Book Recolored memories (Hobby Press), journalist Vladimir Stakić, is a selection of interviews the author conducted with Yugoslav rockers during the eighties and nineties. The largest number of interviews were made for the formerly popular magazines "Rock" and "X-Zabava". We are talking about the biggest names of local rock and roll at the time: from Bora Đorđević, Djoni Štulić, Jure Stublić and Bajaga, to Canet, Gillet, Bebi Dol and KUD Idijot, as well as bands that formed a little later, such as "Goblin", "Bjesov" and many others. The book is a return to a long-gone and different time, through a lot of details, reminiscences and rediscoveries... A real treat and treasure for lovers of Yugoslav rock and roll, pop culture, and life in that country. After the eighties came something completely different. "A combination of circumstances wanted the first period in which I conducted interviews with authors and performers to coincide more or less with the last five-six years of the existence of the SFRY, and the second with the last five-six years of Slobodan Milošević's rule - explains Vladimir Stakić in an interview for "Vreme".
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"WEATHER" Can rock and roll from those two periods be somehow compared?
VLADIMIR STAKIC: In the first, until the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, despite various polarizations on all sides, it was still easier to deal with rock music and there were many more people who could make a living from it. There was never much dispute about the fact that until the beginning of the nineties there were many good records and concerts, but I think that it is now better than at that time to see that in the rock scene of Serbia during the nineties something good was created, despite the multiple limiting conditions. Most of the young people in the time of international sanctions and war conflicts in the environment did not have God knows what chance to find a decent job, nor material possibilities to have a crazy time. That surplus of time and lack of money directed many to the creative side, which led to the appearance of various interesting authors and performers, some of whom are still active today. On the other hand, at that time, in our country, rather than elsewhere in the Western world, for many people, rock stopped being a (potentially) basic occupation and became a kind of supplementary activity or even a hobby from which you can eventually earn a few dinars, but not enough to make a modest living from it alone.
It is interesting that you published integral conversations, you have not corrected your errors or incorrect information. Why was it important to you that everything be recorded exactly as it was spoken??
Because I have no doubt that the basic role of journalism is the search for the truth and its communication. Discoloration due to the passage of time, it is practically inevitable, but in order to present the time affected by the content as accurately as possible, it was simply necessary to see how and in what mistakes were made. Overpainting is not the same as smearing, no matter how much pointing out the omissions does not serve the author's vanity. Along with several material errors that exist in the original interviews, explanatory footnotes have been added, in order to prevent the possibility that the reader may accept an inaccuracy as a fact, and remember it as such and continue to interpret it. Everything that from today's perspective looks like a wrong assessment, either mine or my interlocutors, is, of course, transmitted in the book without any change.
There are many interesting details that people today may not remember. For example, You still have Bora Đorđević in 1988. openly said that he was for Slobodan Milosevic. But then there were many here.
There were many, but not many were in a situation to lose something with their public support. That is one of the things that I have always remembered, because at that time rock musicians who had pretensions to perform on the territory of the whole of Yugoslavia still took care not to publicly opt for any policy that could "cut off" a part of the market. Bora was one of the first to come out differently, and I remember very well that I immediately thought that there was a great chance that this would happen to "Fish Soup" because of that statement he gave me in the interview for "Rock". Tens of thousands of copies of that paper were sold throughout the SFRY, but it never occurred to me to omit the statement. It was simply my job to convey the interlocutor's point of view, not to prevent potential harm to him.
Rock journalism was very important in the eighties: Petar Janjatović, Pera Lukovic, Dragan Kremer, Dušan Vesić, Peca Popović, Drazen Vrdoljak, Darko Glavan...
First of all, without any false modesty, all the people you listed were and remain the first league of Yugoslav rock journalism, and I learned from them and was quite satisfied that my name appeared in the same papers where they worked. Top rock journalists were really highly respected because they wrote excellently and knew even better what they were writing about, and perhaps most of all because what they were doing was vital to them and their readers. None of that stands anymore and I don't get the impression that there's any way we can go back to it because the time of exceptionalism in the media is over. Quick writers of spectacular headlines and template texts are now wanted.
Which conversation was the hardest for you??
The most difficult, without a doubt, was the interview with Johnny Štulić, conducted at the beginning of 1989. There is his statement, quoted thousands of times, that for the previous 40 years we listened to the howling of wolves, and that for the next 40 we will listen to the bleating of sheep. At the same time, it was difficult not because he was in any way an unpleasant or problematic interlocutor, but quite the opposite - because he personally tried to explain all his positions as precisely as possible. So he was able to complicate the answers, and I tried to understand as well as possible what he wanted to say. All the time I listened as carefully as possible and tried to process what I heard in my head and at the same time to respond in a timely manner with sub-questions and subsequent questions. It's the only interview after which I literally had a headache from the effort.
In an interview with Dino Merlin, in the late eighties, you entered into an open discussion that lasted throughout the conversation. Was that normal back then or was it just an exception?
I think it is most accurate to say that it was not abnormal then. Ever since the end of the seventies, there have been sporadic "hard talk" interviews with rockers, and even more highly critically oriented reviews of records and concerts, sometimes argumentative and sometimes furiously spitting, without any serious explanation. Far from the fact that all musicians accepted it "sportingly". But there were also those who understood that even negative publicity can be useful, so in the mid-eighties Milić Vukašinović famously said: "Write what you want, just put a picture... and if it can be in color!". Apart from the aforementioned interview with Dino Dervišhalidović, I don't think I did any that was completely in the spirit of confrontation, but I didn't run away from questions that I knew the interlocutor would not be comfortable with. However, no one ever got angry because of that, I guess because it was quite clear that I wasn't asking anything with bad intentions.
All the greatest musicians from the eighties and nineties are there except for two: Dušan Kojić Koja and Goran Bregović. You didn't hook up with them, or your job just didn't bring you to them?
I'm sorry I didn't interview Koja, because I'm sure it would have been very interesting, but it just so happened that I didn't get to do it in any of the newsrooms I worked for. There were always a lot of people interested, and I told myself that there would be an opportunity next time. The idea of me talking to Bregović for the newspaper never really appealed to her, because he generally gave excellent interviews, but mostly saying what he had decided in advance to say. He sidestepped all the questions that didn't suit him, which I wasn't interested in. Then, in addition to that, sometime in the late eighties, reacting to some of his statements on television in which he slandered his fellow rockers and praised the narodniks, I wrote a text in which I scolded him quite harshly. After that, a well-informed person told me through a mutual acquaintance that Bregović was allegedly very affected by this. I then assumed that, since he is known to have a bad memory, now he also has a reason why he would not be very happy to talk to me, even if I wanted to, so I didn't think about it at all. But the first sentence of this question of yours shows very well how subjective criteria are about who is (was) important in the rock scene. The subtitle of the book is "Interviews I did" because in my initial idea I saw it as the first in a trilogy, the next part of which would contain interviews with at least 30 people I didn't talk to in the eighties and nineties, and I think I had to because they left an absolutely indelible mark on the rock scene of the former Yugoslavia.
What do you think of today's rock and roll scene in Serbia and the region??
Rock and roll is now seen in the media in the region more as a museum exhibit than as a living thing that interests many people. That's why at even bigger festivals, the majority of performers are from the last millennium or the beginning of this one. And the list of my "new" favorites is like this - almost all of them that I didn't discover by googling "new bands" but I "spontaneously" heard them, have been around for a decade and a half to three - "Popečitelji", "Repetitor", "Goribor", "Jarboli", "Viselj", "Consecration", "Porto Morto", "Spurijus"... If this continues, some of the younger performers will perhaps catch up with people from my generation in ten years. Too late for them and for us.
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