Azazello and rock music: Traces of hippie listening in 1970s and 1980s Moscow

In the early 1990s, Azazello sat at a typewriter and produced the two collections of poems that appear in the archive, going back over the compositions written in his notebooks from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and writing new material too. One of the new poems depicted the experience of listening to music as the start of an adventure:

wake up one day all of a sudden!

the vocal melodies are leading you

to a place,

where there is none of what’s

tomorrow or yesterday.

the rain rolls off the eyelashes

in drops,

and rainbows play with each other

in the sun,

the colors sparkle,

like the radiance of ice on a warm day,

full of blood.

the new beckoning sound

seems monotonous,

like an echo inside a cave.

has someone heard it?

you won’t find anyone among us

who’s heard it and hasn’t closed his eyes.

/met with morrison, September 30, 2 am/ (slide 0516) [1]

 

The temporal categories of season, month and hour were always meaningful to Azazello, and at the end of the poem he provides a teasing colophon: the words came to him in the dead of a late September night, and they respond to an encounter with a certain Morrison. This is exactly what it seems – a reference to Jim Morrison, lyricist and vocalist of the Doors, a figure who loomed large in Azazello’s life. At the time of the typed manuscript, Azazello was in possession of a volume of Morrison’s poetry and lyrics in English (letter from Annamie Ummels in archive – Az-clear sleeve-06) and had begun translating them (see his translation of Morrison’s ‘Black Polished Chrome’, also in the typescript – slide 0487). As he recalled in 2015:

Morrison has this Paris Journal. A Dutch woman, she’s here on that photograph, sent it to me, and I started translating it. Because it has rhythm, not rhymes. I wrote poems [stishki] too… I was young then. I tried to make them rhyme [lovit’ rifmu], and then I realised it was better to… or you could call it the breath [dykhanie]. And I started the translation… vile drugs. Imagine. I pawned it to someone – I mean, was it too much for him to remind me?.[2]

 

The poem here that precedes the timestamp and Morrison dedication, however, refers specifically to music as sound. This is not the verbal singularity of the poet Morrison, but rather an immersive auditory experience, perhaps standing in for all Azazello’s listening as he now tries to characterise it, alone at night in his Moscow flat listening to a Doors record. As many other passages and sketches in the archive do, the lines fix on a moment of initiation that instantly becomes universal rather than particular; they exhort the reader to wake up and allow music – voices from a place elsewhere – to transport them out of mundane time and space, and into a wonderland of sunshine, rain and rainbows.

 

***

 

Azazello’s archive is unique in allowing us access to ways in which the Soviet hippie community, the sistema, lived for and through music during the 1970s and 1980s. Azazello began writing in his notebooks – ‘just a little book that you carry around and draw in when you’re high’ [3]– in 1976, at the start of his relationship with the influential Ofelia; a year or so before that, he and Il’ia Kestner had written fairy stories [skazki] together, with Azazello contributing illustrations.[4] Azazello wrote diaries in the mid-1990s too, but it is the material from 1976 to the end of the 1980s that positively brims with references to music, at first a jumble of pictures, fragments of poetry, quotations and slogans, often in English, but in the 1980s increasingly turning to autobiographical prose or a kind of diary form. This is, of course, a fundamentally idiosyncratic body of work, the expression of a personality, produced by an individual with his own preferences, experiences, and an insatiable habit of thinking through his understanding of what music meant in his life. At the same time, Azazello’s drawings and writings allow us to flesh out the ways in which, as Juliane Fürst succinctly puts it, hippies ‘managed to fill the experience of music with ideas and let the ideas grow to the beat of the music’.[5] Although Azazello must be seen as exemplary rather than representative of an entire moment, his musical allegiances, ways of listening and ways of thinking were shaped by the culture around him, and this relationship too finds its traces on the page.

 

Over the course of his life as a listener, Azazello accrued a personal canon of rock music performers and authors. He was a voracious, explorative listener, but he also placed firm boundaries around the music that he valued. His friend Kestner described how hippies drew distinctions:

And we even divided up the music: this is our music, even though it’s from the West. And this isn’t ours. […] So, Morrison – he was ours. Hendrix, Janis [Joplin] – they were ours. Some others weren’t – take Slade, who were so catchy [zavodnaia] – the hooligans loved them.[6]

 

Azazello and his circle cemented distinctions by listening again and again to the records and tracks that meant most to them. Surveying the fragments of lyrics, titles and band names that he transcribed or incorporated into his own writings and drawings reveals a propensity towards blues rock, psychedelia and prog rock, with a dose of the Beatles. Azazello’s tastes encompassed scenes and trends from both sides of the Atlantic, although bands from the United Kingdom predominated.[7] He clearly loved the English language: the cluster of notebooks from the end of the 1970s testifies to some concerted attempts to write poetry in English,[8] and as the wider hippie community was wont to do, he used many specific borrowed English words when writing about everyday experience or pondering existential questions (as he would have done in conversation). But, based on what is in the archive, when he wrote a quotation in English out by hand in a notebook it was almost always a line or phrase from a rock song, and most often (by far) from one recorded by the Doors or the Rolling Stones; if not, it was likely to be a lyric used by Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix/the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Led Zeppelin (in descending order of frequency). He also singles out individual musicians – Morrison and Hendrix are the ones whose names he writes most frequently, but he also draws Hendrix several times (for instance, Az04-1977-1978-14; Az06-1977-04; Az23-1980-1981-10; Az25-1981-24), as well as John Lennon (Az-green folder-167; Az-large white envelope-030), Ian Anderson (Az-green folder-010; Az-green folder-071), Mick Jagger (Az23-1980-1981-20) and Keith Richards (Az-green folder-164; Az21-1981-1982-1985-031). He describes spells listening to the music of the Rolling Stones, Hendrix, the Doors and Pink Floyd, and details in the moment how Patti Smith’s album Easter makes him feel on a particular day towards the end of the 1970s. Only in 1987 or 1988, while incarcerated in the psikhushka [psychiatric hospital], does Azazello make any reference to domestically created rock music: he transcribes texts of songs by Akvarium [Aquarium] (judging by the selection, he has access to the 1987 Melodiia release known as the ‘White Album’ – Az26-1986-1987-1988-042; Az26-1986-1987-1988-045), and he later writes that he is copying out Akvarium lyrics for Ofelia (Az26-1986-1987-1988-081). Otherwise, anglophone rock commands his full, sustained attention.

 

On the surface, we might conclude that Azazello listened mainly to music that we could imagine a hippie or ex-hippie listening to in San Francisco or London at any time from the late 1960s onwards. And in fact, the Azazello playlist would appeal not only to former hippies: these artists commanded considerable commercial success and critical acclaim over the course of their careers and are at the heart of mainstream narratives of rock music history. Azazello’s choices suggest an understanding of rock music that hardly strays far from the least adventurous norms of the 1960s and 1970s: beliefs about rock that it should be loud, built around the combination electric guitar-bass-drums; that its lyrics should take a stab at profundity or iconoclasm; and that – with some exceptions, most notably Jimi Hendrix, but also Patti Smith – it is most successful when created by white English-speaking men (and it should be noted that both these artists were admitted into rock’s firmament in the West as well). Azazello’s preferences seem redolent of mythologies with that were rife in rock culture in its anglocentric manifestation: displays of masculine energy to represent newness and challenge, which ultimately become subsumed into the mainstream, a process that reveals how suited to that mainstream they always were. A form of normalisation was also underway in the Soviet Union, and by the end of the 1970s, a far broader swathe of Soviet society was actively seeking out Western rock music. By 1976, the Beatles and other more or less safe choices were receiving coverage – often tentatively approving – in official Soviet publications.[9] As Alexei Yurchak discusses, in the late 1970s even hard rock and prog had acquired intellectual credibility in the distinctly non-hippie context of conversations between thoughtful young Komsomol activists.[10]

 

Still, before the late 1980s, no one in the Soviet Union could walk into a record shop and browse recent Western album releases. Like the Soviet consumer experience in the 1970s more broadly – ‘a befuddling combination of shortages and windfalls’[11] – obtaining music to play at home was haphazard and fraught with frustration. Even in Moscow, where music lovers could visit Melodiia’s flagship store on Prospekt Kalinina, shortages were a feature. One regular in the 1970s recalled the ground floor as busy and relatively well stocked, with sections for Soviet estrada [light music/pop], folk and children’s music, imports from the Eastern Bloc, and recordings of political speeches. He preferred the classical section upstairs, but for any interesting records: ‘you had to get lucky and arrive at the exact moment a scarce item went on sale [‘vybros’ defitsita]. Or cosy up to the sales assistants’. The same author queued for hours in September 1976 for David Tukhmanov’s concept album Po volne moei pamiati [On a Wave of My Memory].[12] Soviet import-export agreements with Eastern Bloc countries were concluded on the basis of the financial sum involved rather than the number of records, which meant, for instance, that Polish pop records always ran short because they cost more than, and sold better than, the Soviet classical records they were mainly exchanged for.[13] Meanwhile, by far the most desirable item, the Western rock or pop LP, had to be acquired at significant expense on the black market (with the exception of some Melodiia-produced unlicensed EPs and compilations, for which demand vastly outstripped supply).[14] Western records were rapidly reproduced and distributed using domestic reel-to-reel tape recorders. This confluence of scarcity, luck, the black market, personal connections, and a DIY ethos all imbued music consumption with a specific kind of sociality.[15] Access and knowledge felt hard-won, at the level of the immediate community, even if not for every individual within it. A distinctive attitude formed towards the music, framing it as revelatory. The sociologist Thomas Cushman spent time with rock musicians in Leningrad just before and just after it became St Petersburg again, and described what he called ‘cultural fixation’, a name for the way certain records and artists became unassailable in significance for a particular community of musicians:

No one can possibly know the precise mechanism whereby the music of T. Rex became a major template for the subsequent evolution of rock culture in St. Petersburg. The processes of fragmentary cultural diffusion and the development of erratic networks of communication congealed to create a situation in which T. Rex and other prosaic figures from Western rock-and-roll became important, ongoing cultural influences in the Petersburg rock culture. […] Petersburg musicians remained fixated on one stage of rock’s temporal development.[16]

 

If we leave aside Cushman’s apparent disquiet about what he feels to be an undeserved influence, he pinpoints neatly the fact that processes of cultural translation are contingent and arbitrary, especially so under late Soviet socialism. As Will Straw observes, ‘[t]he circulation of records out of that community and cultural space relocates them in new contexts wherein the bases of their individual value and historical intelligibility are transformed’.[17] For all the Moscow hippies’ knowledge of and investment in music as a conduit for hippie ideology to be imported from the United States or elsewhere in ‘the West’, the context of the encounter determined interpretation. Like the musicians Cushman talked to, Azazello tended to look backwards (as he does in the poem above), worshipping the music that had soundtracked scenes from his initiation into a new life (most obviously, Hendrix when he began his friendship with Kestner, and the Rolling Stones when he came under Ofelia’s sway). Patchiness in availability and a lack of reliable information, supplemented by wild rumour, meant there was always more to seek out by the same artists. Moreover, the section of the Moscow hippie community that he was part of lived by a temporality determined by consumption of opium.[18] The cycle of kaif [high] followed by kumar [withdrawal], and repeat, that Azazello experienced during the years that were also his most creative was conducive to ritual and repetition perhaps more than novelty and exploration. Even if Azazello listened to music that was, in the non-socialist world, straightforwardly commercial, or which sometimes seems an obvious or too smooth a choice, and even if he put on the same records over and over again, his listening happened in circumstances and settings that were far from ordinary, whether seen in the context of stagnation-era Soviet culture or the history of rock music consumption.

 

It would appear logical to classify Azazello’s visualisations of and meditations on rock as a manifestation of what Yurchak has termed ‘the Imaginary West’, which refers to the use of a diverse set of symbols and artifacts available to people within the Soviet Union’s borders and with origins or associations with the West to construct an image of this archetypal other place in the Soviet mindset:

These symbols were desirable, first and foremost […] as links to imaginary worlds that were spatially, temporally and meaningfully ‘distant’, as ‘fingerprints’ of these imaginary worlds on the surface of Soviet life.[19]

 

Yurchak gives music a central place in his discussion of this work of the imagination. In terms of Azazello’s practice, however, I would suggest two departures from the paradigm. For Yurchak, the imagination is aided by the ‘semiotic “bareness”’ of the symbols:[20] he makes much of the idea of Soviet citizens not actually understanding lyrics as they listened to or imitated rock songs, ignorance providing a blank page onto which new meanings could be inscribed.[21] Self-deprecating retrospective accounts of not understanding lyrics do indeed come up when musicians look back on this era: for instance, a 2004 documentary showed musician Andrei Makarevich leafing through his own youthful notebooks and pointing out his creative guesses at Beatles lyrics;[22] dismissive references to Soviet rock’s mimetic origins also suggest that in the 1970s rock audiences might often hear performers garbling half-understood English lyrics (we will encounter one such account below). In his notebooks, Azazello, by contrast, is not working towards a plausible phonetic rendering to aid a performance of a song; rather he reveals himself to be a dedicated and insightful reader of musical texts, seeking to understand, to relate sounds, phrases and images to his own world, and to become adept in a foreign vocabulary and grammar that can express what he needs to say. In terms of semiotics, he finds the texts (sonic as well as verbal) extraordinarily rich and replete with meaning. A further complication is that even though Azazello shows interest in landscapes and geographies, including those of some version of a cartographically or culturally ‘real’ ‘West’,[23] what he is seeking and interpreting in the music above all is something unearthly and ineffable, a far cry from the average Soviet citizen’s impetus to reconcile the Soviet Union’s principal ‘other’ with their own values. The voices are calling him to a more radical ‘elsewhere’.

 

 

Interviewed in 2015 while in the process of handing over the physical archive, Azazello provided fragments of commentary on his notebooks and how their contents related to the music he so loved. Evidently showing pages from notebook Az04, he talks about specific drawings (my annotations in square brackets identify which):

I think this is 1977, and this is now 1978. I’d put it to one side. I think, you know what? There should be a page cut out here. I left it with Olesia at Troianskii’s on Baumanskaia. Then they gave it back to me. We’d stopped by then… we were taking drugs [torchali] at home, we changed location [peremeshchalis’] only in summer, not in winter. And so what happened was I left my notebook behind, then they gave it back to me, but a very good picture had been torn out. Drawn in pencil. And these things – they’re my vision for the design [vídenie oformleniia] of a Jimi Hendrix record. A lot of my stuff is connected to music. Friends [Az04-1977-1978-13] ... you see, that seems like it just means ‘friends’ [druz’ia], but at that time – Led Zeppelin, the record…[24] This one I added to later [podrisovyval]. And here I tried to draw Ofelia [probably Az04-1977-1978-11].[25]

 

Although he never aspired to be a musician beyond occasionally playing a harmonica along to his records, the musical world Azazello came to occupy overlapped with Moscow’s community of aspiring and career musicians, and the meanings attached to rock music by bands and their audiences undoubtedly shaped his thinking. He also listened, at times, with and under the influence of the wider sistema. Before turning in earnest to Azazello’s own creative responses to the music he listened to, therefore, I will outline some of the wider context by tracing the musical life of hippies in Moscow in the 1970s in broader strokes, starting with their experiences of live music.

 

 

Hippies and the live decade

 

И иногда как будто во сне Играем сейшн мы в забавной стране, Где все кричат: ‘Time, wine, gin, flat, girl, night’ Мы подпеваем: ‘Feeling all right’   И иногда как будто во сне Играем сейшн мы в забавной стране, Где все кричат: ‘Love, street, ring, price, fuck, white’ Мы подпеваем: ‘Feeling all right’

And sometimes as if in a dream We play a seishn in a funny land, Where everyone’s shouting: ‘Time, wine, gin, flat, girl, night’ We sing along: ‘Feeling all right’   And sometimes as if in a dream We play a seishn in a funny land, Where everyone’s shouting: ‘Love, street, ring, price, fuck, white' We sing along: ‘Feeling all right’

 

Visokosnoe Leto, ‘My Baby Got a Piece of Mine’ (c. 1978).[26]

 

There is a consensus among participants and scholars that the hippie movement in Moscow was closely intertwined with the rock music scene from the end of the 1960s for around a decade. Musicians and hippies alike – and during this period there were people who were both, although interests increasingly diverged as time went on  – saw anglophone rock music as the pinnacle of what could be achieved, almost magical in its resonance.[27] At the same time as venerating them, the musicians and the hippies mined rock records for information, imagery, language and sounds that shaped fashion and art, language and lifestyle as well as music-making. This fascination often began with the Beatles, whose early to mid-1960s output had inspired the first wave of Moscow groups making what was dubbed ‘beat music’ [bit-muzyka].[28] Hippies especially eagerly listened to the Beatles as they transitioned from a pop or rock and roll band to a collective at the cutting edge of musical development, experimenting with the possibilities of the studio and working in soundscapes inspired by – among other adventures – LSD trips. Hippie tastes then expanded, loosely tracking genre pathways that opened up within the music industry in the UK and USA in the wake of the Beatles’ records of the late 1960s, with a predilection emerging for psychedelic rock, art rock, progressive rock and hard rock: the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and so on. Soviet hippie understanding of rock music’s history and meaning leaned on narratives about experimentation and the eschewal of commercial and mainstream values. As Fürst explains, based on her reading of the kaleidoscopic hippie manifesto ‘Kanon’ [‘Canon’], co-written by Arkadii Slavorosov and Sergei Shutov in 1982, it was believed that ‘rock opened an entire new universe, which […] was deviant in the face of opprobrium, and accessible only through a non-conformist mindset’.[29] Like the hippies in the Midlands of the UK Paul E. Willis spoke to for his ethnography conducted at the end of the 1960s, Soviet hippies favoured music that offered what they understood to be raw, authentic communication of emotions, echoing their own feelings of dislocation and desire for transcendence.[30]

 

 

The influence of hippie ideology and lifestyle on what was being performed and composed in the 1970s is acknowledged in general by historians of Soviet rock music, but discussion is fairly scant and tends to affirm a single, somewhat simplified narrative. Most detailed is samizdat rock journalist turned historian Il’ia Smirnov, who credits the hippie movement with first instilling a need for performers to provide ‘music for dancing’.[31] For Smirnov, as for others, the narrative of rock’s development is teleological, with the end point being original repertoire with lyrics written by the performers themselves in the Russian language – the kind of music that was seeing a triumphant emergence into Soviet mainstream culture and even gaining some attention in the West in the mid to late 1980s, just as the first histories were being written by participants and observers from this slightly later cohort. In the resulting chronology that Smirnov and others adopt, hippies are associated first with an era that left almost no trace, when rock groups played their own version of existing material and/or sang in English. Smirnov and fellow journalist and cultural critic Artemii Troitskii agree that there followed a further, more evolved stage, when a new wave of author-performers crafted original lyrics in Russian (a tendency epitomised in Moscow by Mashina Vremeni [Time Machine] and in Leningrad by Akvarium, although each had forerunners in their respective scenes).[32] Cushman too gained a strong sense in his interviews that lyrics in Russian were a cornerstone of authenticity.[33] Smirnov in particular identifies hippie discourse as having a role in the ascendence of Russophone rock, inspiring the language and imagery of the most successful original songs written towards the end of the 1970s – he is thinking most of all of songs by Mashina Vremeni, a group then poised on the brink of official recognition:

The images they created overflowed with the heraldic flowers of hippieism. Above all they were characterised by the utmost sense of the sublime, their use of allegory and their romanticism. The repertoire of Mashina Vremeni, the most talented group from this generation, resembles a tapestry: all the castles and sailing ships leave almost no room for real life.[34]

 

 

There is some truth in the claim that before this tapestry found voice in the romantic, escapist, often lightly satirical lyrics Andrei Makarevich wrote for Mashina Vremeni, domestically produced rock music left little trace in writing or recordings. Throughout the 1970s, bands’ primary activity was to play live rather than to make records. They often played covers, so original lyrics were not in abundance (though there were exceptions, in English and in Russian, and sometimes mixing the two, as Visokosnoe Leto [Leap Year Summer] were doing at the end of the 1970s. The understanding of a city-based scene that has coalesced around rock music but is yet to be active in producing an autonomous, domesticated version of this music offered in these foundational histories is pervasive because it is partly true, but it is also the product of Russian rock music scholarship’s fascination with lyrics and assigning literary quality, itself influenced by the legacy of bands that became famous during the 1980s, once recording albums had become a viable activity.[35]

 

In his influential English-language history that was published during the first flush of glasnost, Artemii Troitskii referred briefly to live concerts given by non-official rock groups in the 1970s. This kind of event was known as a seishen (plural seisheny but more modishly seishená in the 1970s;[36] sometimes also spelled ‘seishn’), which came from the English word ‘session’:

Things were certainly lively in those days – energy, enthusiasm, a new life, independence. Now it’s customary to think back on those days with nostalgia, as one might recall a first love. To be honest, the atmosphere in general was more interesting than the bands in particular. The ‘sessions’ were a show-case [sic] for all our half-baked Hendrixes and Claptons, Jim Morrisons and Robert Plants. They copied shamelessly, often without understanding what they were singing about .[37]

 

The word used for the event – like other anglicisms, appealingly awkward in the mouth, and probably first deployed by readers of contraband English-language rock magazines – seems to emphasise certain features of liveness: co-presence, informality, spontaneity, perhaps also intoxication of various kinds. At the same time, the word might also have a ring of something slightly different, namely the idea of music being taken apart and worked on by talented, committed people.[38] Both sets of connotations suggest that seishena felt unfinished, open-ended, to be repeated even if they would never recur in precisely the same configuration again. Even Troitskii, always ready to be cynical about Soviet rock’s achievements, concedes that something interesting was going on in these live events in the 1970s despite the fact that there was, in his account, little originality on offer (‘far more interesting and adventurous’ is his slight elaboration in the book’s Russian version a few years on).[39] The problem was that in themselves excitement and adventure left little that could be written up in histories.[40]

 

 

Later recollections suggest that at the time of seishena, musicians in Moscow felt engaged in an adventure. Nikolai Shiriaev, the bassist in Vtoroe Dykhanie [Second Wind], a group known for exhilarating performances of material recorded by Jimi Hendrix, remembered this as a time of collective discovery, including via an unspoken competition between two guitarists, his own band’s Igor’ Degtiariuk, and Aleksei ‘Vait’ Belov of blues rockers Udachnoe Priobretenie [Lucky Acquisition]:[41]

All these extraordinary sounds, these guitars! There was nothing – and then suddenly they appeared! As if they had arrived from the moon. Sensations were so intense, because rock was just emerging, it was something extraordinary, and so everyone was in total ecstasy. Of course, the sound wasn’t like today, but we were freer to create, we could rehearse from morning till night […].[42]

 

For his part, Degtiariuk spoke grandiosely of a lineage of experimentation that ran from the Russian Futurists and other titans of the Silver Age to himself and his collaborators, taking in the electric guitar virtuosity of his hero: ‘We had this whole concept that we were the successors of Khlebnikov, Tatlin, Skriabin, the Symbolists. And Hendrix’.[43] The trio – Shiriaev, Degtiariuk and drummer Maksim Kapitanovskii – used Hendrix tracks as the basis to experiment with sounds, and they were known for the sheer volume they achieved live – Degtiariuk’s 70-watt Hohner amplifier was reputedly the most powerful in Moscow at the time. The younger musician Makarevich remembered that Vtoroe Dykhanie played at so loudly it induced in him ‘something close to holy terror’.[44] Another trio, Rubinovaia Ataka [Ruby Attack], took as the core of their repertoire songs and riffs by the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad and the Doors. Vladimir Ratskevich, the group’s founder and guitarist, explained that for him performing non-original material was still an act of creativity:

We all marched in line with the Beatles – that is some of us composed, some reworked things. That notorious word ‘interpretation’ came into use and was very characteristic of Rubinovaia Ataka – that is to say, we remade everything, reworked everything; we had no aim to play note-for-note like everyone else wanted to back then. [Interviewer: But you played only ‘firma’ [existing anglophone material], in your interpretations, right, or did you have some things of your own?] No. What we were doing – these interpretations – that was our own thing [svoe].[45]

 

 

Amid this atmosphere of creation that still revolved around the imported vinyl record, hippies were committed seishen attendees. They can sometimes be glimpsed in memoirs and contemporary sources, including songs – several by Visokosnoe Leto – where their lexicon of English-influenced slang and jealous fandom of the originals could be held up either for collective celebration or as gentle satire (Akvarium’s 1980 hit ‘V pole iagoda navsegda’ [‘In the Berry Field Forever’], poking fun at hippies for their unchanging tastes, is also a case in point). The hippies’ presence seemed to bring to the fore tensions over the value of the music and the emergence of an illegal commercial operation involving self-styled impresario-organisers, those responsible for the venue, and people charged with selling tickets – scraps of postcard bearing essential information and the price of entry. Hippies felt entitled to attend because of a spiritual connection to the music. Musicians, meanwhile, were using the seishena to put their music in front of an audience, and in doing so to receive some payment for their work on stage and sustain an unofficial career. According to Makarevich, hippies had a primary tactic to avoid paying entry, which was to volunteer as ad hoc roadies; if that failed, they rushed the security or climbed in through a window.[46] Makarevich tells such a story to illustrate his own amused toleration (he takes a side swipe at hippies for walking off with precious equipment) and the sheer effort required to put on a concert in these semi-legal conditions. Other accounts perhaps bring us closer to understanding the excitement generated by a seishen and the role in that of the active audience, including the hippie contingent. Margarita Pushkina, who came to write lyrics for Visokosnoe Leto, describes their seishena in the early 1970s, when the group’s repertoire drew heavily on covers of the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad and Creedence Clearwater Revival:

To such music people danced till they dropped […] and were ready to drag themselves from Moscow out to remote dacha stations and small halts, to improbable clubs […]. Sometimes, to aid the mise-en-scène [anturazh], hippies were engaged, and they changed in the toilets of the House of Culture into their colourful shirts, bedecked themselves with beads and, in the middle of the hall, performed the cult hippie dance, which resembled nothing so much as the way daisies sway in the field under a slightly drunken breeze.[47]

 

In Pushkina’s evocation, hippies were bright, highly aestheticised figures, contributing to the visual spectacle of the seishen – perhaps even paid by the organisers for their presence. The innate physicality with which they responded made visible and material the music’s capacity to overlay its beat onto the rhythm of the body and determine its movements: they sway as though they and the music are a single, unified entity.

 

 

Aleksei Khaniutin’s short film, Shest’ pisem o bite [Six Letters About Beat], made as a student project at VGIK [The All-Union State Institute of Cinematography] in 1977, includes footage of Rubinovaia Ataka, Visokosnoe Leto and Mashina Vremeni performing at seishena. The latter two bands play their original compositions with Russian lyrics, while Rubinovaia Ataka perform covers in English: Nazareth’s ‘Silver Dollar Forger’, ‘Never Ending Song of Love’ (a version similar to the original by Delaney & Bonnie) and ‘Long Tall Sally’ (sounding similar to the Beatles’ version). The filmmaker turns his attention as much to the crowd, however: the camera is placed in among it as individuals groove vigorously to the rhythmic drive of Rubinovaia Ataka’s Nazareth cover, and we see swaying shoulders, heads of hair being tossed, and raised hands punching the air or clapping to the beat. Various youthful male and female faces are shown in close-up looking raptly in the direction of the stage as Kris Kel’mi’s mystical sustained organ chords open Visokosnoe Leto’s psychedelic ‘Razmyshleniia’ [‘Contemplations’]. Mashina Vremeni’s audience, by contrast, is seated and appears predominantly male, and perhaps a little older. The film positions itself as reflecting debate about rock music in 1970s Moscow, with various characters delivering pieces to camera in which they describe their experiences. These are framed as ‘letters’ to the editor of a newspaper, hence the film’s title. The final ‘letter’ is in fact a group interview with Mashina Vremeni in which Makarevich does most of the talking; an interview with  the philosopher Igor’ Kon follows as a ‘postscript’, in which he places ‘beat’ in the longer history of moral panics over music and dancing. Most of the other ‘letters’ are read out to the camera by non-professional actors playing the part of their author. One character, though – significantly, the film’s only female speaker – gives a vivid account in her own words of the excitement of attending these live performances:

When I first went to a seishen I was completely blown away [ia obaldela] by it all. It’s the atmosphere, the breathtaking [potriasaiushchaia] music that you don’t hear anywhere else in Moscow. […] The frenzy [azhiotazh] that reigns around the group, the fashionable crowd trying to get closer to the stage… and everyone wants to get to know the musicians [solisty] or the organisers, to be seen with them. And of course they put on such a show with their guitars, their manes of hair [sheveliury] – it’s just nice to look at them.

 

The speech has enough of a flavour of contemporary slang (obaldet’) to feel as though it comes from an insider, while also using terminology that appears to echo Soviet criticism of popular music’s implicit malign influence. The young woman expresses her awareness that being swept up in the excitement of a seishen may turn out to be dangerous, particularly for the female fan. The word she uses, azhiotazh, is the Russian rendering of ‘agiotage’, a French term used by Marx in Capital to refer to stock market speculation. The concept of frenzy or hype that this has come to mean thus carries connotations of an exploitation that is specifically economic: like financial speculators or middlemen peddling goods at inflated prices, rock musicians are selling something that beneath its shimmering surface has lesser value, or perhaps none at all. Young people – young women especially – are therefore imagined as potential victims of the empty allure of a pop icon (à la Beatlemania).[48] In fact, this speaker goes on to say that she has recently acknowledged the dangers of seishena and stopped going: she explains that she knew her parents were worried about her ‘making new friends’ [novye znakomstva], and says that she did not want to end up like the people she used to see ‘over thirty and already in the grave’ [srovnialis’ s asfal’tom] but still regularly going to seishena. Still, she says, she has found it hard to break away; the seishen still exerts its pull on her.

 

 

Although Khaniutin’s film does not go so far as to classify her as a hippie, the former seishen-lover’s monologue in Khaniutin’s film has a subtext that, as well as being a pale echo of the phenomenon of female devotees of rock in its live manifestation being cast as ‘groupies’, is redolent of the habits and passions of hippies. Losing one’s individual consciousness in sound and sensation, experiencing moments of connection with the crowd as a whole but also with charismatic strangers, choosing the temporal realm of the seishen over the day-to-day routine of school or work, over family relationships, and the transition to adulthood – all these are experiences that lie on a continuum with instinctual, body-centred behaviour of other kinds – free love, intoxication, and a search for meaning that is unavailable elsewhere in the sounds of amplified rock music.

 

Modes of collective listening

In the dimly lit little room Friends and Acquaintances were entertaining themselves. Trapped in the box of the tape recorder [magnitofonnyi iashchik], Ian Gillan thrashed and cried out in despair.

Arkadii Slavorosov, ‘Unfinished Epithalamium Performed Solo’ (1976)[49]

 

 

Azazello’s papers have no direct references to attending seishena, although occasional drawings can be found that show musicians performing together (for example, Az09-1977-03; Az04-1977-1978-18). In a wider sense, however, certain characteristics of his writings and drawings are distinctly redolent of the world of the Moscow seishen. Their citational nature is like rock culture of the time; so too is his language, peppered with anglicisms. In content his drawings are often reminiscent of the same mythic composite in tapestry form to which Smirnov compares the lyrics of Mashina Vremeni – castles, ships, knights, pirates, Vikings, and so on (for instance, Az-large white envelope-070; Az-large white envelope-085; Az-large white envelope-090; Az-misc envelopes-15; Az-misc envelopes-17; Az-red folder-02; Az13-1977-09; Az13-1977-12; Az13-1977-18; Az16-1977-03; Az16-1977-04; Az21-1982-1983-1985-100 – there are many more). There appears to be a kinship with – perhaps a direct influence from – the Tolkien-inflected and quasi-Arthurian lyrics of Led Zeppelin.[50]

 

 

It may be that Azazello simply missed the heyday of hippies’ involvement in seishena by being a little too young. Before she met him, his girlfriend Ofelia must have been a seishen habitué, as the wife of the guitarist Igor’ Degtiariuk at the time of Vtoroe Dykhanie’s activity and during his subsequent sojourn with Mashina Vremeni. According to Aleksandr Dvorkin, who was part of Ofelia’s circle before his emigration in 1977, preferences were by then changing, the hippie crowd having lost its enthusiasm for ‘seisheny with dancing’, which they now perceived  to be ‘too vulgar’ and antithetical to proper appreciation of the music.[51] Dvorkin’s recollection of how hippies listened and what they were seeking rings true for the time of Azazello’s initiation into this company:

We got hold of tape recordings and got together to listen to them, recording them off each other. This music didn’t merely justify our existence. In it we saw the meaning of life, giving rock a meaning higher than religion. These vibrations, sacred to us, had to be listened to in silence, in the dark, giving ourselves fully to their sound.[52]

 

Dvorkin’s recollection hits upon a particular quality of recorded sound. As Eric F. Clarke notes, ‘in acousmatically presented music, particularly pop and electroacoustic music created specifically for the recorded medium, there are dramatic opportunities for the specification and exploration of a great variety of virtual spaces’.[53] What Dvorkin presents as a spiritual search can be interpreted more broadly as the commandeering of domestic space using the tape recorder – magnitofon or, in hippie parlance, mafon – to create an environment that allowed hippies, individually and collectively, to imagine other places. Azazello, an initiate, crossed the threshold and became part of this process. His earliest writings, collaborations with Kestner, were, quite straightforwardly, inventions of magical, fairytale lands, their cartography inspired by synaesthetic imagery from psychedelic rock texts:

First things first: what is this fairyland? What does it look like? A fairyland is a blue sky; it is rugged, varicolored mountains interspersed with green valleys; it is rivers, brooks and streams comprised of countless cold, delicious drops…. Come to think of it, capturing a fairyland in words is impossible, so I’ll just get on with my story (slide 0498).[54]

 

Already addressing Ofelia, Azazello draws himself near-naked and seated in the saddle of a horse that seems to have mechanically extended legs, riding above a barely suggested landscape, with the caption ‘and now you and I will gallop into the fairytale’ (Az04-1977-1978-08).

 

 

In and around hippie hangouts, collective listening also shaped and reinforced taste cultures, interpretations of the meaning of certain phrases, songs or albums were debated, information and rumour about musicians and bands was spread. In 1976 the still teenage Arkadii Slavorosov, who was to become a friend of Azazello’s and an important ideologue of 1980s hippiedom – he went by the sobriquet ‘Guru’ – wrote a short story that centred on an impromptu gathering during a wedding party. The detached and disdainful narrator describes the room where the young people have gathered and are putting the household tape recorder through its paces:

The room belonged to the younger brother of the bride, a pimpled youth in deliberately worn-through American jeans. Around him young men and girls had gathered, choosing to sit on the floor and chattering winsomely in Anglo-Russian slang. They looked with contempt at another group of young people, a bit older, sitting in armchairs looking tired, and enjoying discussing Kafka and surrealism to the raging accompaniment of Deep Purple. The older ones gave the impression of not noticing the brash youngsters. […] The intellectuals were half-reclining in Ancient Greek poses, lazily exchanging words, and, to the sound of rock and roll, the young pseudo-hippies looked as though they were trying to provide living illustrations for a medical treatise on Parkinson's disease.[55]

 

Slavorosov’s narrator is scathing about everyone crowded into this room and the values they bring to their listening and responses. There is a conflict taking place over whether the tape recorder should be used to play hippie-endorsed records, Deep Purple in Rock and the Jesus Christ Superstar album, or to allow the younger contingent, represented by one vocal young woman who complains that ‘they’ve let loose some ancient stuff’, to put on some Slade. The hippies who are dancing to Deep Purple are perhaps reprising moves made at seishena, although through the young Slavorosov’s eyes their dance is ugly and distorted (and they do not convince him as real hippies).

 

 

At around the same time, Arkadii Rovner wrote the novel Kalalatsy, which has a chapter in the voice of a reformed hippie, who describes Ofelia and her circle in the manner of a roman à clef.[56] The narrator encounters Ofelia surrounded by acolytes:

A homeless, cynical music reared up and charged forth with a whoop. Pride, sensuality and naked trembling swelled under a prickly sky, sucking everything viscously down into their abysses. Then suddenly the double bass gave a fearless, booming retort. And suddenly there was air, though the double bass did not set the tone, and only occasionally, doubtingly, posed questions; this was more powerful than all the whistling revelry. The music thickened and grew heavier.

The hairy ones passed the smoke around the circle, beating back the advance of the islanders[57] with their heels. The music – a spiral, a hissing snake – coiled itself around them, squeezed, shrieked, and fell still. My head started to hurt.[58]

 

In each of these accounts, music is a dominating presence, tangible and expansive, offering a spiritual experience to some, but oppressive or threatening to the outsider. In the early 1980s, Azazello wrote two contrasting pieces of prose that we can read as his own reflections on collective listening in hippie life. These appear on adjacent pages, inviting their comparison (Az25-1981-23; Az25-1981-25). The first piece is in retrospective vein and should be interpreted as an extended version of the attempts to define hippie identity in slogans and drawings that occupy many pages of the early notebooks. Exemplary of this tendency is a page containing an illustration, definition and poem, all striving to encapsulate hippie ideology (Az04-1977-1978-23). The drawing is of a figure decked out in quasi-military regalia, which includes a peace sign and eyes of providence (here, as elsewhere, Azazello’s ideal garments seem directly inspired by Hendrix’s adoption of 1890s British military jackets in 1966-1967),[59] and with a syringe tucked into a pocket. Beside it the caption reads:

Hippy is not a fashion (though it also happens like that), and not a philosophical movement and not a concept from sociology, Hippy is the psychic state of a person, and it means only that and nothing else.

 

At the bottom of the page, Azazello adds four lines of verse, apparently for a happy hippie collective to recite or sing about itself:

We walk along and sing

We walk along and laugh

And we smoke hashish

And you hang above the flowers as smoke

 

Another paradigmatic statement of hippie identity that feels related is the quasi-manifesto, ‘Parad radug prodolzhaetsia’ [‘The Rainbow Parade Goes On’], which Azazello drafted in 1980 or 1981 (Az23-1980-1981-48; Az23-1980-1981-49; Az23-1980-1981-50) and typed out in the 1990s (slide 0344). This opens with an assertion of the resilience of the hippie community in the face of adversity:

Darkness fell sometimes – they uprooted us, stomped us out, beat us, mocked and maimed us, drove some of us to madness. I have seen broken flowers: empty eyes, frightened faces, helplessly dangling arms.

But we gather once again, because we have something to communicate to each other through words, through music, through dance or simply through a smile.[60]

 

In each of these utterances, music is an expression of hippie identity, a form of communication originating with the hippies themselves. The extended prose passage (Az25-1981-23) is a much less formulaic and more personal take on what it meant to be a hippie, and focuses more precisely on collective listening, but it begins as a retrospective account of this time when Azazello was grasping at an understanding of what was then his new identity, and it too references periods of adversity. It opens with a singular ‘you’ and ‘I’, referring to Azazello’s relationship with Ofelia, which was controversial among Ofelia’s established circle when they first met: ‘We were the best of all and we loved each other like no one else. I cast a spell on you, they said, and we laughed, laughing at the moon together’.[61] As he continues, the passage veers between ‘we’ as a vision of the community as a whole, and ‘we’ meaning the couple. It is as if Azazello cannot disentangle his identity as a hippie from his identity as Ofelia’s lover. His recollections of this past seem to issue from a kind of lost Eden, a world of ease and love within the community and of integration with the natural world: ‘We were people, we were together and we blocked out the horizons with our silhouettes and our hair got tangled in branches, leaves and flowers, and we get covered in pollen. ‘LOVE’ – this was our slogan’.[62]

 

In the present, it is the music Azazello is listening to that brings these memories to mind and affirms to him who he is: he writes ‘I’m listening to the music that we used to listen to before’. He turns from nature and the love slogan to consideration of music, which is intrinsically connected with a feeling of bliss; he uses the word ‘kaif’, but is at pains to point out that he means something different from the effects of drugs:

In those days kaif wasn’t a gauge of how interesting someone was, and you got to know someone through what he dug [po ego vrubam] […]. We dug music, it was our soul, because whichever music you dug would tell people your personality. And in spite of it all, even if you only liked [Black] Sabbath, [Alice] Cooper and others who are more aggressive, love and music were connected as the same thing. And then the third part was kaif, we really loved it (I don’t mean hallucinogens).

 

A note added after the completion of this passage explains that ‘back then we did not know kukhnar [sic – poppy-straw tea]’,[63] suggesting that the dawn of this knowledge marked a transition of some kind. Meanwhile, Azazello continues his nostalgic reverie with an impressionistic, ecstatic image of hippies, himself among them, blissfully laid waste by the effects of music, kaif and love:

This was an explosion of love, kaif left us spread-eagled in entrance halls and flats, we spilled music out everywhere, even though we were in shackles [v khomutakh]. I repeat that we were together. I loved everyone, I loved music and love, I loved kaif, hair, myself and everyone, the clothes [klouz] of hairy people.

 

In the final part of this text, Azazello turns to the present and to his emotional state as he is writing. In a single long, syntactically overloaded sentence – and here as elsewhere he seems to be spilling out ideas while high – he responds as if in real time to a heady rush of sensations and emotions being experienced in the moment. His embrace with Ofelia is at the centre of a collective physical and spiritual orgy that is the final definition of being a hippie:

We were and we are, I don’t want to talk about the future because it’s really groovy [klevo] for me now, I’m happy that I’m hairy, not like the others (we won’t talk about them), and now I’m listening to the music that we used to listen to before, and if I remember something, that’s just groovy; I just smile a little, because I am happy and joyful, for I was and am among music and kaif, among kissing lips, I’m kissing you, I haven’t got the strength to tell you how this is kaif for me, and not because I’m tripping [torchu], I just recognise happiness and I love all of us hairy ones, we-hippies.

 

 

Sharing music alongside kaif, sex and love and reaching an ecstatic understanding of oneself is one vision offered in these pages. Immediately after them (Az25-1981-25) is another account of music and collective, the story of an occasion that seems rooted in real events, and is more nightmare than idyll, with echoes of both the young Slavorosov’s suspicion towards fellow hippies and Rovner’s voyeuristic sensationalism about Ofelia and her circle. Azazello clearly thought something of his writing here as he included the text in his typescript in the early 1990s, retaining its title, ‘Oglianis’’ [‘Look Back’]. The narrative has a disjointed quality: the reader is probably meant to understand that it was written while Azazello was coming down from the trip he describes, and he says he is recalling a dream, fragments of the previous night’s experiences being played back in his imagination.

 

 

The story opens as night is falling. The narrator, later addressed by name as Azazello, arrives at a flat where others have already gathered and are in a state of intoxication. He encounters a smoke-filled interior filled by people dancing and giving in to their intoxication, with a tape recorder playing loud music. As Azazello enters the room, his absorption of sounds and images is already synaesthetic: ‘muzik was playing, mixing the babbling of a crystal guitar with the rays of sun, and there was also the sky, which smelled of something wonderful’.[64] Weaving his way in amongst the revellers, Azazello observes their behaviour – the inconsequential or ambiguous phrases exchanged, the postures adopted, the sharing of drugs. He takes a drag on the joint someone passes him and swallows some pills he is handed but is otherwise detached from the company around him. The narrative quite skilfully suggests the changes in his perception, as he becomes intensely tuned in at a sensory level. Through his senses we experience the transition from night to morning, all bathed in a suffusion of colour, smell and sound: the livid colours of the sky as the sun sets, the changing light in the room as it bounces off luxuriant hair and billowing smoke. Pink Floyd’s album Animals is playing on the tape recorder, and unnerving sounds fill the space:

the cries from animals and the hollow echo rang through everything.

‘wanna finish this?’ a hand holding a joint appeared from the cloud of smoke. someone killed the music [vyrubil mafon] and rewound the tape, and the piercing screams resumed, along with the echo.[65]

 

In Azazello’s perception the track sounds like human cries, and he also hears a disconcerting echo, no doubt heightened by his chemically altered state. It soundtracks the flow of events as ‘little by little, most peepl passed out to the music’. Eventually Azazello is watching a lone pair of dancers:

only two figures remained standing and dancing, responding with acute perceptiveness to the sounds that coursed through them, as they tried to tame the cloud of smoke. their shadows swirled, casting wine-colored spots with orange outlines that slowly moved up and down. my shadow, dense around the pupils, dissipated in the space between those two, intermittently getting closer and farther.

 

This description of dancing is unusual in Azazello’s writings, and in it we can discern traces of the discourse around hippies at seishena. Music seems to be physically entering and passing through the body as an electric current would pass through a wire, animating the dancers and the smokers. The listeners passing out literally ‘switch off’ [vyrubilis’] (the same verb is used above for stopping the tape before rewinding): they disengage and lose their bodily connection to the music. While engagement with the music is in some ways collective and concerted – they dance, someone clicks stop, rewind and play so that the soundtrack continues – in Azazello’s description the individual experiences the music internally, sensorily and somewhat involuntarily. The feelings and sensations produced on this occasion are not warm or inclusive, but instead unsettle the narrator who, by the end of the text, is disorientated and paranoid.

 

 

Mafon, spoon, pen and self

 

Под Hendrix’а ‘Who Knows’ рисую я храм православный, в ночи Я smoke’аю a bit, а с Hendrix’ом полёт очень плавный.

To Hendrix’s ‘Who Knows’ I am drawing an Orthodox church, in the night I smoke a bit, and with Hendrix The flight is very smooth.   (Az21-1982-1983-1985-87)

 

Azazello evidently felt compelled, in striving to understand and convey the way music acted on his body and mind, by a kind of free association involving hand and pen, lines, words and images. He is always conscious, as in the bad trip ‘Oglianis’’ and the memory of the hedonistic hippie paradise, of parallels with narcotic effects: ‘Rolling Stones in my blood, in my head. Rolling Stones and John Lennon’ (Az13-1977-20). The main reason for this was that listening to music was an activity that he undertook while high. An early drawing offers an archetypal image of the hippie listener, captioned ‘Rigby Eleanor’ – unusually for Azazello, the figure is a woman. This does not seem to be Ofelia, but probably someone younger: a more stylised rendering of hippie girlhood. Long-haired and barefoot, wearing flares and beads that denote her adherence to hippiedom, half kneeling, half squatting, she holds a cigarette to her mouth. The interior around her is sketched out in a few lines, but a few significant objects locate her in some version of Azazello’s real materiality: to her side on the floor lies a cigarette packet, and in front of her a pen, and a notebook open at a page containing lines of writing and an eye of providence symbol. The most important item, though, is the mafon, the reel-to-reel tape recorder that sits on the floor behind her (Az-greenfolder-068). The real world is undergoing some kind of explosion as sounds carry from the speakers. This is the mode of listening most frequently evoked in Azazello’s notebooks: domestic, habitual and largely solitary, if not in the company of Ofelia. In autumn 1982, he drew himself and Ofelia sitting next to each other on a couch, with a speaker prominent behind them and their heads bowed as if listening (Az21-1982-1983-1985-085). Azazello later recalled their companionship while he drew:

real kaif – never mind liking to draw – you’re sitting and drawing, and Ofelia is sitting next to you. I turn around – and just see it in her eyes, that without any drugs she is high [u nee kaif] … She likes it.[66]

 

Boiled down to its essence, though, the ritual was a lone one. Azazello would administer to himself the dose he had available (in the winter, when poppy straw supplies had been exhausted, hashish became his ‘only comfort’ – Az21-1982-1983-1985-57). He would play music and put pen to paper. The effects of opium or hashish and of music were to some extent inseparable, and together they inspired him to write and, especially, draw. Azazello’s understanding of the interconnectedness of these processes came across even when he was thinking back more than three decades; when asked about his motivation for exploring drugs and whether he was seeking to expand his consciousness, he responded:

Well, being high taught me how to draw. And music. No, it’s not exactly about expanding consciousness – it’s knowledge [poznanie], you get to know yourself better. But really it’s a test of character [proverka na vshivost’]: if a person is bad, then he’ll lie, he’ll do bad things, mix in something he shouldn’t….[67]

 

In retrospect, then, Azazello described his belief that entering highs and experiencing music with attendant intensity brought personal development, while also revealing a truer self. The pages in the archive reveal this process as it unfolded at the time. A page created while listening to Patti Smith’s 1978 album Easter (Az-clear sleeve-01; Az-clear sleeve-02) is a particularly extensive example of self-reflection catalysed by listening, reaching the page in the form of a kind of automatic writing. Azazello begins with an elaborate self-portrait in which he is wearing a fantastical plumed helmet. To the left of this image, he carefully inks out lyrics from Smith’s ‘We Shall Live Again’ – ‘We are dying’, ‘We are rising’, ‘We shall live again’. On the right-hand side of the page, he begins writing:

I think about nothing, I sit across from the tape recorder [mafon] and listen to We shall live again, shall is the imperative form of the verb. Music is playing, I sit and think about nothing. A snake of smoke leaves my cigarette. It flies upwards, spreads and dissolves. Nothing is everything, I am in a thoughtful state, and if I am thinking about nothing, that doesn’t mean I am not thinking.

 

Observation of the smoke as it rises and repetition and picking apart of phrases from the record, thinking through the foreignness of the grammar as he tries the words out – all this is thinking and not thinking at the same time. What emerges from this meditation once again – recalling the hippie idyll above – is the question of his selfhood and its resilience to external assault (he refers to criticism he has received from Ofelia):

Gimme something, gimme something to give.

Recently I haven’t been drawing or writing down my thoughts as much. I think about nothing, it is just a cold time, man is like a tree, time will pass and there will be new leaves, a new birth – before spring, much, much earlier.

We shall live again. Kaif gives you the kind of state where you remember everything, all your leaves. Lieve me something, lieve me something to lieve. I find it a little sad to sense myself entirely and I think about nothing, the trace of this lies on everything. […] It’s difficult to say who you are, to give yourself your full name, with a full stop, but I have understood this. I am not thinking about anything, and where are the letters and words in my head from which my name will be formed? I know the beginning – ‘AZAZELLO – …..’, who?

 

The records Azazello kept of his highs in notebook Az21, the earliest to contain a sustained attempt to keep a diary, also have this leitmotif of curiosity about his own personality, sometimes with suggestions of it being a personality in flux. Next to a self-portrait towards the start of the notebook, he muses: ‘Perhaps Azazello will become a person?’ (Az21-1982-1983-1985-019). Scattered over this page and the one facing are clues to the thoughts that spurred the reflection in this instance. Under the enigmatic caption ‘he tore out a sound and flew on’, he creates a small sketch of a long-haired man with a swastika on his forehead (it is hard to escape the inference that this is a drawing of Charles Manson, a photograph of whom was reportedly always pinned to Azazello’s friend Guru’s wall).[68] Below a drawing of a face with a halo of hair, Azazello writes the name ‘Adonaj’ – perhaps a reference to Shelley’s Adonais, as quoted by Mick Jagger in Hyde Park in July 1969, two days after Brian Jones’s death, before he released ‘3500 butterflies to flutter above the audience’.[69] In a different ink, Azazello does quote the Rolling Stones in English – ‘It’s only rock and roll’ – and then addresses his beloved, who loved Jones most of all of the members of the Rolling Stones:[70] ‘There are many different gerls in the world. But I don’t know one groovier [klevee] than Ofellia [sic]. Ofelia I love you’. In their elliptical way, the two pages hint at a narrow margin in between mortality and vitality, or between beauty and chaos, underpinning Azazello’s search to define himself.

 

 

In practice, then, that search entailed getting high, listening, and discovering what his hand would trace onto the page. In this notebook, which poses the questions of who he is and who he might become, Azazello begins to write copiously about this process. These passages are particularly associated with the colder seasons, as a sense of confinement, routine and habit descends: ‘the morning vigils with a glass of brew [varevo] beside the tape recorder begin again’ as he describes it in October or November 1982 (Az21-1982-1983-1985-079). Sometimes Azazello writes about this with the distance of memory:

I was getting up at 6 am, getting stoned [ukurivalsia] and going out into the Night, where the wind hurled itself at me. At 8 I would return home and see the dawn, which was always different. I remember a sunrise in February that was electric blue and light blue, slowly being burned through by the sun that hadn’t yet woken up. It was a sign of Spring. I came back to the flet, smoked and listened to Morrison, quietly playing along on the harmonica while Ofelia slept; but as soon as she stirred, I was quiet. I was glad and happy for that sunrise, that salute to the Spring (Az21-1981-1982-1985-041).

 

More typically, Azazello records the experience in the moment itself, or shortly after it, weaving lyrics into the scene surrounding him. These descriptions come closer to stream-of-consciousness responses to the altered state as it unfolds, such as when he imagines an encounter with someone or something beyond himself:

Rolling Stones, I’ve snuffed out the candle, ‘Paint it Black’, the musik is playing and I hear silence. I want to paint in black, there are no more colours. I am alone now, I was smoking. After the smoke, when I’m all alone – Pleased to meet you only guess my name [Rad videt’ tebia tol’ko otgadai menia] .

 

Here, as elsewhere, the words he hears in the music are made manifest in a psychic encounter: as he continues, ‘these are the most unexpected meetings in the silence of the soul’ (Az21-1982-1983-1985-032).

 

 

In the snow-deadened city in the winter of 1982-1983, Azazello is preoccupied by the slowness with which time is passing and his need to eke out his supply of poppy straw. A note elsewhere in the archive comments on the sense of time in this particular notebook: ‘Again a very strange state – the absence of time [bezvremen’e]. I described this in the red exercise book. I’ve lost my bearings in time’ (Az-large white envelope-107). Interspersed with meticulous documentation of the limited colour palette outside the window and the qualities of the different snowfalls are instances in which Azazello homes in on his private reality that become a kind of reportage of the body and the sonic environment. He details the physical effects of dependency, the release afforded as the drug enters the bloodstream, and, in parallel, the swelling sensation as the music is elevated by his physical state:

With clenched jaw and stomach spasming I send the spoonful inside, I feel ill, my brain is clogged, the burden of days, what’s ahead is a very heavy essence. My body pours with sweat – I am the pacific ocean, and I discover my depths once more. I send another spoonful after the first, a glass of water, quicker than hot tea, I come alive, I turn on the tape recorder without thinking, and Woodoo Chile [sic] sings to me about his birth, and I think about my own latest rebirth (Az21-1982-1983-1985-081).

 

Accounts of listening to Hendrix’s music abound in this notebook around this time. Azazello describes an overwhelming affinity with Hendrix, here experienced as if singing directly to him, prompting him to consider the elemental essence of them both in parallel. On other occasions, time collapses in on itself, bringing Hendrix and Azazello into the same time and space:

here, inside, fourteen years ago (!) Hendrix in one Harlem’s club at Eve Holiday[71] and now I’m with a bag and a big spoon (I couldn’t find a dessert spoon). We are here and now (and probably always), not bad – half a glass everyday, what’s half a glass – it doesn’t seem so much (Az21-1982-1983-1985-084).

 

Azazello so rarely comments on external events that it is remarkable to read this entry begin with a brief line about Brezhnev’s funeral, which had taken place the day before (making this 16 November 1982 – we can catch our bearings in time for a moment). Historical events of the present and calendar time are less significant to him than the duration of the record and the opium’s effects, except when noting moments when time rhymes with itself because he is playing a recording of Hendrix playing and knows it was recorded around the same date. Another entry (Az21-1982-1983-1985-87) – the poem quoted above – continues the mode of condensing time and space: Hendrix playing in the East Village (Azazello is probably listening to the record Live at Fillmore East, on which ‘Who Knows’ is the opening track), Azazello’s memory of a little church somewhere, where he has imagined the sounds of Hendrix’s guitar reverberating against the architecture, and the stretched out present in his apartment, high and flying with Hendrix in another dimension.

 

 

Thresholds and invitations

Azazello’s writings and drawings display an instinctive grasp of effects scholars have identified in psychedelic rock, particularly what Michael Hicks has called its ‘dechronization’, whereby sounds distort the experience of the passage of time.[72] A series of sketches in notebook Az04, which amount to a design for album cover art for Hendrix, include a figure with a cluster of stylised rings for hair (when not drawing his own flowing hair, Azazello often draws something suggestive of an afro). The figure stands on the edge of a ravine, holding a clock that is suspended in what looks like a lifebuoy. Azazello adds a caption ‘Attention. No one move. He will stop time’ (Az04-1977-1978-04). Another figure with a Hendrixesque cloud of hair, which looks almost planetary, stares directly at us and urges in English ‘Are you ready?’ as he inserts a syringe into his arm (Az23-1980-1981-03). As we have just seen, Azazello associated Hendrix’s music with flight, seemingly responding to its ‘sense of vertiginous space, as if one were flying through the air’.[73] These effects contribute to sense of invitation to or pull towards something outside the parameters of the everyday, the possibility of transcendence. Sheila Whiteley writes of Hendrix as positioned in his music as a ‘guide’ to the acid trip, promising ‘experience’ in lyrics and creating sonic textures that imply and invite ‘the drowning of individual consciousness’.[74] Hendrix himself thought in terms of what he called the ‘electric church’; in Paul Gilroy’s account:

Music would now produce its own public world: a social corona that could nourish or host an alternative sensibility, a structure of feeling that could […] promote a sense of different possibilities, providing healing glimpses of an alternative moral, artistic and political order.[75]

 

Azazello appears to have intuited much of this through the music itself. The fact that he had never taken LSD in no way diminishes the lure of the trip: one of the most recurrent images he draws is the hippie on foot standing on a path or road, sometimes facing the viewer and sometimes turned away, but always heading towards, we might imagine, an alternative realm (for example, Az04-1977-1978-14; Az04-1977-1978-15; Az06-1977-04; Az09-1977-05; Az13-1977-14; Az23-1980-1981-19; Az23-1980-1981-24; Az23-1980-1981-33). We also find countless drawings of thresholds – precipices (Az12-1976-1977-21; Az25-1981-07), doors (Az-large white envelope-042), gates into Heaven (Az12-1976-1977-37), stairways leading into the clouds (Az-green folder-137), barriers being kicked apart (the Doors’ song title and chorus ‘Break on through to the other side’ is emblematic here – for example, Az-large white envelope-068; Az07-1979-09). The implied invitation to cross a threshold and enter another space is paralleled by phrases that initiate an introduction or signal a change in identity: two phrases from the opening of Jagger and Richards’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Please allow me to introduce myself’ and ‘only guess my name’, stalk the pages of the notebooks for a while (Az04-1977-1978-04; Az23-1980-1981-31; Az12-1976-1977-35; Az13-1977-08).

 

 

An early visualisation of the invitation to the high is a drawing of Azazello stepping away from the viewer, the soles of his bare feet turned towards us, and with two little faces peeping out from the tunnel of his trouser legs. Wielding a syringe, he looks back in our direction. A caption created from the Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ (plus Hendrix’s ‘Straight Ahead’, a locution that Azazello adopts freely into the vocabulary of his notebooks) implores ‘it’s just shout away / its just a kiss away [sic] / and straight ahead / I’ll show you your shelter’ (Az11-1976-1977-05). A little later, next to a drawing of a hippie with wild hair and an expression of horror, on whose shirt the words ‘The END’ are emblazoned, he exhorts: ‘drag, my friend, on your cigarette [papirosa], if you want to give joy to your heart’ (Az14-1980-04). Around the same time, Azazello became drawn to the line from the chorus of Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ ‘everybody must get stoned’ (it is easy to imagine this reverberating as a slogan around the hippie community), and he writes it out a few times. In one of the notebooks (Az23-1980-1981-21), he draws the phrase in large, carefully elaborate lettering. On the facing page are two partially line-drawn hippie figures, one holding a syringe aloft. Below these, Azazello adds an elaborate image of a long-haired electric guitarist bending his head over his instrument, from which are exuding flames that threaten to engulf him; ahead is a stylised sun. The caption is in English next to the guitarist:

Everybody must

get stoned

who was druged [sic]

down by the sun

I’m playing for

you my

night’s sound

 

The phrase can be parsed as an appeal to another to join an experience constituted by forces exerted in parallel, music and intoxication. The ‘I’ in the utterance is evidently the musician playing the guitar and conjuring fire with his nocturnal music, but he perhaps also stands in for Azazello poised with his syringe. A page on, Azazello returns to the lines from ‘Gimme Shelter’ and adds in the title of another Rolling Stones track, and fragments from Led Zeppelin and the Beatles’ ‘Across the Universe’ to accompany a more confrontational image, given the title ‘Midnight Rambler’ – another stoned, wild-haired hippie walks directly towards the viewer with arms spreading, and the phrases around him read ‘it’s just shoot away’, ‘it’s just kiss away’, ‘Ramble on’ and ‘Nothing’s gonna change my world’. Further on in the same notebook, Azazello writes a poem in English, also addressed to a potential initiate:

Friend, do you want to hear

under new born sun,

to hear the sound of last

closing door

Behind.

But before your eyes

you know, ahead –

the LAND,

you’re right, friend

right, right come on

this is the Land

of THE END

Before you, straight ahead

To the land of Kingdom of the END (Az23-1980-1981-32).

 

The poem develops the notion of hippies’ relationship to the sun alluded to in the slogan next to the flaming guitar. Here he ushers the friend into a land that has obvious echoes of the Doors’ track ‘The End’ (in addition to the nod to the band’s title), and the directionality of the journey is borrowed again from Hendrix.

 

 

One of the drawings Azazello seemed most proud of in his discussion with Irina Gordeeva in 2015 makes visible the inextricable processes of consumption of music and drugs in Azazello’s understanding, and the sense in which their absorption is a creative act (Az13-1977-24). Azazello has drawn a hippie in oblique view, but with face turned directly to the plane of the page. The figure, a man, is bare-chested, with ribs visible and a concave belly above the waistband of tight-fitting then flared jeans. The left arm is thrust forward, and in the right hand a syringe is positioned with its needle on the point of penetrating a vein in the lower part. The eyes stare darkly in challenge to the viewer. The image has a label, ‘Solo’ (in Russian – the word is the same as in English when used as a musical term). Azazello explained this picture: ‘a man stands there in the pose of a violinist, and the picture is called ‘Solo’. He stands like this… And he’s standing beautifully, just as he should’.[76] The effect is one that interleaves the injection of opium and musical performance. A caption lower down on the page compounds this layering of the two realms: ‘Saw the solo [pili soliak], saw away, oh, Friend!’ The plea makes much of a double meaning. The primary meaning of ‘pilit’’ is ‘to saw’, and, as in English, this refers the motion of the bow (and perhaps a sound that is harsh on the ears – and it is worth noting that ‘pilit’’ is also used to refer to playing an electric guitar solo). This is underlaid by the alternative slang meaning of ‘pilit’’, ‘to cut open a vein’, which relates closely to the image (although the hand holds a needle and not a blade). The page anticipates all at once the thrill of virtuosity (is the solo being played or being heard?) and the blissful feeling as the substance enters the bloodstream. Although Azazello says that the figure is standing ‘beautifully’ [krasivo], the undercurrent of self-harm is perhaps intended visually too, coded in the emaciated body and desperate, defiant expression on the face.

 

 

Transcendence

‘Just dig the sounds, it’s all freedom’ – Jimi Hendrix, intro to studio recording of ‘Red House’, 1968[77]

 

Sound itself is a recurring theme in Azazello’s writings, and one he presents in a complex, ambiguous way. He often thinks beyond music, positioning himself in spaces filled with sound, or describing how it feels to listen to silence. When he returned to his notebooks to create collections of poetry in the 1990s, he selected ‘Chelovek-zvuk’ [‘Man-sound’], an early poem that personified sound:

This man is the sound,

a cool sound,

without connotations and theories,

without intentions and predestinations,

a sound that’s pure,

fragile, screeching, choking,

a simple sound—this man’s joy.

Don’t muffle it,

don’t stand in its way,

just let it be (slide 0336).[78]

 

The original is written next to a self-portrait, Azazello with a huge poppy flower flopped over the crown of his head (Az-green folder-117). The idea of sound as a phenomenon that should simply exist materially without complication is echoed in other poems, such as one that opens with the line, ‘Ideology is a disease of the brain’, which was probably composed at a similar time: ‘A sound shouldn’t be given meaning,/ Let the air vibrate – that’s the whole thought’ (Az16-1977-28). Sound becomes liberation in another early poem that makes it into the typescript, which has Azazello shrugging off the fact of his own death and forswearing funeral rites and burial in favour of an airborne eternity: ‘Nor do I want a coffin, either./ four japanese kites will carry me--/ the wind, the humming sound i’ll be’ (slide 0334/ Poems 1, 14/20).[79] The page with the handwritten version provides a visualisation: a drawing of one of the kites, setting loose strings that curl into the letter ‘я’ (the first-person singular) at their ends, which float weightlessly in the atmosphere (Az-16-1977-16). Elsewhere Azazello writes fuzzily of an experience of silence:

A strange viscous silence filled with sounds extends itself towards me, absorbing without consciousness, it winds quickly emerging memories in tender soft threads, it brings quiet in exchange for an atom of me. Everything old disappears; I am lashed by a new-new night. Everything flies away (Az-green folder-069).

 

The silence is paradoxically loud as well as material and ingestive. As it consumes something of Azazello his consciousness diminishes, but this once again feels freeing. Fragments and poems like these strive to express a connection between the physical world and consciousness, and an immanent possibility of transition from consciousness to some different state of being that lies beyond it. As we have seen, Azazello imagined parallels between listening to music and the effects of narcotics absorbed into the bloodstream. All the writing and drawing, to say nothing of hours spent simply transcribing the words of songs (for instance, Az23-1980-1981-43 to Az23-1980-1981-47; Az21-1982-1983-1985-150 to Az21-1982-1983-1985; Az26-1986-1987-1988-017 to Az26-1986-1987-1988-028), testifies to the physicality with which Azazello listened. He notes down his impression of this:

Everything comes at once, and nothing comes alone, like an avalanche it crushes and sweeps away, and there’s no sound of screaming, let alone breathing, everywhere the connection of fate, on this paper something is drawn, and around and inside me is everything that came with it (Az16-1977-36).

 

His engagement with music, like the consumption of drugs, is physical and haptic, a route into the spiritual, as the air vibrates and surfaces and chambers within the body resonate, the rational mind absents itself, and the hand holding the pen moves.

 

 

Immersing ourselves in all these lines that Azazello creates on the page, the traces of his listening, we can construct a picture of this aspect of his existence: he is alone in a room, or with Ofelia, or perhaps with others, his body experiencing kaif or kumar, or neither; he is contemplating his surroundings or staring into space, listening to music, or tuning into silence; he is alert enough to draw or write, but in the liminal space of kaif he is drawn to a nothingness in which consciousness no longer rules. His tendency to draw and write in abstractions reflects hippie sensibility at its most curious and flexible, its highest commitment to the high itself. Amid this, Azazello finds a language for moments of transcendence in words he has heard in the voices of Morrison, Jagger, Hendrix and others in his canon. These become something like incantations in his ritual, made bodily as he writes and rewrites them. In this, his work is comparable with that of Slavorosov – Guru – the theoretician of the hippie movement whose writings found an audience beyond hippie circles in the 1980s, and subsequently made it into print in the 1990s (Azazello seems to have had similar possibilities in mind when sitting at the typewriter in newly post-Soviet Moscow). In his stream-of-consciousness novel Rok-n-roll [Rock’n’Roll] (1982-1985), Slavorosov has his narrator walking in the street with a female companion when they are accosted by a journalist who, in the guise of genuine curiosity about their choice of lifestyle, begins to berate them for existing parasitically within the society they claim to shun. This confrontation sparks a long passage of reflection, circling around the possibility of transcendence:

It's so hard to be somebody, but how much more impossible it is to be nobody, to stay forever in that empty room with the bulging wallpaper, in the lightless blueish strawberry fields in a strange forest. Always outside [vne], and outside the ‘always’ itself [vne samogo “vsegda”]. Like faint, shimmering music coming through the wall, balancing on the edge of hearing and sight, touch and memory. You might, dimming the overhead light – the way you'd throw a cloth over the cage that holds the talkative bird of your brain – listen to Zeppelin II or say to a random brother, suddenly feeling that you are telling the truth – your voice is even fading, like the light growing dim – ‘Heaven is side two of Abbey Road’. But who has enough strength – who is so lacking in haematogenic-vitamin powers – to be able to live in – not listen to – the music. (To be transparent and weightless, to let the music lift you above the scuffed parquet; like a glass balloon, a crystal ship, rocking and caressing... And the Moon moves the tides… she has let you in, accepted you, like a caring midwife, taken you to the other side). Hendrix went into it without a splash, unaware of this accidental death, Janis, and Bonham – we'll meet again – ‘where the music is’.[80]

 

In Rok-n-roll, Slavorosov posits an extreme outsiderdom, of which this passage is emblematic: his narrator cannot even converse with the man wearing a suit who is trying to reason with him. The verbs ‘to become’ and ‘to be’, which pervade the journalist’s speech, are category errors for the narrator: hippies are outside everything – by this he means nothing so simple as being outside society (a position which the journalist is accusing him of failing to achieve), but rather being outside the future and time itself, perhaps outside the very logic of the proposition, beyond the act of being – unless that act is of being no one, self-annihilation. Slavorosov uses the Russian preposition ‘vne’, which means ‘beyond the boundaries of something’ or ‘without something; in addition to something’.[81] Rendered as ‘vnye’, the term is central to Alexei Yurchak’s work, and he glosses it as follows:

the condition of being simultaneously inside and outside of some context – such as, being within a context while remaining oblivious of it, imagining yourself elsewhere, or being inside your own mind. It may also mean being simultaneously part of the system and yet not following certain of its parameters.[82]

 

Slavorosov’s striking claim ‘always outside, outside the “always” itself’ appears more radical – a stripping down to nothing, a fundamental refusal of inclusion. Hippies, if they find a way of quietening the chatter of the brain, can just, really only barely, make themselves capable of sensing or remembering something entirely other. Sensation – hearing, vision, touch – is associated primarily with music, which this thought experiment considers as a space that can be lived in, and also as a haven to be reached after death. Physically ailing and uniquely strong because of this, the hippie is ushered into a state of transcendence that is simultaneously birth and a death, a destination to which Hendrix, Janis Joplin and John Bonham, tragic casualties of rock and roll excess, have led the way. The banal yet empathic phrases hippies might utter to one another about what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin mean are traces in the world of an ineffable potential that the music makes manifest to them.

 

 

Death was a preoccupation for both Slavorosov and Azazello. In Slavorosov’s mind, as evidenced in this passage, death was the ultimate transcendence. Underlying this, of course, was a straightforward disconnect both men and surely others in the Soviet sistema felt, which was temporal as well as geopolitical: they belonged to the generation that discovered hippieism after the dream in the West had irretrievably darkened. Morrison, Hendrix, and other musicians had already died untimely, senseless deaths; the Rolling Stones’ image was tainted by Jones’s death and the violence that had descended at the Altamont Free Concert; even the murders committed by Manson’s followers were interpreted as a grotesque perversion of the values of the culture surrounding rock music in the late 1960s. Awareness of these deaths had already filtered into Soviet hippie culture by the time Azazello interacted with it. Azazello’s generation could even have heard about Morrison’s death on Soviet radio: in early October 1971, Viktor Tatarskii announced it on his music programme Zapishite na vashi magnitofony [Record this on your tape recorders], concluding the episode by playing his audience the Doors’ ‘Love Her Madly’) – Azazello was fifteen, and a listener to the show.[83] Initiation into hippiedom under this shadow seems to have catalysed Slavorosov to make a virtue of ugliness and perversion: his writings frequently evoke a reverence for transgression, violence and death. Azazello too makes numerous references to those who have died and appears at ease with the idea of death as simply another state of transition. The crucial ‘red’ notebook from the early 1980s begins in the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder, to which he refers on its first anniversary in December 1981 (Az21-1982-1983-1986-036). Later, over several pages, he is preoccupied by the deaths of other musicians, reverently copying key fragments of English text. There is what looks like a pastiche of obituaries for Morrison: ‘His sexual machinations onstage ended in arrests and fines. All the cuts on this album were done prior to his death’ (Az21-1982-1983-1985-164).[84] Immediately following is a partial timeline of Hendrix’s life (Az21-1982-1983-1985-166), and then Azazello’s transcription of part of an interview with Hendrix that was published in Melody Maker in September 1970, a few days before his death, in light of which Hendrix’s words about himself, copied here by Azazello, gained new resonance: ‘Something new has to come and Jimi Hendrix will be there’.[85] Opposite these words is more transcribed text, this time the sentimental verse reproduced on the gatefold of the Rolling Stones’ compilation Through the Past Darkly (Big Hits vol. 2), released in September 1969: ‘Brian Jones (1943-1969). When this you see, remember me and bear me in your mind. Let all the world say what they may, speak of me as you find’ (Az21-1982-1983-1985-167). Rock’s martyrs feature prominently throughout Azazello’s writings and drawings, but there are other ways in which he suggests the irretrievable time and space of rock, sketching a monument to the Beatles with the caption ‘Yes, fallen Beatles you [ty] are not a phoenix’ (Az16-1977-36).

 

 

Recorded sound accentuates absence and separation, even when its sonic textures feel, as they did to Azazello, as though they are offering co-presence, companionship, and understanding, or an escape into a different world. The sense of dislocation from the origins of the music he lived by is perhaps what leads Azazello to confront and accept his own death so readily, even while still in his early twenties. In a page captioned ‘I will die today or tomorrow’ and ‘the story about how I died’ he draws himself naked and with intricate patterns on his skin, sitting and holding a pistol to his temple (Az20-1977-07). A gun pointed at the head replaces the syringe entering the vein in so many other images; there is an echo of a drawing showing Azazello with his back to us, sitting on a stool and administering the drug to himself, illustrating the poem ‘Oda’ [Ode]: ‘[…] opium courses through me, babbling,/ i’m pierced with needles head to toe,/ the fever burns, my eyes are shut/ yes, opium indeed is god,/ and i, indeed, am also god’ (Az23-1980-1981-20; slide 0332/ Poems 1, 12/20).[86] The short sketch entitled ‘Moi pokhorony’ [My Funeral] opens ‘one wonderful day I will die and that day will be a very groovy one of these days’ and describes a transcendent death taking place in a mythic desert, with Azazello predicting optimistically that when dead he will still gaze up at the sun (Az13-1977-05). Imagining his own death as if it is another blissed-out state implicitly connects Azazello to figures like Morrison and Hendrix, healing the rupture he feels; in Slavorosov’s words, they can meet ‘in the music’. In this sense, Azazello ‘met Morrison’ in his poem about voices beckoning him into paradise.

 

 

To put this in broader terms, throughout Azazello’s archive we find a response to music that embeds it in his day-to-day existence in an extremely physical way and then brings about a change in his consciousness. He absorbs music into his system, as if he is inhaling it into his lungs or flushing his veins with it. Death is an important correlate because it, too, brings about a change in body and consciousness. By putting pen to paper, Azazello connects himself to the music, just as other hippies do when they dance at seishena or in apartments. In doing so, he establishes his own identity, as a person who can draw and listen attentively. In the period of his opium addiction, his engagement with music is equally habitual and repetitive, with Azazello seemingly seeking to live over and over again the experiences he has had before – this is certainly a ritual determined by a kind of dependency, although this fact does not negate its spiritual significance, but in fact reinforces that meaning in the recurrence. He feels drawn into the music he hears as though it is a space he can enter, a physical environment or a narcotic state, and many of his responses appear to encourage an implied reader or viewer to join him and cross the threshold to experience transcendence, even though he is probably creating the notebooks primarily for himself.

 

***

 

Notebook Az26 records the time when Azazello was incarcerated in psychiatric hospital in the mid-1980s. In this unpromising setting, we encounter again the possibility of creating a hippie escape, because Azazello had access to a tape recorder, and friends willing to bring him music. His account of commandeering space by means of music within a hospital ward is surprising even without thinking too much about the privations and loss of freedom hippies encountered in the psikhushka. Azazello’s description of hearing his beloved Doors played loud as he feels the vibration of the speakers is a reminder that, above all, he took great joy from music, not least as a sensory, creative experience, and one which could effect the impossible in transporting him out of the grimmest of places and to somewhere else entirely:

Diver [Iura Diversant] presented me with two days of music, hooked me up with [podognal] The Soft Parade, this is atas [mind-blowing], through the roof [vyshe kryshi] – to listen to Morrison inside these walls. I sat between the speakers and put it on at maximum volume and – we need a someone or something new, something else that get us throw [sic] (Az26-1986-1987-1988-006).