This was part of 1995 CD box created by Siniša Škarica who obviously took a quite big and serious task to dust off old archive recordings and re-release anthology of very beginnings of Rock in Ex Yu, at least those released by Zagreb's "Jugoton" which was pre-eminent recording company back in the day. Judging by the state of Croatian pop music today, we went backwards quite a few steps in the meantime and the music I hear today is so simplistic and banal that it comes as a relief to hear that several decades ago we actually had artists who were genuinely enthusiastic about what they did.
"Estrada susreće Rock'n'roll" (Show business meets Rock'n' Roll) covers a decade between 1956 and 1965 and its full of sweetly innocent goodies recorded by artists who were without exception all very young and playful, either twisting the night away or emulating Italian rockers who in turn imitated American singers. In a strange turn of events, lacking access to US original recordings they listened Italian singers like Adriano Celentano and Mina and created their own versions of Rock, which they later even performed on tours in Soviet Union and therefore brought Rock there in a Trojan horse.
I seriously doubt that singers like Ivo Robić, 4 M, Marjana Deržaj or Lola Novaković ever considered themselves as Rock performers - they were part of current generation of family entertainment and simply covered anything that moved, be it Paul Anka, The Platters or Bill Haley but these singles brought new kind of music to our homes and since we didn't know originals, this is where we learned from. In fact, its wonderful to hear these old tracks from Arsen Dedić, Gabi Novak, Dragan Toković, Zdenka Vučković, Duo Hani (young Zdenka Kovačicek!) and Zafir Hadžimanov (all senior citizens today) as they once were in first bloom of the youth. Even Tereza Kesovija twisted once! However, the "real" Rock comes in the second part of CD where around 1962 artists like Bijele Strijele, Karlo Metikoš and Crveni Koralji finally stepped out of this glitzy, TV entertainment crowd and broke some serious ice with their recordings that no matter how clumsy they might appear today. These were venerable grandfathers of everything that came later.
No comments:
Post a Comment