Soundtrack of that Life: Etseri, Svaneti
As has happened more than once in my seven years of marriage, I find myself alone again for New Year's and Orthodox Christmas. Sometimes I have gone to Canada on a free TLG winter holiday ticket, but those are no longer offered, so more usually I let my wife go to her people in Kakheti while I tend to the barn's denizens.
One small project I undertook this time, solely for my own edification I admit, was the tracking down and reproducing of a certain music compilation CD's playlist, solely from YouTube. It dates from early 1996, and a friend of mine got his copy as a free insert in HMV Magazine of that time, in the UK. He's a rather special fan of music in general. He, another friend from the Netherlands, and I shared an apartment in St Petersburg, Russia, for a few wonderful years before they both married their sweethearts and we went our separate ways. Listening to it now, I'm THERE.
The three of us were already such good friends before that move-in that it had just been a matter of time before we accomplished it, a matter of finding the right place. This turned out to be a two-story affair with 1.5 bathrooms, rather a special place in the St P of the 1990s. Its landlady appeared from even further north in Russia twice a year to demand rent, and more of her we could not have stood, but the flat was a dream.
Each of the three of us had a different way of looking at music. The guy who had that CD, he didn't care what the message of the music was, its lyrics or theme; nor was technical accomplishment by the musicians his primary concern. The emotive content, how it made him FEEL, was primary to him. And his tastes ran the gamut from Brahms to Bjork. If the music and its associated feeling were powerful enough and he was behind the wheel, he'd have to pull over, or crash. He once walked in and started playing the grand piano during a crowded lunch at the city's Astoria restaurant, at which Hitler's printed menus for a victory dinner had been found when the Nazi siege of Leningrad finally was broken in the 1940s. Why spoil a good thing? Let him play on!
The Dutch fellow's main interest in music was its moral qualities; he had grown up with a pipe organ in his family's living room in Amsterdam. Neither was he thrown out when he sat down to a similar, if much larger, instrument in the main cathedral of Budapest and began to use it. He, too, was good enough to let play in that setting.
Me? I could live with a poor message, or one with which I disagreed (as long as it wasn't actively Satanic, say), if the technical quality of the music and singing were high. That's why I love the Eagles and Rush, along with many other groups, and adore Annie Lennox's voice. Sing me the phone book, I don't care.
This CD was the soundtrack of those few years with my flat-mates, often playing in the background. We could come together of an evening after being about our separate businesses all day long and dive, without any preliminaries, straight into any topic of philosophy, theology or the arts, and discuss it until the wee hours came and sleep forced itself upon us. All of the 16 tracks were by people unknown to me until then, and more than one of the compiled artists I decided to follow based upon that one initial song. They ran from Garbage and Portishead to the Chemical Brothers and Oasis. The songs can never mean anything similar to anyone else in the world, except perhaps my two friends from that era, and even then there will be differences between us.
It has been like that for me at other times, too. If smell is a powerful force in many people for reviving memories of certain occasions, for me, music has the same effect. So... Billy Idol's White Wedding will always take me back to Grade 12 in my high school's art room in Canada (we were allowed to have the radio on during art lessons); Iron Maiden's Run to the Hills dates from a few years later, and puts me in a certain pizzeria on Edmonton's Jasper Avenue, run by a pair of brothers from Iran, frequented by street people from after "official hours" until early in the morning. Here some friends and I made some very unlikely friendships with the city's down and out in late 1987, and ended up bringing about 50 of them a full Christmas dinner that year. I wouldn't say that these songs are necessarily at all to my liking; but the happy memories associated with them will always remain.
So now, when I listen to my newly re-compiled CD from 20 years ago (see the artists and tracks below), I'm back there. Nothing wrong with the present (I'll look back on it and compile a new playlist for The Svaneti Years), but that nostalgia, too, has its deep hooks and attractions. What's the soundtrack of a particular time in YOUR life?
Cast - Fine Time; Paul Weller - Stanley Road; Chemical Brothers - In Dust We Trust; Del Amitri - It Might As Well Be You; PJ Harvey - C'mon Billy; Portishead - Numb; Garbage - My Lover's Box; Suede - Shipbuilding; Leftfield - Inspection; Menswear - 125 West 3rd Street; Goldie - Still Life; Sheryl Crow - Run Baby Run; Tricky - Black Steel; Edwyn Collins - Out Of This World; Boo Radleys - Reaching Out From Here; Oasis - Champagne Supernova
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1350 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
Tony Hanmer