Family roots?
– I come from Podkarpacie. One grandfather, Edward Wrona, fought in the Anders Army, he went through the entire combat trail. The second grandfather, Józef Ortyl, landed in a repatriate camp in Romania after the September Campaign, from where he escaped. He fought in Yugoslavia in the partisans of Josip Broz Tito, in 1944 he decided to return to Poland and crossed the whole of Europe from Yugoslavia to Mielec, where I come from, and here he fought in the Home Army. After the war, my grandfather and his brother were caught by the secret police, they cut off my brother’s knees with a wood saw, and they only abused my grandfather.
And the grandmothers?
– Józef’s grandmother on the side of grandfather Edward from Anders brought up a large family, produced food and smuggled it from the General Government to Krakow. Grandma was a brilliant cook, many flavors I remember to this day. Grandma Maria on my mother’s side was artistically gifted, there were teachers and musicians in the family, I got my first violin from my aunt, she persuaded me to start learning to play it at the age of 6. I guess it was after my mother’s family that I went in the direction of music.
Tell me about your education.
– Primary and secondary school in Mielec, studies in Rzeszów. During martial law, I was given dean’s leave in order to perform basic military service.
I graduated from the army, my friend from Mielec Krzysiek Kaszowski transferred my papers from Rzeszów to Lublin, I graduated from the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University.
In Lublin, I worked in the student radio, I went to Radio Lublin, in the meantime I went for an apprenticeship to “Trójka” and stayed there.
That’s the whole story.
Your resume is extensive and rich, let’s pick some tasty morsels. You have met and talked with many celebrities. Like Tina Turner, Carlos Santana, John Lord…
“Each of these many meetings was important for different reasons. Each of these meetings opened a completely new door to the history of music for me. I sat with Tina Turner and her manager for four hours in a hotel in Moscow, this interview showed me the power of New Orleans, Tina showed me what rhythm and blues was.
Jean Michel Jarre showed me the roots of electronics, I spent three weeks with him preparing for his great concert in the Gdańsk Shipyard, I was formally his press spokesman, but also a bit of a guardian, helping him in all matters in Poland.
Meeting James Brown allowed me to understand a man who invents serious things in music and watches other people make money from it. Conversations with Czesław Niemen, Zbyszek Namysłowski, Wojtek Karolak, and Michał Urbaniak gave me a lot – all this put my perception of the musical world in order.
Meeting with Bill Laswell, Carlos Santana or Metallica allowed me to open new gates in the history of music. I organized all this in my head and today I say about myself that I am a music historian, I say it with humility, and the work of a historian never ends, it always lasts until the end of my life, and that’s how I perceive my task.
What is the task?
– Gathering music, gathering knowledge about music, about all pop culture. Propagating it because it is wonderful, because it is very logical, because it can enable others to take a stance on what they see around them.
You announced concerts of such stars as Erykah Badu, Blues Brothers, Uriah Heep, The Stranglers…
– As for Uriah Heep, for example, I was with the late. Adam Galas, the producer and organizer of the concert that took place on August 15, 1992 at the 10th Anniversary Stadium. The concert was called: “Let the world smile at them”, the income from the concert was intended to help children of HIV carriers. 70,000 people turned up, the band got £5,000 for the show and the gig was sponsored by Cats magazine. And I had the opportunity to introduce Uriah Heep. As for The Stranglers, they played at Sala Kongresowa, I’ve always loved them, I had the opportunity to introduce them, talk to them after the concert, I have their autographs.
And what’s the story with Erykah Badu’s concert and her teeth?
“There was a lot of tension before. Erykah brought her entire team into the dressing room, and there they prayed for 50 minutes. When they came out, all in cargo pants, they looked like a Black Panther commando. We were a bit scared of what was going to happen, but after that it was quite fun. After the show, I did an interview with Badu that nobody wanted and he never showed up. To make it more interesting, the tape with the recording disappeared in the depths of Teleexpres.
When we started the interview she asked me: with or without teeth. I didn’t know what it was, it was a mouthpiece that allowed you to produce a certain kind of sound while singing.
How was it with the Blues Brothers?
– With the Blues Brothers, Mariusz Adamiak, who organized the concert in 1996, knew that I was a big fan of both film and music, and asked me for an announcement. I remember walking up to guitarist Steve Cropper with a bunch of album covers and books and saying, ‘Could you sign me? And he looks at me like that and asks what is this? This is some of the records you played on, that you produced. And he smiles, kind of angrily, and says: And you fucking like my wife, recently she counted that I played on 900 records. Okay, I’ll meet you after the concert. We sat in the bar of the Sobieski Hotel in Warsaw until four in the morning, he told me how the Blues Brothers Band was formed. It was a fascinating conversation, one of the greatest experiences of my life, which ended with an unexpected finale.
what?
“I gave him some contact information. A few years have passed and a lady from Warner Bros Poland calls me and says: Mr. Hirk, I have a package for you. Send it by post. No, no, because she’s so undersized, and we have a prikaz from the States to deliver in person. All right, I gave the address, a package was brought to me and inside there was a Blues Brothers hat, a Blues Brothers tie, a Blues Brothers shirt, a Blues Brothers CD, two movie CDs, gadgets and most importantly: original Ray Ban Blues Brothers glasses, made for the band, you couldn’t buy them anywhere. It turned out that when they were shooting the first film, John Belushi lost over 1,000 pairs of glasses on the set. There was such a party.
Did you also support, among others, Depeche Mode and Santana as a DJ?
– Not only them. In the case of Carlos Santana, I was supposed to send the entire track list to his management in the States. It turned out that Santana personally approved it. And he was most proud of what he personally told me before the concert, that I noticed one of his most favorite recordings ever, i.e. “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young. In the case of Depeche Mode, I prepared an original set with post-punk electronic music from Manchester. At the beginning, fans of the band had a lot of concerns about what this Wrona would play there, would he be able to do it at all? I gave.
Now I would like to return to your visit to Lublin on the occasion of the opening of the J. Sikora Turntables showroom, where you presented music from the brought albums. You talked about music, but also about life. I was interested in the theory of parallel paths. Can you tell me about it?
– The point is that we can have different characters, we can have different views on certain matters, we can listen to different music, dress differently, look different, and therefore sometimes our paths should not cross each other, because at the clash of these a collision occurs.
Therefore, it is better to follow parallel paths, look at who follows these parallel paths, to avoid these life collisions.
It’s a bit like shoals. When we’re in a boat, when we think we might run aground, we prefer to go a long way so as not to run aground. This is the theory of parallel paths. Each of us is such a big personality, each of us has his own views, has his own outlook on the world, that our paths should not necessarily intersect with the paths of other people.
In one of the interviews published on the UMCS website on the occasion of the jubilee, you say: “I am not exceptional. That is why I appreciate so much what has happened to me in my life and is still happening to me. And thank you to everyone who helped me. I especially thank my wife for her patience, for her support, for her help, for being able to forgive, for being with me. And my mother, who taught me to love people and respect knowledge. And to my daughter – for going her own way, for having her own opinion, and for being so sensitive.” Beautiful words about gratitude.
– It is also related to the fact that we should become aware of our place on earth. Of course, have your goals and ambitions, dreams, because without them life does not exist – but also look for happiness in what we have every day. Seek happiness, not seek desperation that will push us to evil deeds. It’s not worth being unhappy all your life, it’s worth being happy for a while.
