Hungarian Rock: Chords of Despair : Alternative bands are coming into their own as an exhausted Hungary slouches toward an uncertain future and democracy

The kids were 16 and from the countryside. They came up shyly to Peter Muller after the concert, thrilled to meet the lead singer of Sziami in the flesh. Although they had been in grade school when Muller put together his first band, they knew his songs by heart now, turned on by older siblings and the word of mouth that kept alternative rock flourishing in Hungary before glasnost .

“We’re big fans of yours,” the teen-agers told him solemnly backstage. “We listen to your songs and we cut our veins.”

Muller recounts this story with dismay. He was so appalled, in fact, that he wrote an anti-suicide song that he now sings in concert. At 39, he is both old enough to have fathered these kids and mature enough to feel paternal responsibility for this new, lost generation.

“A lot of young people here today are fans of dark-wave music,” he says, sitting in his two-room flat in a high-rise building in Budapest. “I can understand that but I don’t like suicide, it’s a bad solution.”

Wait a minute. Wasn’t freedom supposed to usher in hope and the possibility of a better life in newly liberated Eastern Europe?

The answer in Hungary is a qualified “maybe.” In Czechoslovakia, the people are still drunk with euphoria from last November’s “Velvet Revolution.” But Hungary, which led the economic and political reform charge just last year, has a national hangover of unemployment, spiraling prices and a plunging standard of living.

“Right now, people don’t have enough money to eat, let alone to buy books, tapes and records,” Muller says.

His views are echoed by social scientists throughout Hungary.

“Especially for young people, the moral and social decay is very deep,” says Dr. Andras Szilagyi, who heads up the psychiatric department at Budapest’s Tetenyi Hospital. “Everyone’s tired, no one smiles, there is a widespread sense of despair. Everyone is waiting for a leader who has a flag and says, ‘Come, follow me.’ ”

Officially sanctioned soft-rock bands like Neoton Family and Dolly Roll still sell hundreds of thousands of records each year recycling stale musical cliches. But it is alternative bands like Sziami that keep the rock ‘n’ roll faith alive. They were among a handful of bands that dared play hard-edged music with lyrics critical of the government during the years of oppression.

Now, they are coming into their own. Led by poets, their songs mix lyrics of political alienation with the swirling, dense, Magyar rhythms and the influences of the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, David Bowie and Talking Heads.

And today, as Hungary slouches toward democracy, its alternative rock bands are sending up an urgent warning message tinged with only fragile hope.

“If you could have foreseen the future while still in the womb, you would have strangled yourself with an umbilical cord,” goes the first line of Muller’s anti-suicide song “If.” “But you’re not stupid, so live .”

We are no one’s children

Just happened to be born here

And still are alive.”

--Europa Kiado

The scene is a Budapest nightclub called Fekete Lyuk (Black Hole). The crowd is youthful, epitomized by the 15-year-old girl with the androgynously cropped hair who hits desultorily on a cigarette and turns black-smudged, cynical eyes on the alcohol-fueled merrymaking. The occasion is a Sziami concert, with Jeno Menyhart, lead singer and songwriter for the band Europa Kiado, sitting in on guitar.

Back in 1981, Muller and Menyhart were Hungary’s dynamic underground duo, fronting an influential band called URH, which took its name from the shortwave radio band used by police. In 1981, Britain’s New Musical Express called them Central Europe’s top rock band. But Muller went on to form Sziami and Menyhart formed Europa Kiado, which means Europe Publishing House as well as Europe for Rent--a reference to how the United States and the Soviet Union had carved up the continent.

This spring, after a decade of playing, an independent label has finally released Muller’s first tape.

Menyhart has been more lucky: after blasting his music as nihilistic and anti-social in the early 1980s, the state record company, Hungaroton, changed its tune and came knocking in 1985. The result was two albums, which he says were poorly promoted and sold only modestly. Now, in hopes of capitalizing on the nostalgia for underground music sweeping Hungary, a newly formed independent record label is releasing a Menyhart greatest-hits package.

Even Balaton, a spare, existential band with elemental lyrics and a syncopated beat that became a legend without ever releasing records, is planning to reunite and tour.

“Underground music and culture is starting to get very popular again in Hungary,” says 33-year-old Mihaly Vig, who co-founded Balaton.

Paving the way for many of these bands are a handful of fledgling independent record firms, often with personal or musical ties to the bands, which sell records from sidewalk stands.

“We produce music that you can’t buy from Hungaroton,” says Gabor Panczel, the brash, 26-year-old co-founder of a small firm called WeAst. “We are a possibility for musicians to publish their work. Before the changes, there was no possibility for them.”

Panczel says he gets up to 10 homemade cassettes a week from bands hoping for a contract. But so far, WeAst has released only several cassettes. Records are more daunting--due to the difficulties in obtaining the money and permission to use one of Hungary’s two record-pressing factories, Panczel says. Needless to say, there are no CD factories.

On top of that, Hungary’s independent record entrepreneurs are plagued by the same problems as Communist factory bosses: Quality control is terrible, production costs are high and things never work they way they should. One WeAst cassette had to be junked and rereleased because the factory forgot to put music on the B side the first time around.

But with an eye toward profits, Panczel intends to persevere.

“There are a lot of private record shops in Hungary now and we have connections in all of them,” he boasts.

It’s the grave of the unknown soldier where you’re sitting

It’s so familiar still depressing how it’s stinking.

--URH/Control

Unlike Britain, where punk rock was created and embraced by working-class kids, East Bloc punk started as an intellectual movement and only slowly spread to the proletariat. In Hungary, the first punk shows were held in the early ‘80s at college clubs and staged by engineers and literature majors--the children of the nomenklatura and the intelligentsia who brought back the latest Western music, books and magazines from trips abroad.

The movement developed its own slang and culture and bands traded songs and personnel like interlocking pieces of some great puzzle. Muller even performed a punk version of the Communist anthem, “The Internationale”--sort of an Eastern European equivalent of the Sex Pistols, singing “God Save the Queen” in England.

“Rock music was a place for people like us who didn’t have a place anywhere else,” says Menyhart, who recalls that the first URH show took place at an outpatient psychiatric clinic, with junkies and paranoid schizophrenics, as well as fans, looking on. “It was the only language for us to communicate.”

Most of the band names mocked the state. There was Committee (after the Communist Party Central Committee); Trabant, named for the two-stroke East German car made of fiberglass that choked the Budapest air with pollution; Balaton, after Lake Balaton, the middle-class resort area much lusted after by Hungarians.

“Ultimately, (Hungarian) rock and roll was proposed as an alternative culture with ideologies of its own,” wrote Anna Szemere, in the book “World Music, Politics and Social Change.”

The lyrics were dark too: “We’ll be killed, sweetheart/war and peace are of equal danger to us,” Europa Kiado intoned, over the drone of whirring machines while the sounds of sirens, bells and machine guns ricocheted off in the distance.

Fast forward 10 years. Today, as Sziami takes the stage, excitement ripples like quicksilver through the crowd and sullen expressions fall away suddenly as fans surge forward, gulping from nearly empty bottles.

In today’s global village, Hungary’s rebellious rockers look much the same as those in Belfast, Belgrade and Boston. The girls are wraithlike, clad in black, with lots of bracelets, scarves and vibrantly dyed hair. The boys have deep circles under their eyes and shaved temples to set off their angular cheekbones. But unlike their counterparts in the malls of the United States, these kids aren’t playing at desolation. Their lives are eaten away by dead-end jobs, overcrowded flats and Budapest’s bad air.

They soon turn restless. Muller is trying out a new music show based on “international language” and he launches into a dark, punk rendition of “Jesus Christ Superstar” that segues suddenly into free-form improvisation. The crowd boos and bellows out for Jeno, who finally takes the stage after midnight. His resonant voice belies his slender build and his poems, recited over the dark, swirling rhythms of a syncopated beat, strike a responsive chord. By now, the bar has long since stopped serving salami sandwiches and kids are passed out on the cold concrete floor of the auditorium. The ragged innocence mingled with wholesale public drunkenness creates a numbing despair that lingers long after the concert is over.

While inflation forces many Hungarians to work up to 16 hours a day just to maintain their standard of living, the growing market economy has also created a new wealthy class of Magyar entrepreneurs who flaunt their forints in trendy nightclubs, restaurants and luxury homes.

This scene is exemplified at Petofi Csarnok, a sprawling discotheque located in the center of Budapest’s City Park. Here, well-heeled teens sway to American rock ‘n’ roll and watch videos of surfers hanging 10 and scantily clad women whacking each other with pillows.

This is the audience that Western merchandisers are gunning for, the kids with the money to buy Madonna tapes and Guns N’ Roses T-shirts and frequent the Adidas and Levis boutiques of Budapest.

The growing wealthy class in Hungary also hangs out at places like the Rock Cafe, a trendy restaurant and club decorated with the icons of American ‘50s culture.

The glam heavy metal spawned in the ‘70s and resurrected in the ‘90s is also popular here. “Super,” enthuses 32-year-old Zoltan Erseg, after viewing a video of Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun.”

With an atmosphere somewhere in between Fekete Lyuk and Petofi Csarnok is the Fiatal Muveszek Klubja (The Young Artists Club) located inside an 1890s villa on People’s Republic Avenue. Like many homes built during the Austro-Hungarian empire, it reeks of Belle Epoque: marble staircases that curve up three floors; terra cotta statues; plaster wall moldings decorated with saucy nymphs and an elegant salon with wood panelled walls. The Communists seized the villa in 1948 and turned it into a Communist Youth Club but it remained a bastion of the alternative arts for those who gathered there to drink and put on provocative poetry readings, plays and concerts.

“We didn’t really understand what they did in New York at Andy Warhol’s Factory, but they were very fashionable here,” says Vig, whose guitar licks pay homage to the Velvet Underground.

Today, the Young Artists Club boasts an art gallery, two stages, a disco and a restaurant that dishes up Hungarian nouvelle cuisine-- a true oxymoron. Some say that clubs like A Is Forbidden and Blue Box have replaced the Young Artists Club on the cutting edge of cool, but it remains the grand dowager of clubs, and the most evocative watering hole in Budapest today.

When the Young Artists Club closes at 2, those who remain drift to Feszek, which means “The Nest.” More colloquially, Feszek is known as “The Old Artists Club” and patrons bring their own music to pop into Feszek’s tape deck. One night it is American oldies, courtesy of an avant-garde clothing designer named Tamas Kiraly.

“Sheh-eh-rie,” Kiraly sings at 4 a.m., twirling around the dance floor in blissful abandon, his long, black, Medusa-like tresses flapping behind him. “Sherie bay-bee.”

Young people in Hungary find most Americans remarkably uninformed about life outside their borders. To illustrate their theory, they offer this anecdote:

It seems that a few years back, Hungary was visited by a popular American rock star who walked on stage to greet a worshipful, cheering crowd.

“Hel-lo Bucharest,” he howled at the 5,000 Hungarians who had spent a week’s pay for these concert tickets.

The bewildered rock star was booed off the stage. “America is so big and powerful, it’s not necessary for you to know what’s going on in the rest of the world,” a 25-year-old factory worker says earnestly. “We can’t afford to be ignorant the way you Americans can.”

Many young adults couldn’t disagree more with President Bush, who jetted into Budapest for 48 hours last summer and saw “people in motion . . . alive with optimism.”

Hungarians joke that Bush must not have ventured past the fancy boutiques of Vaci Street--Hungary’s Rodeo Drive--or the Danube quay lined with modern, Western hotels. He couldn’t have seen the gray-faced factory workers or cinder-block suburbs or subway stations where wrinkled babushkas toddle in from the countryside to sell wilted wildflowers to keep from begging.

“The system just killed the people,” Muller says. “I know some gifted people who should have stayed on stage. But . . . they’ve died, or been killed by the system, or become alcoholics or fled abroad. The same . . . artificially created pop groups I remember from my childhood are still making records today.”

But other musicians find ways to cope. Muller--who graduated from film school--makes TV commercials. Vig is an art director and writes screenplays. Members of Europa Kiado teach English and work as computer graphics artists.

And one group of former alternative musicians has found God, playing punk for the Lord in a popular Christian band called Amen that draws its licks from Johnny Rotten and its spiritual inspiration from Billy Graham.

New, noteworthy groups are evolving all the time. Like the art band Orchestra Luna, whose lead singer formerly sang backup vocals for Europa Kiado and whose keyboard player still does double duty with the band. All classically trained, the members of Orchestra Luna mix avant-garde classical music with Wagnerian arias to create a surreally alluring sound.

Soon, many of these band hope to release records. But how many fans will be able to buy them? For now, they drink bottles of cheap beer in open air cafes and smoke endless Munkas cigarettes, the raspy, unfiltered Hungarian brand with the factory cog logo emblazoned in red, green and blue.

And the future?

“One or two years ago, there were many things you could say in concerts that were still taboo on TV and that made for interesting live shows,” says Balazs Nagy Lantos, a 23-year-old musician who wears his dark brown hair in a long ponytail. “Nothing is forbidden anymore.”