What is Phantom and who wrote the song about it

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Those who were born in the first half of the sixties do not need to be explained what "Phantom" is. They collected parcels at school with toys, notebooks and pencils for Vietnamese children. They regularly saw on television screens, still black and white, the predatory silhouettes of long-nosed aircraft with white stars on the fuselages and wings, dropping bombs down into the jungle, from where tracer dotted lines of anti-aircraft fire were piercing the sky in return. Sometimes the announcers reported how many American planes were shot down by North Vietnamese air defense forces over the past day.

In the yards and doorways, the boys sang with the guitar, mostly about unhappy love with suffering intonations in their voices. But there was one song that was different from all the others. It was sung on behalf of a pilot, and not ours, but an American one, which made it especially attractive against the backdrop of the military-patriotic pathos that was characteristic of the celebratory concerts broadcast at that time. It was about Phantom. The song was performed at an accelerated, rock and roll pace, in a minor key, which gave it some kind of "enemy" sound. A special chic was foreign-style nasty voice. Foreign, and even more soAmerican performers, then the youth listened little, each record brought "from there" became an event in the city. Teachers taught that rock music is terrible, and its main distinguishing feature is a constant heart-rending scream.

English was taught at school, and the younger generation learned from dictionaries what a phantom is. This is a ghost. The name is appropriate for a military aircraft, it is a pity that we do not have such a tradition of naming interceptors and bombers.

In general, the song was popular, and for the lack of originals successfully replaced Western rock music. And young people have always loved to shout. The topic was not new. The previous generation, growing up in the fifties, sang about "sixteen tons, dangerous cargo," which the pilot of the "flying fortress" nevertheless undertook to carry, although he was afraid of "bombing a Korean town." This poetic masterpiece by an unknown author was performed to the motive of Merle Travis's song of the same name.

There was also the "Song of American Pilots" by Alexander Gorodnitsky, but it was even less accessible than the recordings of Western performers or Vladimir Vysotsky.

The old yard song received a second birth thanks to the rock group "Chizh and Company", which reminded us of what "Phantom" is. The text remained almost unchanged, unless, of course, one takes into account the countless versions of it that arose in the late sixties and early seventies with almost every performance. The pilot either ran on scorched earth, or simply walked along the runway. Russian military voicesadvisers were heard sometimes in a helmet, and sometimes in a headset. But it didn't matter. The "Chizhevsky" version can be considered optimized, and its arrangement perfectly conveys the atmosphere of the time in which the song was created.

There is, however, an inaccuracy in the text that casts doubt on the version according to which the song was composed by a Soviet pilot who fought in Vietnam for the communists. Apparently, the unknown author had little idea what the Phantom F-4 was, and what its main technical characteristics were. The text says nothing about the fate of the second crew member. In addition to the pilot, the weapons operator was supposed to be in the cockpit. If he died, then why is nothing said about it? And if he survived, then why are only the pilot taken prisoner? A real pilot would definitely mention his comrade, albeit an imaginary one, in the lyrics of the song, "Phantom" - a two-seat car.

And everything else seems to be quite plausible.