language, Aromanian and even old French, a world inspired by Philippe de Thaün, the first poet to write in the Anglo-Norman French vernacular instead of Latin and author of a bestiary, a translation of the Physiologus, a Christian work written in Greek at an undetermined date between the 2nd and the 4th century AD. It comprises the story of the unicorn that allows itself to be captured only while resting in the lap of a virgin rendered by Phoenix in “Norocul inorogului” (The unicorn’s luck”) and of the immortal phoenix bird rising from its ashes three days after having burned, a symbol of Christ’s resurrection, recounted in the apotheotic finale of the record as “Phoenix”.
The non-Romanian listener is sadly deprived of all these mediaeval and religious references but the forceful yet supple, highly sophisticated music, using, alongside with traditional rock instruments, celeste, violin, piano and a good deal of synthesizer passages, stands for itself even without any comprehension of the lyrics.
The cover, which first appeared with a wrong title “Cantofabule” instead of “Cantafabule”, should have been a collage of the Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir’s faceless body represented as a unicorn on a metal gate background symbolising the Iron Curtain but the initial version was rejected by the censors and replaced by the centrefold showing the fabled animals in a pen and ink technique, a rare censorship action which- in my debatable opinion – resulted in an improved cover.
This was the pinnacle of Phoenix’s career when their concerts could gather tens of thousands of spectators on stadiums and ensure them a lifestyle of unmatched comfort under the otherwise restrictive and repressive Communist regime. They had supporters among the Communist party apparatchiks who either admired them sincerely or were interested in profiting themselves from the huge profits the Phoenix concerts were bringing but also enemies in the strict censors and the occasional culture bigwigs. It was Phoenix’s bad luck that during one summer show by the Black Sea the decibel level of their amps disturbed a communist big shot and thus the band finds itself banned. Romania being Romania the ban prohibited the organisation of Phoenix concerts in Romania but Nicu Covaci found a loophole in staging concerts in collaboration with football clubs, an even more profitable enterprise.
Tired of these, sometimes minor but constant, harassments and convinced of their self-worth, in 1976 Nicu Covaci left Romania by means of a pro-forma marriage with a Dutch lady, returning the following year and orchestrating the band’s escape in the band’s loudspeakers.
One cannot say that Phoenix was an overtly political band. Their aim was only to make the music they imagined, and under a more permissive form of socialism, like in the neighbouring Yugoslavia, they would’ve probably continued their careers as feted rock stars in their native Romania. Instead their hopes for a breakthrough in the West, I.e., in Germany, were thwarted by a combination of factors like: singing in Romanian, lack of interest of record companies in their kind of ethno-hard rock due to the advent of new wave and punk movements, lack of management, or simply bad luck. However, in any period in time there was room for any kind of music and the success of a protean German band like Embryo is for me proof enough that one can succeed even in a narrowly defined and not widely popular niche.
Embryo
Rooted in jazz (Christian Burkhardt, the leader of the band, Dieter Serfas and Lothar Meid were members of the Mal Waldron band, touring with him in the US) but playing jazz-rock, krautrock, fusion, Embryo was a world music band avant la lettre, their quest for bridging the music of different cultures bringing them to Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India, Japan, Nigeria, where they jammed with local musicians, their 1979 tour resulting in the very interesting movie “Vagabunden Karawane: A musical trip through Iran, Afghanistan and India in 1979”. Although in the 70’s they played the Love-and-peace-festival on the island of Fehmarn* in front of about 25,000 spectators, immediately following Jimi Hendrix on September 6, the last day of the festival and Hendrix’s last concert before his death, their appearances in Munich, their home base, many of them witnessed by the present writer, were limited to small venues. But they carved themselves a niche, were appreciated by musicians like Miles Davis, and managed to record more than 44 records** in their 53-year career. They refused to make any compromise, refused the commercialisation of their sound, sought their own musical path and became a cult band. Except for playing for students at sit-ins or demonstrations against authorities, typical of the late ‘60s, and of composing “Espana si, Franco no” in 1971 their later music is devoid of political stances.
Bijelo Dugme
Just across the border from Timisoara, in Titoist Yugoslavia, perfectly contemporary with Phoenix and similar in their interest in mixing rock and folklore, Bijelo Dugme (White Button), enjoyed a level of freedom unimaginable for a Romanian band of the ‘70s. In 1970, when Phoenix were playing beat songs in Timisoara, Goran Bregovic and three of the members of the future Bijelo Dugme were playing Cream and Hendrix covers in Naples, Italy. In 1976 they recorded four songs in the USA and a whole album in London and their music was reviewed in Western magazines like Melody Maker, something no Romanian band could dream of. They didn’t need to smuggle band members outside Yugoslavia, their encounter with the Yugoslav customs being a totally different experience from Phoenix’s. In 1982, after having played in Innsbruck, Austria, upon their return to Yugoslavia, the band tried to hide new equipment in old boxes, only to be discovered by the vigilant custom officers, which gave them such a high fine that they needed their label, Yugoton, to lend them the money to pay the fine.
By listening to two of their most famous songs, “Tako ti je, mala moja, kad ljubi Bosanac” and the older “Kad bi’ bio bijelo dugme” their influences are immediately discernible: a fat Deep Purple sound driven by organ with intertwined folk melodies, the ethnic vein gaining their style the epithet “pastirski rock” (”pastoral rock”). Catchy songs indeed but far from the originality of the “Cantafabule’ album.
With the exception of their final years they weren’t political in any way, only the ethnic strife of the late ‘80s producing pro-Yugoslavia songs not very well received in some parts of the federal state, and the Albanian-language “Kosovska”
Plastic People of the Universe
Neither the legendary Czechoslovak band Plastic People of the Universe described themselves as political. In the words of Vratislav Brabenec, their saxophonist: “Our identity as a band was to do with poetry, not politics. We were more artistic than political. I am one of those whose cultural actions, not political actions, were sufficient to make me a subversive. The politicians made us political, by being offended by what we did and the music we played. I don’t know how many musicians in modern times have been imprisoned because their music offended the authorities, but we are among them. And although it is rather more comfortable for us now, we are still a cultural and artistic dissent against the norm.”, which is a stance repeated by Josef Janicek, their keyboard player.
And how right he is. As in the case of Phoenix, there was no need for the communist authorities to harass and criminalise a variety of rock music only because they didn’t tickle the ears of the top party leaders in the right way. Plastic People, influenced mainly by Frank Zappa (wherefrom their name is borrowed) and Velvet Underground, chose a name that recalled Zappa’s scathing critique of societal conformism and lack of individuality but their songs didn’t incite the spectators to upset the social order and their concerts and happenings didn’t develop into anti-communist events. They were only a thorn in the eye of the authorities which in 1970 revoked the band’s licence to perform. But the band kept on playing at unofficial underground events. In 1973 Brabenec, returning to Prague after a four-year stint working in London, changed the band’s style to more avant-garde jazz, Slavonic dances and klezmer rhythms. He also gave the lyrics a more philosophical and religious tint due to his previous years as a theology student.
They continued to play, the police continued to harass them, like in the 1974 incident***, when a concert with PPU, DG307 and the local group Adept in Rudolfov was broken up by the police accompanied by dogs. 300 of the participants were beaten, arrested and forced to sign documents that they would never attend such an event again. In 1976 members of PPU and DG307 plus supporters like Ivan Martin Jirous, artistic director of PPU, were arrested, with Brabenec and Jirous being charged with “organised disturbance of peace”. Brabenec emigrated to Canada after having been threatened by StB that his infant daughter would be kidnapped and Jirous received an 18-month sentence, one of five he would receive before the fall of communism.
The Czechoslovak authorities thought they had scored a decisive win against the underground movement but the result was the opposite. Havel and the signatories of the Charter 77 took up the band’s cause and demanded their release, paving the way to the Velvet Revolution, which incidentally took its name from the band revered by the Plastic People, Velvet Underground..
I witnessed their music at the Zappanale in Bad Doberan, Germany in 2011 and cannot say it made an indelible impression on me but I also couldn’t understand why such music would need to be banned and its performers persecuted and tormented by the authorities.
Unable to repeat their huge Romanian success in West Germany, Phoenix returned after the revolution to audiences hungry for their music. First sold-out concerts were followed years later by infighting among the members and slowly everybody left the founder and leader, Nicu Covaci alone. Covaci reformed Phoenix several times, sometimes joined by his former colleagues, issued three studio CDs under the name of Phoenix, but the band never returned to its “Cantofabule” fame.
Celelalte Cuvinte
“Phoenix and Sfinx were, for me, a musical school,” confesses Calin Pop, the vocalist and guitarist of CC. “I will never forget March 8, 1972, when I received a Phoenix concert ticket from my father. I was 12 years old, and at the time I was in a guitar circle at the Army House, where we all practiced the same movements in the group. It was the first concert with ‘Cei ce ne-au dat nume,’ and their music created in me a thirst for Western rock. Led Zep, Sabbath, Zappa, and so on.” Promoted by the late Florian Pittis, he once called Ovidiu Lipan in Germany to tell him that there was a band in Romania following the Phoenix path, and Lipan reportedly burst into tears.
Celelalte Cuvinte exploded onto the rock scene with half an album, followed by a full album, and at least the song “Caracteruri” I see as a tribute to Phoenix’s music, with Barbu Mumuleanu’s 1825 lyrics and Ovidiu Rosu’s violin. “They don’t believe they are born, they’re not born, but are fallen from the heavens above / To command, command, command / And rule over the lowly” is an old text, more precisely two centuries old, but it perfectly describes the mentality of the Communist potentates (and in fact, of any dictators). The music of these first two records, along with the band’s second full LP, is difficult to fit into a single style. The high voice and clear pronunciation of vocalist and guitarist Calin Pop, together with the complex structure of the compositions, make the sound of CC immediately recognizable, whether the songs are melodic hard rock, instrumental progressive rock, love songs, or elegies.
In the ’80s, Cuvintele also caught the attention of the repressive authorities and censors. Calin Pop himself recounts that in Timișoara, during their student years, there was a policeman nicknamed Pacala, who carried scissors with him and enjoyed cutting the hair of the local bohemians. One day, he stops Calin for a check, claiming his photo didn’t match his ID. Calin, annoyed, responds: “You bastard, do you want to sell seeds in the market starting tomorrow? My father is a prosecutor, so leave me alone with this nonsense.” The policeman, incredulous, walks a few meters away, radios the police station, and asks if anyone knows a prosecutor named Pop. After receiving an answer, he walks back to Calin and, with a sweet voice, says: “Weren’t you heading to the station? Can I carry your bag?”
This is just one of the many instances of harassment they and other rock bands in Romania faced. Regarding censorship, it’s bizarre that the prudish censors insisted on changing the “naked girl” in the lyrics of “Paraul”/“The brook” while a song with a rather direct anti-government message like the previously mentioned “Caracteruri” passed without comment.
Unlike Phoenix, Celelalte Cuvinte never considered fleeing Communist Romania, and perhaps the genius loci helped them compose album after album, constantly reinventing themselves. In the years following the Revolution, with two heavy metal albums reflecting the disillusionment of the early post-revolutionary years, followed by “Ispita”/”The temptation”, an album with a philosophical, sometimes Oriental, tone describing the temptations to which we are all subjected, “NOS” (from “new old stock”), a critique of the distancing between individuals due to the replacement of physical reality with virtual reality, and “STEM,” an album about our, and the band’s, ability to regenerate. Their latest album, “Lumea asta” (“This World”), is, inter alia, a result of the main lyricist Marcel Breazu’s long-standing interest in Turkish influences in Romanian language and Western music, as seen in the song “Allaturka-Allafranca”, which closes the album like “Pseudo-Morgana”, with its Oriental rhythms closes Phoenix’s first album, completing a full circle.
Nicu Covaci & Calin Pop