Kaveret

Just three years of activity, from their 1973 debut to their split in '76, were enough for Kaveret (כוורת, trans. beehive) to establish themselves in the local imagination as the Israeli rock band par excellence.

Danny Sanderson (דני סנדרסון), the project's chief creative force, met Meir Fenigstein (מאיר פניגשטיין), Gidi Gov (גידי גוב), Alon Oleartchik (אלון אולארצ’יק) and Ephraim Shamir (אפרים שמיר) in 1968, while serving in the entertainment troupe of the Nahal Brigade, which brought together artists and musicians tasked with entertaining the troops (Nahal is part of the Israeli army's infantry, though at the time its members were mainly deployed for agricultural work).

The line-up of friends fully reflects the cultural diversity of the still-young Jewish state: Sanderson was born in Israel to American parents, studied in New York and had recently returned home; Oleartchik was a recent Polish immigrant, as was Shamir, who however was born in Russia; while Fenigstein and Gov were born and raised in Israel.

The five played together in Nahal for a couple of years, though with no ambition yet to form a band of their own. In 1970, Sanderson met radio host Dori Ben-Ze'ev and soon brought his friends in to create musical sketches with comic-satirical lyrics for Galei Tzahal, the army radio station.

It was in this context that Poogy was born, a bizarre and irritable character played by Fenigstein, who soon gave Sanderson the idea to compose "Opera Poogy", a rock opera inspired by the many that were coming out at the time ("S.F. Sorrow", "Tommy", "Arthur"), with a surreal, absurd storyline in which Poogy, returning from Japan, is swamped by acquaintances demanding souvenirs.

The work was recorded as a demo, so it could be pitched to theatre companies, but no interested producers came forward.

After their time in Nahal came to an end, the line-up seemed on the verge of falling apart for a while, with Oleartchik leaving for London. However, Sanderson's determination kept the project alive: Oleartchik returned, and the band was soon joined by Itzhak Klepter (יצחק קלפטר), who in the mid-sixties had played in Churchill's, one of the first Israeli rock bands. The group's name was decided only in 1972, with the arrival of Yoni Rechter (יוני רכטר), who had previously played in the band of the Israeli Artillery Corps.

Kaveret's first and only line-up featured Sanderson, Klepter and Shamir on guitars, Oleartchik on bass, Feginstein on drums and Rechter on keyboards, while lead vocals were mostly shared between Gov and Shamir, though everyone took part in the vocal harmonies and some songs were sung collectively.

In May 1973, during the ha'Zemer ve'ha'Pizmon Festival (the song and chorus festival, effectively the most important national music event between 1960 and 1980), Gov got the chance to meet producer Avraham Deshe (also known as Pashanel), who took an interest in the band and allowed them to record an album at the Triton studios, at the time the best in Tel Aviv.

The sessions began in June and wrapped up in September. Sanderson wrote almost everything, reworking much of the material he had composed in previous years, including some fragments of "Opera Poogy". Unlike that piece, the album does not develop a narrative continuum: as a condition for supporting the recordings, Deshe insisted that the songs be independent of one another. The band complied, but did not give up the character of Poogy, who is mentioned or appears – always voiced by Feginstein – on several occasions, so much so that the chosen title ended up being "Sipurei Poogy" (Poogy's tales).

Nothing much is known about Poogy, except that he often finds himself in surreal situations and that he too has an eccentric personality. He is, however, just one of the many over-the-top characters populating the record, caught up in scenes whose meaning is often hard to grasp, with lyrics that sometimes rely purely on the sound of the words.

The album is now a cornerstone of Israeli culture, to the point that some of its characters have become proverbial. In an article written for the Walla portal, journalist Nadav Menuhin argues that Kaveret were the ones who effectively introduced nonsense and surrealism into local song, influencing numerous artists in the decades that followed, including Isolier Band (איזוליר בנד), Teapacks (טיפקס), Ha'Bilium (הבילויים) and Arutz ha'Kibud (ערוץ הכיבוד).

Kaveret became hugely famous even before the album hit the shops: over the summer, "Ha'magafaim shel Baruch" and "Shir ha'makolet" were sent to radio stations as previews, and the audience's response was enthusiastic.

In September, the band is named band of the year by both the army radio station and Kol Israel, the public radio broadcaster. On October 6th, the Yom Kippur War breaks out, and the band is sent to play at various military bases across Israeli territory, further fueling their legend.

"Sipurei Poogy" is released on November 1st, just days after the end of the war, with a cover illustrated by Itamar Newman. Later a renowned artist, but at the time simply a friend of Sanderson's from their days in the Nahal, Newman has said he drew inspiration for the occasion from Flemish Renaissance painters, and to this day jokingly claims he was never paid for the job.

The tracklist opens with the title track, a kind of advertising jingle in which the band chants in unison that "you can learn a thing or two from Poogy's stories."

The fragment fades out after just 50 seconds into the first proper song, "Shir ha'makolet," which, despite its catchiness and the fame it went on to earn, is a work of labyrinthine complexity: while it keeps to a 4/4 time signature, the verse unfolds in three-bar blocks, while the chorus is defined by harmonic strangeness, developing without rigidly sticking to any one scale [note 1]. As if that weren't enough, at 1:24 a series of vocal variations and interweavings kick in, gradually altering the song's structure, followed at 2:27 by an instrumental break led by an electric piano solo, with the drums doubling up the tempo, spilling into a finale where music and lyrics are so intertwined that, to make sense of the former, you first have to unpack the latter.

The opening section is made up of a series of nostalgic vignettes, but it gradually grows more tangled, in step with the instrumental backdrop:

I remember her at the grocery store

I remember her buying semolina there,

she'd have me carry the krembo

and ask me for bottles of Tempo,

I remember her buying cumin bread there,

I remember her from way back, from third grade.

Give me the money and I’ll give you my heart,

I cross the street and go back to the grocery store,

I pick up the army radio and I pick up new immigrants

from Russia (we're almost there!),

Kfar Shmaryahu

More than the references to local food (krembo is a pastry, Tempo a soft drink brand), what's interesting is how the narrative shifts perspective, with the protagonist first lost in memories and then found busy serving Russian immigrants (one of whom, in a thick accent, threatens: "We're already coming"). Kfar Shmaryahu, which pops up out of nowhere, is a residential area north of the Tel Aviv district (could this be where the story is set? There's no way to know).

The character perhaps has feelings for the woman, as suggested by the line sung in English, itself introduced by a phonetic play on words that gets lost in translation: "third grade" in Hebrew is "kita gimmel," and the second word sounds similar to the English "give me."

Right after, the memory rewinds, but this time a contrast emerges between the two characters, complete with direct speech:

I remember her, she had a mouth and a nose like a chicken,

and she said she loved tangerines

and she even ate the peels of clementines,

"give me more cream and give me that butter" –

"you don't have any more money, so go home.

What would you do if you'd been born a year before

the grocery store was invented?"

After that the vocal variations begin, with one line repeating over and over "she goes to the grocery store and buys a chicken," while the others pick the lyrics back up from the beginning.

In the finale a new line enters, this time the spoken part of an outside observer, who describes the protagonist, giving his full name:

And so sat Yudokulis Lipshitz, sad and aimless,

and tears kept streaming from his eyes without stopping,

without stopping, without stopping, without stopping, without stopping,

it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter,

and she chews, and she chews, she chews and chews,

it's not Yosef, it's not Yosef, it's not Yosef, it's not Yosef,

and that's enough, and that's enough, and that's enough

The protagonist looks back on times gone by and regrets never managing to build a real relationship with the woman; then the spoken recitative merges with the choruses and the music begins to repeat itself with ever-growing intensity, tracking Yudokulis's feelings.

At that point the last spoken phrase ("without stopping") starts being repeated, gradually shifting in meaning according to a precise phonetic progression: although this doesn't come across in the Italian translation, in Hebrew all the words repeated from that point on share a similar sound, and while for a while the narrative still holds together (Yudokulis cries, then tries to pretend he doesn't care, then remembers her chewing on clementines), at a certain point only the sound remains and the lyrics lose all meaning entirely (where does this Yosef even come from, and who is he?), just in time to bring everything to a close ("and that's enough").

Beyond the sophistication of its musical and semantic structure, the track also showcases the band's high technical standing, with a sound that fits squarely within the prog universe, marked by a wide range of shadings: virtuoso Rechter's Fender Rhodes piano lends a delicate jazz touch, akin to contemporary Canterbury musicians, while Klepter's guitar attempts subtle blues shadings in the background, and the chorus points unmistakably to Jewish folk.

The vocal harmonies, perhaps influenced by the West Coast school, reveal a band with at least four capable singers: the lead is Shamir, but the backing vocals also shine, with Gov and Sanderson singing in unison, Oleartchik's obsessive variation on buying chicken, and Gov's closing recitative. Perhaps less technically refined, but hilarious in effect, is the Russian immigrant's scream, handled by Feginstein (as is, in fact, every nasal voice the songs call for).

The song sets the mould for the whole album: progressive pop tracks with folk and jazz shadings, where complexity and accessibility go hand in hand, dense with vocal harmonies and refined clusters of instrumentation, in which the events narrated aren't necessarily comic in themselves, but are rendered so by the way they're delivered, in the name of the absurd.

"Ba'yom u'ba'layla" (lead vocals by Shamir, backing vocals by Sanderson) is an ethereal folk-pop number, a love lament that still finds room for playfulness ("I knocked on the door, you answered that you weren't in"), while "Sherut atzmi" (with Gov on vocals) is a piano-driven soft rock track that surveys a man's life from birth ("I spent years in my parents' nest, but only on a trial basis") to old age ("they say my wife is getting old, but judging by the mirror, which looks so much like me, the factory will be closing soon").

The band is still keen to show it has several expressive modes at its disposal and can tackle important themes with real seriousness. It does so with "Yeled mizdaken" (lyrics by Oleartchik, vocals by Gov), a minor-key folk rock track with electric organ and falsetto harmonies, which deals with depression, and from whose closing lines we learn that the protagonist has been admitted to a psychiatric institution:

A boy is growing up,

a boy is ruining himself,

he learns his lesson

only after he's fallen.

[The boy] speaks badly,

"just forget it",

that's what they tell him

when it falls in the street.

Today you woke up at two in the afternoon,

you saw the time, such darkness in your eyes.

What can you do when dad gets angry?

This year you should get married!

You got up and went to Tel Aviv,

you saw people trying to make something of themselves at such a high price.

What's the cost of a boy who's studied,

who doesn't want to live and feels like a nobody?

A boy is growing up,

a boy with a degree,

he talks a lot, but for us it's not enough,

he lives in his bed,

he turns on the heater,

how strange it is when life has slipped by in boredom.

Dear mom,

a boy is growing up,

it's very sad,

when they bring you your son,

take me aside,

talk only to me,

I want to play with building blocks on the rug.

Poor mom

“Lemrot ha'kol” runs about seven minutes and pairs the album's simplest lyric – a love song with just one or two metaphors about the nation of Israel (“despite everything, we've stayed here, on the land of those who are ready”) – with one of its most intricate pieces of music: part jazz-rock ride, part melancholy slow number, and although it's mostly in 4/4, it's packed with a myriad of variations, accent shifts, and moments where the number of beats per bar changes. At 1'06” there's a marked drop in bpm, without the tempo actually halving (in an era like the Seventies, when musicians were less used to playing rigidly to a metronome, pulling off tempo changes of this kind was trickier), at 1'19” a sequence of four bars unfolds, three in 4/4 and one in 3/4, at 3'20” there are a few bars in triple time and then in 5/4, at 3'44” a few in 3/8, and so on.

“Po kavur ha'kelev” is essentially a folk nursery rhyme, with lyrics that veer toward the absurd, but above all it's the first track where the character of Poogy appears, Feginstein's characteristic voice playing off the others' harmonies. It's one of the most disjointed lyrics, made up of a series of lysergic dialogues between Poogy and a chorus. The opening alone gives you the idea:

Chorus – “Here lies the dog, here lies the dog, this is the crux of the matter”

Poogy – “No, it's the dog's bone”

Chorus – “But the dog's been dead for ages”

Poogy – “Well, that's the bone of contention”

The next track, “Sipur ha'aron”, isn't a song but a spoken-word piece performed mainly by Gov, perhaps the album's finest moment in its blend of theatre of the absurd and modern fairy tale (not so far removed from some of Gianni Rodari's writings):

Well, our story begins in a big house on the corner of What Street and Why Street…

after all, it's Poogy's house.

And inside the house there's a closet,

and inside the closet there's a group of people who've been waiting there for a long time.

Shlomo felt very uncomfortable among all those clothes

and next to him sat Vittora Presto, Hichi Papa and Logi Grasko,

and they passed the time to make the time pass.

One day they all got up and stepped out of the closet

and while they were standing outside the closet

Shlomo suddenly remembered and, putting on his best voice, declared:

But Poogy had asked me to wait for him in the closet!

[He] said this, and before you could say "Jacob Abulafia", [note 2]

Poogy walked in, carrying the groceries, and was left stunned.

"I told you to wait for me in the closet!", he exclaimed,

and everyone had guilty looks in their eyes

because everyone felt guilty,

and since there's no use crying over spilled milk, Vittora Presto

poured the milk on the floor right away, so that no one would cry.

[Poogy] noticed the milk on the floor, got angry and said:

“Not only did you not wait for me in the closet,

but you also spilled milk on the floor?”

At this point, everyone realized what a mess they'd gotten themselves into.

Logi Grasko hid under the sofa and started making rug noises,

Vittora Presto cried over spilled milk

and Hichi Papa, unable to bear the embarrassing situation, sat down.

Logi Grasko, Hichi Papa, Vittora Presto and Shlomo

were all very, very sorry about what had happened

and regretted not having waited in the closet.

Moral of the story:

it's better for four people to live in a closet

than to pay 550 lire a month for a one-and-a-half-room apartment

Still at the crossroads between progressive pop folk and jazz-tinged soft rock, “Lo yadanu ma la'asot”, sung lead by Shamir, continues the story, this time with no external narrator, but from the point of view of those locked in the closet by the overbearing Poogy. For the second and final time on the album, the tone turns tragic: the metaphor is essentially a universal representation of any kind of distress (it could even seem like a stand-in for the Holocaust, though this has never been confirmed by the band, who have in any case never been keen on explaining their lyrics).

We didn't know what to do,

[whether] to sit down or leave,

so we've only just peeked...

Poogy, it's no sin!

And the darkness around us,

we don't know if it's day,

we push and we suffocate,

we can't breathe.

We don't understand why suddenly

not a single sign [from outside] can be heard,

so we really think

we've been sitting for nothing.

Nations and states hang from the stars,

and we, like turtles on their backs,

hung on coat hangers.

It's painful and pointless

living inside a closet,

and I'm just pleading,

I hope you understand what happened.

Poogy, it's overwhelming!

"Yossi ma nishma", a short instrumental jam designed to showcase the musicians' virtuoso skills, is followed by "Ha'magafaim shel Baruch" (lead vocals by Sanderson), a sort of postmodern klezmer in the shape of a folk-rock march, punctuated by ragtime piano breaks. The lyrics are a satire on materialism, so direct they need no explanation:

He'd bought them cheap, they were full of sand,

he cleaned them with alcohol every two hours,

he fed them soup

and when they threw up, he stayed silent,

he took them to the movies every other day.

But one day he woke up,

still half-asleep he looked for the boots in the closet,

but where he'd put them away only socks remained,

and it all made sense to him:

shoes are bought quickly

and socks are never in short supply,

but boots and trousers,

which are always bought together,

will now be very hard to find.

He set off barefoot on his way,

with a cold and worn out besides,

fully aware of the gravity of the situation

and when he asked a passerby

if they'd seen his boots…

for decency's sake we'll leave out the reply.

Baruch searched the village and the town,

in a very delicate state,

depression turning his mind upside down,

when, without hope, he turned

to the missing persons office,

the receptionist got furious with him.

And so, near a farmhouse, he filled up his canteen,

he found tracks that hadn't been left long before,

and suddenly, among the bushes, he heard whispers,

he saw him in the arms of another boy.

He didn't know what to do,

whether to laugh or to cry,

anyway he pulled out a handkerchief,

took the boy aside

and pulled out the gun,

he shot him in the backside.

Then the boy said "I'm sorry",

folded up the blanket

and went back home without trying to be clever,

and from then on, to this day,

whether in the rain or in the heat,

[the boots] are stitched directly to [Baruch's] bones

The closing track “Yo ya” (with Gov on lead vocals), released as a single after the album came out, does call for some explanation. Not so much for the music, which is still one of the most exhilarating funk rock tracks of its era, but for the sheer amount of wordplay and references it contains. The lyrics are divided into stanzas, each recounting the misadventures of a different character.

I got a punishment that was a bit over the top,

they sentenced me to death,

I sat down in the electric chair,

I said goodbye to the car / to [the rank of] soldier.

If only I could at least

swap chairs,

because as they usually say:

change your place, change your luck.

In the fourth line, the ambiguity between car and soldier comes from the word “praivet,” derived from the English “private,” which in Hebrew can mean both things, and the specific context doesn't make clear which one is meant. Then comes the hymn-like chorus, in call and response with the choir:

(Hey yo ya) I ask,

(Hey yo ya) answer,

(Hey yo ya) is it right?

(Hey yo ya) you don't know.

In the next stanza the wordplay hinges on the word “daver,” which means both “thing” and “postman”:

My brother used to collect stamps

in fact he worked at the post office.

He delivered letters,

he was even promoted.

One day a supervisor noticed

that my brother was also collecting the letters,

he was fired from the job on the spot,

because there's an end to everything / postman.

The third room ties into a biblical passage – “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise” – taken from the “Book of Proverbs”:

I had an uncle who was so lazy

who was too lazy [even] to laze around,

he would go to the ant

and come back in a bad mood.

Had he been less stupid,

he would surely have known that there's

an addition to the proverb:

consider her ways, and be wise.

In the last verse, with a catastrophism worthy of Inspector Clouseau, the wordplay hinges on "tov'im", the plural present tense of the verb "to drown", and on the root "tov", which in isolation can mean "good", "well", "better" — effectively creating an ominous twist on the saying "two is better than one":

My cousin wanted to swim

so he could always stay afloat,

he studied swimming by correspondence course

with a renowned lifeguard.

When he finally went into the sea

he vanished within seconds,

two people immediately dove in after him,

because two drown better than one

Given the feverish anticipation, the album flies off the shelves and shatters every record in Israel's still tiny music market (the country had a population of 3.2 million at the time), selling 70,000 copies in a year.

Its success also endures over time: reaching the 150,000-copy milestone around 1995 (at least according to accounts from musician Izhar Ashdot and the newspaper Yediot Ahronot), it stands as the best-selling Israeli record among those released during the Seventies, with an abysmal gap over any hypothetical rival (no other album from that decade has ever reached 80,000 copies).

As mentioned at the outset, Kaveret's adventure was short-lived, but after the split all its members launched solo careers that were successful and, on average, of high quality, with the sole exception of Fenigstein, who became a major film producer. There have nonetheless been occasions to bring the band back together, if not to record new studio material, at least for the odd concert, each time hailed as an event.

The last such occasion came on August 7, 2013, at Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, in front of 50,000 people, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of their debut. Unfortunately there won't be any more, given the death of Klepter on December 8, 2022, due to complications related to COPD.

[note 1] Our colleague Marco Sgrignoli explains as follows: the track is built on the Aeolian mode of the key of G major (more commonly known as E minor). The verse moves comfortably within the key, but the chorus throws things off balance by borrowing two chords from the parallel minor (G minor), moving first to the flattened seventh and then to the major third, before returning to the starting E minor with a perfect cadence that restores balance.

[note 2] Hayyim ben Jacob Abulafia (1660-1744), a rabbi who lived in Smyrna during the Ottoman Empire. It is left to posterity to understand the reason for the reference.

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19/01/2025