THE SIXTIES IN HUNGARY - The Funny Fools Story

Positively on Király Utca

Bitlisz - said Peter Buchberger. Or he might have said it so: bitls. Which was more or less correct. After all we were both freshmen highschool students in a class that had English as a major. (For Peter, the second time). So, he was a relative senior, sharing a desk with me. He knew what was going on. And what really was going on, according to Peter, was the Bitls. They were the new thing, the big thing. The real thing. England was on her knees and young people went crazy. Real crazy, like losing it …are you getting this, Gaby?
The conversation we had been having took place on King Street, the penny lane of our corner of the world, walking home, like we did every day, straight from the high school we attended at the east end of Kiraly Utca. The point was to decide who likes what band the most. For we were at the age when these things suddenly acquire disproportionate importance. I was being most impressed with the Spotnicks. They were awesome. I’d been already playing Amapola - or at least making a good attempt at it, but Orange Blossom?…Orange Blossom! That sound! That technique! How could they even play that?.. And now Peter says it’s the Bitls. I’d better pay attention. Here I was, at 16, the budding young guitar player and I hadn’t even heard of the Bitls let alone their music. "So how is it? The music I mean..." Peter didn’t sound too convincing: "it’s better than anything". "How is it so good"? Peter couldn’t answer that. But I knew at that point that it was something profound and glorious, something that will sweep me off-and-away for the rest of my life. It was a premonition. Supernatural.

Charlie Braun had graduated and left The Blackcollars. I took up the lead vocal. Otherwise the band remained the same but modernized. Up to date. Rudi Schmidt played the drums. (The girls were dying for Rudi. He was handsome. Tall, dark, intense yet gentle.) Joe Gulyas played lead guitar, I played rhythm, sometimes lead and Zoli played bass and piano. Joe and Zoli also sang harmony. This was very unusual in those days, because for most bands Elvis, Cliff and Del Shannon still ruled along with The Shadows. We were different. No Shadows. No Elvis. We did Beatles, Dave Clark, Kinks and whatever we could learn from Radio Luxembourg and Free Europe. We even did twist - it was still a fad and the kids loved it. Whatever it was it had to be vocal oriented. And we did two originals of mine. They were primitive. Very. But that was not the point.
We practiced at Zoli’s home or in mine, unplugged sessions called “dry rehearsals” - much to the joy of our respective mothers. The amped rehearsals which we held at our high schools, brought crowds of school kids and created an immediate following. And we played at the sweet and innocent events hosted by the schools called “Class Tea” or “Class-Buli”. (Buli is a diminutive corruption of “ball”, also a collective, meaning a “get-together”, a “party”; “having fun” etc.). And, on occasion, at the Sunday Dances.

The guitar I got for my fifteenth birthday in October, 1962. It was also my Christmas gift…It was a save-the-salvageable solution from my parents, the only practical one.
The bug started in me while in eight grade. Music had begun bothering me, it caused me torture... Nobody in the family had any formal musical background - though my mom sang quite beautifully, as I’ve found out later. I still don’t know where my urge came from but an urge it was and strong. I did sing in the school choir, never solo, but I sang. Despite of that, I was an outspoken enemy of music-teaching. I started crusades to eliminate music from our classes; sabotaged anything that would’ve educated me, like theory, reading and Kodaly. How stupid. All I should’ve done was to open my ears and pay attention. Would’ve helped a lot a little later. But no. I had to revolt. And I revolted against anything that gave me an opportunity. It happened to be the music classes, and, later, physics. (That’s more understandable…) My nature to revolt must’ve come first - and music was a casualty just because it was there. All in all, eventually I’d dropped my position against music education and some theory somehow stuck to me; it came handy later on. My relation to music outside the school was entirely different. I remember the first song that got me spellbound was the magnificent “Calcutta Ist Am Ganges”. (No Merseybeat yet…) The song, like a bug, infested me and I wanted to play it. Sing it, too, but no lyrics. So I wanted to play. Mom bought me little toy saxophones that worked under the principle of the kazoo, but had valves and keys like the real thing. I drove everybody up the wall. But played it in key. My favorites were, for a long time, trumpet and saxophone. Then I made drums by covering big glass pickling jars with tout layers of cellophane. You could play them like percussion. Then I got down to the real thing. I’ve fashioned guitar-like things from whatever offered to turn itself into a musical instrument: attached a neck to a thermos bottle and several other similar contraptions.

The next days I spent turning the waves upside down and inside out on every radio set I could get my hands on in search for Beatles music. And those radio waves were a mess. And I couldn’t understand the announcers. Despite the year I’ve completed with my English grades all A-s I still couldn’t make out what Radio Luxembourg DJs were blabbering. Nobody could. I must’ve stumbled across Beatles music in the vast radio space mostly made up of static and interference but I didn’t know if I did; I had no reference. And boy, were those waves a mess!
In this frustration one dubious hope remained. An almost-miracle. And it happened. To everyone’s greatest surprise State Radio Petõfi (largely corresponding to BBC2) made a slight political mistake and announced the formal introduction of The Beatles’ first LP. We were glued to the radio, every self respecting young boy and girl in the nation. The broadcast was clear. Un-jammed. And the music was…great. Different…So different that we’ve all lacked the foundations - both musical and cultural - to be fully able to appreciate it. An almost-disillusionment. It left us wide-eyed but un-satiated. Uneasy, restless. Projection sublime: a big warm wave, seductive and shiny was coming towards us over the Iron Curtain to deliver us to worlds colorful and happy and free. In the music I didn’t yet fully understand there were qualities, tender messages that were to trigger two basic emotions: one for the need to cry and one to scream.

The Department of Agitation and Propaganda was in a fix. A dilemma. For even then, just barely out of the ’56 revolution there must’ve been thinking heads in there too; heads who were capable of assessing a lose-lose situation. The Official Propaganda of The Propaganda Department was that the West was employing a Vicious Propaganda of their own for sometime, the so called “Strategy Of Destabilizing” - as in Destabilizing the very moral fiber of the Social -Communist society by means of bombarding the Eastern European countries with messages which Destabilize by making young audiences tune in to their decadent and freedom-suggesting vices: movies and music. Movies like “Gone With The Wind”, “Dr. Zhivago” and, of course, “James Bond”. These movies were regarded, justly, as the most damaging to communist morale. In the Music Department, until the appearance of The Beatles there was only one Major Evil. American Rockandroll. Elvis Presley. He was quickly termed indecent and decadent but the Department had lost that battle in no time; Rock and Roll came and won. By 1960 every decent and morally correct dance school taught true boogie-woogie and rock and roll. The fact that there was no defense against the impact of popular music - as opposed to the movies, which, if not shown (and they weren’t) were toothless - had caused major concern. Music was a different beast for them; you couldn’t stop radio waves and your choices of fighting this evil were limited and the end result was dubious. But so far they managed to stay afloat.

The Beatles had changed all that and the Thinking Heads saw the ultimate futility of anything they could put up against such a formidable force of Destabilization. The best they could do was to delay the inevitable as long as possible. And they just did exactly that. All information was withheld; the little that got through was mislabeled. The music was publicly ridiculed and downgraded in every possible way. And those who appreciated this evil capitalist manifestation were oppressed and harassed. But, in the end nothing helped. The point of the matter, however extreme it may sound, is that the music that came out of England in the early Sixties with The Beatles at its pinnacle has unleashed destabilizing forces so great that it brought down (directly or indirectly) the whole regime and the whole East European Union with it.
So, as those thinking heads in The Department foresaw all this, their actions were limited and delaying in nature. They couldn’t fight The Great Wave with the hope of winning. The first thing they did was jamming to death any possible radio station broadcasting to Eastern Europe.
After the Beatles-narcotic had sipped into my system in that small dose, soon I was getting withdrawal symptoms. I didn’t know that it was withdrawal symptoms for I didn’t know what withdrawal was; I only knew that if I didn’t get some more of that “not-so-great” music into my system I would surely die. Again, this time even more frantically, I started to search the radio. (The State Radio had stopped broadcasting any new English music - although this was due to copyright restrictions as well as to political motivations). And this is one point among many where the Department’s policies backfired.

I had no other means of getting my quota of Beatles but to turn my attention really seriously to the West. In the process I’ve soon discovered my saviors; the horrendously jammed short and mid frequencies of Radio Free Europe and Voice Of America; the unjammed but weak and static-noisy Radio Luxembourg and sometimes BBC.
Myself, I settled down at Radio Luxembourg which, for the next five years supplied my nutrition with supplements from Free Europe. With this, if I hadn’t yet been destabilized, I’d surely gotten so. Seriously. I can say that by 1964 the most destabilized segment of Hungary’s (as well as the other self respecting East European nations’) population was the “beat” musicians. This had brought on the wrath of the State Oppression System in various forms - which in turn made the whole Experience even more exciting, even sweet. In some respect much more so than the same Experience of our infinitely luckier counterparts’ who’d had the privilege of having been born in free western societies.

At the time of the conversation on King Street I’ve already had one little success in my bag of trophies, and a slowly-but-surely progressing career as a would be rock starlet. In the spring, at the May One festivities, on the stage of one the two big girls’ schools, my first band, The Blackcollars, had a rousing-screaming success performing some mighty interesting stuff.
The concert went like this. Two boys were majoring in the Leöwey Gimnazium’s German Branch. (Gimnazium equals high school. Not a sporting hall.) Charlie Braun (seriously!) sang, quite well, and Rudi Schmidt (yes, they were of German ethnicities) played the drums. They asked my mentor, Joe (who was an ethnic Croat) to team up with me and Zoli on the piano to form a band for the May One gig. We did - under the condition that I will have an original in the program . No problem. Charlie’s big hit was “All Shook Up” by Elvis. Got a standing ovation.Then we played my first “original”. (I’d had my guitar for seven months now.)

The masterpiece went like this: “Crying for your heart” - pra pam pa pam. In “C”. Again, “crying for your heart” - pra pam pa pam. Change: “crying for your heart” - pra pam pa pam - in “F”. Back to C and close the period: G - F - C: “ just cry-y-y-ying”. And similar sophistications. But the beat was Merseybeat. And the vocals, something new, different, tantalizing. Something that was never heard before and the young hearts in the auditorium were ready to pop. And cry. It was in the Message.
I sang the lead along with the two harmonies into one mike. And we had one amp called “wirestack 10 watts” into which we plugged the two guitars. Zoli played the piano and sang into the air. Rudi’s drumset was a low tom, a footpedal banging it from the bottom, the top was played as a snare, and there was a regular cymbal attached to it by an extension. We had no bass - the bass guitar had yet to be invented in Hungary… The conclusion to this Hit Song was such a rousing screaming applause that it took all of us by surprise. We didn’t know what to do. But I took it as a clear direction which way to go. Which is a great improvement compared to no direction, which was what I had before. When I was still too young.
By the fall the band has grown stronger and we were playing gigs frequently. Little gigs, like the innocent, school-class “Five O’ Clock Teas” but also difficult and physically challenging ones - Saturday night weddings in the nearby villages. All-nighters, grueling gigs. But they paid some money and we could buy amplifiers. Other wirestacks. 20 watts.

They sounded. Eventually a friend of mine lent me his dad’s zither. It was a big German zither, differing from the more primitive Hungarian ones in having a large, resonant belly, which has some twenty open strings over it, some in the bass frequencies. The main part of zithers is a neck with 4 to 8 strings, tuned to an open chord. You play solo or full-chord melody by pushing the strings with something across them, like a little stick, Hawaiian style. Never your fingers. But it has frets and you have to press the strings down to meet the frets. (With the German one you hit all those open strings in between melody notes, creating an accompaniment. Naturally it will sound right only in the key it is tuned to). I started to play it like a guitar, pressing the strings down with my fingers, finding solo melodies and simple harmonies. It ate into the flesh of my hands. Deep. This must’ve been when my parents decided on the guitar… In a wise decision they avoided the possibilities of me becoming a trumpet player, or worse, a drummer. So a guitar it was. A nice, natural colored acoustic semi-western. Felt good, sounded good for Eastern Europe. Must’ve cost a fortune - and we were poor in Hungary those days, everybody.

In the spring of ‘64, out of the ashes of The Blackcollars I created my new band, The Bouncing Beetles. Whence the name from? First, I steadfastly refused to call any of my groups a mundane name. Most, if not all the bands, chose names that were superficial with marginal meanings and no character. The worst were the corny ones with names like Harmonia Vocals, The Silvertones, Metro and such. Then came the Greek alphabet. You couldn’t go wrong with that. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Omega. (Oh, the Great Omega.) What do names like these reveal to you? Character? Style? I’m someone, who likes to read messages, like, in this case, some information about the band. The only noncommittal names I could live with were the ones which used the personal name of the leader, or founder of the band. (Such was the ILLÉS Band.) The rest, the ersatz ones I found nauseating and avoided them, because, to me, if you don’t have the imagination to give your band a unique name, you don’t have the imagination to make unique music. So, I stayed with the English names, and they had to have some meaning or character.

A Beatles photo appeared in the “Tükör (Mirror) Magazine”. The retarded text stated the following: “These four young men, holding phonograph records in their hands are the new musical sensation in Britain. They are “The Beatles.” What the picture actually showed - it’s a famous, if rare photo, (I still have it, gleaned from the Mirror) - was one of The Beatles’ typical tricks: jumping into the air while still playing (guitars and not phono records, stupid!). The quality of the picture was bad yet for any fanatic like me, and other kindred hundreds, it gave clues equal in value to a detective interpreting a burnt picture of a crime scene. We saw the stage (Hamburg?) the hair, the clothes, the boots, the Voxes, the Rickenbackers, Paul’s violin-bass and we saw them in the air, having jumped high above the stage. We didn’t know how they’d done it but it was cool, very cool. So, they jump…We learned how to jump while playing, bouncing up and down. There is a little bug, out in the fields, a tiny beetle, that bounces. That’s how it spends its little life. A Bouncing Beetle. Got it?

The fall of the Old Guard is a sad story and reflects the political mentality of the time. “Rocco” has been the top band even when I’d just finished prime school. They were legends. They played American Schmaltz complete with the looks and attitude. Ventures, Duane Eddy, Elvis, Buddy Holly. Lately, to be modern, they added The Shadows and played it very well. (Everybody did. Except us.) Their gig was steady, working for Frantzi Herman, the top dance-school teacher. His place was the best in the city, the great ballroom called Pannonia Hall (Bela Bartok has played here...) in the Grand Hotel on Kiraly Utca, the main drag.

A strange institution these dance schools. Bastions of old world charm. Obviously, as remnants of days past, they were, decidedly, what the socialist nomenclature would term as “capitalist decadence”. Yet, we were not only allowed, but encouraged to enroll in the dance classes. They must’ve figured it out that being a communist youth (from now on “youth.com”) shouldn’t be synonymous with awkward, elephantine and clueless. The youth needed to be taught some grace and manners too - if for nothing else, to be able to behave and also to dance at factory bulis. So, with the exception of morons (and the very poor) we all attended dance schools. Boys and girls. Religiously. Where else could you make body contact? Even kiss!? That was the attraction!! Of course we also learned dancing - we needed it and I’m still proud of it - and manners, but friend, what a dating establishment it turned out to be! That’s where our first awkwardly sweet tries of contact with the other sex happened. In the form of innocent first loves. Our hormones doing the cha cha cha.

Classes were twice a week. The music was invariably provided by some seasoned piano player who could play all those dance
rhythms easily, at the snap of a finger, sometimes accompanied by a drummer. Every second Sunday evening the school held a Dance. Our version of the “Hop”. Ostensibly these dances were to test and improve our newly-learned skill, but in reality they turned into real bulis, events that we truly wanted. With rock and roll being the most popular dance, the bolder teachers started to hire real bands and soon the opportunities came for the teen bands like mine. That was double fun. It didn’t matter that we played very little rock and roll. (Actually the most popular dance form of it was called “Everybody”, a version of boogie-woogie. This was invented at the beaches of Lake Balaton in the summer of ‘63. Lake Balaton, in the summer, was the place to be, to be hip and to get carried away. It was The Scene, the hotbed of new ideas, the place to learn about the newest things from the West, to learn about each other; to make love the way the young like to make love, in a beach-culture environment, almost decadently. It came as close to “free love” as it ever would. Our Little California.)
The Funny Fools not playing dance-hall rock and roll mattered only for a short time. The kids found out that the other stuff was even more fun, even more exciting for them and they fell for it. For ever. And that’s how we - and many other bands in the country - started to build our foundations.

New empires grow on the ashes of the old... Early spring is armed-services draft time in Hungary. It so happened, that in the spring of ‘63 three of the guys got drafted. That meant the end of the six-piece band. A farewell gig came and the Hall was packed. The band played wearing black mourning-bands on their arms. (This was considered a sin, exciting revolt). The gig went down peacefully but when they announced the End all hell broke loose. The fans proceeded to shove the furniture into a pile in the middle of the dance floor, breaking them. This was gilded period-furniture, the kind you’d expect in a Grand Hotel - even in Hungary. The band was powerless to stop it. I was only fifteen and all the fans were my seniors. I left. The police came. Rumor has it that the cops beat and arrested a dozen fans. They also arrested the band. Then, to demonstrate the power of the System they persuaded the authorities to issue the draft summons for the rest of the band. So, everyone in the band entered the service that spring - and service was two hard years in those days. When Rocco came out his spirit was destroyed. He never recovered.
The gigs at the Pannonia were banned for a year. Came the spring of ’64. Mr. Herman was a very polished gentleman, a modern-thinking businessman and he told you rabbi jokes. He caught me in front of the Café at the Hotel Nador and asked me to play for him at the Pannonia. Do you think I turned it down?

On the first Sunday we had a quarter-of-a-house. On the second, a half. On the third it was packed. On the fourth you couldn’t squeeze in Twiggy. The dance “shake” was slowly becoming the fad. The kids went crazy over the new style. And the bouncing… It looked totally silly but it worked like a sensation. We were also blasting as much as we could - the hall was big. But we were loud - and that was again something new. Beat music is only good when loud. The louder, the better. Our biggest hit was “Have I The Right” of the Honeycombs. When we played that, the kids were also bouncing up and down with the beat, so that the building swayed. This was the scene, when, from the front of the stage I noticed the cops. For some perverse joy they called themselves “The Yard”. These were plainclothesmen. They stuck out like a sore thumb as they were trying to make their way towards the stage. It took them a long time because you couldn’t move, cop or not. But they were coming. And they were coming for me. I knew that. I was public enemy, turning youth in large numbers onto Western cultural values. They were afraid of that. With reason. So they wanted me, bad.

Gabor was hanging out with us, making himself a nuisance, just getting his taste of things sublime. (He became my rhythm guitarist with the FF partly because of what transpired then.) I motioned him over, stuck my guitar in his hands and calmly walked back and behind the heavy crimson curtains, which lined the rear wall. In the cover I snuck out the stage back door, into the hotel’s backyard, then into a tangle of passageway labyrinths and ended up on a back street. (Some cops were beating up a drunkard…) I got away. They say the cops stopped the music, declared the gig over and sent everybody home. And they were turning the stage inside-out, looking for me, investigating the back curtains thoroughly and for a long time, not understanding where I could’ve hidden. Then gave up and went home and listened, in secret, to Radio Free Europe...

This was our last gig at the Pannonia. Next week “The Phantoms” played. I think, in those days they were better. They played the rougher end of the spectrum, sort of white R and B, Stones, Animals, Them, Chuck Berry and played it very well. It was also good to dance to. Yet somehow they didn’t generate mass-hysteria. The place became their steady gig for a year. At least the establishment survived and continued; it became the main spot to hang out, the watering hole for the budding musician. Mr. Herman gave me a life-long free pass. I loved to go too, as just another kid, to dance, for the girls, for the scene. And to watch the band with a critical eye. The competition which I had to surpass.
The following day I was called to the school principal. She was a devout communist. The big, burly gym teacher was also there. After the berating, he took me downstairs, to the nearest barber and my longer-then-Beatle-hair was cut. The barber took a great pleasure in the act; they held a grudge against us” longhairs”. The gym teacher kept apologizing.
The band was banned from public appearances. So, I formed the Funny Fools that summer - and went on turning the city on its head.