I said in January that I should re-post this story. Took a while. I read a really amazing blog post today and its narrative involved the Bosnian crisis, so it inspired me to finally re-post this. I’ll share that blog post tomorrow.
I should set the scene: August 2003. I’ve been in Bosnia since the beginning of April. I have recorded an EP, my first project since a CD I hastily put together my last semester in college in 1997. I have a band comprised of three Balkan misfits I already have a great affection for. My drummer, Elvis, also produced the EP. I have a “CD release” gig at the longest-established rock club in Sarajevo (it existed–in some form–during the siege). I’m leaving in the days following the gig for the Slovakian mountains–a vacation with my wife’s family–and the Greenbelt festival in the UK, where I have a gig. This is the day of the gig:
So we have an ok rehearsal yesterday afternoon, I’m sure there will be some fuck ups tonight at the gig, but we’ll plow through them and in general rock, as long as there is a good crowd with some energy. I will definitely have NO voice after the gig. Just as well.
After we were done, around 7:30, the guys took me to pick up the CD’s. I immediately got a bad feeling when I was no longer dealing with the guy I had been dealing with all along, but was picking up the CD’s from these two gangster-looking guys working out of their low-rider Benz. I got back in our car with the CD’s and immediately Elvis goes, “Were they mofia or what?” I said, “I’m never doing business with that guy again.” But I got my CD’s, they didn’t look half bad, so that was that. I thought.
I got home and first thing stuck one in the CD player. I was never concerned about the music reproduction because, after all, this is now digital to digital reproduction, exactly like when you or I burn a CD on our computer: an exact copy, and you don’t have to be a techie to burn a CD on a computer, right? I was checking the disk more for skips or improper tracking (the pirated CD’s here are almost never tracked correctly, meaning “track 1” is the first song plus a split second of song 2–a major pain in the ass when you have your CD player on “random”)……but I popped it in and immediately, within a second, could tell something was horribly wrong…
You’re thinking: “The CD contained Bosnian turbo-folk music!” NO! That, my friend, would have been great—at least some hilarity to go along with my shock, disappointment and confusion.
The sound quality was simply horrible. It sounded like an analog recording reproduced 100 times (you know, like a tape of a tape of a tape … + 98 more times). My heart immediately sunk to the ground floor (we live on the 4th). I tried another one in disbelief…how could they fuck this up? …but it was exactly the same shitty quality. I had one of my two masters sitting right there, so I confirmed that it was fine; it was. I thought maybe the master I gave them was fucked up somehow, so I ran and grabbed it from the other room; it was fine too. I tried yet another CD off a different spindle and it was the same. I was fucked.
I called M in hysterics, I didn’t even know where she was or if she was going to help me. It was almost 9pm on a Tuesday and I was alone in a city that loves to hate me, up against some mobsters who had just ripped me off.
…Now this being the last minute and all, there was no fixing this problem in time…
M was out somewhere, and she offered to help me out and asked if I wanted her friends to come with. I said, yeah, that might be good. I called the guy I got the CD’s from, told him the problem, and we decided to meet right away to talk about it. M came and picked me up and we went to where those friends were hanging out. One friend in particular is this older guy with tons of connections all over the city. He first called the guy I was dealing with…then things got a little out of control…
I just wanted some emotional backup, but I got a touch more than that…M’s friend called the kind of guys* everyone is afraid of, apparently. Already long story short, the four of us went up the restaurant with the CD’s, I explained to Jr. Gangster Kid the problem, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “What do you want?” I said a refund, there was some hooing and hawing…and then, and this I did not see at all, only heard about it—those guys everyone is afraid of—showed up, they had just pulled their car into the parking lot, and within a few seconds I was getting my money back.
I bought the CD sleeves from somebody else, so I now have 280 CD sleeves and no CD’s. Today I’m burning copies of the disk to take to GB, to at least give away to people. Funny thing is, I could’ve probly burnt the 280 in 2 days with my two burners…even with my shit software I could’ve done a better, faster job by myself, with just some CD labels, than this guy did. When I get back in September, I’ll start looking at companies in the States who do CD printing, and it will be the end of the year before I see any CD’s that way, but at least I know they’ll be OK.
…the end…how things changed after that. I was actually back in the States in September, never to return to Bosnia again…
* They were known as the gray eminence, which I had never heard of at the time and thought sounded a bit funny but it turns out is a real thing.