I haven’t been able to find much about Menelaos Mihalidis. I found his name, along with a dozen or so others, as one of the Asia Minor-born composers who wrote popular songs about hashish, without being a user. I found a list of a dozen songs that he wrote.
And that’s about it.
What little there is suggests that he was born somewhere in Asia Minor during the days of the Ottoman Empire and that he wound up in Athens with other Asia Minor refugees, where he created music during the 1930s. His works were recorded by the leading performers of the day: five of 12 songs listed at a Greek lyrics site were recorded by Roza Eskenazi, four by Antonis Diamantitis (Dalgas) and the others by Marika Frantzeskopoulou, Rita Abatsi and Anna Pagana. In the tavern with the laterna seems to be one of his early Athenian works, recorded in 1930.
While he may not have left much of a trace of his life in what’s been captured by the internet, we have his songs, which have been recorded repeatedly during the revival of rebetiko.
About this song. The laterna is a smallish, hand-cranked piano on wheels, usually heavily decorated with flowers and posters. The crank turns a wooden disk covered with small nails inside the laterna. As it turns, the nails pluck piano-like strings and play whatever tune the arrangement of nails has been designed to play. The device – very much like a player piano or oversized music box – was invented in Europe and became popular first among Greek residents of Istanbul and then Greeks in Greece.
In the tavern with the laterna is a lover’s lament:
The laterna plays and in the tavern I drink it and get drunk
and I sing from the heart for a guy I love
…
You lit my Saturday, aman, aman and left me
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