Omega’s Staying Power : Rock Group Keeps Beat in Hungary

With about 2,000 slightly sunburned vacationers from Budapest looking on, Janos Kobor, lead singer of Omega, pranced onto the stage through a cloud of artificial smoke that swirled and billowed in the red and purple lights. He snapped the microphone cord, shook his mane of blond hair and growled the signature lines from the latest Omega album.

“The gates of darkness seldom open,” he hissed, “on the dark side of the earth.”

Despite Kobor’s diabolic rasp and the sulfuric lighting effects, it seemed that much of the audience, as though jaded by too many expressions of vaguely focused gloom, was waiting for that point in the evening when the older, friendlier, familiar Omega, the Omega of the ‘60s and ‘70s, would re-emerge, and take them back from where they had come, more or less together.

Symbolized Protest

For 20 years, this five-member band--guitar, bass, keyboard, drums and singer--has been at or near the top of the pop music scene in Hungary and in much of Eastern Europe. They have played before thousands of fans in every country of the Soviet Bloc, at a time when rock music symbolized protest, much as it did in the West, and when it was far more potent as a political statement. In this geographical setting, where Soviet demonology once placed rock music near the top of its list of decadent Western influences, it was an activity much more fraught with risk and daring.

They have made 13 albums and sold millions of records in Europe, mainly in the East. They have traveled as far west as England, where they were once billed as “Red Star,” a ray of light from “behind the Iron Curtain,” and in West Germany, where their only experience of American audiences came from nightclubs full of American soldiers.

To their regret, they have never managed to make the difficult commercial transition to the West. Eleven years ago, an album released in America, “Sky Rover,” sold about 60,000 copies and actually made it into the top 20 in St. Louis for about two weeks. That period, the middle to late ‘70s, seemed like Omega’s big chance, but fleeting fame in St. Louis was as far as it went.

East European Fortune

What Omega’s members have had in place of a Western fortune amounts to a kind of East European fortune.

They live comfortably, though not lavishly--certainly not by the pop-star standards of the West.

They have houses and cars that are no grander than those of solidly middle-class Americans. The band’s amiable lead guitarist, Gyorgy Molnar, drives a 3-year-old Volvo and shares half of a large old house with his mother, girlfriend and daughter.

They are recognized, at least two or three of them, when they walk down the streets.

In public, they are careful to be on their best behavior. This seems to come without great effort, for all of them are easy-going, modest and accommodating to well-wishers and autograph-seekers.

They are also, by the description of knowledgeable figures in the pop music world of Hungary, thoroughgoing professionals and canny businessmen.

Anniversary Concerts

Their pictures are currently plastered all over Budapest on a poster advertising a pair of 25th anniversary concerts to be held this weekend at a city sports stadium.

The concerts may constitute a kind of unacknowledged valedictory for Omega, for their performances have grown increasingly rare over the last years. They have played only five concerts so far in 1987, compared to 200 dates a year through most of the 1970s.

The members of the band seem to sense, without directly saying so, that their greatest days are past, that pop music has evolved beyond their style, and the time has come to yield the stage to another generation.

Kobor and the keyboard player, Laszlo Benko, who started the band in their school days, are now 44. Molnar, 38, is the youngest. As Kobor says, it has been a long time since he was a young man sprinting through the streets of Budapest, “outrunning the cops who wanted to cut my hair.”

Those days, in the ‘60s, were a time of deep political caution in Hungary, where memories of the 1956 uprising and its defeat by the Soviet army were much fresher. At the time of the Prague Spring of 1968, the liberalizing movement in Czechoslovakia--that was also squashed by Soviet tanks--Omega had found its audience at home, begun to push across the national borders and entertained the larger dreams of stardom.

‘It Was Fun’

It was not easy, Molnar recalled, “but it was fun.”

“No one would record us in those days,” he continued. “We couldn’t get a studio. The studio managers said they didn’t have the equipment to record us, so our first albums were live performances (that) we recorded ourselves.

“It was a strange time. They (the authorities) were afraid of everything rock ‘n’ roll came from. Mostly, in the press, they didn’t refer to rock ‘n’ roll. They would call it ‘jazz-rock’ or ‘jazz.’ ‘Jazz’ was the preferred term--anything but ‘rock ‘n’ roll’.”

Early on, the group decided to remove itself, as much as it could in the context of rock music, from politics. One of their earlier songs, “Death Flowers,” was barred from Hungarian radio because the lyrics were deemed “too morbid.”

As their experience grew, they learned the high value of ambiguity, of the lyric that could be heard one way and explained another. In a sense, they also learned to count their blessings, for at least their music was being made in a country where it could be heard on the national radio. Ambiguity, as many another East European artist has learned, was preferable to silence.

‘A Bit Melancholic’

“Our music is a little bit melancholic,” said Kobor, who has a hand in most of the lyrics, and of course sings them all. “No, it is not politics. I don’t care about politics, because you can’t change anything anyway. In Hungary, there is no strong censor, but they are, you know, careful. When we made our last album, the record company asked us about the title. They said, ‘this “Dark Side of the Earth,” does it refer to Hungary, or does it mean the socialist world?’ And then after we said no, then it’s all right, no problem.”

Though it was once a pioneer of popular music in Hungary, with a style and image that was often compared to the Rolling Stones, Omega is now almost Establishment. Much of the money the group has earned has been plowed back into music-related enterprises. Kobor has outfitted a professional recording studio in his house. A vast array of sound and lighting equipment, along with the skilled technicians required to run it, is rented out as a business, as are the trucks used to haul it.

In addition, Omega has also sponsored and produced the records of newer groups on the Hungarian music scene, including two called “First Floor” and “Napoleon Blvd.” Both are now riding high with Hungarian youth, in effect taking over the position that members of Omega once held themselves.

Indeed, it is the studio, and the constantly advancing technology of the music business, with its computers and synthesizers, that now fascinates Kobor. He stood at the rear of the outdoor theater in Balatonlelle last week, an hour before the concert, looking over an assortment of lighting and sound controls whose complexity would do justice to the command center of an atomic submarine. He seemed perfectly at home.

‘I Cannot Read Music’

“It used to be the performing I liked the most,” he said. “Now, it’s the writing, the work in the studio. I like computers. I cannot read music, but now I can compose it, using computers, and now I think it is this part I like the most.”

But performing still brings its excitements. For Molnar, it is still the best part, the part he figures he will always remember.

“I like it,” he said, “when they hear old songs and people in the audience light matches and cigarette lighters and hold them up. That’s nice.”

By the time darkness fell, the 2,000 seats for the Omega concert had nearly all been filled. There were, as a disk jockey in Budapest had predicted, teen-agers in the audience accompanied by parents who had gone to their first Omega concert before those children were born.

Backstage, the band members changed out of an assortment of sweat pants and T-shirts to performing clothes, all basically black except for Kobor’s gray knit get-up. Nervously, he twisted the ends of his hair around his finger and looked over the group, his family for the last 25 years. Drummer Ferenc Debreczeni put on his boxer’s shoes and sat with his drumsticks, beating out a complex pattern on the seat of an empty chair. Tamas Mihaly, the bassist, the only classically trained musician in the band, zipped up a heavy, sinister-looking black leather jacket.

Cracking His Knuckles

Benko, the keyboard player, stood in the doorway, cracking his knuckles. A gold cross dangled from one pierced ear.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s go.”

It was a fine concert. Kobor pranced about the stage with his usual androgynous energy. Debreczeni gave a trial run to his computerized drum solo. They played straight through, a set of two hours and 15 minutes.

Toward the end, they did the old songs, and the people in the crowd lit their matches and held up their cigarette lighters. Their encore was “Birds in Her Hair,” their biggest hit in Hungary, a song that goes back to 1971. It got the audience on its feet, swaying and singing, an anthem of the old times, now cutting across two generations. It left everyone feeling good.

Kobor drove himself 80 miles back to Budapest that night. He drove a friend’s Russian-built Lada. It was smooth and fast, and the highway was almost empty. It seemed a good time for reflection.

“They love that song, ‘Birds in Her Hair.’ Even in other countries, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, they know the words to it. For me, it’s also the best from us. Our slow songs were always the best songs. We were never really a band like the Rolling Stones, even though people compared us.”

Polish Audiences Best

He recalled playing in the other countries of Eastern Europe. Polish audiences, he said, were probably the warmest. It had been fun playing in Poland, but they have not been back since “the troubles”--the time of Solidarity. Prague, in the mid-’70s, was also a good city to play. In East Germany, there were always lots of police, he said, but the audiences were good. The best, of course, was Hungary, because that was home.

“We played many places,” he said. “The only place we missed was the United States, and by now, I think we’ve missed it. We are older now, and I think it is to hard to make the cross. Really no one has made the cross, from East to West.”