by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the two presentations of A Capitol Fourth PBS showed a particularly interesting documentary on
the Fourth of July: Free to Rock,
an audacious film produced and directed by Jim Brown and Nick Binkley and
dedicated to the proposition that the real force that brought down the Soviet Union and led to the destruction of
the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War was … rock ’n’ roll music. It’s one
of those arguments that a case can be made for but this movie pushed it way too far. I’d seen previous documentaries about what
life was like for teenagers in the Eastern Bloc in the 1950’s and 1960’s and
how Western rock, to the extent to which it trickled through the Iron Curtain,
offered youngsters in that time and place a sense of additional possibilities,
the idea that there was this liberating energy out there that could be grabbed
by teens in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and used as a way out of the
stifling control the Communist Party bosses in those countries imposed on their
people. I’d seen at least one previous film on this premise, How the
Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, and while the
rock revolution as depicted in Free to Rock doesn’t begin and end with the Beatles, they were
certainly at the epicenter. In the West the Beatles converted rock from a
teenage cult item its audiences were expected to grow out of as they got older
(reason enough why Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, pushed him out of rock and towards middle-of-the-road crooning when
Elvis got out of the Army in 1960) to a serious social phenomenon and an art form that could express as much, emotionally,
socially and politically, as any other form of music. What Jim Brown didn’t
really mention was that well before rock existed as a mass phenomenon in the
West, the Soviets had already had to deal with earlier generations of their
young people taking an interest in jazz, to the point where Edward R. Murrow
once claimed that Louis Armstrong was America’s most effective ambassador.
Armstrong was actually offered the chance by the U.S. State Department to be
the first American jazz musician to tour the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc
— and he turned it down because he was worried he’d be expected to toe the
American propaganda line that everything was hunky-dory in the U.S. and he
wouldn’t be allowed to talk about segregation and racism. So it was Benny
Goodman who became the first U.S. jazz musician to play the Soviet Union under
State Department auspices in 1962, and he encountered some of the same bizarre
restrictions Western rock acts would face later when the Soviets started
letting them in. The Soviet
teenagers first heard rock in the late 1950’s when it was broadcast on the
Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and despite Soviet efforts to jam these
broadcasts they not only got through (especially in the wee hours of the
morning after the crews at the Soviet jamming stations went home for the night),
they were sometimes taped off the air by Soviet teenagers and later shared with
their fellows as so-called “bones” or “ribs.” These were amateur copies made on
record-cutting booths (which were actually quite common in the Soviet Union as
a way soldiers stationed thousands of miles from home and their families could
communicate via audio letters) and etched onto discarded X-ray film, which
meant they were pliable and could therefore be concealed on the person of the
seller. People caught selling “bones” or “ribs” risked everything from a short
prison sentence to a long stint in the Gulag, not only because they were distributing music the
Soviet authorities considered subversive but also because they were selling the
discs and therefore engaging in private enterprise. The market for “ribs”
zoomed up when the Beatles hit — it’s not mentioned here but in How
the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin it’s shown
that the Soviet government responded to the Beatles’ growing popularity by
issuing a propaganda magazine denouncing them as a decadent act who had
formerly performed wearing toilet seats around their necks (true, at least in
their wilder upper-fueled nights in Hamburg in the early 1960’s) and their
manager was a “London fairy” (half right: Brian Epstein was Gay but he was from
Liverpool). The propaganda magazine was probably counterproductive in that it
made kids who hadn’t heard of the Beatles before aware of them.
The Beatles and
the growing “psychedelic rock” movement that followed them from the U.S. in the
mid-1960’s inspired Soviet musicians to take up rock — there’s a fascinating,
almost sexual sequence in this film showing a man who became a major Russian
guitar builder practically going into orgasm at the sight of a Fender
Stratocaster and determining to build a replica (he got his pickups by stealing
them from pay phones in Moscow) — and among them was a man who’s listed as a
co-producer on this show as well as being extensively interviewed: Stas Namin.
In 1967 he founded a rock group called Flower that built enough of a following
that the government-owned monopoly record company, Melodiya, actually signed
them. Their first Melodiya album sold 500,000 copies and their second sold a
million — but after they’d sold 12 million records the government reversed itself,
suppressed his band and canceled his contract. The show begins with Stas Namin
playing a concert inspired by the arrest under Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime
of the women’s performance-art and musical group Pussy Riot; amazingly the
writers of this documentary try to present that as a triumph — saying that
Russians were able to demonstrate publicly and openly today in a way they
couldn’t under the Soviet regime — but the truth, of course, is just the
opposite: Putin’s government is just as authoritarian as its predecessors and
just as committed as the Soviet regime was (and the Tsarist regime before
them!) to keep tight controls on Russia’s artistic community and enforce,
sometimes brutally, their standards of what’s considered “acceptable” art and culture
and what’s considered beyond the pale and therefore a matter for the police.
One of the quirkier aspects of Free to Rock is the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em attempts of
the Soviet cultural bureaucracy to sponsor “rock” acts of their own. They officially
authorized groups in a genre
called “Vocal-Instrumental Combinations,” or VIA’s for short after the initials
for those words in Russian, and judging from the clips presented here the
politically correct VIA’s played in a soft pop-rock style musically and sang
about hard work, Soviet discipline, building the socialist state and the other
propaganda points the Soviet government was trying to instill in their youth.
One of the quirkier figures portrayed here — though the brief depiction of him
really didn’t do justice to his remarkable story — was Dean Reed, a U.S.-born
rock singer who attempted to make it in the U.S. in the late 1950’s and got
precisely nowhere (he got a one-single deal with Imperial and a major-label
contract with Capitol, but the one record he made that ever charted in Billboard, “The Search,” only got as high as #96. Nonetheless,
his record “One Summer Romance” was so popular in South America that he settled there in the early 1960’s,
settling in Argentina, fronting a rock band otherwise consisting exclusively of
Argentine musicians. He lived in Chile for a while and apparently it was there
that he was first exposed to socialist politics, eventually becoming a
committed Leftist and running afoul of the Argentine military junta that took
over in 1966. The Right-wing junta deported him and he went to Europe, settling
for a while in Rome and appearing in spaghetti Westerns like Adios,
Sabata. In 1973 he was invited to relocate
to East Germany, where he lived for the remaining 13 years of his life and
became known as “Der Rote Elvis” (“The Red Elvis”). Publicly his statements on
politics were down-the-line doctrinaire Communist — he denounced Alexander
Solzbhenitsyn for having “slandered” the Soviet Union and he defended the
Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the building of the Berlin Wall — but
there were enough East Germans unsure of where his real loyalties were he was
often accused of being a CIA agent, as well as an agent of the East German Stasi secret police. Reed also never turned his back on
the U.S. — many of his songs from his East German period reflected his
homesickness — and in 1986 he gave a controversial interview to 60
Minutes. His defense of the Berlin Wall on
the program got him hate mail from the U.S. denouncing him as a traitor, and
six weeks after the interview aired he was found dead in a lake near his home
in East Berlin. The authorities officially ruled it as an accidental drowning,
but his friends in Germany suspected he had committed suicide (especially after
a note was found among his effects expressing regrets over the foundering of
his marriage) and his relatives in the U.S. thought he’d been murdered. Reed’s
peculiar story seems like one of the great unmade movies (ironically among
Reed’s 20 films were one in which he wrote, directed and starred as Victor
Jara, the Chilean radical poet killed when that country’s military, with the
full support of the U.S., deposed President Salvador Allende in 1973 and
started a reign of terror, and whom Reed had known personally during his days
in South America) and it’s given oddly short shrift here.
The next phase of Free
to Rock depicts the trickle of American and
British rock bands that were actually allowed to perform behind the Iron
Curtain, starting in 1969 when — a year after the liberal Communist government
of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia was overthrown by Soviet tanks and
soldiers — the Beach Boys were invited to play in Prague and frontman Mike Love
(whom we’d just seen as leader of the current edition of the Beach Boys at the Capitol
Fourth concert) announced he was dedicating
their song “Break Away” (actually written in collaboration between Brian Wilson
and his father Murry, the only time the Wilson brothers’ dad wrote for the
Beach Boys himself) to Dubcek. There are interviews with members of the Nitty
Gritty Dirt Band, which wangled an invitation to play in Moscow because they
were officially considered a folk ensemble instead of a rock band, and folk was
considered the music of the oppressed American working classes. The first major
rock star to play the Soviet Union was the young Elton John, but he wasn’t
allowed to bring his full band — the only instruments he was allowed to use was
his own piano and a pair of conga drums played by his regular drummer, Nigel
Olsson. I remember seeing the TV special from this concert when it originally
aired and hearing Elton John explain to an interviewer that throughout the
concert he’d tried every trick in his book to get the audience out of their
seats and dancing, and was frustrated that he couldn’t. Later he found out why:
the authorities had minders patrolling the aisles throughout the concert, and
every time someone was moved by the spirit of the music to get up and move, one
of the minders shoved them back down into their seat.
It wasn’t until Billy
Joel came in 1987, after Mikhail Gorbachev had become the Soviet leader and
proclaimed his policies of glasnost
(cultural freedom) and perestroika
(economic freedom), that a major Western rock star was permitted not only to
play the Soviet Union but bring along his full band and use electric
instruments — and Joel responded by covering Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are
A-Changing,” playing guitar on the song instead of his usual piano, for a
double-edged message: a song that Dylan had written to celebrate America’s turn
to the Left in the 1960’s became an acknowledgment of the new freedom that
would eventually bring down the Soviet Union altogether. (Of course the
producers of this program couldn’t resist the temptation to include a clip of
President Ronald Reagan confronting Gorbachev in Berlin and saying, “Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This is one item that plays very differently in the Donald Trump era than it would
have under any previous
President, Republican or Democrat: as I joked when Trump was still a candidate,
today he’d be saying, “Señor Peña
Nieto, build up this wall!” It’s
nice to be reminded of a time not so long ago when Republicans actually
believed that the barriers between countries should come down.) Free to Rock is an interesting documentary even though I suspect it way overestimates the role of rock music in bringing
down the Soviet regime — Charles watched part of it with me and said it was
full of post hoc, ergo propter hoc
fallacies — and I also was annoyed that it didn’t mention that well before
rock, the Soviet government had felt similarly threatened by their citizens’
exposure to American jazz (while the Communist Party U.S.A. blew hot and cold —
pardon the pun — over jazz, at some points regarding jazz as a form of
bourgeois social decadence that would be swept away when Communism took over,
while at other times they hailed jazz as the authentic voice of
African-Americans expressing their determination to combat racism). The Soviets
even had their own “safe” jazz musician, Leonid Utyosov (that’s what the
Wikipedia page on Soviet jazz musicians calls him; when I read about him
decades ago I remember seeing the last name rendered as “Utseyev”), who was
able to stay in business for decades by carefully calibrating his music and
pushing it just to the farthest edge of hotness the Soviet authorities would
then allow.
The lesson essentially is that authoritarians of all stripes, Left,
Right or nonideological, always
seek to control the popular culture, not only to make sure subversive or
anti-regime messages aren’t secretly being communicated to the masses in the
form of “entertainment” but also because authoritarian regimes seem to want
their people to be grim automatons committed to the greater glory of the Leader
and whatever his social project is. The worst examples are the fundamentalist
Islamic regimes like Afghanistan’s Taliban, who banned music, sports and
virtually all other forms of popular entertainment, and instead expected people
to get their mass jollies by being ordered into Kabul’s former soccer stadium
to watch enemies of the state get beheaded. One partial counter-example was
Nazi German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who seemed to understand — as
his Communist counterparts did not — that truly apolitical light entertainment
was actually good for a
dictatorial regime: if you gave people harmless ways to amuse themselves and
have fun, they’d be less, not
more, likely to rebel. This point was made in one of the most engaging
documentaries I’ve ever seen about cultural repression in the Eastern bloc
during the Cold War, East Side Story,
which was about the surprisingly few musicals produced during the Soviet period
in the U.S.S.R. itself and its dependencies. Made by Dana Ranga, who herself
grew up behind the Berlin Wall in East Germany, East Side Story referenced the 1934 Soviet musical Jolly
Fellows (in which Leonid Utyosov played the
male lead and became a star), directed by Sergei Eisenstein’s former assistant
Grigory Alexandrov. When Charles and I watched East Side Story I commented, “At first the Soviet censors refused to
allow this movie to be released on the ground that it was too frivolous —
indeed, the theme of super-serious Communist censor boards barring the release
of innocuous entertainment precisely because it was innocuous entertainment becomes a leitmotif through this film — but Alexandrov managed to sneak
a print to Maxim Gorky, who in turn showed it to Stalin personally; Stalin
loved it and ordered it released.” But it remains true that authoritarians of all stripes tend to hate the whole idea of “culture” and
try to keep their citizens from having access to it — as we’re seeing from the
Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate all funding for PBS, the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts from the federal budget.
