Where the name The Second Spirit came from

I have met a lot of interesting people street performing all these years. At one of my usual spots, I became good friends with a person named Vlad. He loved music. Seeing each other nightly for a few years, we became very good friends.

I was trying to think of a name to do my music under. I started asking around and I thought that Vlad, being a acclaimed writer, would be the perfect person to ask.

Vlad was a Russian author and I heard his writings were incredible from others on the Vegas strip. He would tell me stories about his life and when he was in the Afghanistan war.

So I asked him what a good name for my music would be. He thought about it a minute and came up with an incredible name but it was over 30 words long. I loved his nonconformity, but the name was too long and I told him.

He started talking about a book he wrote in Russian. It was about when he was in Afghanistan war. He and his friends would have to live through their Second Spirit to cope with the struggle. The Second Spirit was another self that was not bounded by jails or worldly things. It was a free spirit without possessions and pain or imprisonment.

He discussed that the only way they could get through the war was living through their second spirit. As I remember, he had a Russian word for The Second Spirit and it took him a minute to figure out how to translate it into something similar in English.

I said, “Vlad, that is perfect: The Second Spirit“. He talked more about it, and to me it was a great name for my music because it represented a intangible spiritual side of this physical world.

Unfortunately, Vlad past away a month after he gave me the name The Second Spirit. After some recent research, I found that his mom was trying to raise money to have his ashes sent back to Russia. She was successful a few months later.

I miss Vlad dearly. He was a good friend and will always be remembered.

Here is more about Vladislav Tamarov and one of his books:

Drafted into the Soviet Army in April, 1984 and sent at the age of nineteen to serve in Afghanistan as a minesweeper, Vladislav Tamarov turned in secret to the pen and the camera to chronicle his 621 days of war. Photographs depicting the haunted faces of both soldiers and civilians, the country’s rugged yet beautiful mountain terrain, and the banality of daily life between missions are interspersed with Tamarov’s unsentimental but passionate prose, in which he reveals his growing disorientation and takes to task his government for a campaign that has been widely dubbed “the Soviet Vietnam”.

Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier’s Story Paperback – October 30, 2001