Entrepreneurial Tapists

History and Technology

Record piracy is coexistent with the development of the recording industry in the opening years of the twentieth century.²¹ Fledgling sound recording companies dubbed records for distribution under another label and at least one opera fan bootlegged opera performances on cylinders from his prompter’s box at the Metropolitan Opera between 1901 and 1904.²² Edison’s cylinder machine was capable of both recording and playback, but lost to the Victor Company’s convenience and marketing of playback‐only vinyl records.²³ Vocal records dominated due to their acoustic superiority and opera arias, while a small portion of the production, lent legitimacy to the recording industry.

The coming of radio and electric sound recording in the mid-1920s created a new situation for the recording industries and hence for recorded opera as well. “Electric recordings” relied on a microphone for amplifying the vibrations of the singer’s voice but were still recorded “live.” Radio had an immediate impact in presenting to the public the singing voice “amplified” by the microphone, thereby bringing new‐style singers like crooners into the recording limelight. Opera gained its regular, though limited, place on the radio primarily through the “live broadcasts from the Met,” which began in 1931. Importantly for pirate records, broadcasts of most radio programs through the 1940s, including the Met Opera broadcasts, were recorded on discs as “soundchecks” and often stored in the corner of a station or network. These soundchecks became a foundation of the opera live recording industry.

Enter magnetic tape in the late 1940s. Originally used for recording film soundtracks, magnetic recording made possible the mixing of tracks from several sound sources.²⁴ The arrival of magnetic recording meant several things for those who were to become the opera pirates. First, and most obviously, the availability of consumer reel‐to-reel tape recorders meant that for the first time since cylinders, recording live performances in situ was practical, even if awkward. Stories of how a reel‐to-reel tape recorder could be smuggled into the theater in a briefcase, with the microphone up the raincoat sleeve began in this era.

Ironically, the arrival of magnetic tape in the recording studio gave the new opera pirates a reason for being. Magnetic tape allowed for the manipulation of recording through editing techniques. Rather than “dubbing” an original performance, now a single track could be dubbed, or several performances could be “edited together” to achieve a perfection not always available in nature. One of the most famous studio tinkerings was when Elizabeth Schwarzkopf supplied Kirsten Flagstad’s high Cs in her recording of Isolde in the Wagner opera.²⁵ Opera afficionados felt they could no longer trust what appeared on disc as a “record” of a performance.²⁶

The possibility of “over‐engineering” also meant that some values, like spontaneity, risk, “presence” (a sound engineering term similar to Benjamin’s term “aura”), and operatic vocal excess were devalued in favor of accuracy, consistency, and blend achieved, according to opera pirates, through technological tricks. In contrast, the bootleg recordings were valued for being “live.” Live performance is “authentic, with all its flaws, where a studio recording is note‐perfect but sterile.”²⁷ In live performance, the stakes are higher than if mistakes can be corrected by tape. The flaws, the tempo, the high note held longer, the difficult passage taken faster—these “feats” of live performance become part of the thrill of listening.

Live recordings also circumvented the “legal” limitations of the recording industry: singers often had exclusive contracts with individual record companies—RCA, Columbia, etc.—and could not record together even if they sang together onstage. Ideal casts and occasional pairings onstage offered the potential for something new, something extraordinary to emerge on a “hot night,” a performance known to opera fans for having superseded the ordinary to a peak experience.²⁸ Even around 1980, when the record companies began to notice the market for live performances, they patched together various rehearsals and performances, sound‐engineered into a whole.²⁹

Finally, the pirate tapes of live performance allow for literally “collected memory.” Being there—“I heard Callas in Dallas in ’56”—is a memory that can be collected and re‐collected in its retelling. The recording represents an equally important artifactual memory. It becomes part of the collection, and its very specific musical content is incorporated into the knowledge base that opera lovers share and debate. The act of collecting and the comparison of performances are considered an active, participatory way to be part of opera performance.

Therefore, not only did the bootleg tapes of live performances come to stand, for many of the operagoers of the time, as “real opera,” but also the radio broadcasts, both contemporary and the airchecks of the past, took on added value as an “authentic” operatic experience. For a few enterprising men, these tapes became the foundation of a small distribution network that bound together singers, record producers, vocal record collectors, and listeners.

The Singers and their Songs

Tapes of complete live performances of operas were the norm. Some operas were rarely performed, others were obscure. Some were performed with famous conductors, performed with a distinctive cast, featured star singers, or were performed at a major opera house. Some were taped broadcast recordings, so common on the radio from the 1930s.³⁰ Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” was a particular favorite, especially since it was less frequently recorded than Verdi or Mozart.³¹ With all this in mind, however, the pirates became known particularly for their multiple recordings of the divas—the star sopranos—especially those who were less available on commercial recordings and who had voices that emphasized their performances as singing actresses.

The one singer who crossed the boundary between the formal opera world of stardom and the pirate kingdom was Maria Callas.³² At last count, there are at least sixty‐five live performances with Callas. While now available on YouTube and remastered CDs, her high E-flat in the triumphal scene of Verdi’s Aida is one of the frequently shared moments.³³ Other “must‐haves” are her bel canto performances in Donizetti’s operas.³⁴ While Callas also formally recorded many operas in the studio, the discussion of her weight and her interpretations backed the large sales of these live pirated recordings. Her voice in particular attracted comment: it was heard as “tortured,” or “shrill,” or “just plain ugly.”³⁵ The scholarship on Maria Callas and pirate tapes is extensive,³⁶ but one example may illustrate. The recording company EMI had planned to record Verdi’s La Traviata in the 1950s; however, they could not include their star, Maria Callas, in one of her most famous roles because she had already recorded it with the Italian label Cetra and was prohibited from recording it with another company for five years. Amidst complicated dealings among companies and agents, it still had not materialized as late as 1968. Into the gap came several pirated recordings that were hunted “with a vengeance,” with three pirate labels issuing a live 1955 performance from La Scala, another of a 1952 Mexico City performance, and yet another of a 1958 Covent Garden performance; by the end of 1974 at least four different complete performances had been issued on “private labels.”³⁷

Magda Olivero, popular in Italy, was a second favorite, her singing available in at least seventy live performances. After dissatisfaction with professional life and the coming of World War II, she retired, but then returned to sing onstage ten years later in 1951. In the United States, she was known by the mid-1960s through her pirate recordings. According to one description, Olivero was willing to “mold, shove, and mangle” her voice “into countless colors and emotions in order to serve the music.” She had to find ways to “make her voice beautiful,” as her art was often extreme and brutal.³⁸ Due to these qualities and her rarified repertoire, commercial companies were not willing to make the investment.³⁹ However, in 1975, at the age of sixty‐five, she was invited to sing three performances of Tosca at the Met: “Her prodigious technique and breath control spoke of a bygone era.”⁴⁰

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Turkish soprano Leyla Gencer came to be known as “Queen of the Pirates.” She was recorded in pirated live performances in over twenty different operas—some in “two salable versions by two rival pirates!”⁴¹ She sang nineteen roles at La Scala between 1957 and 1983 but was often compared unfavorably as “the poor man’s Callas” and so was “shamefully neglected by the recording companies.”⁴² When asked, Gencer was delighted that the pirate recordings exist and “keeps quite a collection [herself], supplied by [her] friends,” even though she realizes that the “risk of a bad performance might end up on records.”⁴³ According to the pirates, Gencer was perfect because her “uninhibited dramaticism was, aurally, extremely satisfying.”⁴⁴ They loved her as “one who prowls a stage like a wild thing confined behind bars.” Hurling “imprecations like no one in the business,” she was perfect to wear the crown for those who valued singing over the top.⁴⁵

As illustrated by the record catalogs created by the “live opera” record companies, however, the range of taste and popularity extended beyond these soprano divas. To take an example from one undated 1950s newsletter:

The September release will feature two complete operas and a solo record. First of the operas is Rossini’s Zelmira, initially produced in 1822 […]. The singers, headed by Virginia Zeani,⁴⁶ are excellent […]. Second opera is the most famous production by the Brazilian composer, Antonio Carlos Gomes, Il Guarany, first produced at Milano in 1870 […] this can also be recommended without qualm. […] Had Kirsten Flagstad lived she would have been 70 in July. To commemorate her birthday […].⁴⁷

Or, to take a later example:

“An Event of Unparalleled Importance!!” For the first time on records, absolutely complete and in very good sound, the famous 1954 La Scala production of Spontini’s La Vestale [….] Maria Callas was at the height of her musical powers, while her dramatic talents burned more ferociously with each new performance [….] La Callas smolders with dramatic conviction.⁴⁸

Whatever the performance, whomever the singer, one unwritten rule is that a tapist cannot use a tape “to ridicule an artist or to harm a reputation.”⁴⁹

Recording, Production, and Distribution Networks

Contextualizing operatic bootleg records in the 1960s and 1970s, especially for the United States, requires a market reality check. In 1974 figures, the proportion of the market allotted to classical music was four percent, with opera a very small subset of these sales.⁵⁰ The American center of this bootlegging and dubbing activity was the environs of New York City, with its Metropolitan Opera among its premiere recording sites. But the network of tapists was worldwide. Enterprising producers of “private” opera recordings received tapes of live performances at major opera houses throughout Europe and beyond. Performances were taped in house or from radio broadcasts, and then acquired by the pirates for their special, limited issues. Many tapists who tape for private listening come from the professions, from teachers and doctors to other professions.⁵¹

Among the first to capitalize this venture was Edward J. (“Eddie”) Smith (1931–1984). EJS records copied the practices of a commercial company, including a catalog complete with numbers, different labels, and a newsletter with reviews of new releases. He created several labels, such as “The Golden Age of Opera,” (1956–71; 566 releases!),⁵² Unique Opera Records Corporation (1972–77), A.N.N.A. Record Company (1978–82) and the Special Label issues (1954–81). Each of his labels were printed with a catalog number, e.g., EJS-122D, along with a notice at the bottom: “Private Record Not for Sale.” He reissued historic recordings, including Toscanini’s earliest Wagner recording with the New York Philharmonic in 1932 (EJS-444A, “The Golden Age of Wagner”) and on the other side of the LP included selected opera house recordings from Covent Garden, the Vienna Staatsoper, and the Chicago Opera Company in 1930 (EJS-444B).

His sources were sometimes studio performances or rare broadcast tapes from the interwar period. Many of the singers loaned their own private unissued and broadcast recordings and some set up private concerts in apartments that were recorded in the singers’ homes.⁵³ Smith sold his records in brown paper sleeves with the center cut out to reveal the label. Just as the major record companies like RCA Victor and Columbia, the pirates were able to request small‐run custom pressings at various record producing plants, which further muddled relations between the labels and record companies.⁵⁴

At the production site of Ralph Ferrandina, nicknamed “Mr. Tape,” a popular New York City producer, the process of copying tapes was impressive. Twenty‐six reel‐to-reel tape recorders and later twelve double cassette recorders were operating at the same time. Limansky states that all copies were made double‐time and of multiple operas. He got used to hearing Aida in one ear and Tosca in the other, while hustling to fulfill the customers’ orders. He was also in charge of mounting the masters, checking the quality, and keeping the tape machines in working order.⁵⁵

Other labels soon joined in the 1970s. Ed Rosen’s label (ERR) belonged to a new generation of pirates. Some were hopeful singers who also befriended opera stars; Rosen’s collection, for example, began in friendship with the tenor Richard Tucker. Rosen also used mailings, but added more professional packaging, libretti, and photographs.⁵⁶ New distributors arose carrying many “private labels” and other collectors, like Charles Handelman, advertised “on demand taping” from their private collections.⁵⁷

The private record producers created an informal distribution system with different notions of quantity/profit, different stars, and a different aesthetic for a community that not only purchased but also shared their knowledge and recordings. Information about pirate recordings sometimes surfaced in the press but during the 1960s and 1970s, it was often encoded in otherwise regular catalogs of record and tape sales, ephemeral newsletters, or classified ads. As in other “underground networks,” members learned from each other how to recognize traces of this underground distribution system and, indeed, to use the Soviet expression, “read between the lines” in stories about opera stars to find evidence of desirable and available material.

For example, in the late 1970s during the opera season, a one‐page weekly newsletter called “Diva” circulated gossip about the Metropolitan Opera and predicted the performances to see (and eventually to tape). An occasional magazine, Opera Fanatic, was born from the conjunction of an opera radio show on the Columbia University station, a circulating catalog, and an enterprising disc jockey.

Many members of the musical community made use of these pirate tapes. One tapist recounted that he “tapes on demand,” often for performers who are studying roles.⁵⁸ But the largest audience—and customers—for the bootleg opera recordings are opera fans and collectors of vocal art, many of whom intersect the official music community as performers, critics, music journalists, radio show hosts, university lecturers, and sound engineers.⁵⁹ They are often collectors of tapes and through their detailed description of individual performances—from the interpretation of a given phrase by a given singer to anecdotes of performance disaster—may “leak” information that suggests the existence of a tape, which then adds to its value. Through their program notes and curation, the opera pirates saw themselves as patrons of the arts and as catering to collectors’ legitimate demands.⁶⁰

Important communities of listeners⁶¹ are represented by vocal record collectors. Early in the 1960s, several clubs were formed in New York City that brought together collectors and experts of vocal art, with opera and art song recordings as their primary object. Some focused on the singing itself, such as the Vocal Record Collectors Society,⁶² which publishes an annual recording of selections from members’ collections. Other collecting communities focus on sound engineering, especially remastering older recordings, with reports published in the ARSC (Association for Recording Sound Collectors) journal. These groups overlap, with recording engineers participating in collectors’ meetings and remastering/reissuing collections for institutions like the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts or the Sound Archive at the British Library. These groups also represent the curators of the recordings, especially from the collectors’ communities.⁶³ While the role of collectors is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting here that the goals of collecting—such as the accumulation of knowledge, systematic classification, as well as “records” of experience—may duplicate the functions that Benjamin feared would be extinguished by mechanical reproduction.⁶⁴

History and Technology

Sound recording began in imperial Russia with record producers from the Victor Company arriving to record Russian singers in the first decade of the twentieth century. Before the October Revolution, Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin had joined Caruso as a “bestseller” for the international Victor Company⁷⁷ and three record pressing plants were established in and near Moscow.⁷⁸ Concurrently, gramophone records, especially from the international Gramophone Company, were illegally duplicated and distributed, inaugurating a history of musical piracy in Russia.⁷⁹ Despite (or perhaps because of) an emphasis on agitational recordings, the Soviet recording industry failed to thrive until the mid-1930s, when the state began production in earnest and increased record production exponentially in the areas of classical music, opera, folksongs, and mass song.⁸⁰ Imports from the west, notably jazz, were smuggled to aficionados, some even in the Soviet nomenklatura, through routes later amenable to rock music.⁸¹

In the late 1940s, intrepid record producers distributed popular music etched on used x‐ray films. Hospitals were willing to give them away, because due to their flammability—and several hospital fires—x‐ray films had to be destroyed at the end of each year. These record producers built their own recording machines by rigging a gramophone to a second one with a recording stylus. They worked in secret, making records one at a time. These “bone records” or Roentgenizdat, could then be played back on a gramophone.

From the late 1940s, “distributors” of bone records stood outside of the department store GUM or under the Kuznetsky Bridge in Leningrad. Due to the flexibility of the x‐ray plates, they could fit twenty‐five in each sleeve of their coat! While colloquially called the “ribs of rock,” most of the songs recorded featured tangos and popular songs, with a couple of jazz standards.⁸² The few Elvis Presley tunes (like “Heartbreak Hotel”) represented his vocal balladry not the rhythmic thrust.⁸³

X-ray records were linked to “hooliganism” and made illegal in 1958, while some record producers were sent to prison.⁸⁴ The ruling may have also been a fallout from the World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow during late summer of 1957, when for the first time live and recorded music of all sorts from all over the world was played and replayed in Moscow. The world’s youth was perhaps less impressed with Soviet musical achievements than had been hoped by the authorities and the Soviet youth were perhaps less resistant to the charms of popular western music than decades of Soviet education would have preferred.⁸⁵

The early 1960s saw changes, both organizational and technological, to the Soviet music recording industry. In 1964, the state enterprise Melodiya replaced the All-Union Firm and Studio of Gramophone Recording, uniting under its auspices the sound recording studios located in Moscow, Leningrad, Tallinn, Riga, Tashkent, Vilnius, and Tbilisi, and the manufacturing plants located in the first four cities. Melodiya also controlled the 30,000 retail outlets, wholesaling branches, and arrangements with external recording companies from the west, such as EMI/Angel and Le Chante du Monde.⁸⁶ According to one estimate for the late 1960s, fifty‐five percent of all record releases (about 1,200) were from the classical repertoire, although they accounted for only fifteen percent of sales. The rest were about evenly divided between estrada and folk music.⁸⁷ According to various estimates, by the late 1960s, between 170.5 and 200 million discs were produced per year.⁸⁸

What changed—and challenged this state monopoly on recorded sound—was the affordability and ubiquity of tape recorders in the USSR The first viable home tape recorders became available—and legal!—in the early 1960s. By 1965, almost half a million tape recorders were produced per year and by 1970, they numbered more than a million annually.⁸⁹ Reel‐to-reel tape recorders remained the norm, long after tape cassettes became the standard in North America, Europe, and Asia. The reason for this absence is that Melodiya feared that consumers might purchase classical recordings on cassette and then erase them to record what they wished. Even as late as 1984, blank cassette tapes were rare and very expensive.⁹⁰

Magnitizdat, from a combination of the Russian words for “tape recorder” (magnitofon) and “publish (izda(va)t),” describes a form of copying and self‐distributing of tape recordings. The term covers a wide range of music‐related practices in the USSR, from copies of rock albums from the west, music that was considered illegal in the Soviet Union, to home‐grown music by Soviet musicians and sanctioned for distribution by the performers but not produced by Melodiya. In fact, according to Troitsky, who wrote about Soviet rock in the late 1980s, some magnitizdat recordings were sold right outside the Melodiya offices, as well as at train stations and other locations.⁹¹ While ribs of rock were distributed in the tens of thousands, magnitizdat tapes numbered in the millions.⁹²

The Singers and their Songs

Here I focus on one form of magnitizdat that epitomized the intimate connection between the vocalist, the performance, and its reproduction: “guitar poetry.” In Russian it is called avtorskaya pesnya (“author’s song,” “authored song,” or “songwriters’ song”). As a genre it is distinguished from other forms of non‐classical music like Soviet mass song, composed for individual or chorus, in service of the state;⁹³ from estrada, stage or variety songs; and from folk music.⁹⁴ Guitar poetry is also distinguished from blatnaya pesnya, songs from the criminal underworld, with which it shares some roots.⁹⁵ Importantly, guitar poetry is also distinguished from rock music, especially imported from the west, that also circulated in magnitizdat, starting from the late 1960s.⁹⁶ The audiences for these forms did not necessarily overlap. As anecdotal evidence suggests, rock music tapes overtook bard song for many young people by the early 1970s.⁹⁷ In fact, the “textual meaningfulness” of guitar poetry was outright dismissed by one of the major subcultures listening to rock magnitizdat—the Soviet hippies.⁹⁸ The circulation of guitar poetry represents a particular network of taping, reproduction, and circulation that relied on live vocal performance for its sustenance and participatory community.

The practice of guitar poetry started in Leningrad in the late 1950s when the oldest of the Russian bards, Bulat Okudzhava, began performing his poetry to a seven‐string guitar in private apartments. Gerald Stanton Smith, who provides a central and early account, first heard Okudzhava’s voice in 1963 when a “fanatical jazz fan” in Leningrad played him an amateur tape. The fan’s tape recorder, made in the GDR, was “without a cover; it needed endless cajoling and makeshift repairs.”⁹⁹ Okudzhava had moved to Moscow, after his parents were “rehabilitated” in 1956, and he joined the Soviet Writer’s Union in 1961. His songs were personal and, as a war veteran, anti‐war, but not necessarily anti-Soviet, with cryptic references to the Soviet terror in which his father had perished. According to Stites, his performance style was simple and modest and his lyrics always authentic, whether in verses about the Arbat or an old jacket.¹⁰⁰

However memorable the lyrics, they were received as music, the singing and guitar‐playing central to their taped resonance and replication.¹⁰¹ The acoustic guitar is central to its performance and symbolism. After Stalin’s death, the seven‐string guitar gained a reputation as a “democratic” instrument among youth.¹⁰² It was also inexpensive, available, portable, and relatively easy to learn to play. ¹⁰³ For the bards, the seven‐string guitar “was the absolute object of the poet’s devotion as well as the symbol of his artistic freedom and autonomy.”¹⁰⁴ The bards themselves immortalized it in song as the “silver strings,”¹⁰⁵ or as a “faithful companion.”¹⁰⁶

It is also decidedly vocal—and sung. Recited and declaimed public poetry readings mattered then, as did those that briefly flourished in Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square in the late 1950s.¹⁰⁷ But the singing voice itself became a marker, an identifier, as well as a dramatic gesture. Platonov describes it as “bad singing,” relying on simple melodies, inexpert guitar playing and “untrained, often highly idiosyncratic voices.”¹⁰⁸ And yet, it circulated as “sung” and could arguably invoke and evoke older singing traditions that were able to blend oral traditions of performance with aural traditions of song genres that gave magnitizdat a longevity as song.

Vladimir Frumkin, a musicologist and Shostakovich scholar, gave shape and legitimacy to guitar poetry as music. His manifesto, “Music and Word,”¹⁰⁹ read at the May 1967 all-Union seminar on the problems of amateur (author’s) song, held near the Petushki (Vladimir region), predicted that future historians would turn to guitar poetry as one of the most sensitive indicators of the emancipation of the individual, of the spirit of the inhabitants of Russia, and he urged the many bards present to spread guitar song beyond the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. His 1980 publication of Okudzhava’s songs offered his appraisal of Okudzhava’s significance:

Before Okudzhava, the Soviet song industry had virtually no competition from within the country […]. The state monopoly on songs seemed unshakable. Suddenly it was discovered that one person could compose a song and make it famous, without the Union of Soviet Composers, with its creative sections and department of propaganda, without help of popular singers, choirs and orchestra, without publishing houses, radio and television, film and record companies, editors and censors.¹¹⁰

A second singer who anchored the genre is Vladimir Vysotsky, “the unofficial bard of the official word.”¹¹¹ Vysotsky’s career is emblematic of the gray area between a formal and informal relation to the official culture. He is characterized variously not as anti-Soviet but “dangerously un-Soviet,” arousing “bureaucratic suspicions” whenever he was formally engaged—as a theater actor, as well as on film and television. Remarkably, before his death he acted in twenty‐six television or cinematic films,¹¹² but it was his guitar poetry that helped propel him to a peculiar kind of celebrity, able to comment on everyday Soviet life in realistic terms—and get away with it!¹¹³ He was acquainted with Okudzhava and mentioned him many times in his performances, sometimes dedicating songs to him.¹¹⁴ He was allowed to record a couple of “safe songs” in the state studio, to be distributed through Melodiya, but his formal albums of guitar poetry were recorded abroad.¹¹⁵

The quality of his lyrics is often skeptically evaluated,¹¹⁶ but as a singer and performer, Vysotsky’s influence was considerable. He managed his notoriety by organizing hundreds of unannounced—and unauthorized (!)—“concerts” scheduled in smaller towns to avoid the attention of authorities. His audience arrived with tape recorders in hand. To give one idea of the extent of these live performances, an online database lists 245 live recordings of his song, “Ia ne lyublyu”—with a high variability; the tapes also include his spoken introduction to a song (avtometaparatekst).¹¹⁷ These spoken introductions not only created dialogue with the participating audience but also established the particulars of the performance situation, time, and place. These introductions added value to the individual performances and also allowed fans and collectors to develop expertise on the evolution of the singer and his songs. Toward the end of his life, Vysotsky recorded songs “for posterity on quality recording equipment in the homes of Mikhail Shemiakin and Konstantin Mustafidi,”¹¹⁸ but they did not diminish the value of the live performances for fans and collectors; the ambiance of the “bad recording” was also part of the genre.

Vysotsky’s earliest songs were related to the “camps,” as gulag prisoners were beginning to share their stories upon their return to Moscow. He also leaned heavily on the genre of “criminal” songs, sometimes crude, and later added dramatic genres to his repertoire, accumulating an oeuvre of 500 to 600 songs.¹¹⁹ The guitar was central to his composition. According to his mother, he picked up his guitar, immediately played, and never studied, a claim celebrated in the fan lore.¹²⁰ Vysotsky believed that writing the verses “with guitar in hand” created more dynamic and effective lyrics, with music emerging “as a final step in the creative process.”¹²¹

Of the major bards, Alexandr Galich’s guitar poetry fits best its interpretation as a genre of dissent. Like Okudzhava he was a member of the Soviet Writers Union and like Vysotsky he was involved in filmmaking, being formally trained as an actor but making his living as a screenwriter and member of the Union of Cinematographers. He had traveled to France in the late 1950s to co‐write the screenplay for a French-Soviet co‐produced film, Nights of Farewell (Tretya molodost’, dir. Jean Dréville and Isaak Menaker, 1965) on the life of French‐born Russian choreographer Marius Petipa, a sign of privilege in Soviet cultural life. But this was not to last. Galich’s first and last public concert was at the March 1968 national festival, sanctioned by the regime—the All-Russia Bard Concert with almost thirty performers. It lasted for three days and attracted 2,000 people, even though it was held far away from the center in the Siberian town of Akademgorodok in the Novosibirsk region.¹²² Among other songs like “Clouds” and “Ballad on Surplus Value,” Galich sang “In Memory of B.L. Pasternak,” which “castigated the hypocrisy of the literary establishment that let the great poet’s death pass almost unremarked.”¹²³ He was “virtually banned” from singing again in public.¹²⁴

Compared to Okudzhava and Vysotsky, Galich’s lyrics to his guitar poetry were more explicitly political. Two of his songs—“Night Watch” and “Stalin”—targeted the latter: “a bastard not a father.” While in 1962 Stalin had been discredited, such direct criticism implied criticism of the communist system. His lyrics have also attracted much more analysis and elevation to poetry.¹²⁵ According to Garey, “the underground mechanisms that allowed Galich to dodge censors rendered the historical record of performative importance spotty.”¹²⁶ As Platonov writes of guitar poetry overall,¹²⁷ Garey sees Galich’s songs as a “dialogue” and emphasizes the communal aspect of the orality and evolution of his sung performance. While other guitar poets, such as Yuri Visbor, Alexander Gorodnitsky, and Yuli Kim, also performed guitar poetry during these years—and were represented in the tape repertoire—Okudzhava, Vysotsky, and Galich remain the most prominent in the genre.

Recording, Production, and Distribution Networks

Even though tape recorders had become available, their quality was not always the highest and increased re‐tapings diminished the sound quality significantly.¹²⁸ The circumstances of recording and rerecording add to the sonic component of the genre. In Smith’s eloquent description:

There is usually considerable surface noise and distortion of sound, and quite wide variations in tape speed—repeated copying on different machines may render a voice quite unrecognizable, converting a baritone into a gabbling contralto; there is range of assorted clunks and pops as the microphone is shifted or bumped; and there is persistent background noise—some of it extraneous, like vehicles passing in the street outside, or the footsteps and voices of neighbors; and some that forms an integral part of the genre ambience—the creak of furniture, the chink of bottle against glass, the coughs and muttered comments, and, most of all, the semi‐conspiratorial audience participation: requests, repartee with the singer, warm or bitter laughter, pregnant silence at the conclusion of a particular telling song followed by a bustle of relieved tension‐breaking movement and murmuring.¹²⁹

The Leningrad scene¹³⁰ is described by Vladimir Kovner, one of the most proficient and prolific tapists. He bought a tape recorder on his first payday in mid-1959 and installed it in his family’s room in their communal apartment; he recorded Conover’s VOA jazz programs and borrowed old records, taping romances and “gypsy songs” for his collection. In the fall, his friend brought him an Okudzhava recording made at a Leningrad party: “the tape recorder had been under the table and the recording was creepy,” but “from that moment his songs became an integral part” of his life. In the early 1960s, Kovner’s tapes were played on the radio at lunchtime at the Karl Marx factory where he worked until the party leadership happened to listen. He was also involved in the organization of Okudzhava’s first “semi‐official” concert in Leningrad arranged by two trade union activists at the Pulkovo Observatory. While it was not the success of later concerts, by the beginning of 1962, Okudzhava’s growing popularity was indicated by the strength of the Komsomol newspapers’ condemnation of his “permitted” concerts. Therefore, many future recordings were made live in apartments “with a couple of dozen attentive, understanding, loving listeners and, as usual, with a pair of tape recorders.” Kovner speaks fondly of borrowing the Grundig tape recorder of his friend, the collector Mikhail “Misha” Kryzhanovsky, as they aimed for quality copies.¹³¹

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the bards performed their concerts in private apartments and were taped with their permission. Friends were offered the possibility of copying the tapes for their own use for free, usually supplying their own tape. Or tapes could be traded as part of the elaborate system of blat, or informal exchange, that operated in Soviet society.¹³² Or tapists would become “publishers,” distributing tapes hand‐to-hand to someone they knew.¹³³ Sometimes an unannounced concert proved an opportunity for multiple tapings by several audience members, multiplying “master copies” for potential reproduction.

The tapists involved in early commercial operation—to distribute tapes for money—used the sound recording kiosks located in most cities that were established ostensibly to tape legitimate Melodiya records or authorized recordings from Eastern Europe. According to Kan, they were not regulated for a very long time.¹³⁴ Homemade tapes of the bards began circulating on a large scale in the major cities, especially among university students, the intelligentsia, and academic elites. As compared to other forms of popular music in circulation, magnitizdat recordings of guitar poetry began as essentially an urban phenomenon.¹³⁵ Its audience was, in Daughtry’s words, “broader and more ideologically diverse,” however and extended to music enthusiasts who might not otherwise be involved in magnitizdat circles.¹³⁶

The tapes were listened to in private apartments, dorm rooms, and commuter trains. The songs themselves were added to the performance of “tourist songs” on the outdoor student campouts and long hikes that had begun in the late 1950s; admiring amateurs might perform the bard songs live, with guitar, helping to spread the songs, which could then be re‐experienced on magnitizdat.¹³⁷ Many audience members brought handwritten songbooks to live performances or shared the lyrics in communal settings. In defending the importance of these songs for community participation, Garey remarked that “hundreds of people didn’t get together in the woods and sing Beatles songs.”¹³⁸

Overall, guitar poetry “evolved not just as a song genre but as a sociocultural phenomenon [that] formed communities that were never entirely within, yet also never outside of the Soviet kollektiv.”¹³⁹ Skirmishes with the authorities, whether in terms of unauthorized concerts or tape distribution, as well as the perceived (and sometimes real) threat of censorship or punishment, may have added cohesion to that community of tapists, their listeners, their collectors, and their imitators. As the official Soviet composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky wrote in 1965, the bards “are armed with magnetic tape. This presents […] a certain danger since distribution becomes so easy.”¹⁴⁰

The Bards, Magnitizdat, and the Authorities

In 1974, when Vladimir Frumkin and his wife left the USSR, he brought among other things a selection of reel‐to-reel tape recordings of Okudzhava’s performances.¹⁴¹ He had submitted his tapes to Soviet customs officials who, after several hours returned them with the assurance that they were approved for export. Upon arrival he discovered that the tapes had been de‐magnetized and Okudzhava’s voice erased, he assumed during their “stay” in customs.¹⁴² This story is repeated by the protagonist as well as others to illustrate various aspects of magnitizdat. While undoubtedly a personal loss, Frumkin was not prohibited from leaving, demonstrating the relative tolerance of magnitizdat compared to its print progenitor, samizdat. Like magnitizdat, samizdat also used an improvised production process and underground distribution system. However, as numerous commentators point out, samizdat was most often intensely political and was viewed by its makers and readers in that way.¹⁴³ The songs of magnitizdat, with the exception of some of Galich’s songs, were not apolitical so much as they were un‐political, indifferent, or even disinterested. Various trials marked distributors of Soviet samizdat, both physical and literal, while as Kovner remarked, “They didn’t arrest you for distributing bard songs.”¹⁴⁴

It is not that the leadership liked these songs. But their children “belted out these songs at home and at their dachas with all the power their tape recorders could muster. The leaders themselves listened to them on their own, saying to themselves: ‘He’s really laying it on thick, the bastard! But that’s the truth he’s gabbling! Only what’s the point? You can’t do anything about it anyway.’”¹⁴⁵

But neither was the practice without risk. Kovner relates a 1965 search of his apartment; while they seemed primarily to be looking for printed samizdat, his bard tapes were “for the first, but not the last time” in the hands of the KGB. He was then interrogated and summoned two months later for an “instructive” conversation. He received his tapes back, signed on the back “seized during a search.” He was kicked out of his job as a teacher, though allowed to continue working at his factory.¹⁴⁶

By the early 1970s, the bards themselves were targeted. Phone calls by the authorities to Okudzhava’s workplace at Literaturnaya gazeta expressed “surprise to have a guitar player working in the poetry section.”¹⁴⁷ He was expelled from the Party in 1972 and a book of his verse plus music was withdrawn from a planned publication, so he stopped performing until the late 1970s. Vysotsky was also critiqued for “profiteering” and urged to stop this “illegal entrepreneurial activity” by the influential Sovetskaya kultura.¹⁴⁸ It is probably not coincidental that in 1970 a “Songs Commission” was created within the Writers’ Union’s Poetry section.¹⁴⁹

Galich’s fate illustrates the price for being openly political. A bootleg copy of his songs was published in Frankfurt in 1969, which he did not disavow; this presumably was the excuse to expel him from the Writers Union in December of 1971 and from the Cinematographers Union the next year; he was forced to emigrate in 1974.¹⁵⁰ In the words of Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, writing in 1988, “As soon as Galich began to sing, that is, as soon as he allowed himself to be himself, he turned from a successful dramatist quite acceptable to the bureaucracy to an unwanted person.”¹⁵¹

Was it, at least in this case, all about politics? In a telling 2008 dialogue between two Soviet émigrés, Vladimir Frumkin and mathematician/poet Boris Kushner, Kushner describes his response to the bards: “the main source of the guitar poetry was not protest at all, but the natural, inherent impulse of creativity in a person […] Express yourself.” Kushner in the early years did not feel the opposition that Frumkin perceived: “There were good, talented songs, there were mediocre ones. And when I sat down to the piano, my favorite melodies arose under my fingers. […] whether the author was a member of the Composers’ Union or not—what did I care.”¹⁵²

Yevtushenko also recounts an impromptu concert in his home when Galich and Okudzhava met with the famous Belgian singer Jacques Brel. All sang for each other—and none sang their own songs. “Galich sang old romances, Okudzhava sang carriage songs, and Jacques Brel sang Flemish folk songs.”¹⁵³ No tape exists, to Yevtushenko’s regret, but their choice of repertoire suggests that it was the singing and the songs, the participatory experience, and the “romance” not of the forbidden but of the melody that invigorated these guitar poets of magnitizdat.