LIFE STORY OF IVAN IVAČKOVIĆ: ‘While my peers dreamed of holding a girl’s hand, I dreamed of Mick Jagger in Belgrade’
For more than forty years, he has been a journalist. Alongside that, he has written books. All his literary works, except for the novel Bezverje (Godlessness), revolve around music. He has written about The Rolling Stones, Bajaga i Instruktori, Azra, and Yugoslav rock ‘n’ roll. He was the first to write a book about Đorđe Balašević and is now preparing a book about Bijelo Dugme. He thinks of himself as untalented.
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Had I chosen a different path, I might have earned millions by now, ended up in prison, gone bankrupt, made a fortune again, and waited for my next arrest. That would have been a life! Excitement in abundance. Perhaps my biography would already include a spectacular death. I’d have gone out Hollywood-style, like Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, gunned down at a toll booth—perhaps near Stara Pazova. Instead, here I am, sitting at home, writing books and newspaper articles, trying to infect others with culture, that insidious disease my parents passed on to me.
Dule Savić is my double
I had two first loves, both platonic and full of fantasies, none of which was sexual. My first was Pižon from Red Star Belgrade. I became obsessed with football, especially Red Star and the Yugoslav national team. In 1974, Katalinski scored a historic goal against Spain (everything is historic here), securing our place in the World Cup. That victory felt like the most important event in my ten-year-old life. By that time, Pižon had played 174 matches for Red Star. I imagined playing alongside him, of course, at The Rajko Mitić Stadium, packed so tightly a pin couldn’t drop. Some people came to watch Pižon, but 100,000 people came to mostly watch me. It was the last minute of a match against Real Madrid. A victory was as essential as air. Pižon crossed the ball into the penalty area, straight to me, and with a spectacular strike, I scored! The 100,000 erupted, chanting my name! In reality, Dule Savić’s career was an exact replica of my dreams.
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones
My other first love was Mick Jagger, intertwined with my passion for football. After all, rock ‘n’ roll and football are similar in many ways—a connection I’d understand only later. In 1975, when I first heard The Rolling Stones, I understood nothing except that I loved their sound. I had just discovered The Beatles and would soon stumble upon David Bowie. Together, they became the main culprits for my lifelong infatuation with rock ‘n’ roll. In 1975, while my peers dreamed of holding hands with girls, I dreamed of The Stones performing in Belgrade and telling them how much I admired them before the concert. A year later, they did come to Yugoslavia and had two concerts, but only in Zagreb. I had a ticket but couldn’t attend due to circumstances. To this day, that remains my favourite Stones tour, making the concert I missed my favourite of all time. Since then, I’ve travelled the world to see them perform in other countries
In the new millennium, I began to feel a sense of shame that The Rolling Stones had never played in Belgrade. Determined to change that, I started working to make it happen. It was a start of a story, which, like any other story, except for the beginning, had its crisis and its resolution. The resolution was their unforgettable 2007 concert at Ušće. The Stones outdid themselves, the audience surpassed all expectations, and the event turned into a celebration that Ronnie Wood declared their best European performance of the tour—the biggest and longest tour they’d ever embarked on.
Fear of Talent
I began my journalism career in 1982, writing for Omladinske (later renamed a challenging NON). It officially belonged to the Serbian Socialist Youth Alliance, but it was an underground publication—brave, original, and outstanding. My contributions didn’t do much for the virtues of the publication – my early writing was dreadful. Much later, I was thinking about why the editors—masters of their craft—published my work. For a long time, I thought that they had done it out of pity, but then they told me that they recognised some invisible talent, that I became a good journalist, and that I didn’t disappoint them. Lord only knows how they saw that talent. That’s what made them great editors – they saw the invisible. that I still don’t see in myself. I think I am not talented, and it's good that I'm not. People hate those who are talented. For me, it's easy—no one hates me; they know I lack talent, which means I'm harmless. I compensate for the lack of talent with hard work, but no one fears someone else's hard work, and neither do they fear mine. People are only afraid of someone else's talent. That's natural because anyone can work—though most often, no one wants to—but only the talented are directly connected to God.
In any case, I was constantly learning how to write, and today I learn more than ever. Once, Americans and Brits had the best journalists. That was before the 1990s when journalism became dreadful, both there and here. I read countless articles by the best American and British journalists—that was my university. I was fortunate to learn from the best here as well. I was around Peca Popović when he revolutionized the press with the magazine Rock. His invitation—probably in 1984—to write for that magazine and for Politika daily was an honour for me. I learned from Dragan Todorović, a God-given journalist. I watched up close how Tirke wrote an article, how Manjo Vukotić boosted circulation. Zoran Miljatović, who had been my editor back in the 1980s when I wrote for NON, brought me to Nedeljni Telegraf in 2003, under Momčilo Đorgović. The Telegraf newsroom was the West in the East. I believe some things I created with Dragan Stošić, editor at the daily Danas, and their director Dule Mitrović, have left a mark... But there's no point in listing everything—forty-plus years of journalism cannot fit into a few sentences.
The Starry Paths
Journalism drains a person, but it also gives them many beautiful things. We know we’ve left some trace. Even if that trace ultimately remains only in the dust of the National Library, in newspaper archives with tattered edges, we imagine that it makes us a little less mortal. Journalism also brings many other privileges. Writing about music led me to encounters with almost all my most important mentors. Journalistic paths sometimes turn into star-studded trails, allowing me to ask questions of Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper, James Brown, Peter Gabriel, Sting, John Mayall, Bryan Ferry, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull... I shook hands with David Bowie; there’s a photo in my room of Keith Richards embracing my wife. I keep Miles Davis’s autograph. I’ve stood on stage with Rod Stewart, interviewed Bill Graham, the world’s most famous and powerful concert promoter—a man harder to interview than Jagger. Oh, and I almost forgot Roger Waters. And when you find yourself forgetting Roger Waters, that’s when you realize just how many such encounters there have been.
Of course, the most important thing for me is that I met the Stones. They’re pretty much as you’d imagine them. Jagger is polite but distant—you can sense an impenetrable barrier around him the whole time. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood behave as if you’ve been sharing beers every night at the pub around the corner. I also met Charlie Watts; he was a world of his own—seemingly grumpy but mostly lost in his thoughts, quite absent. But I was lucky with him too—it happened that he was in a good mood when we met. I’ve been playing drums since my teenage years. I play poorly and persistently. I couldn’t resist telling Charlie that I’m a drummer. I left out the part about being terrible. This was in Belgrade, before their concert. He asked me, “Do you want to play tonight?” He was unusually cheerful, so I mustered the courage to reply with a cheeky joke: “Depends on the fee.” It could’ve gone badly—he might’ve turned around and walked away. I really took a gamble. But instead, he laughed. “You’ll have to sort that out with Mick,” he said. “I don’t handle those things.”
Family Ties with The Stones
My wife Sanja has officially put up with me since 1996, the year we got married. Before that, she endured me unofficially for ten years—that's how long we dated before tying the knot. And we've known each other our whole lives since elementary school. When the Stones came to Belgrade, Sanja was pregnant, and they gave us a T-shirt with the iconic tongue logo as the first gift for our daughter Anita upon her birth. Later, when Anita grew older, they hosted us at one of their concerts in Austria. We attended a backstage cocktail party and had the best seats in front of the stage to watch the show. Every time the Stones go on tour, we receive an invitation to visit some European city and be their guests. At first, it was just Sanja and me, but now Anita comes along too. Who could resist such invitations? This has been going on for nearly twenty years, and it still feels a little unreal to me.
Chris Jagger and Anita
In 2012, at the residence of the British ambassador in Belgrade, I hosted the promotion of the fourth edition of my book The Art of Rebellion. It was the first book I ever wrote, somewhere in the mid-1990s. The topic—yes, I know, I'm boring—is The Rolling Stones. For the promotion of the fourth edition, I invited Chris Jagger, Mick's brother. We share some mutual friends, and he accepted the invitation. He's a musician with his own career, but far from being interested only in music. On the contrary, he has a wide range of interests and is incredibly intriguing. We both stayed in the residence for two or three days. Chris played Stones songs for me, and it felt like I was living in a fairy tale. Perhaps the most beautiful moment was one I stumbled upon by chance: the short speeches at the promotion had already taken place, Chris and I had played a few songs for the journalists and friends, and everyone was enjoying various drinks in the garden of the residence. That’s when I saw Chris entertaining Anita, making her smile. You see, I’m not the kind of person whose dreams come true—I didn’t even dare to dream of moments like this.
Emotional Homeland
When I wrote The Art of Rebellion, no one wanted to publish it. That was Serbia in the 1990s—none of the publishers believed in a book about the Stones! No one except Željko Drašković, who was then the marketing director at Radio B92. Željko took it upon himself to pay for the printing, and that’s how the book came out. Then newspapers and TV started to take notice. I think the turning point was when Blic, thanks to journalist Bane Bjelica and editor Raško Kovačević, put me on the front page. They didn’t do it because of me—we didn’t even know each other at the time. They did it because of the book. Suddenly, everyone else wanted an interview. In the end, The Art of Rebellion had five editions, and it could have had ten if I had been able to focus more on it. Why couldn’t I? Because I kept writing more books, so I always had to focus on the new one.
My other books are mostly about our shared past, about Yugoslavia. When you line them up, they form a small history of that country, told through a unique perspective—through the careers of Đorđe Balašević, Johnny Štulić, or the once-thriving music scene as a whole. They are like small museums of our memories, both personal and collective. Memories of the golden days of Yugoslavia, followed by the days when it disappeared in blood and shame. Ultimately—or perhaps above all—these books, How We Started Singing, Between Extremes, The Pannonian Admiral, aim to help younger generations understand why many of us still see Yugoslavia as our emotional homeland.
Bijelo Dugme
It would be a bit silly to make big plans at sixty years of age. But I have a few small ones. For example, I plan to publish a new book early next year. I’ve been writing it for a long time; it’s a book about Bijelo Dugme. My generation was their first audience. We grew up with them as people, and they grew with us as a band. We were the kids buying Dugme’s early albums; we were the kids at Hajdučka Česma. In essence, it’s another book about us, about Yugoslavia. For me, this book should also be the last one on that topic. I feel that with it, I’ve said everything that’s been on my heart when it comes to Yugoslavia and our fate. That I’ve revisited all the most beautiful memories and said everything I needed to say about the things that have burdened me for decades. I don’t really have other plans, but it’s not that I don’t wish for anything. I’d like to watch my child grow up, to travel a little more, and to write another two or three books. All of that if luck favours me. Not health, but luck. Luck includes health, and among the healthy, there are people whose fate is unhappy. On the Titanic, everyone was healthy.
A Grim Outlook
A message and advice to others? I can't even think of giving anyone advice with what little remains of my sense. Who could I teach anything? People haven't learned a thing, not even from a tragedy as profound as the pandemic. COVID-19 wasn’t just a global disaster; it was also a reminder of how precious every day, every hour, every moment of our lives truly is. A message that we should pay more attention to the feelings and needs of others, to care for one another, to strengthen tolerance and love toward others. Instead, people have only strengthened their love for themselves. They’ve become even more selfish, even harsher, or more indifferent to others. From a world like this, we shouldn’t expect anything except for it to collapse soon. Perhaps it already has, but each of us harbours a little Koštunica inside who hasn’t been informed yet.
Branislav Bjelica