(date roughly inaccurate, give or take a few weeks)
This is about the time I started buying LPs again, after some break. This usually meant less photography, as both came from the same budget, and I didn't have my usual customers to develop their negatives and do the prints, so that income had dwindled. The album of the months was the first one by Buldožer, and the 2nd one to come out in shape of a newspaper for a sleeve. No extension, the pages were square, but the idea was there just as it was in "Thick as a brick". This was, however, a very different album, more to the side of Frank Zappa.
[inserting these two paragraphs in february 2022, when Marko Brecelj died]
I was actually close without knowing it. Third semester, I had no time to listen to the radio, except maybe on saturday mornings, because we always went somewhere in the evening, and on workdays, when the latter two [Maletić, Simurdić] and „through this programme, the strangling and bothering by Jovan V. Nikolić“ ran „randevu s muzikom“ (rendez-vous with music) [18:20 - 19:00] it wasn't even worth trying, because there was a double door, strewn over by a rug, between us and the host, and he was almost deaf and tried to watch TV... So then, practically at random, in the Musical magazine in dunAvska*, I spotted this album sleeve done as a newspaper, gathered that someone's trying to repeat the TAAB gimmick, so I bought it on sleeve alone... to compare the graphical solutions, I'd say. And then it took me from tuesday to friday to take it home and give it a spin. And then almost went too late to town...
And only later I got to meet the team, at least Maletić and the two guys from the hungarian redakcija**, Beker & Muči [Becker, Mucsi], only next spring, in 1976, because I moved and the „Borsalino“, were they drank, was the nearest tavern. That's where I heard why Buldožer doesn't play in Subotica - there was a bet between one of the band and Dečo Žgur, that the audience would or wouldn't be more than 2000 [or some thousands, don't remember the exact number], and the prize was ass licking. And that the party, where they delayed Žgur from throwing the iron [i.e. puking] until they installed all the microphones around the crapper*** was among the crazier ones.
She had then heard someone on the radio say that "Zappa was writing protest songs in the beginning, but then he got rich and switched to lyrical". Which got a good laugh out of anyone who knew anything about prog rock at the time, so it got repeated. I think she used it to show her contempt for that kind of expertise. I think it happened once when we had two or three guys from Radio Novi at the table, in Borsalino, when she pulled that one.
Beštara taught us to play preferans. It's a card game, usually played with hungarian deck (same as the standard 32, which is the 52 without 2,3,4,5 and 6, but with different imagery), three players, auction, complicated scoring, with mutual charges and countercharges, but the sum total of everyone's score always evens out, and the scoring is negative, i.e. you want to go low. The game ends when the sum of the three player's main scores is below zero, then the sidescores are added and subtracted and the total is deduced. There are counterchallenges ("kontra"), whereby the challenger claims the guy who auctioned the game will fall, and that scores double. If the counter fails (i.e. the auctioner still wins), then the challenger scores his score up, thus making the game longer - now it takes two wins (though not all the auctioning scores the same) to neutralise this, and the game becomes longer. There are multiple levels of countering - kontra, rekontra, surkontra, norkontra, bum tralala and brick-on-the-head (because multiplying the score by 64 either ends the game immediately, or makes it last for hours).
We played that a lot. Perhaps not too many games, but many many hours. That's when I learned to hold tight and pee a lot, later.
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* the difference between the accent of Novi and the rest is exactly in such places: everyone else says dUnavska ulica, short falling accent, they say dunAvska, short rising.
** redakcija is newsroom, i.e. the staff and their editorial prerogatives, however it doesn't stop in newspapers - any collective producing regular written-audio-video material has one, or at least one per programme section, e.g. „redakcija kulturno-umetničkog programa“ is in charge of culture-art programme. It's headed by the glodur, i.e. glavni i odgovorni urednik - chief and responsible editor. Glodur is part abbreviation part mockery, as glodar means rodent.
*** the recording of the puke is in the finale of one song on that album, „bluz gnjus“ - the yecch blues.
9-VIII-2011 - 31-X-2025