# A Memory of Childhood and Music

> I was browsing through Mohsen Chavoshi's old songs and listening to them. Songs that threw me back to many years ago. Memories that came alive for me and I wrote them down.

2025-08-14 · Alireza Azadi · https://a-azadi.blog/en/post/music

Growing up with a singer is truly a fascinating thing. My story with Mohsen Chavoshi is just like that. Let me tell a little memory while I'm in the mood :)

I think I was 6-7 years old when one of our relatives, who wasn't very old in those years, would sing a snippet of a Mohsen Chavoshi song everywhere: "My rock dove.... my fishless tank.... oh, closed robe on the shieldless warrior," and this was etched in my mind for years, and I didn't understand what it meant for years either. Especially the word "robe" (Qaba). I always forgot this part entirely! The image I had built in my mind of this snippet was weird to me, and simultaneously, thinking about it was interesting to me. How did a dove (Kaftar) and a well (Chah) relate? Does the dove get covered in oil and come out of the well?! How does it become a rock dove (Kaftare Chahi)?! This mountain of questions stayed and stayed until I went to a new school in second grade, and our school bus driver was a car audio enthusiast who had a white Peykan. "Mr. Hosseinzadeh". Now that it's been mentioned, let me introduce this character a bit.

He had a Pioneer audio system (speakers and stereo) with a remote control for the stereo with black rubber buttons and a silver body that looked very small in his clumsy hands, and it was interesting to me how these huge, shovel-like hands, and that jalopy of a Peykan, had this cool stereo and speakers. I knew Pioneer was a good thing because my uncle had also just installed an audio system back then and everything of his was Pioneer, and he kept praising it D: He was fat with messy hair and face and not very neat clothes. It was as if cleanliness and he never got in the car together, even when he took out his rag from the side of the door and wiped it over the dashboard to supposedly clean it. I later found out that he even had a wife because his wife took us a few times. But she wasn't much better than her husband either. She had a blue knitted glove that was threadbare. One of those gloves where the fingers stick out. Her clothes and appearance weren't like the ladies I knew...

As I said. He had huge hands but his nails were short except for his pinky nail. I wondered a lot why only this nail was long? I always saw him stick his finger in his ear, scratch rapidly a few times, and shake it out the window, but I thought this nail surely must have another use besides cleaning and scratching his ear, but when I went and asked my mother this question, and she instantly gave the exact same answer, I became certain that anyone whose pinky nail is long cannot be a very clean person. I myself really wanted to grow my pinky nail to see how it felt, but it never happened, and every attempt, however futile, to grow my pinky nail was met with my mother's scolding, and my giving up on growing it. Let's not stray from Hosseinzadeh!

Despite all this, Hosseinzadeh, however, was very careful about his audio system. He never let us turn the volume all the way up, although his car was never clean. Even that remote in his hand wasn't clean, but he always put it in a specific place. I never trusted him. Not that the poor guy was a pedophile :)) but he was generally weird. He had a friend who owned a tire repair shop. On the way, we would always pass by his shop; he would roll down this window in front of the shop with that Peykan window crank handle, stick his head out, and yell: "Senjeeeeedddddddd" (Jujube), then he would laugh out loud: "Har har".
I would say to myself, my God, why is this man acting so crazy (sheft in Mazandarani means crazy). Until one day I asked him: Mr. Hosseinzadeh, why do you do this? He explained to me that he is his friend and hates jujubes. This is where I realized that no matter how much you have grown up, you can be old enough to even become a kids' school bus driver, but you can tease your friend like this in the street. Honestly, I really liked this action.

Hosseinzadeh had two good habits. One was that he would recount all the scary movies he watched with his wife for us (a bunch of 8 to 10-year-old kids), and I was always eager for tomorrow to come so Hosseinzadeh would again recount the continuation of the week's scary movie for me. For example, during my 4 years of elementary school, I knew the six Saw movies with full details without ever seeing even a minute of them. His second good habit was being a music enthusiast, which is exactly the intersection of the memory of Hosseinzadeh, Mohsen Chavoshi, and me.

I always thought I owed my music enthusiasm to my uncle and my father, who both played instruments, and there was always something playing in our house, but now that I think about it, the story goes further back. The whole way back home, my love was for Hosseinzadeh to be in a good mood that day and put on music for us and turn up the volume. Because some days when he jotted things down in his notebook, he wasn't in a good mood afterwards and wouldn't turn up the music volume.

From the third year onwards, I was the oldest kid on the bus and could take the remote and skip through the songs myself. One of his favorite singers was Mohsen Chavoshi. He would always tap the beat of the songs on his large thighs with his hand, and I had learned from him and would repeat it. It was a lot of fun. I would search through the songs, find Chavoshi's "Arouse Man" (My Bride), and turn up the volume. It was one of Chavoshi's early songs that I listened to a lot. With those speakers and that player quality, such a bass-boosted song really hit the spot: "Forgive, the bride of the story... my heart has acted young. If for a moment it was unkind to you... What a good fate... when God Himself has mediated for our happiness eh ehhhhhhh h h h h". It was during those same years that the movie Santouri was also released with a lot of buzz. I don't know how it happened that we had its CD at home. I sat down, watched it, and fell in love with Chavoshi even more there. A talented young man in love who became an addict and lost everything. Even his love. That album had a few standout tracks: Sang-e Sabour, Tanha Boodan, and Khianat. And for me, Chavoshi was just these songs in those years and nothing else.

And a year or two later, I got my hands on ADSL, and the era of downloading and archiving began.... I said these things because I was listening to Chavoshi again, and I don't know why Chavoshi's tracks with Hossein Safa no longer exist on any music streaming platform, and I went back to that old archive. About 500 GB of music that I downloaded drop by drop and with terrible internet during middle school and early high school, and I still have them with me.

Throughout all these years, I always knew and know that Chavoshi sounds like an exhaust pipe, but in the high school days when we listened to "Ghatar" and "Cafe-haye Shaloogh", to the university years with "Parooye Bi Ghayegh" and "Amoo Zanjirbaf", and to this day when I hear the Safa-less Chavoshi, it has always been and is Chavoshi. It's a strange feeling that with each song you can be thrown into the depths of a memory. From the memory of the school bus driver to the memory of walking alone in the deserts of Shahroud.

This got so long! 😂 It's all Hosseinzadeh's fault....