Tamás Torma

The Music Is Over, and so Is the Text

Tamás Szőnyei: Nyilván tartottak. Titkos szolgák a magyar rock körül 1960-1990 (Kept on File: The Secret Service and the Hungarian Rock Scene 1960-1990). Budapest, Magyar Narancs, 2005, 828 pp.

 

They have you on file
But they can't keep you in file
Can't keep you in line - can't keep you in file
I scream and I listen - I do what I want
I flee and I stay - I do what I want
I'm reported, I'm caught - I do what I want
I defend, I attack - I do what I want
I do what I want
I do what I want
They have you on file
But they can't keep you in file
Can't keep you in line - can't keep you in file

Tamás Szőnyei's book begins with these lyrics from Kontroll Csoport, one of the key Hungarian rock bands of the 80s. This particular song was taken up by the restless young at a time when the wave of Solidarity strikes was sweeping Poland. In Hungary, people started to struggle with the first Rubik's cubes, and István Szabó's Mephisto, set in Nazi Germany, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
There were no mp3s, no mobile phones, no Internet; we were in our early twenties, and, holding some pathetic portable cassette recorder in the air, we tried to record these revolutionary lyrics in obscure clubs on the outskirts of town. Not that they were really revolutionary - more likely just daring, rebellious and exciting, like someone who tried to cheek the cops when asked to show identity documents. This was all supposing, of course, that we understood anything of these words; for, in those crammed cellar clubs, with their appalling amplification and acoustics, we were more likely to hear just odds and ends of the lyrics: idowhatiwant or theyh a v e y o u o n f i l e b u t t h e y c a n ' t k e e p y o u i n f i l e . This is the first time I've seen them in print, and they are as surprising as the quarter century that has just passed. It is not poetry; that is immediately obvious. It is based rather on lean, simple opposites, screams followed by silence, defence by attack - (standard for new wave bands at that time) with a refrain that is just as effective to this day - effective enough to become, in 2005, the title of this eight-hundred- page volume.
They have you on file; they can't keep you in file. This is specifically Eastern European. Here in our region, it is fashionable to call ourselves Central European, or perhaps East-Central European, in order to feel (or navigate) ourselves closer to the Western, the real, half of Europe, where no doubt they also keep this and that on file (perhaps it's better not to know what exactly). It was only here in Eastern Europe, however, that the state was capable of running scared to this extent from the otherwise harmless subjects it kept so carefully on file. I don't know what happened before 1974 in Portugal, Argentina or Paraguay, from where the only stories that got this far concerned troublesome individuals who were dumped at sea, or who just happened to disappear, only to turn up as tortured corpses. In comparison, the Kádár era was not a hard dictatorship. In the years of hangings and severe prison terms following the 1956 Revolution, rock 'n' roll was still on local radio stations somewhere between Mississippi and Kentucky. Then, by the early 60s, the repressions had eased.
Coming after the thugs of the Rákosi years (1949-1954), the fear behind the Kádár consolidation had its roots in the 1956 uprising. After sifting through piles of case studies, one more banal than the next, the situation, as Szőnyei sees it, is that the omnipotent state, of which we were all instinctively afraid to some degree, either with reason or because of our upbringing, was in fact much more afraid of us. If the former state security authorities could pay such attention to such a seemingly peripheral area as youth music, then how many agents can it have had operating in literary or academic circles? Among many others, Szőnyei quotes a report from 1964 in which the agent (who was co-opted three years previously while serving a prison sentence) describes a Cultural Competition held by the Young Communist League:

.then the compere asked the leader of the band Echo II why the band was called Echo II. The leader of the band responded, "Recently we were happy to learn that the Americans' successful rockets are recognised in Hungary, too, and we named ourselves after this rocket." Then, of course, people at the back started to laugh, while the leader of the band looked at the speaker cynically. When asked what kind of music they play, the same leader of the band answered: "Whether you like it or not, music from the West." With the same cynical expression.

Less than ten years had passed since the "unfortunate events of 1956", as jokes would refer to what, according to the official phraseology, was a "counter-revolution". The country was building socialism, and the Young Communist League had significant tasks to perform in shaping the socialist type of human being. True socialist culture had to be adequate to satisfy the demands of those desirous of culture and entertainment. Then, into this soup, cooked according to plan, a little fly fell. The youth branch of the party, the Young Communist League, advertised a competition to find those who were best able to adapt the musical dregs of decadent Western culture, certain pop songs. What happened? The young band leader said the above into the microphone.

We were at primary school at the time, but I can still remember how, in a ruled notebook, I kept a list of all the songs I heard on the state radio's one and only light music programme ('Just for the Young'). I wrote down the English names phonetically, as I heard them: Mankíz, Frí, Shaking Blú, Prokol Hárem. And I remember the smell of the small tobacco shops where you could buy pictures of music bands in black and white and colour (!) for one forint. We could swap these, or stick them in our season ticket holders. The Iron Curtain could not drop heavily enough to stop a few pop magazines from slipping through underneath it. The grainy photographs pirated and distributed by these small shops were arguably symbols of a private sector responding immediately to consumer demand, and they portrayed the stars as a message from the tempting Western world, the author claims.
At the same time, however, Directorate III of the Budapest Police Headquarters was filing reports on how the Hungarian-born road manager of the Nashville Teens and the Spencer Davis Group arrived in Hungary, how he immediately invited a singer called Sarolta Zalatnay to England, as well as beginning discussions with the bands Metró and Omega, setting off something of a rivalry between the two. In addition, at a meeting of the Agit Prop Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, a special note was made that "in the matter of jazz" the Communist Youth Organization, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs should all investigate the problem without fail and, if necessary, disband certain jazz bands (It was characteristic of their ignorance that by jazz they meant pop music), and that state radio and television should diminish the quantity of dance music in its programming.
The flexing of muscles was still the same, but the inaccurate way it is expressed reveals the mindless bureaucracy behind it - 'dance music', 'jazz'. They had no idea what this whole thing was about. It was enough that this music of the young could not be fitted into a spectrum that stretched from Hungarian folksy music to operetta. Keeping a guitarist and singer in the mould of Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan or a hard rock band under observation and profiling them, was considered a matter of state interest. As to how many might be on the other side - that was not discussed. They had no rubric for that.

From the end of the fifties, the Ministry of the Interior developed a burgeoning bureaucracy covering youth policies. Initially, they were satisfied with what they called "reports on the atmosphere". Very soon they felt that specific places and concert locations had to be kept under observation and pressure had to be applied to targeted individuals to extract some information, or at least something compromising.
As Hungarian rock music expanded, so did the network of agents surrounding and criss-crossing it. In the 1980s, it was not unusual for there to be two informers within a single rock group who would - thanks to the discreet charm of the system - also inform on each other. At the same time it is not difficult to notice the high capacity of state security institutions for self-inflation in the Weberian sense. More and more informers would generate ever more matters appearing to be Matters with a capital M - self-promotion was strong, but so, too, was servility towards superiors. The higher information rose in the hierarchy, the more it lost of its specific value, becoming more ideologised. It took on the colours which the political bodies really wanted to see.
By the time these self-important reports reached the highest party forums, they were worth next to nothing and rarely served as the starting point for any kind of operative decision. It is instructive that when, two decades later in the 1980s, they again sought to combat "the negative tendencies appearing in rock music" with the same repressive old solutions (ban, destroy what needs destroying. Offer guidance, and encourage what is good and worthwhile) appeared to be forgotten. Ageing party functionaries were outraged by certain words and details of lyrics. ("How dare they call a band 'Committee'?" was the response of Deputy Minister of Culture Dezső Tóth when, in early 1983, he called to account Hungarian rock musicians at a forum in the town of Tata. Rolls Frakció's famous refrain "To piss I stand, to crap I sit / As far as honour goes I'm in the shit," was banned for its first line. The authorities did not even hear the second.)
The author's dogged work in the archives over many years has produced surprising results. He writes the thirty-year history of Hungarian rock music in the light of informers' reports and succeeds in rewriting it in the process. Fairy-tale conventions would have the heroes facing adversity becoming better and more lovable, but here I found no heroes. What shocked me was the pettiness and the low level of competence with which the Hungarian state regime dealt with its citizens and their business. Much ado about nothing. Hungary delicately forced some individuals into exile and succeeded in disbanding a number of groups - who, by today's standards, couldn't have hurt a fly - but the authorities either did not dare or did not want to touch performers of any real importance. Meanwhile, an extensive information apparatus worked on them and lived off them. In the Hungary of "existing socialism", it was not unknown for three men telling jokes in a bar to be imprisoned for years for incitement. Just imagine, what a serious challenge, what a time-bomb, a singer on a stage, mike in hand, could be!

Still, this was not all fun and laughter, and it is this moral uncertainty that lifts Szőnyei's work above being simply the informers' history of thirty years of pop and rock concerts. In his preface, he suggests that he took on this Sisyphean task because he owed this much to the past. His good taste keeps him from outright moralising, but, I might add, we owe that much to the future, too.
There is a leader of a band mentioned in the book whom I haven't seen for a long time. I think I can say that back then we were friends. I was an enthusiastic novice journalist hooked on his concerts; he was a veteran rocker and, in his day job, the director of a subsidiary plant of the local agricultural cooperative. I wrote articles about them, made radio reports, and even conducted a long interview as part of a sociological survey - all this was as good for them as it was for me. The real point, though, is that we just liked talking to each other. For him, I was the educated young man with a still fresh mind, while for me, he was the embodiment of Reality. Today he is a wealthy man who often figures in the tabloid press on account of his estranged wife, but I am convinced that were we ever to meet again, we would be able to have a good conversation just as we did before.
Before this book came into my hand, I was talking about this connection, and someone interrupted to say "But he was one of them!" "How do you know?"
"I don't. Someone told me." And what for twenty years was a clear and pleasant memory has now become muddied. All the way through the book, I wondered if I would happen upon something that would point unambiguously to him as being one of the informers - but there was nothing. One tries to weigh things up in a sober fashion - that it is out of the question, he didn't live like that, I can't have been naive enough not to notice anything suspicious - but sober arguments cannot deal with situations like these. True, all that is needed is for a pinch of misunderstanding or malice to get caught up in the information chain, and I receive the news. Nevertheless, from that point on, nothing is as it was.
Everyone involved becomes covered in disgusting slime. Maybe that's what he was. More likely he wasn't, but this uncertainty will never be eliminated, and I quietly have to admit defeat. If I were to meet him, I would probably dodge him.
Yes, this is what remains, this unexpected lack of composure, this bad taste left in the mouth. The media picks at petty, blackmailed informers, while we learn nothing of those whose task it was to recruit and run them. (To his credit, Szőnyei names all names where he can.) Those who wrote reports because they believed that the cause was noble are now going to court to defend their privacy, and we assign people to the political "right" or "left" according to what transpires about their past.
Has this been our common past, I wonder, when reading Tamás Szőnyei's book, which is still just a history of rock, albeit one seen through an unusual prism. But history always lasts up to the present day - as I know from another rock lyric.

 

Tamás Torma
first specialised in the rock 'n' roll scene, going on to write on culture in general. For some years now he has been an editor of arts programmes broadcast by Hungarian Television.