I once went on a mini-tour with a punk band, which included Iława. We arrived for the night and it was clear from the start that it was going to be an adventure, because there was some rubbish lying around the yard, single shoes and a broken baby stroller, and a burnt-out neon sign was blinking above everything, like in American motels. If someone had watched us in a movie, they would have shouted not to go there. But we did go. To a building that also looked abandoned. Finally, a clearly frightened lady appeared and directed us “to the boss upstairs”. On the stairs, a man passed us with a shopping bag of glass bottles, chased by “You weren’t supposed to buy these, idiot”. Should we have left three times by now? Yes, we did.
But no. We got to the boss, saying we had a reservation. “I’ll give you 13. There are even candles and towels there.” If there are candles and towels, then give it to me, perfect. The room was in the building next door, the lady we met earlier was supposed to take us. We went out into the yard and… a bucket of cold water flew at our guide from the first floor balcony, and it’s worth mentioning that the story takes place in November. Then we only heard from above: “Sorry, that was supposed to be for Bogdan.” And that was it. The tearful guide took us to the room, to which I had to leave the door open every time I wanted to go to the bathroom, so that my companions could see me go in and out. The next day we ate a very early breakfast in the car, in the parking lot under the supermarket.
Why am I writing about this? Because I have been with the bands on maybe a dozen or so trips and I could tell a few more strange stories, and Dezerter has been traveling like this for 40 years and has a bunch of stories. And you will find them in “Come, it’ll be great”. Some are funny, and others are funny until you realize they were actually dramatic. You won’t go through every step of the band’s career chronologically here. Instead, you’ll learn how it came to be and what connects Dezerter to Wojciech Waglewski and Nosowska. This lack of chronology can be misleading, but if we look at it as a collection of anecdotes, which it is, it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes you just have to wonder what kind of, damn, Kaśka is.
If you don’t learn anything from this book, well, you won’t learn whether it really happened or whether the author just remembered it. He himself writes that “sometimes a different angle of view is enough, sometimes you think something different during the same conversation and draw completely different conclusions.” It’s true and there’s nothing to nitpick about. The brain remembers what it wants.
The stories themselves are really cool. I found answers here, for example, to two questions that have been troubling me. First, how did it happen that Polish punks released an album in the US in the 80s? Second, since we have two Krzysztof Grabowskis and both are musicians and both are famous, does it happen that people confuse them? There is also a story about how a Polish punk rock band ended up at concerts in Japan, how skinheads organized really serious fights at concerts, or what is up with drumsticks from the oven. There are also stories about a few dubiously legal actions, but the years go by, and I guess it’s time to speak out.
And how do his texts come about, when someone asks him, he will… answer. I, on the other hand, strongly identify with the story of coming up with great things in a dream, which you would forget about by morning, so you have to get up and write them down, even though you really don’t want to, and in the end it often turns out that it wasn’t even worth it.
press materials
Some people reading this may sometimes think that the band was grumbling that “we had to come back at night because the sleeping conditions were bad”. But… I have to defend my colleagues from the industry here. I know from experience that going to a festival as an attendee and going there for work are two different poles. When you just have to survive and go listen to music, sleeping in a tent or next to a bonfire with people walking over your head – cool, that’s how festivals are. But since I started going to festivals professionally, where you’re on your feet from eight in the morning to three in the morning, doing things, and the next day you still have to be focused and ready to work again, then… I assure you that a party over your head is the last thing you want at that moment. Imagine that after 12 hours of work you come home and your neighbor is having a party until four in the morning, and on top of that he invited 70 people and decided to open the windows so that you can hear better outside. And so it goes every day. Well, it’s the same in the music industry, only not at home.
The writing style is more conversational than literary, and of course that’s not a criticism, because it makes the story flow easily. I would easily compare it to a book Jarek Szubrycht “Leather and studs forever”only about punk, not metal, so obviously it’s cooler. The only thing that could be faulted here are technical issues. For example, pages 101 and 102 got lost somewhere in the print. Sometimes there’s also a lack of proofreading, but this book is definitely far from “Metalowe wersety”, where I had to sit with a pencil and insert commas, because otherwise my brain wouldn’t understand the content.
If you want to learn the history of the band, this book won’t tell you much in detail. But if you want to see what life was like for an underground musician in Poland, you’ll devour this book in one evening.