Rock and Hard Places (8 page)

 

ESCAPE HAS ALWAYS been the most precious of rock’n’roll’s renegade imperatives. As soon as the first guitar was electrified, it was identified as an ideal weapon with which to vent dissatisfaction with the world, as noisy as a gun, nearly as dangerous and almost as likely to get you arrested. Young people ever since have been forming rock’n’roll bands to escape homes, hometowns, families, expectations, tedium, frustration, poverty, the prospect of having to work for a living, or even just a vague, incoherent ennui which they have a hard time explaining, man.

In Sarajevo, they formed rock’n’roll bands to escape the literally inescapable: the three-and-a-half-year siege of the city by the motley assortment of drunks, hillbillies and thugs trading as the Bosnian Serb Army. The siege of Sarajevo—a city surrounded by steep, ridged hills that might have been designed as cover from which cowards could wage war against civilians—began in April 1992. In late 1994, a new independent radio station called Radio Zid broadcast a request for demo tapes from local bands. They received submissions from twenty-five groups they’d never heard of. Something was clearly afoot.

Something still is. I’ve come to Sarajevo at the behest of my friends at The Serious Road Trip, unarguably the world’s most rock’n’roll non-governmental organisation. They’d been telling me for months that there was much here to interest an itinerant rock journalist, and they weren’t kidding. Every Sarajevan still the silly side of thirty seems to be in a band, or to have several dozen very good friends who are in bands. Or to have been in a band once. Or to be thinking about
starting one. Or to be very keen for me to come and spend a few hours being deafened by enthusiastic renditions of their material in some tiny, sandbagged rehearsal space in some disused basement of some shrapnel-shattered building.

It would be enormously gratifying to be able to report that the quality is as startling as the quantity, and that as soon as the smoke lifts, Sarajevo will be hosting an A&R gold rush to rival the boom years of Seattle or Manchester. It would please me no end to be able to write that Sarajevo is an El Dorado of rock’n’roll genius, mostly because the musicians in Sarajevo’s bands are, by and large, decent people who’ve put up with more than enough, but at least partly because most of the musicians in Sarajevo’s bands boast military service histories that would make the Dirty Dozen look a bunch of simpering lightweights.

The truth is that Sarajevo’s is a fairly typical European rock’n’roll culture, comparable with those of Berlin, or Stockholm, or Tel Aviv, where genuine brilliance only fitfully upstages big fish/little puddle mediocrity, and where earnestness is having a real field day at the expense of wit. In fairness, nobody pretends otherwise. Everyone agrees that Sarajevo’s favourite song of Sarajevo’s war was written by Americans (Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name,” which, as one local musician puts it, “was the ‘Blowing In The Wind’ of this war”). Everyone also points out that the difficulties of procuring guitar strings and plectrums in a city where you couldn’t take food and water for granted would have hobbled The Beatles at their most fecund.

Sarajevo’s rock scene today revolves around three venues. Trust, across the street from Veliki Park on Sarajevo’s main road, Marsala Tita, opened in late 1995, and is now a popular meeting place with fine coffee, a tiny balcony on which bands play twice a week, and a pool table. Trust’s patrons have a tendency to hastily invent something called “Bosnian rules” on the rare occasions that I look like I’m going to win, insisting that the black has to go in off one cushion, or into the same pocket as my last coloured ball, or be potted left handed or, in one desperately fought frame, all three.

Kuk—the Bosnian word for “hip”—is a short walk away up Kralja Tomislava. Kuk is a low-slung, circular room that was originally built as a morgue attached to the nearby university, but was turned into a nightclub during the 1950s. Kuk was commandeered by the
Bosnian army shortly after the siege began, and handed back, minus all equipment and fittings, in 1995. Since then, under the supervision of The Serious Road Trip, Kuk has been refurbished as an exhibition hall, music therapy centre and rock venue, the intermittent availability of PA sytems permitting.

The best-loved of the three clubs is Obala, which opened in 1993 in what had been an academics’ cafe by the river, not far from Sarajevo’s shattered library. There are two ways into Obala. One is to walk along the footpath and go in through the front door. Until recently, this was an option only for the foolhardy or the very, very fast. The more trodden route starts a few blocks back on Vase Miskina—the pedestrian arcade that winds through the old city’s market district, Bascarsija—then winds up alleys, down side streets, through a derelict building, across a playground and enters Obala through an emergency exit. Such circuitous detours are now second nature to every Sarajevan. Ida, the unfeasibly attractive translator I’ve borrowed from The Serious Road Trip, explains that the route we’ve just taken would not have been observable from the hills, and would therefore have been safe from snipers.

And mortars?

“Well,” she says, “those can get you anywhere.”

The people who run Obala are justly proud of the fact that they closed only five times during the entire siege, and that the place was nearly always full, even when the chronic shortages of pretty much everything and attendant inflation pushed the price of a beer up to fifteen deutschmarks (£5.50, or thereabouts) and a shot of whiskey to eight, making Obala nearly as expensive a night out as any bar in Copenhagen. When the shelling was especially bad, the Obala DJs would crank the music up so loud nobody could tell how close the explosions were. Every band in Sarajevo cut their teeth as a live act in here. On the nights that Obala staged concerts, they tell me, the place was so full that people stood out in the halls.

I’m shown round Obala by Adis, one of the club’s founders. He also plays drums in a band called Z.O.C.H., which, I am gleefully informed, is an acronym standing for Zlatom Optocene Cune. Zlatom Optocene Cune, I am even more gleefuly informed, is Bosnian for “Gold-Covered Dicks.” I file this phrase alongside the only other Bosnian I have
managed to retain—the vivid admonishment “Popi govno,” which means “Drink shit.” As luck would have it, I have interrupted Adis in the middle of a Z.O.C.H. rehearsal in one of Obala’s back rooms, and he invites me to sit in on the rest of it. He dusts off a sandbag for me, tells me to make myself comfortable and apologises in advance for the volume.

“If it’s any help,” he grins, tapping at his snare, “we did this to Bono when he came here in January.”

While I wonder how loud sound has to be before the human eardrum implodes, Z.O.C.H. crash and clatter their way through half a dozen songs of proficient enough grunge ordinaire, before we return to the club to talk. The members of Z.O.C.H. are all in their late twenties and early thirties, older than other Sarajevo musicians, and perhaps more realistic than most about their situation.

“Everything here stopped in 1992,” explains Soba, the guitarist, who says he was an officer serving in a Special Forces unit until his demobilisation last December. “It’s impossible to do any proper recording. There are hardly any facilities, and what producers there are have never heard of Steve Albini, for example. We can’t talk to them, never mind work with them.”

At present, the only outlet for Bosnian rock’n’roll is Radio Zid, who released, in early 1995, the only available recording of Sarajevo bands—a roughly-recorded live CD called
Rock the Under Siege
, which featured such local luminaries as Sikter, Protest, Gnu, Bedbug and the rather gloriously named Hindustan Motors, among others. Z.O.C.H. were not featured on
Rock the Under Siege
for the same reason they’re not featured on Radio Zid: they’ve been banned by the station. This is ostensibly due to the graphically sexual nature of some of Z.O.C.H.’s lyrics, but I get the impression that the real reasons might be more personal—Sarajevo’s rock scene is as hopelessly riddled with petty jealousies and rivalries as anywhere else’s.

“It’s hard,” shrugs Soba, “but we do what we can. We’ve been somebody here, you know, and it doesn’t mean a lot. We want to go and play in other places now. Anywhere. Except Serbia, obviously.”

Whatever merits Sarajevo’s rock groups possess, variety is not one of them. They are exclusively male, and almost as exclusively keen on riff-heavy guitar rock, heavily in hock to Green River, Pearl Jam,
Soundgarden, Mudhoney and the Seattle grunge lineage in general, though Nirvana’s stock in Sarajevo has fallen rapidly since Kurt Cobain’s suicide, which elicited some sorrow, but little sympathy (“When I heard about Kurt,” one drinker at Trust tells me, “I had just finished a shift at the hospital, and run home through the shelling, and . . . well, for fuck’s sake, you know?” There is no mistaking the disgust in his voice).

I unearth only one band who don’t look and sound like they should be haunting the coffee shops of Seattle in silly beards and plaid shirts: Beat House Project, an unabashed techno act from the name down. Sarajevo’s dance scene appears pretty well dormant—the first rave in the city was staged by Radio Zid the week before I arrived—although the bleak, otherwordly, electronic atmospherics of Massive Attack and Portishead have touched many a nerve. Most ascribe this torpor to the fact that, in Sarajevo, ecstasy is as rare as non-smokers—and even if you can find a tablet going spare, you won’t get much change from 200 Deutschmarks. Beat House Project have a litany of funny stories to tell about the peculiar difficulties of making music like theirs in a city where, for long periods, there wasn’t any electricity. They have some less amusing anecdotes concerning the five wounds that the trio collected between them during the war.

Sarajevo’s conversion to loud guitars and inchoate screaming about alienation is a relatively recent development. Zelimir Altarac-Cicak, the veteran Bosnian journalist, DJ and promoter, explains that tastes started shifting dramatically with the beginning of the siege.

“Before the war,” he says, “only pop music.”

The sort of anodyne europop he’s talking about was generally sung in Bosnian—or, as the language was known before the war, Serbo-Croatian—and is best exemplified now by the work of a singer-songwriter called Muha, a shy and painstakingly polite man in a beret and an overcoat, who looks and sounds completely unlike someone who wrote his last album in hospital, recovering from wounds sustained in the defence of his city while fighting with a Special Forces unit.

“But now,” confirms Zelimir, “everything is rock’n’roll, everything is noise.”

Aida Kalendar, one of Radio Zid’s indefatigable volunteers, puts it another way.

“You do not,” she says, “spend the whole day being sniped at and shelled and then go home and listen to Blur.”

The Moron Brothers are another typical Sarajevo rock group. In fact, The Moron Brothers are just typical Sarajevan youth, or even just typical youth. They’re friendly, funny, like a drink and are gratifyingly excited about being interviewed by someone who has met Eddie Vedder twice. And then . . .

“I met Doma, the bassplayer, in the army,” says Tela, the Moron Brothers’ guitarist. “I’d rather not say which unit, because, well, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

The Moron Brothers formed in 1993, and have averaged one gig a month since.

“We already owned most of our equipment,” continues Tela. “We got strings and things like that from friends outside. It was just good to have something to do. Musicians were lucky that way. It helped to be able to get together and sing about . . . well, everything we didn’t have during the war. In fact, about everything, and anything, except the war. We’d had enough of that.”

 

ON THAT COUNT, The Moron Brothers are speaking for an entire city.

Six months since NATO’s criminally overdue airstrikes ended the siege, Sarajevo is still palpably exhausted by its long ordeal. Nobody has yet bothered to take down the hand-painted “Pazi—Snajper” (“Danger—Sniper”) signs that hang at the city’s exposed intersections. Many of the metal barricades and tattered blankets that were erected and hung to deter and distract the killers in the hills are still in place. I’ve also noticed that quite a few people tie their shoes strangely, threading the lace straight down one side and straight back up the other, without crossing them over. I initially assume that this is some obscure craze, like the wallet-chains or baby pacifiers that occasionally become regrettably popular with the kids back home, but when I mention it to someone, they say no, people used to do that so it would be easier to get their shoes and trousers off if they were hit. More than once, I’m nearly run over by cars coasting silently downhill, according to frugal wartime habit, with their engines switched off.

My other narrow failure to become the single most pathetic casualty of the Bosnian conflict occurs in the monumental ruins of the library. The
library, or what’s left of it, totters near the spot where, on June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist called Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. This assassination preceded a train of events—world war, lopsided peace, world war, cold war, collapse of communism, rise of nationalism—that may well have happened anyway, but the symmetry is eerie. It’s as if the echo of Princip’s pistol, gathering momentum down the decades, somehow rebounded on its point of origin, magnified a millionfold. Along this street, the 20th century began and ended.

The library is—or was—a magnificent Austro-Hungarian building, a repository of thousands of priceless documents, books and treasures. It was destroyed in August 1992 by Bosnian Serb Army incendiary shells—a deliberate act of vandalism, a cultural genocide to serve notice of the attempted human one to follow. As I walk out onto the remains of the first floor balcony above the entrance, I hear an enormous crash immediately behind me. When the dust settles, I see a lump of exquisitely carved ceiling masonry lying on the floor. It has missed me by about three feet.