Song About A Rooster

In a week or a month, the Lviv-based rock group Mertvy piven (Dead Rooster) will turn ten years old. This again reminds us Ukraine is heading for the end of our decade. I will be writing about this elsewhere, but today I am going to state a fact. Mertvy piven is becoming a veteran team, something like The Animals or Plastic People of the Universe.

Thinking of them, I am changing. I am experiencing a frenzied velvet revolution, for I cannot but remember them tenderly. I could imagine my younger brothers and sister being exactly the way these musicians are. I would like all of us to live in a certain anarchic and syndicalist commune at a dilapidated Lviv villa, looking a little like a castle and a little like a railway station with departing passengers. I would like to travel with them eternally somewhere away from this country of unwithered weeds, where "we are told we don't exist and there's no place for us" (the latter being, pardon me, an autoquotation from about ten years ago, unfortunately, still more relevant today).

For they were and still are something like the Bremen musicians who have lost their way in time and space. We used to perform together in the opera and circus, underground and outdoors (in our decade everything was possible). We would sing in any place which could gather a hundred or two of the offbeat youth, somewhat non-Soviet but, if may say so, "European" or even "different." However, it seems we will not die in Paris.

Once Walter Mossmann, a German poet, our good old Walter, a fighter against nuclear power stations, anti-Semitism and Ukrainophobia, invited all of us to no other place than Nuremberg for Barchentreffen, a kind of a festival of free music. We would keep our noses to the grindstone almost until midnight. It was a summer night in the center of the medieval city, and crowds of Germans of various ages were flying about with beer steins in hand, dancing to our tunes The Beautiful Carpathians, Alcohock, Ptakhorizka (Chicken Cutter), Krayina ditey (the Country of Children), etc. The stage was in the open - five centuries ago the minnesingers competed there. But if anything as indiscernible as "drive" exists in this world in addition to all kinds of "lines," the latter was surely with us that night. Then we happily lingered in the make-up room over a box of seemingly light beer put out by also enlightened organizers.

Then the good Walter came in and said something like this: "Look, you've changed the image of Ukraine these people today! They saw it as lively and interesting. They had only known two things about it: Chornobyl and the Mafia, now they also know you." He made a pause and went on: "You know, you deserve a great award from your Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But, first, your ministry is not one of those who dish out awards for such things." He made another pause. "Secondly, why on earth do you need that award?"

I love them for this outsider spirit. This may mean today that some songs do not yet sell. I like to have them out of all those "idiot-parades." I have already said that in this country we have to belong to the minorities, which is not that bad.

I still think that a few decades later this territory (Good Lord, what will happen to it?) will see a special type of people wandering around. You will be able to recognize them instantly as listeners to an eternally living Dead Rooster who hails from OUR decade.