The man had a Gipson ES-335 semi-acoustic guitar, red, with a hippie peace symbol on the soundboard. The "ES" in the name stands for "Electric Spanish". Since 1958, the guitar has become a favorite in jazz and blues circles because it combines the best of two worlds - the warmth of an acoustic instrument and the hard precision of an electric guitar with low feedback.
Quick-fingered Lee
World fame smiled upon the man with the red guitar when he performed at Woodstock on August 17, 1969 with his group Ten Years After. His name was Elvin Lee. Actually Alvin, but we declared him Alvin in the eighties, so I will push him through this text with the glorified name. He was almost 10 years old at the festival where the myth of the American and world countercultural nation, of the "other America" was officially born. The English guitarist, born in Nottingham, dusted off the ten-minute thing I'm Going Home.
Hard and manic blues-rock, a rhythm that is most similar to the rattling of a train and a reduced text consisting of the repetition of the phrase "I'm going home, yes, I'm going home, baby", speaks of the joy of returning to one's beloved. About the joy of man returning to his place. After Woodstock, Elvin Lee was awarded the title of the fastest guitarist in the world - and that was an era in which the absolute heroes of the audience were precisely the guitarists.
In 1969, I went to school in a Bosnian town. I knew nothing about the quick-fingered Elvin, whose real name was Graham Anthony Barnes. My interest in this type of music will suddenly awaken seven or eight years later in the Tuzla gymnasium. And I experienced a live concert by Western bands as a journalism student in the early eighties in Sarajevo, which was then turning from a hard socialist larva into an Olympic butterfly.
Placebo freedom
One of the most painless surrogates of freedom was music. If some western bands play in front of a crowd of domestic shaggy youths, then it is proof that that country somehow belongs to a world from which many things separate it, above all ideology.
January 1983 in Sarajevo was proverbially cold. This means that I was wearing winter gear - boots, jeans bought from a smuggler, a colorful "hippie" sweater that my sister knitted according to my design, and a blue winter jacket. I didn't wear a hat - my mane, which fell in curls on my back, could have served as both a hat and a scarf.
I headed on foot from the hill above Skenderija towards Zetra - the newly built Olympic hall, whose name, according to the speculations of the media at the time, was actually an abbreviation of "Green transversal". Since green was the traditional Islamic color in Bosnia, there were already jokes about it. But no one took it seriously. Neither did Vojislav Šešelj, who was still a Sarajevo Marxist at the time.
Entering Zetra
Zetra was called "ultramodern" and celebrated as another achievement of socialist avant-garde architecture. It was all nice and good. But it was not a concert hall.
When I entered the hall that Wednesday, January 26, 1983, I was surprised by the complete absence of a concert atmosphere. They redirected us to the stands. The ice was still exposed, the hockey players were just finishing their training on it. The stage occupied part of one stand and the ice. I have never been to such a concert before or after that evening.
A lot of people gathered in the stands. It was funny to look at that sea of shaggy heads in the seats above the ice, where you'd rather expect a winter fairy tale than a rock concert.
That fairy tale will happen in the same place a year later when Olympic ice dancers Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean will join Ravel Bolero in its five minutes of eternity to reach that magic that all art strives for. But this evening was not in the cosmic plan of great events. Rather, it will remain in the chronicles of bizarre misunderstandings.
The light in the hall remained on. Smoking was prohibited. Elvin Lee didn't want to start the gig at first. Then he picked up the guitar anyway. The Sarajevo public, extremely sensitive to fraud of any kind, began to resent it. Lighters and some bottles flew. The outcry was directed not at the famous guitarist but at the stupid organizers who turned the concert into a unique failed experiment.
In the rhythm of the baton
And then Elvin Lee played I'm Going Home. That guitar found us. She called us. That beat overpowered the anger at the icy surface that separated us from the stage.
One man jumped over the fence, ran and fell on the ice to the cheers of all the surrounding thousands of disaffected people. Well another and another. Elvin Lee beckoned us to the ice between two riffs. Security men and socialist militiamen ran after the people, stumbling and cursing. Five-pointed caps slid across the ice like pucks. Hilarious performance that will somewhat compensate for my rotten boss.
I jumped over the fence too. Running on ice was more complicated than I thought. My goal was to get to the stage. A national militiaman was approaching me from the side, balancing precariously on his well-cleaned shoes. I managed to dodge him. In the fall, he reached my back with a baton. The pain merged with Elvin Lee's ecstatic scream - home, I'm going home, baby. I jumped over the fence and blended into the crowd, so that my comrades would not single me out. The back was tingled with dull, insidious fangs.
That night, before going to sleep in the cold toilet of my dorm room, I looked behind me. In the mirror, under the squinting light, a thick diagonal mark appeared, which slowly turned from purple to purple. “Well, thank you, Elvin. Well, I arrived home too".
Gavro and Juraj
In retrospect, I can say that Elvin Lee played well, but everything else was a disaster. In those years, there were many better and much worse performances in Sarajevo. The British band Wishbone Ash, whose music I liked to listen to when there was no one around, on rainy afternoons, held one of the best gigs I've ever attended in the big hall of Skenderija. On that Thursday, the twenty-first day of October, 1982, English musicians sounded better than on the excellent albums I had in my collection.
In May 1983, the iconic band Juraja hip (Uriah Heep) offered a miserable gig that lasted only about fifty minutes at the same place. One of the disappointed fans called it a typical performance of spoiled world bands in the banana states. I would say that such an assessment has elements of truth, but the already mentioned concert of the Visbon Eš group still makes any generalization impossible in advance.
I will always remember Gavro from my neighborhood in a Bosnian town, who was always nearby when there was mass madness. This time he was standing next to the "Crucified Aunt" as Alija Kučukalić's sculpture "Figure on a Chair" is affectionately called by Sarajians. He spread his arms like that figure and howled - at the Wolf - U-rijah-hep, U-rijah-hep. He was brought by provincial rockers for fun, and he couldn't even pronounce the name of the famous band properly.
Elvin was one of the best
But let's get back to my association with Elvin Lee.
What else needs to be said about one of the best guitarists of the seventies and eighties? His solo from the thing I Can't Keep From Crying - "I can't stop crying" - loved Jimi Hendrix, with whom Elvin Lee sometimes performed. Hendricks told him that he would try something similar. As we know, he did not arrive. The version that Elvin Lee played at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, and then at a number of other festivals, only confirmed his global guitar fame.
Elvin Lee grew up in a family of country musicians, he played the clarinet at 12, the guitar at 13. He played solo in various bands, his musical path also led him to the Star Club in Hamburg, where the Beatles performed before him. In addition to his band, he played with George Harrison and many other great musicians, and in the United States he recorded an album with the Christian rocker Mylon Lefebvre. On the Road to Freedom.
The man who played at Woodstock at the age of 25 did not deserve to be mocked at the ice hall as a place where he would meet his Sarajevo fans at the age of thirty-nine. He died on March 6, 2013 at the age of 68 due to complications following a routine surgical procedure in Spain.
His message from an ancient thing could also be understood as a spiritual testament: I'd Love to Change the World: I would love to change the world, but I don't know what to do, so I leave it to you.
After all
I must mention that before the war, Gavro disappeared from one of the Belgrade rafts - they say he was swept away by the water. I must mention that the professor of the Academy of Fine Arts and sculptor Alija Kučukalić, the author of "Figures on a chair" next to which Gavro roared before a concert by the band Juraja hip in the early eighties, was killed in June 1992 by a grenade that may have been sent by someone who was at the "Crucified Aunt" as the kid arranged for the first time with his girlfriend. I would also like to mention that the wooden seats from Zetra were used to bury the dead in that war and that I felt guilty when Zetra itself was killed.
This text is dedicated to a man who died exactly eight years ago, the same one who played the guitar on that January evening 38 years ago in Sarajevo above the ice, on which both we and those who chased us were falling. I also dedicate it to all the people who were part of my world and did not survive the nineties.
Bonus video:
