How I became a traitor

Changes in composition

After leaving Rogozhin , who was the main vocalist of the group, in the Forum collective in the summer of 1987, the image of the group described by Kushnir in the face of the three frontmen of the group is “a burry little guitarist Fedorov, narcissistic peacock Rogozhin and the vampiric punk dancer Garkush, in whose awkward pirouettes sometimes the ghosts of living tragedy flickered ”- began to crumble ^[3] . The images of the participants gave the stage program elements of absurdism , and after the disappearance of one of the elements of the program, a replacement was necessary. After a long search, Ozersky found Evgeny Dyatlov , who could also act as a vocalist in the group ^[3] . By that time, as in the case of Rogozhin, Ozersky, by his own admission, did not know either Dyatlov or his vocal abilities. Also in place of the third frontman in the group, a “bright guy with powerful, classical vocals who had been singing in the choir for many years” was a rather striking candidate, which was rejected by the participants due to a lack of sense of rhythm ^[6] . When the band first met the new vocalist, Dyatlov amazed the participants by performing the Queen 's one-on-one song while playing the violin, after which, according to Garkusha, “Fedorov simply fell.” According to Leonid Fedorov himself, he liked the Woodpeckers more than once Rogozhin: “He [Woodpeckers] is generally musically gifted. He intonated more interestingly than Sergei [Rogozhin] , had a good voice, knew how to play. At the first rehearsal, Eugene took the violin and immediately played what we needed ” ^[6] .

In May 1987, jazz percussionist Pavel Litvinov joined the group, previously playing in the groups of the Library and the Jungle . The guitarist Igor Skaldin, who performed with the group for six months, was replaced by Dmitry Matkovsky from the disintegrated band Manufactura . With the departure of the alto saxophonist Nikolai Fedorovich from the group, Nikolai Rubanov became a permanent member of the collective ^[7] .

Record

The album was recorded in 1988 in the studio of the Leningrad Youth Palace, where together with the AuktsYon group, the television , air , games , myths , and experiences of Alexander Lyapin, already known at that time, were also recorded ^[3] . The group decided to record not "hackneyed" hits, but completely new compositions. Leonid Fedorov recalls the work on the album as “euphoric”, describing it like that, because the group had complete freedom in recording: “Nobody cursed with anyone, we made a sound for ourselves ...”. Also in May 1988, when Fedorov first entered the studio, he quit the Russian Gems production association: “At the end of winter, Garkusha and I went to Moscow to the Festival of Hopes of the capital's rock laboratory , and I took a few days off. In principle, they should have fired me under the article, but the aunts who worked with me stood up for me, and I quit of my own free will. ” He had been burdened with work there for a long time, because after the institute he did not count on a career as a specialist in the “heat treatment of metals and alloys” and considered it unpromising, but to get a “definition” of his work book and salary, he got a job where he got by institute distribution ( in "Russian gems"). After his dismissal, Fedorov was able to give stable concerts and completely immerse himself in music ^{[3] [6]} . Other participants followed, so that working days would not burden the program of concert performances, which began to give directly the main profit to the group. So on the record of the album itself (“How I became a traitor”), the group gave back two and a half thousand rubles, honestly earned by them ^{[3] [6]} . For the amount paid, the musicians were given a two-week room under the stairs with a 16-channel tape recorder and remote control, there was also a curtained-off place for recording vocalists and acoustic instruments, and the rest was recorded on the couch, next to the tape recorder.

The process of compiling the program was as follows: Dmitry Ozersky or Oleg Garkusha wrote a poem, and Fedorov and Ozersky finalized it, processing the text, and superimposed the resulting music. Garkusha clarified the situation related to non-attribution of certain compositions, indicating the reason for the processing of his texts: “For example,“ She-Wolf ”and“ Shards ”were at first my poems. Then they came to Lena Fedorov, of them all the words were removed, leaving in each verse one of my key phrases (and all the other words there are now not mine). My lines are “he goes to his she-wolf” and “fragments of girlish hearts crunch under my feet” ” ^[8] . The opening composition of the album, “Boy as a Boy,” was written from a phrase spoken by Garkusha during the recording process ^[3] . In addition to this, the album by Garkushi includes “Polka (Sucking)” and “Bombs”, along with “Boy as a Boy” performed by him, as well as partially the song “Shards”. Shortly before the recording, Dyatlov, who was accepted into the group, also performed the vocal parts in two compositions - “The Hunter” and “Fly, Lieutenant”, and the vocals in the songs “Shards”, “My Evening”, “Lisa” and “New Year's Song” were assigned to Fedorov ^{[3 ]} . Despite Dyatlov’s desire to perform the songs “My Evening” and “Lisa”, the group decided to limit the young vocalist and took him to play the violin in “Sosot”, and in the “New Year's song” he performed backing vocals ^{[6] [9]} .

The blank was ready in almost one day, as the drummer of the group Igor Cherednik was able to record his parts in turn on a barrel, and then on the drums. Fedorov also brought a ukulele on which he played in the song “New Year's Song” and a sitar, which he used for accompaniment in “New Year's Song”. In addition to this, in the original magneto-album between the compositions there were several “bundles” - repeating monosyllabic text replicas composed hastily and recorded on a household tape recorder.

Album

The name of the album was invented by Oleg Garkusha after watching a television program about the former TASS officer who became a spy in the Titan cinema, where he worked at that time ^[3] . Immediately after watching, he wrote the poem “So I became a traitor”, which was supposed to turn into a full-fledged song, but Fedorov did not like the text and, together with Ozersky, rewrote the text in “New Year's song”, while leaving the key phrase from Garkushinsky's poem: “ So I became a traitor ”- which was chosen by the group as the name of the album ^[10] .

The album’s design was already done by a Leningrad artist Kirill Miller , who had already worked with a group for decoration and image design, who became an integral part of the team for several years ^[11] . It was Miller who came up with and implemented the cover on which he depicted a fig , tied with a bow, which later became the basis for the scenography of the group's performances with the album program. When arranging the album, Miller, for some unknown reason, slightly changed the name of the album, decided by the participants, to "How I became a traitor", which was strengthened by the record.

Initially, the album was compiled in draft form and was released as a magnetic album, in which there were bundles between songs and an instrumental bonus track - backing track for the song “Hunter”. The clean version of the compositions “Bombs” and “Fly Lieutenant”, included in the original release, was compiled in Leningrad by Leonid Fedorov and Mikhail Rappoport, while the rest of the tracks were mixed in February 1989, during the group’s French tour, at the Studio Studio du French studio Vai d'Orge by engineers Patrick Clerk, Georges Moya and Jean Taxi without the participation of the group, however, some bundles and the instrumental version of The Hunter were excluded from the album. The album in France was released under the Paris label Volya Productions. The Paris version was released on the territory of the USSR by Melody, as a copy from the matrix of the French edition ^[3] . The album was subsequently translated and remastered by Hamburg Studios Master & Servant in 1997 ^[12] . For the first time, the album was officially released in Paris on LP, CD, cassettes, and the first edition was dated March 6, 1989. The release of the album involved a trial between three French labels (VOLYA PROD., ANTENN-2, SCILLA PROD), since Volya Productions had the rights to release the whole album, and ANTENN-2 and SCILLA PROD. released under their labels the singles "Nepman" and "Lieutenant" ^[1] .

All music was written by Leonid Fedorov and the group AuktsYon ^[2] .

• Oleg Garkusha - vocals
• Evgeny Dyatlov - vocals, violin
• Leonid Fedorov - vocals, guitar, keyboards
• Dmitry Matkovsky - guitar, ukulele, sitar
• Victor Bondarik - bass
• Dmitry Ozersky - keyboards
• Nikolay Rubanov - tenor and soprano saxophone, nozzle
• Igor Cheridnik - drums, percussion
• Pavel Litvinov - percussion
• Kirill Miller - design

According to the arguments of Dmitry Ozersky, How I became a traitor became a turning point, where the group, in an attempt to expand the boundaries of creativity, switched to metaphorical material. In addition, the group was able to work for the first time in a professional studio, despite the available program “Everything is calm in Baghdad”, having recorded material from scratch, compiled in a short time directly in the studio. Ozersky, as the main author of the group’s lyrics, felt that when recording the album he experienced professional growth in writing lyrics ^[6] . Fedorov believes that in the program “Traitor”, two songs, “New Year's” and “My Evening”, became one of the strongest compositions in the group's work ^[13] . Kushnir, reviewing the album, wrote that many of the songs on the album are avant-garde ska, in which melodic lines get entangled in complex arrangements. He also noted that fuzzy vocals and “inability to give oneself” became the main advantage of the group, having migrated from the shortcomings ^[3] . In the “Book of Life Accounting”, Mikhail Margolis called How I became a traitor frame for the entire subsequent work of the group, since it is with him that the desperate-broken speech of the lyrical hero begins ^[6] .