Wikipedia gives the following introductory sentence to the "road movie" article: “A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home to travel from place to place, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives”. Our life is the path that we go, ride, or fly by, or by the side of which we sit, licking our wounds and gathering strengths to move forward. You can get off the road, you can get on it; after all, one might not know about it at all, but the road exists anyway. The road is a symbol of life, which had started somewhere and will end somewhere, but this life would be incomplete without a traveler making his way along that road.
In the summer of 2012 I reached a crossroad, had some thoughts on which way to go, chose the direction and took a turn. I jumped into a car passing by. Soon after that I understood that I had just joined a rock band from Yerevan called “Road Movie”: Henry was driving, sitting to the right was Mesrop, and also in the cabin there was David, who was absorbed by reading a book.
While learning the old songs musicians become familiar with each other at a level that is higher than just a teamwork. First of all, they should become a collective. This process is not that easy. Difficulties, frustrations, distractions – everything tries to keep the progressive component, but with due diligence there comes a certain feeling at some point that I find it difficult to describe now: whether the instruments start sound better, or the musicians begin to reveal their hidden abilities, or altogether. As a result, the band play proves to be fun, and hours spent in rehearsal do not seem lost already. Old songs begin to sound in a new way, and new ones emerge on top of that.
How is a new song being born? Perhaps it happens differently in different cases: it could be a melody heard in a dream or accidentally played on an instrument, or some rhythmical sequence of words, or something like that, other than a song requested to be written on such-a-subject in such-a-genre with such-an-emotional mood or ideological overtones. This is about a point where the two worlds touch each other: in one of them we do exist and in the the other – our music. By working hard and long we approach the boundary of these two worlds and at some moment begin to grope IT there, beyond our understanding. Each of us gropes for his own thread and begins to pull, and then we weave a new canvas. It is a compromise between the readiness for perpetual work and the quality of the result. And so, “Don't Wait” was born.
At the end of November, we were booked to play in a short series of concerts. As the result, we came to something our road kept for us at this stage – to yet another compromise. We had to discuss with our sax player the possibility of joint continuation of our musical activities. His busy schedule did not allow (allowed not) to spend time in a rock band. The conversation was friendly and quite adequate, and after that it was clear that the Road Movie band is now a trio. There is a symbolism on which I am not going to spread now. Going further.
It was at this time when we came up with the idea of starting The Clubbing tour. It was decided to play in as many clubs that could provide some definite conditions and, of course, give us some financial return, as possible. The more gigs we play – the more experience we get, and different clubs introduce us to a wider and different audience. But in order to play for "different audience" we had to come to another compromise – addition of many cover songs to our repertoire, which was previously avoided by Road Movie in every way. Because of this motley contemporary repertoire we faced the task of working up such track lists that would allow us to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of all the components of an event: teamwork, energy, mood of the audience, room acoustics, equipment, performance. We even experimented with interchanging the responsibility for compiling up the track listing within the band members. In some of the clubs we played twice, but used different approaches. Some set lists had been prepared in a couple of days, others – the minutes before we hit the stage.
The audience at our shows always plays its important role. In addition to the applause, cheers and smiles, our audience provides us with the necessary feedback. It is often due to the people in the audience, both one-time and permanent comers, that we hit upon something that gives us all the reasons to believe that our efforts have not gone in vain.
Speaking of symbolism, I can figure out some examples of its manifestation at the level of word play. However, I am doing it just for fun, because a true symbolism might have not yet fully appeared, or we have not yet noticed it.
- Having decided to buy a Fender bass guitar I was trying for a long time to find the right option of buying it abroad and shipping it to Armenia. All of them seemed impractical. The idea had almost extinguished when in the middle of autumn the official representative of Fender in Armenia started working in our city, leaving me with just a task of choosing the right model. Fender Precision Bass was purchased on 12/12/12.
- Speaking of The Clubbing Tour we said "we are clubbing" – a play on words in Russian, indicating the swirling smoke or cloud. Usually we do not see how this process starts, and also cannot know how it should end. The same can be said regarding the Road.
- We referred to adding the cover songs to our set lists saying "we shake the old days." Here is the crossing of the timing aspect of the term, pointing to an old approach of maintaining the existence of the local groups (when performing covers drowned a band and its identity got lost), and the semantic aspect (adding cover songs to the repertoire of Road Movie).
- Speaking about the short interval between concerts in Stop Club-e and Calumet, I wrote in some of my Facebook posts "From the frying pan into the... Calumet", but it was only the next day when I realized that Trndez national holyday was celebrated the day before, during which people jump through a burning fire, and the opening song in Calumet on that night was a Deep Purple song called "Into the Fire". (in Russian, Calumet sounds similar to "полымя", which concludes the Russian analogue of the mentioned saying - "Из огня да в полымя").
- On one of our concert photos, we are caught with our Fender guitar necks crossed. Speaking of the future adventures instead of saying "fingers crossed" we say "Fenders crossed".
- On the poster from the concert dedicated to the 70th Anniversary of George Harrison, the listed performing band's name is “The Kings' CrossRoad Movie”, which consisted of the members of The Kings' Cross and Road Movie bands. The intersection of these groups can also be seen in the fusion of words “Cross” and “Road”, forming the word "crossroad".
- Track list of that tribute concert ended up with the song "All Things Must Pass", which was consonant with the end of the concert and the end of our tour. Also, on this night my heavy bass guitar pick broke.
Hardly could I call those last three months of winter, during which we were clubbing, crazy – all that happened was quite reasonable and understandable. And even though I was able to fit this story about them onto a couple of pages, all remains for us equally an inexplicable and a mysterious experience of the passage of our Road.
