Seven Events That Made America America (25 page)

Wolf Biermann, who had already been banned, slipped bootlegs of his songs to West Germany. Labeling himself East Germany’s “officially recognized state enemy,” Biermann holed up in his apartment to write. CBS Records managed to sign him, and, more miraculously, found a way to get sound crews inside East Berlin to record him. Here was a die-hard believer in communism forced to hide out in his flat in Communist Germany, while his supposed class enemy, the capitalists, sent its lackeys to tape his songs. Granted a travel visa to perform in Cologne—under the provision that he not sing “Stasi-Lied,” an anti-secret police song—Biermann arrogantly told the audience that East Germany was “the better Germany,” provoking cat-calls, but then proceeded to play “Stasi-Lied.” The “Better Germany” was not amused and revoked his citizenship. As Timothy Ryback observed in his history of rock behind the Iron Curtain, “Biermann, a proclaimed Communist, found himself banished to the capitalist West, forcefully exiled from a county that used machine guns and barbed wire to keep millions of citizens from fleeing.”
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The unfortunate Biermann had to make do with a 350,000-mark villa in Hamburg and another half-million marks in record sales, even as East German police were turning the dogs anew on concertgoers at Alexanderplatz. But his exit sparked an exodus of high-profile entertainers, who demanded to leave. The East German government accommodated them rather than allow them to dissent at home.

Of course, that failed as well. Large-scale rock riots broke out in East Berlin in June 1987, following a concert across the Wall by Phil Collins, David Bowie, and the Eurythmics that featured massive loudspeakers aimed eastward. When security forces tried to disperse the thousands pressed against the Wall on the eastern side to listen, violence erupted. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, the Communists concluded, and in June 1988 when Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson were scheduled on the western side, the East Berlin government slated Bryan Adams, the Wailers, and Big Country, enlisting figure skater Katarina Witt as the moderator. Pink Floyd’s concert was uneventful in East Berlin, but the restrictions evident in the East led
Le Monde
to sum up the dueling concerts with an editorial about liberty called “East Berlin Loses the Rock War.”
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The surrender documents were all but drawn up when the Communists invited Bruce Springsteen to perform in front of 160,000 people. While the German propagandists had actually read Springsteen’s lyrics and knew about his signature antiwar song, “Born in the USA” (he “uncompromisingly points out the inequity and injustices in his country,” noted
Neues Deutschland
approvingly), the thousands of young people did not get the memo. Here were the flowers of communism, waving American flags, raising their clenched fists, and singing along, “
Born
. . . in the USA! I was . . .
born
in the USA” as though they really
wished
they had been born in America!

Soviet attempts to control rock by co-opting it through state-approved VIAs (“Vocal Instrumental Ensembles”) were hardly any more successful than the Hungarian, German, or Czech variants. Offered generous financial support, the VIAs tugged at the underground, and while they muffled the protest of rock a little bit, they also spread the music into the factories and towns. But for every officially sanctioned VIA, “a thousand amateur rock-and-roll outfits hammered out covers of the latest Western hits,” with estimates putting the number of nonsanctioned bands at 100,000.
⁷⁹
One such group, Tsvety (“Flowers”), managed to conduct national tours without caving in to state VIA requirements. Led by Anastas Mikoyan (who later took the name “Stas Namin”), Tsvety broke the Moscow ice. Then
Mashina vremeni
(“Time Machine”) jumped in, blending a Soviet style with Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple sounds. Initially employing lyrics with double entendre, the band soon moved to outright scorching social criticism. “Battle with Fools,” for example, proclaimed that if one killed all the fools in Soviet society, no one would remain. The songs immediately spread throughout Soviet youth courtesy of the black market. Unable to defeat Time Machine, Soviet authorities finally made the group a state-authorized band.

Artemy Troitsky, the Soviet equivalent of Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, promoted what, by Western standards, would be decidedly unhip concerts in the 1970s, including a flute/cello band called Aquarium, whose influences included Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. However, it wasn’t long before the guitarist at a 1979 Aquarium concert began rubbing his Fender Telecaster guitar against the microphone stand before lying on stage. An official watcher group, a “judging committee,” was dumbstruck, and left in protest. “We bear no responsibility for the performance of such hooligans,” snorted one of the judges.
⁸⁰
The lead guitarist, Boris Grebenshikov, later to emerge as the “Soviet Union’s premier rock star,” spent countless hours reading Tolkien and Western music magazines and was described by Troitsky as “a fairly self-indulgent but democratic guru.”
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He would later disavow much influence from groups such as the Beatles (although most Russian bands borrowed heavily from the Liverpudlians, adding a distinct Russian bard element). Grebenshikov was well familiar with darker bands such as R.E.M., and spoke in religious overtones about music, likening it to “a middle person between God and people . . . a musician should be . . . an intermediary between God and people.”
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Having already made an enemy of the Pope, communism was now aligned against both God and rock and roll.

As if to confirm his prophecy, the most popular musical event of the early 1970s was
Jesus Christ Superstar
, the Tim Rice musical. In 1971, a complete English-language performance of the opera was staged in Vilnius, Lithuania’s major municipality—even before it opened in London. Subsequently, virtually every rock event in the USSR began to include some tip of the hat to the musical. By the end of the 1970s, the nightly news program
Vremya
used the theme song as its introduction! God and rock and roll had proved to be the combination that would ultimately destroy communism. But Troitsky and others gave it a push. Troitsky wrote a key 1975 story published for the Soviet youth journal about British rockers Deep Purple, fully aware that “Russian rock . . . was a power tool of subversion and resistance. . . .”
⁸³
Iron Curtain ears were more attuned to British rock, finding American black rhythms, up to that point, unappealing. But where American music had the black-white tension, Soviet rock and roll touched on equally dangerous (and rebellious) themes: betrayal, alienation, drugs, alcohol, and teen loneliness. The government repeatedly promoted Troitsky, whose ideas gained currency.

At the same time—long before Mikhail Gorbachev’s celebrated glasnost—British and American country and rock groups were allowed inside the USSR, beginning with Roy Clark and Cliff Richard in 1976, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1977, and Elton John, who appeared in Leningrad in 1979, although each performer had to clear censors. (Ironically, the avantgarde rocker Frank Zappa refused to perform in the USSR when invited, out of protest against its oppression.)
⁸⁴
Others, more appropriately perhaps, simply rebelled. Elton John, told he could not play the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR,” did so anyway during his encore, and a previously polite, even quiet, auditorium erupted. After a series of highly publicized concerts failed to materialize, Soviet authorities returned again into the fog of distrust and suspicion among the youth. John Lennon’s death in 1980 produced both respect (Radio Sofia in Bulgaria dedicated two hours to Beatles music and a popular Estonian band wrote a song, “Requiem,” in his memory) and the predictable propaganda, with East German papers reminding readers of the thousands of people murdered every year in America.

When Moscow hosted the Olympic Games in 1980, it opened the floodgates for Western sounds and influences, and the first true rock clubs opened in Leningrad and Moscow within a couple of years. Groups found they could tour within the Soviet Union, and the government discovered the commercial potential of allowing them to do so. The phenomenon came full circle in 1986 when a double LP called
Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR
was released in the West. Soviet rockers actually went on tour, visiting France and Japan the following two years. The swell of rock and roll that took place in 1987 sparked a sudden and significant antirock music backlash (Bulgaria attempted one last time to shut down its rock clubs, and Czech police interrupted several concerts)—but even that fizzled quietly, and the Communists quickly started sponsoring rock festivals. The Bulgarian band Milena Rock Cooperative (named after the Cyndi Lauperish Milena Slavova) led the new heavy metal charge; and by 1988, Bulgarian party newspapers ran ads for concerts featuring the British band Uriah Heep.

Spies such as Vasili Mitrokhin, whose smuggled notes revealed the anti-Soviet influence of rock music, warned that radio broadcasts from the West were producing “unhealthy signs of interest in . . . pop stars” and “almost surreal” levels of subversion in some Russian cities.
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Spy memos reported that 80 percent of Soviet youth listened to Western music broadcasts, which “gave young people a distorted idea of Soviet reality,” and repeatedly noted the “treasonable nature” of such music.
⁸⁶
No less than Jim Morrison, the iconic Doors revolutionary, summed it up when he said, “I’ve always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority, like ideas about breaking away or overthrowing the established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder and chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.”
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Romania sponsored sociologists to study the “youth problem,” and officials moaned that the young had embraced materialism and cosmopolitan-ism.
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But the real development was, as always, “in the grooves,” as
American Bandstand
fixture Dick Clark used to say. By the mid-1980s, Soviet youths were importing less Western music and began making copies of Soviet rockers, who no longer needed to imitate the Americans or the British—in either style or rebellious lyrics. A final crackdown by Konstantin Chernenko proved the last, wheezing gasp of a totalitarian society seeking to control youth and music, a scene straight out of
Footloose
with the overprotective preacher trying to pull the plug on kids “dancin’ in the streets.”

Gorbachev’s glasnost policies did not create anything new, but merely reflected what was already in progress. If anything, as Russian rock critic Artemy Troitsky argued, glasnost conceded rock and roll’s victory, while at the same time producing “the biggest anti-rock backlash [in the Soviet Union] of the past couple of years [i.e., 1986-1987]. It was initiated by some Russophile writers, supported by certain officials in the Ministry of Culture . . . under the banner of glasnost.”
⁸⁹
In 1987 piano-rocker Billy Joel became the first American star to tour the Soviet Union with a fully staged show. Joel even recorded a live album in Leningrad, and in 1988, the government sold airtime to Pepsi, which flashed commercials featuring pop superstar Michael Jackson with his metal-studded jacket. When the Berlin Wall came down a year later, rockers like Joel and Springsteen could, metaphorically, point with pride to small sections they helped crack open. Certainly the Iron Curtain rockers tipped their hat to the Americans: “The whole spirit of the 60s [in the USA], the rebellion against the establishment, affected significantly the spiritual life of my generation and of the younger people,” recalled Czech writer Václav Havel, “and in a very strange way, transcended into the present.”
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And while rock music may have had limited impact in America and Britain when it came to fomenting a political revolution, pop music played a central role in ripping apart totalitarianism.

Recently, some academics, realizing that they had been had by the mythology of anticapitalist, anti-American rock, have displayed amusing gymnastics in trying to backpedal their way out of their arguments. One asserted that “rock was not inherently anti-Communist” (and of course many conservative critics wrongly charged it with being overly pro-Communist).
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In fact, rock by its very nature was antiestablishment. When that same critic claimed the “rock ‘revolt’ was not
against
the dominant culture, but
within
it,” the circular logic approached Hendrix-level lyrical nonsense: all revolutions begin within the dominant culture—but against what? The same Stephen Stills who warned “There’s something happening here” would have had the same reaction to the Iron Curtain police (although the Soviets would have jailed him for such observations), and, like Wolf Biermann or the Plastic People of the Universe, would have no doubt written some East Bloc version of Neil Young’s “Ohio” to commemorate those killed by German riot police.

Perhaps power chords emanating from stacks of Marshall amplifiers did not literally shatter the Berlin Wall, and perhaps the mythology of the influence of rock music in transforming any culture has seen its share of hyperbole, but even critics don’t question the fact that the music of liberation played
some
role in undermining totalitarian states. As Timothy Ryback wrote in
Rock Around the Bloc
, “Western rock culture has debunked Marxist-Leninist assumptions about the state’s ability to control citizens.”
⁹²
A fitting Stalinist-style monument, Ryback continued, to the heroes of socialist rock would depict a young man in blue jeans, “head thrust defiantly upward. In his hand, where the Stalinist war hero once gripped his Kalashnikov . . . this long-haired warrior would clutch the electric guitar.”
⁹³
And perhaps what was always assumed to be just Western rebelliousness in rock was deeper than once thought. John Kay, the vocalist whose version of “Born to Be Wild” became an American anthem of liberty used in the counterculture movie
Easy Rider
, was born Joachim Krauledat in Tilsit before escaping to the West to start Steppenwolf. Jan Hammer, famous for his synthesizer work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and later for the music in
Miami Vice
, grew up in Czechoslovakia.