VASKO THE PATCH
Art that builds bridges and gives freedom
The dimly lit bar welcomes me with the smell of tobacco and the heat of electric instruments on stage. The person I’m looking for is nowhere to be seen. The manager of the bar makes a phone call and puts it on speaker. Vasil Georgiev, or better known as Vasko the Patch, tells me that there was a misunderstanding with the schedule of our meeting. I hear jazz music and clink of dishes in the background — he is at home?! He was expecting me next Saturday. I panic. I spent so much time preparing for this interview just to mistake the date with a whole week ahead. For a moment I thought my trip to Sofia was a wasted opportunity.
“No worries. I’m heading over to you right now,” says Vasko as if I am an old friend who just invited him for drinks after dinner.
I sit down and wait but my eyes are restlessly running around the room. Patches Blues Bar is Vasko’s museum and personal space to preserve and keep his passion for blues music alive. Naturally, everything in here is one big patchwork — photos of known and unknown Bulgarian artists on the walls, guitar cases on the ceilings, metal plate signs from the communist regime decorating the way to the toilet and Route 66 plates hanging around the bar.
Thirty minutes later me and Vasko are sitting backstage in a two-by-two square meter “office.” His jacket, made from patches of course, pops out under his long white hair which he keeps pushing back with the bandana tied across his forehead. We share an old leather couch, the only furniture in the room, and as I brace myself to start the recording, he shuffles a small harmonica in his hands and suddenly starts playing.
Vasko and his collective Poduene Blues Band have been on stage since the late 1980s — times of major political changes in Bulgaria — to spread love and peace. Vasko describes himself and his group as “a poor family of sad musicians who want to be free, to play their favorite music, to destroy walls (…) and to dig deep inside people’s hearts.”
When the Berlin Wall was collapsing and Vasko was singing about it in front of 200 000 people on the main square in Sofia in 1990, nobody thought that everything he does till nowadays will become a symbol of freedom and democracy for the nation. Today I am sitting across the same man who my parents saw hope in 30 years ago, at the brink of change, and he is playing me a song about the lack of beer and annoying hot chicks at the bar while I ask my questions.
At first, I thought he does not take me seriously. Little did I know I was in for a spiritual rollercoaster ride.
“While I am walking down the street, I am creating songs. I am contemplating my life through songs. Afterall, life is a song.”
The orchestra driver from Poduene takes after a family of construction workers and carpenters. He graduated a trade school and spent his young adult years as a car mechanic playing music on the side. At some point, the taxi company he was working for fired him because he used to sleep in the backseat of the cars during the days after playing in underground Sofia bars the nights before. “I am a mechanic by heart. (…) I can do a lot of things with my hands. But whatever I do, it always ends up with music.”
Vasko’s music career started as a drummer in the basement of his friend’s house in the 1970s. His drums? Two pots and a paint bucket. It was years later when he went to Norway and Denmark to play with Trio Universe, when he earned money for his first Tama drum set. Living abroad for half a year was also when he dicovered blues music thanks to a hippie commune in Copenhagen. One night, surrounded by stray dogs and a lot of marijuana, Vasko was slipped into blues music by Muddy Waters’ album Hard Again with Johnny Winter on the guitar and James Cotton playing the harmonica and till this day he never let go.
The harmonica is Vasko’s token of freedom. He uses every second he is not talking to me to play his songs. The sound fills the small room with the memories of a whole generation before I was born. One second it’s the fast-paced rhythms of Nyama bira (No Beer) and the next the slow, whining melody of Den Sled Den (Day After Day). All of this, produced by the same three-line textual stanza and a 12-measure blues scheme.
Blues music originated in the early 20th century. Musicians of that genre express their feelings, rather than tell stories through their voice and rhythmic techniques. Those feelings often relay sadness or melancholy, due to problems of love, oppression, and hard times. Maybe this is exactly why blues music struck a chord in Vasko’s heart. He sighs deeply when he talks about the ability of art to help one forget reality in tough times. Good quality things are created in times of struggle. Everyone can do it when it’s easy. He takes a deep breath again and continues playing.
It wasn’t easy for Vasko, he despised the regime, but he returned from Denmark for his high school sweetheart and today wife — Elena. She was waiting for us back at the bar, where I later got to know her too. Living in communist Bulgaria, where even music wasn’t created freely — songs had to pass four different commissions and fit very strict lyrical and melodic standards — Vasko won the trust of the people when he decided to create Poduene Blues Band and feed his new family with music.
“It’s important to show that you have the desire [to make a change]. I showed people that I have it and even nowadays I am striving to justify their trust with every song I make.”
Despite 20 albums behind his back, and the responsibility of being the father of blues music in Bulgaria, Vasko still prefers to not be recognized when walking down the street. Back in the early 1990s, the reason was the risk of whether the people he met related to his democratic agenda or not; today he simply enjoys traveling around pubs in the small towns and villages cross-country and having casual conversations about politics, music, life. For him ambitions are under the limelight, far from where he ever wanted to be.
I switch off the recorder, bewildered by the conversation I just had. Vasko invites me to have a beer at the bar. We are back next to the Route 66 sign and another two hours pass by in conversations about art, history and democracy. He compares communism to a zoo, where everyone is imprisoned and waits for the alms of Someone. For Vasko, democracy is a jungle — life is survival of the fittest, but it’s sweet. He talks about it so passionately that I can’t help myself and ask why he never got into politics. Isn’t that the ultimate way to achieve change?
“Politics is important and very much needed, but music means so much more in my opinion. Politics builds walls, whereas art builds bridges and frees the soul.”
Monica Boyadzhieva is a journalism and film studies student at the American University in Bulgaria. She has recently rediscovered her love for Bulgarian music and reaches out to artists to learn more about their passions and stories.
