![]() He would sing for workers at a nearby construction site and they would give him watermelon. Mirzoyan, now 39, says he started learning Vysotsky songs when he was five and growing up in Zaporizhia. “When time passes, you can find a third meaning.” Vysotsky is often called a prophet,” he says. “Usually there are two meanings in his songs. Mirzoyan, who performing Vysotsky’s songs, says the singer was far more than just a painter of reality. Songs like “He Did not Return From the Battlefield,” conjured up the legacy of war, something Vysotsky understood from his father. At a time when the USSR was celebrating Yuriy Gagarin’s flight and the achievements of the space program, Vysotsky’s voice was something else: gritty and darkly real. His lyrics speak with the voices of outlaws and thieves, of soldiers like his father and of the working people of Moscow. After the war, he lived for a time in Soviet-occupied East Germany with his father - Semyon Volfovich Vysotsky, who was a colonel in the Red Army. He spent his first years in a cramped communal flat in Moscow, before his parents divorced. But what rings through his music is hardship. Vysotsky achieved fame in his lifetime - Mozgovoi says he was the first man to own an S-class Mercedes in Moscow. Others say they’re universal - lyrics for the whole world, as well as Russian-speakers.įor many, though, Vysotsky’s songs are about their own lives. Some insist that his lyrics are impossible to translate. It’s hard for these concertgoers to explain just what Vysotsky meant to them. With a bit of vodka, he adds, for when the music grew too emotional. “Vysotsky was banned because he gave a certain freedom to people,” says Alexander Mozgovoi, 50, who grew up hearing bootleg Vysotsky tapes.“People listened in secret their kitchens,” he says. ![]() Back then, says Balabukha, people played his music on reel-tape recorders - often just amateur recordings of his concerts. Many can remember when Vysotsky was alive and officially banned. People in the audience shout out Vysotsky lyrics. The first concert is taking place here in Zaporizhia, a steel town not far from the front lines of the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Now, more than 37 years after Vysotsky’s death in 1980, a well-known Ukrainian singer and lyricist named Arsen Mirzoyan is doing a tribute tour. ![]()
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