Rabiz And Reality: The Dimmer Days Of An Armenian Folk Star

[MosJan]

Rabiz and Reality: The dimmer days of an Armenian folk star

 

By Vahan Ishkhanyan

ArmeniaNow Reporter

Totik, with a cap pulled down to his eyebrows, pale and slim, a bundle of nerves, a cigarette always lighted, his hands and feet frozen, his bed never made up, greeted this New Year as he did the last: Waiting.

 

He sold newly written songs, but as the New Year approached, the money had not. When 2004 came, Totik and his wife had nothing but some chicken nuggets and vodka, and they turned off the television in their home, so that visitors would think they were not there, and they’d be spared the embarrassment of having nothing to offer.

 

From the top of popularity as a folk artist, it has been a long fall to the bottom where Totik tries to keep his mind, but is tormented by memory and a demonic reality.

 

But it was not always this way . . .

 

In the 1980s he had no spare minute to count his shabash money (the money that guests pay to singers and musicians at a wedding party). There was one Armenia and one Totik. The prestige of the wedding party was rising when Totik was singing. Many broke the tradition of wedding on Saturdays and rescheduled their parties for Monday to accommodate to Totik and he, indeed, beautified their occasion.

 

 

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Totik – Ashot Begoyan - was a pop folklore star. True, his songs were never broadcast on television or radio, no records of his songs were available for sale. But he was more famous among the working-class population than many official singers.

 

Totik’s “Carousel” and “Road” songs were unofficial hits that were sung from Armenia to Central Asia, his records made in apartments with amateur equipment were circulating throughout Armenia and the Soviet Diaspora.

 

At the top, the Soviet government did not accept rabiz (folklore). The Armenian intelligentsia considered rabiz not ethnic and ignored it. But at the common level the working class and villagers lived with rabiz, staged weddings and funerals with rabiz, which was the song of their souls. “There are oriental elements in rabiz,” says Totik. “Our nation, for those who don’t know, is in the East. Turks, Persians, Arabs came and reigned over us and had their influence. There is no merriment without rabiz. Will they make the bride dance under Pavaroti?”

 

Ashot Begoyan, 47, was born and raised in a rabiz center – the 3rd district of Yerevan. As a child he pronounced his name, Ashotik, as Totik, which became his nickname. His parents were divorced. He grew up with his granny. His mother constantly pressured him, about which he wrote in one of his songs:

 

My grandma found something in me

 

That you couldn’t find, what was my fault?

 

“My mother was also pressured in her life, was nervous like myself,” says Totik, who understands his mother, because like her he gets nervous outside and comes home and pours his nerves on his second wife, Anush, like his mother did to him. And it was impossible to live with his mother: “People would come to me very often, it’s a music world, drinking parties, and my mother could not bear it.”

 

When Totik was 12 years old his mother sent him to boarding school attended by children from poor backgrounds or families with one parent or no parents at all. Two years later, he escaped from that school: “One of the teachers insulted the whole class. Me and my friend left. Who would sit at her lesson?”

 

He was leading a half-begging life, lived in orchards. But he was earning money by singing and maintained himself and his grandmother.

 

At the age of ten, he received a gift for his birthday – a small accordion, and began to play at once: “No sooner had I taken the accordion than I started to play. God had granted this talent to me.” He never had a music teacher and does not properly know the notes.

 

Among his first well-known songs is “I am a 14-year-old boy.” The number in the song changed with every year as he grew older, and at the end he was singing – “I am an 18-year-old boy…” It was his critical age when he went to prison.

 

He was returning home after playing at a baptism ceremony and a house-warming party when his friends stole money from a taxi fleet cash desk and he was arrested together with them: “I was asleep in my car, my two friends went and stole, I didn’t know anything about that. And the next thing I remember is their beating me in the police station.” He remembers how he was beaten by a policeman, he was kicking him for so long that the heels of his shoes came off and then he was beating him because of his fury over the spoiled shoe heel. But the policemen failed to make Totik confess to the crime. He was sentenced to six years in prison. He wrote a few songs while in prison, of which the most famous is “This world has become bitter, the stone on my soul has become heavier.”

 

The prison where he spent his “golden” years left the hardest trace in his life. It was in prison that he developed insomnia that torments him so much even today: “If you have committed a crime, you feel calm. But it is very hard when you commit nothing and still are in jail, suffering all the time.” He finished secondary school in the colony of Kalmykia, Russia but the colony was a more important school for him: “Many people at that age had already graduated from universities, but I graduated from the academy of life, understood what a man was, and no higher school can give this education.”

 

He spent three years in prison and was freed by pardon. The applications written by his grandmother that her grandson had committed no crime played their role.

 

On his way home from prison, on a train, he wrote one of his best known songs – The Road:

 

Choo-choo-choo-choo-choo, the train goes;

 

Choo-choo-choo-choo-choo, I am returning home.

 

Mummy, dear, why are you crying?

 

Your son’s coming home from prison, isn’t he?

 

“I was lying in the train near Rostov, the rhythm of the road was inside me, I came home and the song had already been done.” The song, “Carousel”, that Totik wrote in 1979, a year after his release from prison, brought him fame (Stop the carousel of life, I’ve made up this song because of my missing love).

 

The 80s-90s were the most fruitful years for Totik. His band (clarinet, dhol, accordion, that he played himself) were invited to play at wedding parties from Rostov, Tbilisi, Krasnodar. Within three days they earned up to 2,500 Soviet rubles (about $500 according to the black market exchange rate).

 

During the Karabakh war, Totik went to the front with a detachment. He wrote military songs, one of which became a drill song. Later he released a cassette with patriotic songs – “Yerablur”.

 

After the war, failures followed one after another. His wife left him and took his two sons with her to Russia. In 1994, Totik sold his apartment and left for Moscow to be close to his sons, however police took him to the police station, beat him and took $12,000 from him: “I’d thought I’d go and we would unite in Russia. I was thinking about my children. But it turned out my wife didn’t want to unite. In Moscow they took me when I was standing in front of the hotel, beat me heavily and gave me 24 hours to leave the place. I asked them at least to return me my money. They said: but who has taken your money from you?”

 

Totik remained alone, without home and money. His situation is reflected in the following lines of his song: “Having left the Palace, I don’t have even a tent. I was King, but I don’t have my throne today.” His mother died in 2003 and Totik moved to her apartment.

 

His neuroses did not give him rest, he gave himself to binge drinking, but it was no salvation. No sooner had he given up drinking that his nervous shocks repeated with renewed strength.

 

It is more than 10 years that he has not sung at a wedding party, his health does not allow him to do that. Nervous shocks are aggravated along with the country’s social situation and many wedding parties are held without live music: “People’s merriment is the source of our money,” says Totik. “In the past when I played at a wedding party, an ordinary worker was giving shabash from the bottom of his heart. True, I didn’t get so much money as at a wedding party of a rich man, but I earned about 300 rubles with a worker’s shabash, a high monthly wage, which I earned within one day. And now you will not say the same about a worker’s family, there is Hayelectro plant in front of me, a worker there used to eat at least one dinner with meat a week. Now the plant is idling and there is no worker. A fraction of the country’s population lives in good conditions. But even they are not aware of the situation in the country. The one driving a Jeep will not see the bumps on the sidewalk.”

 

But he continued to create, wrote the second "Road", but this time not the road of return, but the road of leaving: “An unknown and alien country is calling me…”

 

The second Road is about saving oneself from Armenia -- the road to freedom from poverty. “This is not a state, this is a bigger colony. I had left a small colony only to enter a bigger one.”

 

He started to make money by writing songs on order. He wrote all sorts of songs – album songs, birthday songs, songs for wedding parties. His songs are sung by numerous famous singers – Tata, Tatul, Srbuhi Kekejyan, and others. He already knows the taste of the singer and “shapes the song to his or her heart.” He says that they are afraid of performing one of his latest songs, because it is about the real situation in the country and not the glorification of the government: “Armenia, your brain is sick, Armenia, there is pain and grief in your heart.”

 

But the hardest thing is to write a funeral song. The customer tells him the details of the dead person’s life, tells him what episodes should feature in the song. “They tell me all but the size of his shoes.” When he starts to write, he breaks down and cannot hold back his tears. “I become half a man, I don’t know that person. You must enter his psychology, the way he lived. I sleep only half an hour a day, and this person comes to me in my dream. And how can I explain to the customer? I say I don’t want, brother, he says – so you don’t respect the dead person.”

 

But orders are not permanent, and customers often delay the payment, sometimes they do not pay at all. And he becomes nervous from this anxiety. His second wife, Anush, is the only person who takes care of him, the only person who believes in Totik’s success and has set herself a task to return his former fame to him. She has written down about 1,500 of his songs into a copybook, doing it with care and in beautiful handwriting. And about as many songs have been lost without a trace. Anush says she wishes she had been by Totik’s side from childhood to save all his songs. Anush is Totik’s doctor, she is a nurse by training. She was laid off from her job and now, as Totik says, she wants to keep her form by giving him injections.

 

“It is very difficult to live with Totik, everything can get on his nerves,” says Anush. “When someone sings a song on television he gets nervous. When I do the laundry he gets nervous, he tells me to move my hands in rhythm. When I speak he gets nervous at my voice, he tells me to lower my bass, keep the tone when speaking. They ask me how I bear all this, I say I like taking care of a patient, I am not interested in those healthy.”

 

Totik had no occasion for joy on the threshold of the New Year. They bought bread and cigarettes from the shop on credit hoping that the money for the ordered song would arrive soon, but it had been delayed for a long time now and the hope was fading. A few days ago someone wanted to order a song. Totik demanded money in advance, but the customer refused. Rabiz singers have no money to pay either.

 

“The situation in this country will improve, but I will not see it,” says Totik. “I want the situation of people to improve a little in the coming year, then I will feel good too. When people go with anxiety on their faces, talking to themselves, I feel bad, when they start to smile, I will feel good. All I need is health.”

[Sergei_Nagavitsin]

3rd District (Yerort Mas) Ayoo

[MosJan]

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