It always seemed that he was a boy. Yes, in a suit and tie (he looked exceptionally - both cool and modest at the same time) - and what, there are no boys in suits and ties? Are they in the same shorts in winter and summer jumping through the streets?
With such a smile! With such a radiant and incorruptibly sincere smile, do adult uncles go on stage? No!
Gil was my preschool childhood. My New Year - when Winter salted snowballs in a birch tub and I licked them all because of my childhood and thoughtlessness, tasted them, trying to find and detect salt. Cucumbers were salted at home, weren't they? Were! The same ones from the barrels in the "Vegetable". They were also caught with a huge net or scoop, like a fish with a net. And if you needed a brine, then this is in a jar, a bag, separately. And the snowballs were not salty. Although I, one devil, licked them again, and was in full confidence in the correctness of Eduard Gil and in my own method of knowing the world.
The ceiling is icy, the door is creaky,
Behind the rough wall, the darkness is prickly,
As soon as you go over the threshold, there is frost everywhere ...
And it was winter in winter, and from the words of the song a chill ran out of the gate - not at all May. And, swaying (this is also from the personal arsenal of knowledge of the world), or rather, dangling like a buoy in a storm, immediately after the "Winter" I walked and shouted: "Water, water-ah!!" - and this all meant the sea and summer, only then it was necessary to sing about the rain outside the windows and about "shaking the chandeliers". At about this moment, my parents were ready to kick me out of the house for anything - at least for a bucket of sand from the sandbox (summer in summer, and prepare the sleigh (sand for the Christmas tree) ahead of time).
Slow Sea Waters –
It's not like rails in two rows,
And the steamers see off ...
I didn't particularly like rails and the train - I endured. We went by train to the country, the doors (heavy and wooden) in the vestibules could easily cut a hefty boar in half (yes, yes - what can we say about a puny child), it was stuffy to the point of impossibility and you couldn't really see anything through the windows - every day the trains with trailers were not washed, there were difficult times. Falling out of the train, you found yourself in a fabulous spruce forest, the path ran between the trunks in children's three girths, it was gloomy, fabulous, a little scary, and needles fell into sandals ... And mosquitoes also bitten.
No.
The idol of my early childhood did not sing about trains.
He sang about moonstones, blue cities, seas and all sorts of interesting people, for example, about lumberjacks, and the phrase "hands are used to axes" has been stuck in the brain forever since that time and is already irremovable from there - a reflex.
People dream sometimes
blue cities,
Who have
There is no name...
He always reminded me of a paper boat - this beautiful and so fervently smiling Eduard Khil. A Leningrader, with cheerful, just laughing eyes, a man. How long is the life of that paper boat? How much life is that life for any of us? But come on, you sing and jump all the sorrows out of spite.
We are strange creatures, humans. Unless, of course, we remain human. And children - until old age.
His vocalise "I'm very happy, because I'm finally coming home", written by Arkady Ostrovsky in 1965, is about the entire sixties. About space above our heads, about Victory at an unheard-of price and the opportunity to just live. About joy. You know, in childhood there is such joy, from nothing. From the breeze, from the ladybug that tickles crawls and climbs on the arm and is about to fly to heaven, and there will be bread for everyone - both black and white, and not even burnt. In adults, such joy also happens - after terrible shocks. And if without them? And if it's just - from a breath of air?
He also sang serious songs, of course. And they turned out to be real, somehow he knew how to do without pathos, and he had an interesting habit - at concerts Gil alternated funny, simple songs with military, patriotic songs. And no one had cognitive dissonance - probably, they didn't know the concept of this, so they didn't ...
A thousand times I talk about the same thing: realness. Only she alone defines the singer. Either they believe you, or... You are tolerated. On stage, on TV and on the radio on the wall. Gil was not tolerated, he was loved - for his love of life, but he had seen everything: military childhood, evacuation, orphanage, illness. However... And who hasn't seen it then?
To the gallery page
There was one funny (and stupid) story with him - about the song "How good it is to be a general." He performed it at a concert at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. The generals in the hall were offended by Gil. And they removed Gil from the airwaves. Gagarin helped - he went to whoever needed it and explained that "this song is not about our generals, about Italians. It also says so: signors. It's a comic song, comrades." The comrades understood. Gil went on the air. They became friends with Gagarin, and then Gil sang Pakhmutova's famous song to Dobronravov's poems "Embracing the Sky".
If you knew, if you knew,
How the hands yearn for the steering wheel ...
The pilot has only one dream - height, height ...
You know, I still love him. His appearance (flashes on the Internet - so I immediately listen) causes a surge of bubbles of happiness in the blood and a feeling of air weightlessness in the body.
It's great that all this sudden and new popularity (of the same vocalise) covered him with a wave of world fame a year and a half before leaving, in 2010, as if saying: "You, guy, did everything right in life - you will continue there. To please people is the best of professions!" He continues, a good man, Leningrad resident Eduard Khil.
Give music, rather music,
More music, music —
Everything is somersaulting!
Narrow shoes, take off narrow shoes,
Take off your narrow shoes -
And barefoot!
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.