This is part 4 of the little series about great songs with even better covers. It may blow your mind; I guarantee you it will be the most incredible music story you have ever heard.
Since about the early 90s, I was a fan of the Polish rock-punk-ska band called
Kult, established in the early 80s and led by a singer-songwriter-saxophone player
Kazimierz Staszewski, famous in Poland as Kazik. About that time, the band released a record called "Tata Kazika" ("Kazik's Dad") consisting solely of covers of songs written by Kazik's father
Stanislaw Staszewski in the 1950s and 60s. The songs were incredible. Their lyrics were (still are) the very best I have ever heard in either of the two languages I know well. Kult's music was also very good. At the time though, as pretty much everyone in Poland, I had no idea who Stanislaw Staszewski was or that Kazik had a dad who was himself a musician.
During World War II, Stanislaw Staszewski was a soldier in the underground anti-Nazi
Home Army. As a participant of the
Warsaw Uprising, he was arrested by the SS and shipped to
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Germany. While in the camp, he contracted pneumonia. The camp guards mistakenly thought he had died, and threw him into the heap of dead bodies that were to be burned later. However, a package addressed to him had arrived at the camp, which prompted one of the inmates to go look for him. That's how it was discovered that he wasn't quite dead. He had managed to survive until the camp was freed by the Americans. He then returned to Poland, became an architect, got married and had a little son named Kazik. He also started writing songs that he would perform at house parties for his friends. Exiled from Poland by the communist, he and his wife left for France. He left his family though, and went on to live by himself in Paris, still writing songs, God only knows for whom. He died there in 1973.
His son Kazik grew up without a father, and, for most of his life, passionately hated him for abandoning his mother. That's part of why, even though he knew his music and was a musician himself, Kazik never touched his dad's songs until the 1990s. Another reason for this reluctance was that Kazik was at the time a deeply religious man (a Jehovah's Witness, though not baptized), and his father's lyrics were dark, depressing and quite vehement in their denial of the existence of God. They were exactly what you would expect from writings of someone who once lay dying in a heap of naked bodies destined for a crematory furnace. They were also magnificent.
At any rate, at some point Kazik changed his mind and his band made two records with covers of his dad's songs ("Tata Kazika" and "Tata 2"). Some time later he also changed his mind about religion and became quite an outspoken atheist.
Below the fold are two versions of the song
Celina, which is a story of love, jealousy and murder, set in a poor and crime-ridden neighborhood of pre-war Warsaw. The cover isn't actually the official version from the "Tata Kazika" record; rather, it appears to be a private performance by Kazik, but whatever, it doesn't matter.
