Yury Morozov is an enigma of Soviet underground music. Many have heard his name, some have even heard his music - one or two of his many styles of music - but everything else has been shrouded in a mist of uncertainty. Who is he? Where and with whom did he record his albums, so different to recordings of other underground rock musicians - both in content and recording quality? Is it rock at all? Yes, because he sings covers of the Beatles in Russian! Nonsense, he sings about God! He plays jazz! Not jazz, but rather "musique concrète"! No, his music is a sort of cacophony with absurd lyrics! No, he is "kinda Krishna, beloved by everybody very much!"* It's said he wrote it all in a nuthouse! Even the quantity of his recordings has itself become the stuff of legend.
Yury Morozov was born March 6, 1948 in Crimea. In 1960 moved to the North Caucasus, to Ordzhonikidze. It was there in 1969 that he formed his first band "Bosiaky".
Beginning in 1971, Leningrad was home to him. Yury set up a home studio, where he began experimenting with sound recording. He was well skilled in electronics, and it helped him to compensate for the lack of access to high-quality audio equipment and instruments.
USSR industry produced a very meager range of related products, and the "iron curtain" which securely held the country to “victorious socialism”** also blocked the import of foreign goods. This meant that music enthusiasts like Yury had to design and build not only effects and amplifiers, but sometimes speakers, mixers and even guitars.
In the autumn of 1972 Yury managed to land a job in the Leningrad studio of "Melodiya" record company. Working as a sound engineer gave him both invaluable experience and access to professional level foreign audio equipment.
"I remember how Yura admired great musicians, in particular a violin quartet of international fame, who, upon entering the Chapel for a recording session, used to shake hands with the janitor, the cloakroom attendant, asking about their health, about life's affairs. And, unlike them, some Soviet variety "star" burst into the studio, passing without noticing any small fry around, sending recording engineers for pies." - Nina Morozova
Yury was completely dedicated to his career: he worked on Melodiya projects in the evening and night shifts, and then, in the quiet morning hours when his neighbours were out at work he recorded his own music in his home studio. He used to do most of the work alone, with occasional help from his closest friends and associates.
After the middle of the 1970s Yury Morozov was already "well-known in tight circles"; tapes of his music had circulated all around the country. In 1976-1977 he ventured out of his studio environment and participated in several live shows with members of "Nu Pogody" band. One of his live performances at a party for at-risk teenagers at the "Druzhba" club was recorded and included in the discography of Yury as the "Group in Memory of Mikhail Kudryavtsev." In June 1977 the only performance of the Morozov-Kudryavtsev-Petrov power trio took place in the hospital on Kosciuszko Street which is now regarded as a Russian hard rock milestone. However, the humble product which a Soviet underground band might produce performing on mediocre equipment on third-rate stages was too far removed from the artistic vision of an engineer by profession and a perfectionist by nature...
"I'm afraid of professional musicians. They all enter into the temple of music and sound through the same narrow corridors. It isn't my way. I always play with amateurs only. The reason is, I'm not a musician in the conventional sense of the word. Sheet music makes me nauseous." - Yury Morozov
Later, Yury Morozov would work with many famous Russian musicians and rock bands - but these were very different times.
"When in 1974-75 Yura served in the Army after the Polytechnic college, I sold my clothes through secondhand shops; I sold books to raise money for a trip to Dolgoprudny near Moscow, where he served. We did not think about any career or money. Life was psychedelia. And work, too. Music, painting, understanding of each other, the search for meaning and value of human existence was the substance of our lives. It was the '70s! Actually this search and spiritual base remained the main thing for us forever." - Nina Morozova
During his life, Yury went through a lot of interests: music and literature - besides poems he wrote short stories and novels, about Buddhism and Agni Yoga, vegetarianism and raw food diet. He was starving, meditating. He once sold everything and went with his wife to travel in search of Shambhala. He was not a religious man, but it was he who wrote the most heartfelt and poignant songs in the genre of Christian rock.
But there was something he had never done: he never allowed the ordinary to crush him. He always sought out the exciting, the new, the unexpected. He could be straightforward and intolerable, but he never hid himself away. When he started to interest the KGB, he began to make duplicates of his recordings - in the event his work was seized he would still have a copy. Yury Morozov was a deeply "non-Soviet" person, entirely alien to the spirit of conformity, obedience, slavery. In Putin's 2010s Russia he would have had a hard time.
"Sovok**** rock and music in general are at stage of drastic stagnation. That does not bother me. I continue to work on the construction of my own cultural universe so I play the instruments not with hands now, but with thoughts in their pure form..." - Yury Morozov, shortly before his death.
Respect of professional musicians, cult status among the rock audience, and perhaps the most extensive and stylistically diverse discography in the history of Russian rock music did not bring Yury earthly riches: to the end he could not afford to buy a good guitar, playing on East German junk*****. Already seriously ill, Yury went to the doctors every day on the subway.
He died in 2006. His books have been published in small collector editions and are no longer in print. From his musical archive, which he restored and systematized in the last years of his life on 46 CDs (mostly 2 albums per CD), 6 CDs have been published. Nina Morozova keeps trying to raise funds for the publication of the rest - if you want to help, you can support her through the site in memory of Yury Morozov zcinzsar.ru
* This quotation about Yury Morozov is from a song by Mike Naumenko ("Zoopark" band)
** The label introduced by USSR Communist party congress in 1935. The congress stated that socialism had overcome and was adopted in general in the Soviet Union. “Victorious socialism” became a target for jokes among people in 1970s-1980s because the policy created a permanent deficiency of consumer goods.
*** Replacing foreign names with close-sounding Russian word combinations was a popular Soviet slang game. So "Beatles" turned into "Bityi Lys" (Beaten bald-header), "Led Zeppelin" turned into something like "Ice saw", and "Mahavishnu" was transformed into the similar-sounding "Maha-cherry" in Russian.
**** "Sovok" (dustpan) is still a contemptuous label for the worst side of the ineradicable Soviet mentality: servility, conformism, and resistance to dissidence.
***** According to his friends memories book "Against all odds". It may be error since Yury hinself said in one of his books that he sold his quitar in late 1970s.