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Abstract

As in all other spheres of life in Bulgaria, the political and economic transition in the end of the 20th century caused a se-rious impact on the functioning of youth culture. After the formal socialist institutions and organizations were disbanded, various

informal youth communities emerged, affiliated on the basis of music preferences and other interests. This work is dedicated to the development of rock culture in a small peripheral town in northwestern Bulgaria. I am trying to show how the local rock community was formed and also its lifestyle in the time of transition through claiming common identity and common space. So the object of the study is outlin-ing that place’s the atmosphere, everyday practices and the interactions between the members.

Key words: youth culture, rock culture, subculture, public/private space

This work which traces the history and function of the rock culture in a small peripheral town in northwestern Bulgaria1 is a part of the research project «Youth subcultures in post-socialist Bulgaria», headed by senior assistant professor PhD Vihra Barova from IEFSEM – BAS. Most researches related to youth subcultures in the field of anthropology and sociology focus on the situation in larger cities (for example Taylor 2006). The study of a small subcultural community, which remains in many aspects apart from the cultural and information flows while attempting to express and assert its identity, allows a more dense cognitive picture of youth (sub)culture in Bulgaria.

How was the local rock community in peripheral towns different from the sub-culture in the larger cities in Bulgaria in the 1990s? In a number of ways: Rock fans

1 About the history of rock culture in Bulgaria: Барова 2004 [Barova 2004]; Леви 1993 [Levi 1993]; Спасов, Воева 1992 [Spasov, Voeva 1992]; Дайнов 1991 [Daynov 1991].

‘OUR PLACE’, OR WHERE THE ‘BLACK SHEEP’ USED TO HANG OUT

Yana Yancheva

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in small towns were far less numerous than in the larger cities. Most of them usually knew each other both inside and outside of the culture. Provincial towns did not have a critical mass necessary to create subsets of subcultures defined by genre or alle-giance to a group. In larger cities of Bulgaria there was (and still there is) a degree of differentiation between the fans according to music style preferences; tension and competition among the communities often arose. Unlike the big cities, competition between the youth groups (companies) was rare, or did not exist, in small towns, because the preference of the music style was not decisive for their formation. Also, all groups had similar lifestyles and ‘occupied’ common places, while trying to es-cape the adults’ control.

Being less numerous and living in a more conservative social environment, com-pared to those from larger cities, the fans from smaller towns were much more vi sible and exposed to formal and informal institutions’ control and supervision. These factors made the local rock communities more cohesive and distinguishable from the surrounding social environment. Although away from the main informa-tional flows, many of them were able to shape a specific lifestyle and influence local everyday life.

The selected town is a good example of how the youth subculture movements are popularized. It was selected for several reasons. It is a small (population in 2014 – 12 726)2 and peripheral town in northwestern Bulgaria, near the Bulgarian-Serbian border. It is often described as an ‘ordinary’ Bulgarian town. The researched town is also interesting because the history of its rock culture can be traced back to 1960s.3 It reflects both the influence the youth subculture movements have had on the eve-ryday culture of the peripheral regions of the country and the continuity between several generations of rock fans.

I am also an insider – coming to this town as a participant observer. Born in the small town, I was a part of the local rock community from the 1990s and the early 2000s. This position enables me to gain a deeper insight into the dynamics and the community’s evolution using my own experience and recollections. Knowing rock fans from different generations and social positions, I was able to conduct sincere and open interviews and to collect sometimes quite intimate personal information, which otherwise would be difficult to share with strangers.

The aim of this work is to show the formation and functioning of a subcultural community in the selected town in the 1990s, seen in terms of the shared place. As the research objects are the rock fans that formed an outlined community a central topic for the research is the relation between the shared place and the identity formation.

Michel de Certeau offers a definition of ‘place’ as an order of coexisting elements or of ‘instantaneous configuration of positions’. According to him, the ‘space’ is composed by the relation between direction, velocity and time, so it consists plenty of ‘intersections of mobile elements’ (or moving bodies). The space is a ‘practiced

2 http://www.nsi.bg/nrnm/show9.php?sid=270&ezik=en3 Yancheva 2012; Yancheva 2013.

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place’ because it is a result of the producing operations, happening in it, which situate and temporalize it. So the space is expressed ‘by the actions of historical subjects’ (Certeau 1984: 117–118).

It may occur that Marc Augé’s opposition between his definitions of ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ is based on Certeau’s opposition between ‘place’ and ‘space’. Augé identifies the terms ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ as ‘instruments for measuring the de-gree of sociality and symbolization of a given space’. However, he calls the space of circulation, consumption and communication ‘an empirical non-place’ and iden-tifies the ‘anthropological place’ as ‘any space in which inscriptions of the social bond or social history can be seen’ (Augé 2008: VIII). The latter is characterized by some features. The anthropological places are recognized as places of identity, of relations and of history. As Augé’s definitions are not applied only to physical forms, but to abstract ones, too, these features of place present a system of possibili-ties, prescriptions and interdicts which have both a spatial and social content (Augé 2008: 42–47).

Here the so called Club with its characteristic of a space of community’s identity formation is presented in the light of Certeau’s definition of space as a place of the community members’ producing operations and practices. Augé’s perception of non-place as a space of producing consumption and communication can be also applied. Both authors admit that the elements, coexisting in the same place, are bound by their interrelations and the shared identity but it is shaped by the frontiers between the insiders and the others.

The main research method in this paper is conducting thematic and biographi-cal interviews with the rock community members. The biographical methods focus mainly on interpretation rather than the historicity and are able to reveal the com-plex and multispectral image of the of individuals and groups’ experience (Roberts 2002: 21; 76–77). They allow understanding the changes in the social and historical experience of individuals in their beliefs and cultural practices of everyday level, the meanings that people attach to their actions (Fischer-Rosenthal 2000; Rosenthal 1997; Ludvig 2006). The individual interviews and some thematic group discus-sions were conducted in 2012. People who I talked to were from different gen-erations, born between the 1960s and 1980s, with different social, educational and professional status. Almost all interviewees knew each other and knew about my past and about my purpose. They had kinship or friendship relations, or were just ac-quaintances from the time of their common youth. There were individual interviews with fathers and their children, brothers and sisters, couples and intimate partners. Some group discussions between friends were conducted. Life stories include the narrators’ biographies, recollections and description of everyday practices and spe-cific events in the community.

In the research I also use my own memories and the method of participant obser-vation in the past and present. Concerning this, I have in mind the ‘danger’ of ideal-izing my youth past. The third method is archival investigations of the local news-papers. They provide information about the place of the local rock community in the

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town’s social and cultural life and also reflect the local society’s attitude towards the rock fans. Collecting and investigating old personal photos help in reconstructing the community’s life and image. I will keep the identity of the respondents and the name of the town in secret due to the nature of the shared information and due to the fact that some of the informants interviewed for the project, still have conflicts with police and other institutions.

Here I am presenting the specific place as a factor for consolidating a subcultural community. The earliest researches on subcultures in North America were concen-trated on the topic of the deviant behaviour of the youth in the frame of the ‘local’. The European tradition in cultural studies pointed its interest towards the youth subcultural resistance. In the 1970s the British cultural studies theorists (Birming-ham school) conducted significant researches which rejected the idea of deviance and substituted it with the idea that youth’s deviant behaviour had to be recognized as actually a negotiation between the social groups which had different level and strategies of adjustment for resistance. That idea offers ‘more politicized opposition between youth and dominant or parental culture’ (Laughey 2006: 22).

The concept of youth subcultures seen through the terms of social class and generational unity presents subcultural resistance as regulated and dominated by the ruling class and media (Laughey 2006: 23). As David Muggleton points this concept romanticized the working class character of youth subcultures as a lone resistance against the dominant culture and the parental culture. This concept rec-ognizes the youth as a class of its own (Muggleton 2000). Andy Bennett rejects the deviant frame of reference in studying subcultures and suggested a new approach which sees youth as capable to produce and defend its own culture, norms and val-ues (Bennett 2000:15).

In my work I am using of the term “subculture” based on Sarah Thornton’s broad definition. She defines subcultures as social groups that are perceived as originating and deviating from the normative ideals governed by adults or the dominant culture (Thornton 1997). They are mostly informal and organic, and their members are united by the principle of personal choice (although there are exceptions). Subcul-tures operate on the basis of shared consciousness of belonging to the “otherness” and the “difference” in the context of the large and dominant culture. Sarah Thorn-ton determines the subcultural space as ‘an integral part of growing up. It is a rite of passage for the young people which marks adolescent independence with freedom to stay out late with friends… in a space which is relatively their own’. It allows them to gain independence from adults’ control as well as to indulge in the ‘adult’ activi-ties of flirting, sex, drinking and explore cultural forms which confer autonomous and distinct identities (Thornton 1997).

This definition is appropriate about studying the local rock community, as its members tried to shape and demonstrate their own identity and were unified by the perception of being different from the mass. But despite the rock fans’ need for isolation and differentiation from the dominant culture, they simultaneously tried to become an influential part of the towns’ cultural life and to give some transparency

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to their lifestyle in order to break the common prejudices and stereotypes of their negative image among the population. This situation shows that as Dan Laughey explains ‘youth subculture is not created in an autonomous space but is negotiated through localized interactions shaped by structuring influences’ (Laughey 2006: 17). So the local youth (rock) culture can’t be studied as an isolated phenomena struggling against the dominant culture, its identity is shaped simultaneously by context itself, by its effort for resistance against that context and by the efforts to establish negotiation with it.

The context

In the period of socialism the researched town developed some industries4 as well as agriculture. On a local level it was popular as a tourist destination for bal-neological treatments and its proximity to the mountains. In the 1990s life in small peripheral towns especially in the Northwestern region was strongly influenced by the transition to democratic government and the market economy, which caused many cultural, social, economic and political transformations. The town lost its pre-vious positions in industry, agriculture and tourism because the largest and most profitable factories and the balneological centre were closed and destroyed. Today the Northwestern region in Bulgaria is understood to be the poorest region of the EU.5 As a result of all these factors the town’s population has decreased with 20 % since the 1990s.6

The last decade of 20th century was characterized by liberalization of cul tural life and cultural market (Еленков 2011: 399–402 [Elenkov 2011: 399–402]; Еленков 2008: 478–517 [Elenkov 2008: 478–517]; Дойнов 2011: 381–384, 402–403 4 One of them was a huge factory for plastic production which in the period of socialism was specialized in producing plastic medical equipment for the Eastern Bloc market. Other important industries were a factory for abrasive tools, a factory for extraction and processing of marble and many smaller factories for processing plastic, wood and wood furniture.5 In contrast, the economy of the Northwest region is lagging far behind the national level, the region having the highest unemployment rate in the country. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/docu-ments/3217494/5626883/KS-29-00–787-EN.PDF/8beeb02f-d724–45b8-ae5c-81c8ee4f7 fae?version=1.0,1-9.; also in: http://www.dnevnik.bg/bulgaria/2011/02/25/1049980_ severoza-padna_bulgariia_e_nai-bedniiat_raion_v_es/ It has the following characteristics: The degree of ur-banization in the region is 63.2%, below the national average rate of 72.5%; The economic activity of the population aged 15 years and over is the lowest in Bulgaria – 45.0% in 2010; According to the National Statistic Institute’s data the employment rate of the population aged 15 and over in the Northwest region for 2010 is 40%, which is lower compared to the national average rate (46.7%); In 2010 the unemployment rate in the Northwest region registered an increase (7.1% in 2008, 8.0% in 2009 and 11,0% in 2010); The region forms only 7.42% of GDP of the state. The Northwestern region has the lowest rate of GDP per capita in purchasing power parity in Bulgaria and in EU for 2008. (http://www.oblastmontana.org/add/SIP_SR.pdf )6 National  Statistical  Institute,  National Register Of Populated Places: http://www.nsi.bg/nrnm/show9.php?sid=270&ezik=en

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[Doynov 2011: 381–384, 402–403); expanded opportunities for exposure to west-ern music and culture, growing the sense of the occurrence of «freedom» in young people’s actions to demonstrate their identity (Yancheva 2013). Since then many in-stitutions charged with youth socialization (like the Pioneer and Komsomol Organi-zations, very influential in the socialist period) were closed, and the local cultural institutions decreased their activities due to budget shortages.

The second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s (predominantly among the generations born in the 1970s and early 1980s) heralded the culmination of the formation of rock subculture in the town. During this phase, it took on its clea-rest and most distinguishable features and its members shared a common life. In the end of the century the local rock community had an essential presence in the towns’ cultural life, organizing many small concerts for local bands and even some popular Bulgarian ones. Despite the economic situation of the region, it initiated the foundation and organization of one of the first rock festivals in the country. One of the reasons for this activity was the formation of a common space, visited by all rock fans in the town, which is the object of this research. As well the rock fans took actions which tried to declare their position in the cultural (and social) life of the town.

Outlining the atmosphere in the Club, everyday practices and the interactions be-tween the members, I am trying to show how the local rock community was formed in the time of transition through claiming common space and common identity. It is an example of the spontaneously emerging, informal, initiated from below, (pre-dominantly but not only) youth communities which occurred after 1989 when the formal institutions were disbanded. They had to organize and shape young people’s informal everyday life and leisure time in the second half of 1990s, to give a frame of their identity as opposed to the parental culture or the culture of the mainstream youth, to stand out of the mass.

History

In late 1980s and early 1990s, in the town there were a few kompanii7 of fans who were visible and identifiable as belonging to the rock culture.8 They were con-stantly interacted with one another and had their own strategies of demonstrating their rock identity. Yet all these youth companies were unified within the framework of the local rock community due to two main reasons – the preference for rock and metal music, and the desire to ‘break normality’, as reflected by adults and their institutions.

The study of the rock and metal fans from the late 1980s and early 1990s reveals the changes in youth culture that occurred as a result of political and social transfor-7 Groups of young people, who were related by fellowship based on common childhood or neigh-bourhood, common interests and preferences in music and sport or studying in the same class.8 For understanding the characteristics of rock fans at that period, see Yancheva 2013.

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mations in Bulgaria at that time. For example, the popularity and the experience of the youth metal bands from the late 80s inspired and influenced the latter evolution of the local rock and metal scene and saw an increasing number of youth bands in the next period. In previous periods there were many fans and companies as well, but their relationships between each other and their actions in practicing rock culture were more individual (Yancheva 2012). Unlike them, the fans who were aged 16 to 22 in-between two political eras gradually began to recognize themselves as sharing the same culture and to consolidate a community based on their common interests and ‘struggles’ (Yancheva 2013).

But the foundation of a common dwelling for all rock fans from the town was mainly a result of the activities, initiated by a group, belonging to the earlier gen-eration who were born in the early 1960s. That group formed the Long Table rock band and gained popularity in the town. In the early 1990s, inspired by ‘the wind of change’, their stage contributions supported the political party Union of Demo-cratic Forces. In the late 1980s the band had many concerts ‘on the stage’ of the local so called Club of Cultural Activists (Клуб на културните дейци). This club was located in the basement of the town’s cultural institution chitalishte (House of Culture) and its purpose was to provide a stage for the local cultural elite’s perfor-mances. Until the end of 1989, except the public activities, this club was open only for members. After that, for a few years the new director of the Chitalishte opened the club for the wide audience and he invited local bands, rock and pop musicians. So the Long Table band’s concerts there attracted many rock fans in the club.

Meanwhile, in the early 1990s the harder styles of rock music (from hard rock to death metal and hard core) became very popular among the teenagers of that decade and the need for a public space, where they could gather and listen to their music arose. In the beginning such a place was the Video Club (the ex-cinema and a disco at the weekend), which was the public space, where all young people from the town gathered. In 1992 two young men, rock fans from the generation ‘in-between two eras’ opened the very small Buffalo’s bar (with just three tables) in the town’s centre. Immediately but for short, it attracted all rock fans in the town from all gen-erations.

In 1994 the Club of Cultural Activists was hired by a private businessman. The membership was removed and the bar was open for the wide public. The Long Table band and some high-school students’ and garage bands started to perform regularly at the club. Thus the place was gradually “conquered” by the rock fans of all genera-tions but predominantly by the generation the high-school students and it entirely changed its functions, image, atmosphere and visitors.

Interior

The contractor never changed anything in the bar’s interior. It was essentially a long corridor with a larger space at the end with an old piano and a space for dancing.

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The capacity of the bar was about 80 people. One of the most important elements, which gave the club a homey, cozy atmosphere, were the large sofas (‘these damned sofas’), allowing gathering of large groups of people and direct communication be-tween the tables. As one of the former visitors (male, born 1968, pedagogue) points out, the interior was creating a familiar space where friends could socialize: „… We could talk to each other through the tables … narrow, homey, familiar … from the first to the last table you could see good friends.“ From the first sight one could see the shabby state of the bar: big ragged sofas; scuffed tables; mouldy walls; old jangly piano; and a wood stove for heating the bar in winter. Due to the low rent, the businessman was obliged to open the place for the same cultural activities and events, as during earlier (socialist) periods; or as one of the rock fans said: ‘From time to time they took it away from us’. The bar offered predominantly alcohol, beer, hot drinks and some snacks. The barman was a long-haired and toothless man around the age of 50. The waitresses were often recruited by the visitors. One of the interesting people in the bar was the old waiter ‘from the old guard’, known as the first professional waiter in the town. His elegant manners and style contradicted the whole atmosphere, but he was successfully integrated into it without changing his professional habits.

Visitors = the community

Soon after it was hired by the businessman, the Club became a dwelling of al-most all rock fans in the town from all generations. Its attractiveness was due to several reasons. The main one was the fact that the contractor of the club could not be selective about his clients. All of those with provocative behaviour or appear-ance (long hair, tight jeans, very big shoes, large long skirts, black or very colourful bright clothes, hand-made jewels); all outsiders or as an interviewee admits (male, born 1973, poet, web-designer, unemployed) ‘those who were a thorn in peoples’ side’, all of them were welcome. The opportunity to listen and play rock music without causing discontent9 was conducive to the ‘appropriation’ of the bar by the local rock fans.

Another very important factor was its location and its nature as a hidden and underground space, which allowed the life inside to be hidden, undisturbed and invisible for the outsiders. The cultural institution, the chitalishte, is located in the town’s centre, opposite the Town Council and the Town Hall and very close to the High School, the Police station, the central garden and the disco. The club’s location in the basement of the cultural institution as located ‘under the official culture’, gave it symbolic meaning as a hidden and underground place. There were no windows, lights, signs, advertisements outside to suggest the existence of the bar, due to the

9 According to one of the fans, other bars and cafes offered ‘hamburger music’.

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total light and sound isolation. As most of the visitors pointed out that the people in-side ‘were looking for isolation’, despite the regular check-ups of the police officers.

In the earliest times (1960s and 1970s) the groups were strictly boyish or girlish. At the teen age they used to gather only for school concerts or informal parties in the town’s garden, where boys were performing on guitars or just making fun and the girls were the ‘audience’ (Yancheva 1912). There was a firm control and supervi-sion over girls’ behaviour and leisure time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s at the teen stage, the members of the kompanii were also mostly boys, because the school-aged girls were still rendered more control over their behavior, people they met with, and the time to come home. This is why the girls at that generation joined the male kompanii mainly after finishing school and only for partying as girlfriends or suitors of the boys. They remained in the periphery of the groups (‘a girly fan club’) without participating in other activities.

This trend strongly declined in the second half of 90s. For the first time there was a relative equality between the genders, concerning the number and their involve-ment in the events. This change in the gender status of the local rock community was due to the lower parental control over girls’ free time (compared to previous genera-tions); and also due to the girls’ own feeling of emancipation, they began to feel as equal partners to boys across most of their activities.10 For the first time there were mixed kompanii, within which both genders had equal statuses, and in some of them the leading core was composed by girls, or they had the position of informal leaders or other influential roles. For example, girls began to organize popular and crowd parties at their homes or country cottages, inviting many people from different kom-panii.11 They also arranged hiking excursions to the near mountain, organized the camp (when boys were helping) and initiated some minor ‘rebellions’ (protests at school for various reasons, spontaneous midnight swimming in the central square fountain, funny and sometimes scandalous scenes in the Club, plenty of alcohol and marihuana ‘experimental’ gatherings and many others – activities that were inap-propriate for girls’ behaviour in the socialist period). Other girls were influential for attracting new members (recognized like ‘cool’, ‘funny’ or ‘interesting’ people) whose presence was valued in their mixed fellow circle. In the The only exception with the lack of girls’ involvement concerned the rock bands formation. Playing was still entirely a boyish activity, but some of the girls showed interest in guitar lessons. In the Club context girls had equal status as boys – they would organize parties,

10 Despite the Club was visited by men and boys from different generations of rock fans, due to the mentioned change, the only female visitors of the bar and the only visible female fans of rock music at that period were teenage girls, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s.11 Among previous generations girls were waiting to be invited to males’ parties or their status of ‘popular girls’ would increase if they were associated with most attractive boys. But now, in the late 1990s, it was often when the boys’ status as ‘cool guys’ would increase if they were invited or had the opportunity to participate in parties and other activities, organize by girls, who were recognized like ‘interesting’ or ‘extraordinary’ or if they had access to their kompanii.

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initiate dances, chose the music, bring decoration but the concerts were organized by the male half.

Among the rock fans at that time there were also entirely or predominantly fe-male or male kompanii. In the Club context sometimes members of the girlish and boyish groups were flirting or philandering with each other or made a couple, with-out breaking the groups’ ‘boundaries’. It means that the romantic relations were rarely involved in the groups’ social life. Sometimes outsiders (members of other different groups) used to gravitate around a core from the opposite gender, forming a ‘fan club’ or being associated as ‘temporary guests’. In some mixed groups the choice of partners and the romantic partnerships were accomplished (recruited) pre-dominantly inside the group. This is the reason for changing the partners between each other inside the fellows’ circle (it means that almost all boys had a relation or flirt with almost all girls from the same group) and this tendency sometimes con-tinued to their mature age when they chose marriage partners again among their school-time fellows. In other mixed groups, the romance and relations inside the group were (intentionally) avoided, but often the guest-partners were constantly incorporated in the company.

Most often particular groups were formed on neighbourhood, age or school or class-mate principles. It was common even for the older generations of rock fans and visitors of the Club. There were entirely musicians’ companies, formed around bands. The Club was ‘inhabited’ by 5–6 very big and distinguishable companies12, but they all communicated openly with each other and over time the borders be-tween them became more and more difficult to be determined, their members often mixed or became involved in other groups. Some people gravitated or participated in two or more companies due to different kinds of relations, like friendship, love, work, or school contacts. Later, especially after the closing of the Club, and after different sets of life changes (like marriages, leaving for university education, mov-ing to other places, or change of work) some of the companies were reduced and their members mixed with members from other groups. Others left the subcultural scene and the town forever.

We can conclude, that the 1990s marked the period of the local rock commu-nity’s existence, when it fully formed as a subculture due in large part to the op-portunity all rock generations to ‘inhabit’ a differentiated and hidden space, which they quickly transformed and recognized as ‘theirs’. Until that period, the local fans used to communicate predominantly in the frames of their own generations. In the 1990s, due to the atmosphere in the Club, people of different generations – from the oldest to the youngest (among them there were even fathers and children) had the opportunity to communicate directly, sharing common parties, heavy drinking ses-sions, hooligan adventures, organizing common concerts and performances, even some of them were connected through their work or families.

12 One of the interviewees tried to identify them like: ‘one of the companies gravitated around the Mordor music band’, ‘the female company’, ‘your company’, etc.

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Some of the groups united members with preferences to harder styles of rock music, especially the bands’ companies. Others united people with different tastes, varying from the music of 1960s till the 1990s. In the Club it was possible to hear various kinds of music: jazz, rock, metal, wave, grunge, hippy, music from the 1960s and 1970s, even Goran Bregovich (the soundtracks ‘Underground’ and ‘Arizona Dream’ were hits at that time) and Prodigy. The element which united all visitors was their perception of being different in the context of the small town, where ‘the day starts in the dark morning and ends with the TV’s first programme’13.

The Club never functioned as a café or a bar for short meetings and coffee or vodka breaks, but it became a place for constant communication. This is the reason some of the visitors (usually students) spent all day there, even during class-time. There was a great differentiation of social status. It varied from unemployed, self-employed (middle-class businessmen, musicians, workers in the field of construc-tion, interior and exterior, stone-cutters) to intellectuals and officials (lawyers, poets, architects, journalists, some young teachers and members of the municipality) but the predominant group of visitors were high-school students. All kompanii included members from all social statuses and these differences did not affect the whole com-munity’s internal cohesion and homogeneity. The relationships were based on the principle of personal prestige, the personal characteristics and mutual trust.

The people, who visited the Club, spontaneously formed an informal and self-controlling community. They recognized themselves as belonging to their specific community, defined by shared space and practices, music tastes, uncommon behav-iour, interests and even life goals and belonging to the rock culture as a whole. They share the perception of having a common identity of rock fans, and of being different in the context of the small town (the ‘different ones from the mass’, of the people who were trying to avoid the mainstream tastes and mainstream behaviour14. Today all in-terviewees recognize the visitors of the Club as the local rock community from the late 1990s. They also rationalize that behind the doors and walls of their ‘haunt’ they used to form a hidden and secret world, which caused the others’ curiosity and uncertainty.

The life inside

My personal memory coincides with all of the interviewees’ recollections, which universally describe the Club as a place, where everyone felt ‘at home’. Usually the

13 A popular Bulgarian song: ‘Our Town’, composer Boris Karadimchev, performed by Tangra Band.14 These are some answers of my request to informants and the ex-visitors of the Club to describe the atmosphere inside: (male, born 1962, lawyer, former member of the municipality) ‘[a place] for a bit different circle of people’, (male, born 1973 poet, unemployed, web-disigner) for people ‘with different interests’, (male, born 1962, social pedagogue) ‘there were no people [to come] by chance’, ‘those who weren’t interested, decided to leave’.

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members of the separate companies used to sit together on the same table, but it wasn’t a rule, especially in the end of the evening.

However the cozy atmosphere was not only due to the common perception of shared interests, space and belonging to the community, but it was also due to the visitors’ intentional efforts (their producing practices): they rearranged the sofas and tables to achieve maximum comfort and opportunities for direct communica-tion; they formed the dance floor, made the D.J. cabin, brought their own recordings, brought old guitars and posters to decorate the walls (or as one of them says ‘to make it more typical, more comfortable, as made for yourself’), men used to keep the fire in the stove. There was no a DJ; the visitors used to choose the music by themselves, drunk enthusiasts sometimes used to play ‘cold jazz’ on the jangly pi-ano, and the bands used to have performances very often.

Many of the ex-visitors still recognize and remember that the people’s efforts to create this home atmosphere were not occasional but intentional: (male, born 1968, social pedagogue) ‘instead of staying at home, I am there’, ‘… narrow, home, famil-iar … from the first to the last table you could see good friends’, (male, born 1976, musician, composer) ‘it was cool – the same as you were at home’, ‘the enchant-ment was due to the fact that when they got drunk, they could sleep [on the sofas] and when they got sober, they could go home’, (female, born 1977, teacher) ‘we were sitting there as we were at home’, (female, born 1979, painter) ‘they brought alcohol, and even the snack’, ‘trying to make it for yourself’.

The Club had that intimate atmosphere of being ‘home’ because the community members’ private lives happened there: partnerships almost exclusively were with-in the community. People celebrated weddings, engagements, New Year Eve, name days and birthdays together. They shared heavy drinking sessions to commemorate divorces, split-ups, and friends’ commemoration, made future plans for businesses, migration, family or education. In the evening the children were slept on the big so-fas. It seems that the visitors’ behaviour in the Club was more typical for the private sphere as it is defined according to Jeff Weintraub’s idea of the sociability approach on the opposition public – private. He takes private as the realm of personal life and relationships, domesticity, intimacy and friendship, as well as of the invisible and the secret character of ‘privacy’. It is the realm of the family, ‘the collective unit, consti-tuted by particularistic ties of attachment, affection, and obligation’. And Allan Silver says that ‘the domain of private life is characterized with valuable and moral qualities such as intimacy, affection, generosity and trust’, which are recognized by the visitors as existing among them at that time (Silver 1997). Weintraub sees the public as the realm of sociability, which is constituted by diversity and social distance. This is the realm of the impersonality, the formal institutions (‘the market and bureaucratically administered formal organization’) and the instrumental relations (Weintraub 1997: 18–21; 37). So following this approach of opposing private to public I accept that the intimate atmosphere, created by the local rock community, and the ties of friendship, trust, self-control, affection between them took the Club out from the frames of the

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public space and the place adopted the features of a private space, where the life inside was active and communicative, but it was invisible for the public outside.

However, it is difficult to talk about common or shared interests in general, be-cause the people who ‘inhabited’ the club were very different. As one of them (fe-male, born 1979, teacher and office assistant) said, ‘some of us didn’t like reading, others were on the other side, some of us used to do nothing, others had very big ambitions’. But all interviewees with nostalgia and romanticism remind that the Club united them, providing them with the opportunity to ‘communicate with peo-ple, close to each other’. One of them (female, born 1978, painter, babysitter) says: ‘there were no dress codes, you could have parties with those who you liked and the prices were cheap’. There were long joke marathons; discussions about ‘the things of life, about life and death’ (male, born 1973, poet, web-designer, unemployed), about books, movies, music, future plans, and personal problems, new projects for concerts or business were planned. Or as one of them (male 1973, artist, farmer, unemployed) said ‘One company had a few topics’.

The people in the Club were able to create successful means of self-control and maintaining moral principles and order. Some people said: (male, born 1973, poet, web-designer, unemployed) ‘It created own values (principles) and started to defend them’, (male, born 1976, musician and poet) ‘almost all of us didn’t support such acts’ – aggressive drinking and fights, (male, born 1962, journalist, who was on many different public positions) ‘there was a particular ethics inside’. Despite, the fact that drinking was a central activity in the Club, aggression and behavior which could de-stroy the common confidence and peace was not tolerated. Each form of aggression (verbal or physical) was prevented in advance by the insiders. The poet born in 1973 explains: ‘People didn’t tolerate particular acts, which didn’t correspond to the com-mon life…, neither conflicts with intruders who used to shout too loudly, who used to drink too much, who wanted to fight, or tried to use drugs.’ Almost all people, who used to visit the Club, were looking for active communications with close people and for the opportunity to have fun. At that time among the rock fans from the town there were only 3–4 boys who had problems with drugs, and they mainly used legal medi-cines from the pharmacies, because they were accessible.

At that time, the local rock community’s common ideas referred to rejecting the mass consuming culture, conformism and uniformity, referred to the need to defend their right to express themselves freely, nevertheless the public opinion. Some of the rock fans from different generations are still recognized by their fellow-citizens as ‘freaks’, because of their eccentric appearance and nonconformist lifestyle.

Projects

The transformations in Bulgarian society after 1989 generated the aspiration among many people to express their identities in an open manner, so plenty of vari-

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ous eccentricities were performed in the social space at that period. Despite its hid-den and secret life inside the Club, the rock community in the town generated the self-perception that its culture was worth and the need to express its identity to the wider audience. So the rock fans organized a number of events and activities which allowed them to become more visible to the public and worked to break the conservative and negative images of them as ‘outsiders, losers, junkies, degraded drug-addicts’15. The local newspaper started a column about rock music and the his-tory of rock culture in the town. Its authors were some members of the community. At the same time, the newspaper presented most of the public events, which will be described below.

Among the fans, some of them distinguished themselves as informal leaders, who inspired the others with their ideas, some of them were too bold for the context of a small town. Some played in more than one bands. They performed in the Club or in the neighbouring garden. But the front-man of one of the groups – Mordor – was a young man (1974–2012), a stone-cutter by profession, and an artist by vocation, who managed to inspire his friends with his ideas and when he arrived in the town he immediately took on a unifying role. Every Christmas he organized big concerts for his band in the cinema for his birthday, but other bands, even from neighbouring towns were also invited. He was the ideologist and the leader of his band Mordor, which became ‘a legend’ and gained many fans not only in the town, but also in the whole of northwestern Bulgaria.

He and another very active rock fan, a lawyer and a member of the municipality (born 1962) often invited other bands from the area and many famous Bulgarian rock groups to play in the Club. In summer, the life of the bar moved out in the neighbouring garden, there were concerts, parties with guitars, tape recorders and improvised dances. In winter the parties were sometimes organized in other places like stone-cutting workshops in the grave yard, the rehearsal halls in a small factory, and cottages outside the town.

After the success of the small rock performances in the Club and the garden, their organizers had the idea to organize a big rock festival in order to provide entertain-ment, new contacts, new music for the rock fans and the town. Many interviewees point the lawyer and the journalist from Long Table Band and Mordor’s front-man as the progenitor of this project but many rock fans from different generations were involved as volunteers in the organizational process. The festival became famous as the first rock festival in Bulgaria16. All of the famous Bulgarian rock bands, many unknown bands from all over the country and some bands from the Balkans per-formed on its stage. The big successes of the festivals were the concerts of famous foreign musicians like Exploited, Joe Lynn Turner, Graham Bonnet, and others.15 One of the interviewees (male, born 1976, musician and composer) said: ‘The people in the town think that everyone, who wears a black T-shirt, is a drug-addict and a degenerate.’16 It had nine issues: 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012. But from 2006 till 2008 it was with another name and was organized by the municipality, not by the community members.

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The foundation of the festival marked the end of the Club’s existence and the be-ginning of another influential period of existing of the rock culture in the town, but its history deserves its own article. For our purposes it is important to point out that through the rock festival the local rock community not only declared its presence, but also had essential impact on the town’s cultural life, on the local government’s aspirations to attract tourists and visitors in the town and influenced the develop-ment of rock culture in the Bulgarian northwest, and even in the country (despite not so distinguishably and glamorously as places like Kavarna, Bourgas and Sofia). Also the foundation of the festival coincided with the foundation of a second rock club, called ‘Friends’, which managed to unify again the whole rock community in the town and continued to invite on its stage many popular bands from Sofia and the region.

The end of the existence of the Club

During the period of the Club’s existence, the ‘scandalous’ behavior and life style of its visitors was exaggerated over and over again, which became one of the main reasons for its closing in 1998. Rumours spread of crowds of drug addicts, alcoholics, ‘sectants’ (people involved in dangerous cults or religious ideas), and degraded, aimless people. The municipal newspaper defined it as ‘addicts haunt’17. All interviewees remember that at that time conflicts and aggression in other bars and disco clubs in the town exceeded many times the ones in the Club regarding their quantity and quality. Although the Club’s visitors, as a rule, did not tolerate aggression and tried to calm down any and all conflicts, police officers checked it regularly compared to all other bars in the town. The Club was the only bar in the town, where they made actual check-ups of visitors’ age (1996 – 1997). The other complaint was that the Club’s music used to disturb the order after 22.00 pm, which was also groundless because of the total sound isolation. On the contrary, none of the discos were fined or closed for this reason, despite the loud music which dis-turbed the near neighbourhoods. This was due to their owners’ influence over the local official institutions.

Many of the interviewees think that the main reason for closing the Club was political. The mayor and Town’s Council closed the club in order to gain political popularity prior to the 1998 elections. But according to other fans, the most signifi-cant reason was the businessman-contractor’s wish to transform the bar into a res-taurant in order to increase his profits. But his plans were not successful and today the place is a fitness club.

17 Cohen (1980) and Jock Young (1971) show that the moral panics were caused and constructed by dominant ideological apparatus such as media and the police.

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Conclusion

Despite officially open for all visitors, the Club became a space, ‘inhabited’ by an underground community with its specific culture, norms and identity. The place lost its characteristics of a public bar for meetings and consumption. In the frames of the rock community, inhabiting the Club, there was a variety of personalities, tem-peraments, social statuses, professions, tastes, eccentricities, preferences for music and lifestyle. However, the locked, self-regulated community was unified mainly by the shared interests in music and by the shared need of expressing the members’ individuality and otherness. The differences and the diversity of individualities were managed by the mutual acceptance of each other’s otherness and by the established norms of tolerance. Disagreements were very rare and on personal level, and the community managed to suppress all conflicts through the established self-control mechanisms.

The interviewees’ used expressions like ‘The Paradise is lost.’ (male, born 1968, social pedagogue); ‘It was cool time, glorious time.’ (male, born 1973, artist, farmer, unemployed); ‘The Club was the real place.’ (male, born 1973, poet, web-designer, unemployed); ‘[It was] a dream in the past.’ (female, born 1977, teacher) show their perceptions of the Club as a place, bearing the spirit of sympathy and empathy of the rationalized otherness. It was the place, where everyone brought a piece of themselves, of their world, of their spirituality, taste, sensuality, of their oth-erness and uniqueness; and they (we) incorporated all these elements in one shared common space (patchwork), where the tolerance, the mutual trust, the confidence and the open communication were raised into an ideal. The inner moral was not imposed by authority or power, but it was a part of everyone’s ethics. In the ‘haunt’ where many and different personalities gathered, everyone used to come to find isolation from the outside world and to find or create their own ‘home’, to experi-ence themselves and to find out a partner. Despite the establishment of the Club was essential for shaping the subcultural community’s features, it is not the one and the only factor. Rock fans were driven by two opposing needs – to hide the intimacy of their relations and on the other hand, to reveal their ‘otherness’ and tastes (through some public activities) in order to break the common prejudices and fears. This striving to balance between hidden production of practices (in the Club) and public performances (open air concerts, festivals and local newspaper publications) aiming to negotiate their presence in the dominant cultural and social context was also an influential factor, shaping the local rock fans’ identity. The aspirations to express openly their ‘otherness’ was premised also on the social and political changes after 1989 in Bulgaria, when young people and

The existence of the Club marked the period of its visitors’ personal growing and gaining maturity, most of whom were teenagers or at their 20s. The Club’s closing was not only a result of objective, pragmatic reasons, imposed by one’s will, interest or authority. Its end is a metaphor of the visitors’ release from the life-saving and feeding cocoon of their youth. The Club was the place where many dreams, plans

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and longings were born and that atmosphere of creative energy and bursting inspira-tion became a launching spring-board for many of the insiders. Not all of them were able to succeed, not all of them wanted to release themselves from the cocoon and to ‘fly wings’, but many others grabbed this inspirational energy to make a start in life and never looked back. I think that the end of the club was the symbolic end of the adolescence for many of the insiders. According to my perception that is the reason for the Club’s atmosphere of mutual trust and affectionate relations never could be found again in the second rock club – ‘Friends’, which was created by for-mer visitors of the previous one exactly after its closing in 1998 and also gathered all the rock community in the town. However the Club’s spirit continued to live in everyone, who ‘inhabited’ it.

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