Before they played, he says, “each listener imagined we are a very, very powerful group with a lot of instruments, like Grand Funk Railroad. We had to write down lyrics three times for approval.”īy 1979, Rodion GA was sufficiently popular that Roșca formed a band to perform live (more than 30 musicians were part of the group over the following decade one sacked member was so furious at his treatment that he denounced Roșca to the Securitate). Fighting against the regime was not possible for me.” For his own lyrics, he says, “there was an organisation that supervised permission to sing songs. My goal was not to put my life in danger and to destroy my mother. Why? Because my mother had two children and she lost them and I was the only one left for her. “We never had problems with the authorities singing this music because I never used lyrics against the regime.
To ensure they were acceptable to the state censors, many Romanian musicians, Roșca among them, would use pre-existing approved poetry as their lyrics. In 1971, Ceaușescu’s July Theses demanded culture be focused on celebrating national values. Can you imagine what a trauma it was for me? Going to my mother’s grave with flowers and I find another name. “This cemetery stole my mother’s gravestone. When she found that the radio station was transmitting my music, she dressed herself and went to the neighbours and told them: ‘Today my boy will sing on the radio! Listen at five o’clock! He’s the best in Romania!’” The latest Rodion GA collection, Rozalia, is a memorial to his mother, decided on after he went to visit her grave and found the headstone gone. “My mother was so happy that her boy at last was recognised. And though there were no singles, Roșca says he had No 1 songs based on radio play.
Why? Because my mother had already lost two children and I was the only one left for herĪ few of his songs were released on compilations on the state record label, Electrecord. The third reason is that I suffer from grandomania, and when I made a very nice song I was so excited, and this made me each time make another song.” Then, I am very, very selfish, and this selfish attitude made me want to fight against the other groups and conquer them. The main reason to record my music was to memorise my songs. “I was not a good instrument player, but for me it was very important to record my ideas. “A lot of people said I am mad, and from madman came mad music,” he says. He was writing songs on guitars and began recording them in 1975.
I made coils, I made cones from paper, and replacement parts”) and in recording himself with a Tesla two-track reel-to-reel recorder. Roșca learned music as a child, but Rodion GA’s peculiar sound owed more to his experiments with electronics, which were the result of necessity: in a country where consumer goods were a rarity, Roșca had to learn the skills to improvise in making and repairing equipment (“There is no loudspeaker in the world that I cannot repair. Men in jackets, ties and moustaches dance with their frilly-bloused girlfriends to a song that begins with a synth fanfare before a martial drum roll introduces hugely distorted powerchords. It shows Roșca and the band he had recruited on what appears to be a Romanian light entertainment show. Watch Rodion GA on Romanian state television in 1982.Ī clip on YouTube – said to have been broadcast on New Year’s Eve 1982 – is a good example. There were people who committed suicide.” They made a very big mistake cutting the hair of some people. This was the reason for lots of crime made by children against their parents. A lot of parents made the mistake of cutting the hair of their sons when they were sleeping – a big trauma for young people. And they were very, very angry against the people who were listening to other kinds of music. Also they were very angry against the people in the cities. They did not like the students and the people who were following the fashions like long hair. “There were a lot of peasants living in villages, who were working in the Securitate and Politia. “Romania was a village country, you know what I mean?” he says. Worse still was the suspicion that fell on anyone daring to grow their hair or wear some version of western fashion. The Romanian authorities would keep files on you, search your mail, make your business their business. I t wasn’t easy being the biggest record collector in Cluj, says 65-year-old Rodion Roșca.
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