the most final
concluding work

And so the decade was over. But it was not for me to decide whether that term was long or short, because 10 years later I became a different I from that I who 10 years before was handed to the educational system for them to format me into one more usable member in the current society. It’s only fair to admit that the goals set before my didactic cultivators were, in general, achieved. I grew up from a snotty Octoberist to the Head of School Komsomol Committee. I realized that, with the universal gravitation in place, spitting into the sky was meaningless.

Even though I did not have enough of Komsomol zeal to sing "The Internationale" at All-School Komsomol Meetings along with the backup gramophone record by the Bolshoi Academic Choir, I still had no doubt that the USSR was the bulwark of peace throughout the world. (When in doubt, it’s enough to recollect those small-sized red flags with the yellow prints of a dove which Soviet people used to wave at celebration demonstrations.)

Generally, we were the best in everything, and the only area in which we lagged was music. In any song by The Beatles, there were more interesting chord sequences than in the entire Soviet song production. The reason for such a dishonorable state of affairs was that all songs by us started from A-minor… If only The Beatles would not mess around with the politics. By what right did John Lennon announced that the Soviet Union was a fascist regime? It was our country who lost 20 million people killed in the war against fascism, so why couldn't The Beatles mind just music?

However, Furtseva, Minister of Culture of the USSR, was really a nasty bitch not letting them have a tour of the Union. She personally did not miss enjoying their performance behind the closed doors and then announced, "Sorry, guys, but our listener will not understand your music." Yeah, some accomplished bitch of a Minister, because they were getting ready and had already written their hit "Back to the USSR".

As for the school curriculum, I did not comprehend chemistry at all, as well as algebra with trigonometry, and several other subjects for which I did not have time enough. Yet, I was trained to distinguish landlord Famusov from its creator, poet Griboyedov. Wasn't that a sufficient base of knowledge for entering the broad road to bright brave life?

Anyway, it was too late to supplement. The time was up. The final exams were close at hand and then Graduation Party traditionally followed by the night of collective roaming of graduates who were not classmates anymore but still had to meet the dawn of their new life together.

However, all of that was just a background to the more important matter. We were preparing for the contest organized by the City Komsomol Committee. Competition in the nomination The Best Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble, aka VIA. You want a VIA? You'll get it!

All the previous winter, long before and even never suspecting they would announce the competition of VIA's, we were busy producing electric guitars as advised by instructions and blueprints in The Radio and The Young Technician magazines. For a start, we experimented in mounting piezo elements on a common acoustic guitar. As a result, the sound got amplified the way it would with a mike shoved in thru the soundhole, yet it sounded nothing like an electric guitar. Besides, the guitars for 7 rubles and 50 kopecks did not look like those in black and white pictures of different rock-groups with their hair reaching below the shoulders.

Wanna have a guitar with stylish horns? Cut its body out of three-centimeter-thick plywood. Be ready for a long hassle with the neck. The guitars which we manufactured after the drawings in the magazines for advanced technicians could not keep to key.

What is "keeping to key"? Well, if you pluck a string at the twelfth fret and then pluck the same string released, you get the same note, only over one octave. And with the necks we produced, there sounded different notes, the guitars did not keep to key; that's what it meant.

The upshot was we had to fall back on using the necks of common guitars which kept to key alright. Yet, the headstock of a common guitar with its slots for strings looked ridiculous on an electric guitar, like a saddle atop a cow. To replace the headstock in the neck, you have to saw it out and substitute with a homemade one having no slots and with all six or four tuning pegs in one row.

Father soldered the electrical rigging of guitars following the schemes printed in the magazines. Besides, he brought from the RepBase shielded cable enclosed by braided metal strands for the connection of a guitar to the amplifier. Without such a cable, electric guitars issued a godawful wail miles away from any music.

All the testing was carried out in our khutta, with the product in progress connected to the ancient radio receiver because Father said if it worked on that junk then with a normal amplifier would make it sound topnotch.

The pickups became a major headache. A pickup is a tiny box installed under the strings with an individual coil for each of them. One coil comprised six hundred spirals of hair-breadth copper wire wound by hand, now it remains only to multiply them by the number of strings to equip the guitar with a pickup…

Eventually, everything got assembled. The radio receiver shakes its case bursting from steely thundering cords and popular guitar riffs, drowning Mother's yells of protestation from the kitchen. Wow! We're delighted. The bomb! Father looks pleased too…

Now you can take everything apart, level the plywood of guitar body with sandpaper, putty it and tenaciously polish again, this time with finer sandpaper before spraying the body with paint (you’ll choose red, betcha), then re-assemble your shiny new electric guitar. Enjoy!.

Thus we got all the right, as well as equipment, to apply for participation in the contest organized by the City Komsomol Committee who kept pace with the contemporary life demands. All in all, there were exactly 2 competitors vying for the laurels of the Konotop’s best:

1) VIA "The Kristall" by the House of Culture named after Lunacharsky (aka Loony);

2) VIA "The Orpheuses" by the Club of the Konotop Engine and Car Repairing Plant (aka the KahPehVehRrZeh Club).

The Loony guys were in the business for years. They had an electric organ played by Sasha Basha, who had graduated from the Music School in 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…