Let's start again / Eran Suisa
The summaries of the year of the entertainment world in 2005 were all about the big comeback of that time, and in general one that was not seen the same years before - Zvika Peak.
It started in the cult series "The Maestro" and continued as a judge in "Kohav Nold".
From there, in fact, Peak never disappeared until his last day.
Concert tours, a welcome guest in the studios, a singer who is played on the radio and writes songs at a dizzying pace, including many that you have not heard of, because they failed and did not gain the fame of the songs he created at the beginning of his career.
This outwardly very natural comeback was never taken for granted by Peake himself.
The singer, who knew years of almost total disappearance, realized that he must not miss the new opportunity he received.
I was 12 years old when I danced the "Auto Dancer" and was first exposed to the singer at a graduation party.
After exactly a decade I started working as an entertainment and gossip reporter.
No one prepared me for a phone call from him a week after I took office.
It was not yet eight in the morning, and a number ending in five zeros appeared on the screen.
One that is reserved for particularly hot AHMs. From the other past of the line it was Peak, with its famous voice and intonation, which received dozens of imitations over the years.
"Eran, is it nice to write like that?"
He asked.
"I ask you to talk to me before any news you publish."
I don't remember what my reaction was to him, but I do remember running inside the rooms of the house to tell my mother the voice of the singer she grew up listening to.
That conversation was the first of hundreds that would come later.
Zvika was extremely obsessed with his outward image, in a way that I had never known before - nor today.
This week, hours after word of his death became known, many colleagues and industry people told how he used to keep them updated.
All of them were members of mass WhatsApp groups where he made sure to send at least once a week a new picture or a link to an old song.
A quick search in this group brings up a picture of him with Gal Gadot, a picture with Noa Kirel and a picture of Daniela, his daughter, with her husband Quentin Tarantino.
There was also a lot of news - all positive of course.
There, the recipients of the messages found no trace of the brain event he had four years ago, or of his medical condition.
At the height of his fame in the late 1970s,
After his death I also went through our personal correspondence.
Every word I wrote got a response.
Good or bad - it doesn't matter anymore.
Peak saw it all, remembered it all, and over the years tried to keep it all.
He also made sure I knew he knew everything.
Even when I congratulated him on the birth of his son, knowing that I had published in the newspaper, he scolded me for not mentioning his age.
"What does it belong to?"
wondered
The biggest crisis in our relationship was around an investigation I published about his business conduct, under the title "The Automatic Dodger".
It was about journalistic revelations that were not comfortable for him and the image he was trying to present.
Behind the scenes he tried to bring the investigation to a conclusion, including vigorous conversations into the night and the intervention of lawyers.
At one point, he even involved the publisher of the newspaper where I worked in those days, so that he would have an impact. Not surprisingly, even after the publication of the investigation, he insisted and claimed differently from what was described in it about his behavior.
Peake was also a tireless worker.
It's not by chance that several singers pulled out correspondence in which he offered to write an album for them, or to appear in a show he had fantasized about but never materialized.
All has been said.
Zvika had a glorious, groundbreaking and temporary career.
One that will continue for generations.
But he was also unusually stubborn and hardworking, and perhaps these are precisely the qualities that made him the icon he was.
The pop leader / Yair Nitzani
Tzvika was a special singer, composer and musician.
I especially liked the popist in it, and for me it connects to the sweet feeling that I try to preserve, of the pleasure of hearing a refined pop song for the first time.
One round, cool song that makes you feel so good, that you just want to hear it over and over again - until another hit comes along and takes its place.
Such were in those years "Venus" by Shocking Blue and also "Two Apples" and "The Automatic Dancer" by Zvika.
When the soldiers of the military bands were jumping around in their uniforms and singing about Armorers, Haska and Sierer Harov, Tzvika played with the bands of Hasmar Street and started to produce cheekier and sexier pop.
The Chocolates and the Fats and the Thins, Zvika's early bands, were the fringe youth and the "less good" kids of the time, with electric guitars, flared pants and long hair.
Tzvika's pop was ahead of its time, served on 45 rpm floppy disks, without complexes, without feelings of inferiority and without a shirt on the cover.
He dressed like someone from another planet, a colorful planet with a lot more sequins, and was always larger than life.
I loved his early and curious use of the pioneering synthesizers, just like Giorgio Moroder in the early 70's.
He was also a very entertaining man, one who delivers his messages in a calm tone with the soaring peaky sound.
When I saw his number dialing me in the identified conversation, I used to answer him in imitation of Zvika Peak "Hello, Zvika", and he would answer me "Di Yair, seriously", with the famous Polish R.
In our last correspondence, when I asked how he was doing, he answered me "kind of fine..." There was not, and probably will not be, anyone else here of the type of Zvika Pick.
Pick in a photo for an interview in "Shishab", April 2020. "God blessed me", photo: Zohar Shetrit
One man's Beatlemania / Asaf Nevo
In April 2020, the late Zvika Pick gave me an interview cover for the Passover supplement of "Shishab". The conversation between us, at the height of the Corona days, took place two years after the brain event he had on a flight from London, which ended in a hospital in Vienna, and after the long rehabilitation he underwent when he was returned to Israel.
In the celebratory interview, an essential layer of Pick's true personality structure was revealed: as long as career and success matters were concerned, Tzvika was the most skilled media animal that emerged in the world of local celebs, a celebrity who occupied the gossip sections for five decades.
But as soon as something goes wrong - he became extremely anxious about his privacy.
This was, among other things, the reason that for months nobody knew what really happened to him, what his actual condition was, what he was suffering from and what he was fighting for.
"It was terribly unpleasant," he explained his health condition in an interview, trying to downplay the drama.
"All of a sudden, without an illness, I didn't feel anything. I felt fine and I just wanted to sleep. They forced me to get off the plane, go to a hospital and do tests - so I went. They transferred me to a hospital, and I went to sleep. When I got up in the morning I wanted to speak, but I only got one word out : 'What'. Only 'what'. The head works and the mouth doesn't.
"You know what it is? I couldn't say a word, a single word. I lost the ability to speak, nothing happened to me. There was nothing life-threatening. I didn't lose consciousness, I didn't pass out, nothing. I was lucid the whole time. Something Small moves with me, and that's it."
You are a communication animal.
Zvika Pick,
When we moved on to talking about the career, something else flowed from him.
"In the last 20 years, people realized that my external appearance and what I do on stage is only one part. They realized that I was able to create a career that is not obvious that happened," he explained.
"The songs grew all the time, and generation after generation love them. Every time I come across it, I'm shocked all over again.
"Suddenly people noticed that I had accumulated songs, many songs, that are popular among all ages, and are still played on the radio, which is not obvious. I am proud of them and that so many people still love them. I am very happy, God has blessed me."
Indeed, the God of rock and roll blessed Peak with recovery and rehabilitation, which returned him for the last time to the success stages of the festival (2019), alongside the best young stars.
"I performed 130 shows in three months, I was seen by more than 600,000 people, 10,000 people at each show, four times a day," he explained excitedly about the reactions he received at Festigal.
"This is an amount that is overwhelming. I received a tremendous amount of love from the audience. It was unbelievable that this happens every day, every day, four times. I looked at the audience and I couldn't believe it. Children and adults sing my songs together. Little children sing songs that were created before Decades. After four such performances, you go home and can't sleep at night because of all the excitement."
If the late Modi Bar-On were to create a series about the history of popular music in Israel, Tzvika would have a place of honor in it. Probably more honored than the place he was given in his life by the tastemakers and opinion makers, and certainly more honored than the final image, in which the highly accomplished and award-winning musician is wooing on the eve of his death On the doorsteps of young female stars to compose songs for them, knocking on the doors of the pop machines to stay relevant in the fast and elusive present of instant culture.
In the series that Chevron would create, he would tell the story of Henrik the outsider, a newcomer struggling for his place in a world dominated by sabers.
Strange clothing (both as a child and as a star), Hebrew is not his mother tongue, no service in a military band, no connections, no protections.
Only talent and elbows and education he received from home to believe in himself and never give up.
In his greatest decade, between 1970 and 1980, Pick changed the world of music in Israel in the context of the figure of the star.
Along with the success as a musician, as a composer and as an arranger whose hits were skyscrapers, he turned stardom into a profession.
The performance on stage, the clothes, the gossip, the hysterical and mass adoration.
He was the first to make thousands of female fans scream at Atref.
One man's Beatlemania.
In his series, Moody Bar-On would at one point take a breath and explain that Zvika's lack of success throughout the 80s was just the prelude to longing for him and his glorious comeback in the 90s.
But in the end, when the stardust disperses, Modi would explain, Zvika also knew that what really matters and what remains forever is the music itself, the songs.
Zvika commented on this in that interview: "The most important thing in my career is the songs I wrote. Take my entire career, all the performances and records I sold, the television and the Eurovision and the admiration, and all the articles in the newspapers - without the songs there was nothing. You can analyze my career endlessly. Everything Bullshit. In the end, there's one thing that matters - the audience loves the songs endlessly, endlessly, and that's the most important thing."
Own volume / Eyal Levy
Last week, at the exhibition grounds, during the coverage of the Likud primaries, I remembered Zvika Pick.
What is the connection?
In the 1970s and 1980s, where David Amsalem and his entourage marched, the stage of the City of Youth stood.
There is not a child in the central region who has not passed through the gates of that city during the summer months.
In those days, the exhibition grounds complex became a huge gymboree for enthusiastic teenagers.
On one side, the Katargel tournament was held, on the other side, a young talent competition was held, but at the center of the event, every evening, was a performance.
Then there were performances, and there was Zvika Peak.
The group of 14-year-olds knew that on the evening when the maestro would shell, it might be their only and slim chance to meet a girl their age.
Yes, this is the evening when the stars will align and the magic door will open.
For a year we fantasized about the performance, that's why on that day we wore the best Danish Zuko clothes and arranged our hair, so that it wouldn't run away.
We practiced in the dress rehearsal punch lines from the idol songs and memorized selected trivia details.
Although we weren't expecting Peak's music, we were more in the direction of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, but who could Roger Waters have matched?
Then, as the sun set over the fairgrounds and the spotlights came on, Peake took the stage.
Yes, over 40 years ago hysterical screams and wholesale fainting were recorded on the same embankment where Amsalem preached.
As much as we tried to interest the girls, we were air as far as they were concerned.
They looked through us towards the stage, to take in a little more of Peak's size.
And he was huge.
With Nancy Brands, photography: Moshe Shay
"The concert in the Youth City was, in my opinion, the first in Israel where there were tens of thousands of people," recalls Moti Dichna, Peak's bassist in those years.
"We didn't know such things back then. He was attacked like Mick Jagger. We would go to concerts in the suburbs in police cars and ambulances, as if God had come. Zvika dressed differently, put on make-up. Who had heard of similar phenomena then? He sang music at volume and not that of old men. The first rock star in Israel."
Groundbreaking?
"Revolutionary. There were military bands at the time, Hive played pleasant rock, while Zvika brought quiet ballads along with 'Maale Maale'. It was the rock dream incarnate, and we had an excellent lineup. Nancy Brands was the musical director and keyboardist, and Zvika was a very funny person. The combination Both of them were crazy."
Brands joined Zvika two years after immigrating to Israel from Romania.
"I would wrap him in a lot of mood," he recalls now.
"I did all kinds of tricks on stage, and it was also very easy to fall in love with him, because he was different. The accessories he brought, the style. The Israeli Rod Stewart. At that time there was a combination of a wonderful singer and a tall, handsome guy. I remember performances where girls would throw underwear on stage , but poor thing, they were not his size."
miss him
"Very. Not long ago, they held a tribute evening in his honor at Cinema City. He was on the piano, and singers sang his songs. I was also invited to speak, and I made him laugh. He said, 'I haven't laughed like that in five years.' I hugged him and whispered, 'You know how much I love you. '".
From the hysterical evening in the youth city, I did not remember Dichen's music, nor Brands' jokes.
I only remembered that, contrary to the original plans, we ended it alone, without phone numbers or a date for the weekend. A group of boys who returned with their tails between their legs, but still hummed 'up, up' in the hope that next year they would be at the top, in the built-up youth city.
Last week I walked around the exhibition grounds between the pavilions of Nir Barkat and Amir Ohana.
The city of youth was no longer there, the mythological stage disappeared along with it, and now a producer, the maestro, will only remain a monument.
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