For some fast and rumbling moments, memories of the war between Croatia and Serbia seem far away, buried beneath the rock euphoria of the band Daleka Obala. The group is playing in an old cobbled courtyard, crowded with about 2,000 fans and the usual debris of beer bottles and spent cigarettes.
Behind the stage remain scars from last year’s mortar attacks, which left shattered windows and splintered roofs on the centuries-old buildings around the Vega Club. Even now, as most in the crowd understand, Serbian forces remain within easy mortar range, flanking Osijek on three sides.
Yet young fans near the stage dance with their hands in the air, and others drink Coke or beer, while bandleader Marijan Ban sings: “Why, why must we fight/every day and every night?/Why, why must we die?”
Early last year, Ban was carrying a rifle on the front line, as were two of his bandmates. A third was in the Croatian navy. The reunited quartet from the coastal town of Split is just part of an uneasy rebirth of a Croatian music and nightlife scene in the year since a cease-fire halted the war.
But things are still not as carefree here as before the war. Isolated sniper and mortar attacks continue in the border areas around
Croatia. And memories of the war that erupted with Croatia’s declaration of independence from the former Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991, still keep some away from the reopened clubs and bars.
“Before the war, I was a happy young man,” says Ban, who once sang mainly about girls and sailing. He joined the army after a sniper’s bullet nearly struck his baby daughter. “But now I’m too much older. I’m not singing happy songs like before.”
Much the same can be said of the young generation of Croatians who are nonetheless venturing out again at night. At the Dali Caffe in Osijek, Goran Grahovac, 28, stands outside with some friends, singing along with the hopeful pop of Neno Belan’s “Sunny Day,” which blares from the club’s sound system.
“Near the end of the war, places like this started to open up,” says Grahovac, who did underwater demolition for the Croatian military during the war. “But I didn’t want to go out. I don’t know why.”
In Osijek during the war, young people risked their lives to go out to small clubs like the Jazz, built in a midtown basement of this elegant city of 100,000. Many nights, men and women crowded around the bar, listening and drinking, as grenades showered the city.
“You live for one moment, a second moment, a third moment, and you are happy to be alive,” Miroslava Gacinovic, 26, recalled of those days and nights.
For others, the danger was part of the experience of stepping outside. “During the war we were in Osijek all the time and we were out more often than right now,” says Dijana Lujic, 19. “It was fun because it was dangerous.”
Jazz co-owner Darko Pepis, 26, says he kept the club open during bombardments as much for the comfort of himself and his brother as for his customers. Soldiers often stopped there for a drink direct from their duties on the battlefield, joining a regular crowd that was there night after night.
“The most important reason we remained open is that people needed it,” Pepis says. “There was no other place to go out, come together and spend time, to be with your buddies.”
At Dali, Gacinovic sips cognac and says: “We were living in basements, and we were going out to basements. Our whole life was in the basement.”
Most of her friends from college either were killed or moved abroad during the war. Those who stayed have developed ulcers, high blood pressure or other medical and psychological problems.
“Everyone was sad, without money,” Gacinovic says of the first days of the cease-fire. “When you went out, you only heard sad stories. Now we are starting to forget. People are going out much more.”
Although mortar shells are no longer falling on Osijek, parents here and across Croatia are still afraid to let their teenagers out. There are many guns on the streets now, often carried and fired recklessly by drunks.
“One night I didn’t tell my parents what time I would be back,” says Goran Brkovic, a tall 17-year-old with a ponytail. “They waited until half-past 4. They were worried someone had cut my throat.”
A devastated economy
At Vega, music director and co-owner Edo Unkovic has invested in metal detectors and two Doberman guard dogs to keep such dangerous elements away from his club.
But a greater problem for him and other club owners and music promoters is the ruined Croatian economy, in which a physician typically makes as little as $150 a month. Few people have the resources to go to clubs regularly. And many young people have left the war-torn city for more opportunity elsewhere.
“A lot of young people with ambition want to get money and don’t want to wait five years, two years, three days for the country to stop the war, and economic growth,” says Unkovic, who served in a special-forces unit of the Croatian army during the war. “I am a little bit older. I have some capital and investment, and I must stay here and prepare for the better days, or the bad days. . . . Tomorrow a grenade could fall here and everything is finished, and I must put on my uniform and go to the front.”
Others have suffered in different ways. Nino Dvornik, a top-selling Croatian dance-music artist, lost about 80 percent of his audience when Serbian fans across the former Yugoslavia stopped listening during the war. Now he rarely finds gigs willing to pay for his full eight-member band.
At a recent concert at Vega, Dvornik sang to a recorded backing track, sharing the stage with a woman who danced behind and occasionally tapped an unplugged keyboard. “I’m glad Yugoslavia is now history,” he says, “but I used to make a lot of money.”
The emergence of wartime artists like the singer Thompson, who took his name from the famed American submachine gun and who topped the Croatian pop chart for several months, has also been a frustration for career musicians.
“When war started, everyone sang about the war,” Dvornik says. “People who were not singers were singing, `We will kill the Serbians!’ People really don’t know now who are the real singers.”
The arrival of MTV in Yugoslavia about five years ago did much to foster an active modern rock movement in the Balkans, producing everything from punk to native folk songs.
“There are plenty of good musicians,” says Daleka Obala bassist Boris Hrepio, 30. “But there is no hope for them because there is no opportunity. You have to work very hard. I don’t have a family, so it is easy for me. But two guys in my band have children and we have to play everywhere so they can buy food.”
The capital of Zagreb suffered less direct damage from the war, but that city’s nightlife scene has yet to recover.
At the Zagreb Hard Rock Caffe (not associated with the chain, but an excellent copy nonetheless, with all the appropriate autographed posters and memorabilia), the customers with the most to spend are United Nations troops from France and England. While they buy drink after drink, Croatian customers often buy one cup of coffee and sit over it for hours.
A slow record market
For many, record buying has also dropped in priority, and CD players remain an expensive luxury. There remain only five record shops in the town center.
On the street, a group of long-haired college students sell used records to passersby. Some also peddle bootleg tapes of recent releases from Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Whitney Houston.
“We sell records to buy beer and cigarettes, that’s all,” says one bearded 25-year-old, who goes by the nickname Blaf. “And we love rock ‘n’ roll.”
Blaf says he has been selling rock and pop discs with his friends at this spot for nearly six years. In one box, Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps” album shares space with Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” and Lou Reed’s “New York.”
Later at a nearby bar, Blaf and a friend complain about the disappearance of concerts by major Western artists since the war. In the year before the conflict, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, the Ramones and Tina Turner had performed in Croatia. Now only a few Croatian acts even tour their own country.
A police officer joins Blaf and his friends at the table, and soon the music peddler is wearing his police cap, quoting from Pink Floyd and toasting “peace and music.”
A few beers later, his mood drops as he forgets his love for music and struggles to understand the war and everything it has taken from him and his country. Blaf lost his best friend on the battlefield, and for a moment the distraction of rock hardly seems to matter to him.
“Why?” he asks. “Why did my best friend have to die? Why?”
