Just found out a sad news that Ivica Krajač has died. Everybody who was growing up in the 1970s remembers his name, as Krajač was extremely busy and successful lyrics writer for anybody and everybody in Croatian pop music at the time. On every single than-popular pop festival, his name was often quited ceremoniously before the performance - "and now, the song composed by XY with lyrics by Ivica Krajač (and orchestra conducted by Nikica Kalogjera)!"
In a way, his zenith might have been 1970s when local, home-grown music enjoyed particular success and Krajač was particularly versatile as not only lyrics writer but also songwriter himself, serving everybody from peppy Ljupka Dimitrovska to big stars like Drago Diklić, Tereza Kesovija, Gabi Novak and zillion other names. In fact, without him it would be difficult to even imagine our local pop music, since he was one of the most creative people around. Apparently he was also a theatre director, which I didn't know.
Krajač came to prominence in the late 1950s as one of the founding members of very popular vocal quartet 4 M - they were beloved as mainstream entertainers, but this was way before my time and I struggle to find any appeal in their recorded music. (They even represented Yugoslavia on Eurovision). When the quartet disbanded, Krajač created a name for himself as a songwriter and ever since he was a busy man, serving other singers with either lyrics or music or sometimes both. Basically, he is connected to every artist of his generation. While the posterity might remember him as lyrics writer of countless "schlager" pop hits of 1960s and 1970s, my connection to Krajač is his friendship and collaborations with Karlo Metikoš - as a tandem, they created two rock-operas (Gubec beg and Grička vještica) that I still own on the records and know every single lyric + in 1973 they teamed to create a debut LP album for than 23 years old Josipa Lisac and the result was "Dnevnik jedne ljubavi" (The diary of one love), to this day highly praised and beloved concept album and one of the first rock albums in a country. It was because of his collaborations with Metikoš that I noticed lyrics of Ivica Krajač - I also noticed that he carefully tailored his songs according to performer (very much like Arsen Dedić also did) so he would serve pop fluff to some and highly poetic lyrics to others. Decades ago, when I was young and hopeful journalist, I have actually meet and spoken to him, I still remember how excited I was when he mentioned casually that he still owns rehearsal tapes for both rock operas created with Metikoš - they will probably never be released in public, though I would love to hear how the work was created.
No comments:
Post a Comment