Turning Russian Rock Into Gold : American Record Producer Spins Hopes on Soviet Union’s ‘Madonna’

Glasnost works both ways. Last year, Paul McCartney recorded an album in the Soviet Union. This year, Laima Vaikule, the Soviet Union’s answer to Madonna, is recording an album in the United States.

On March 13, the Latvian-born pop singer and her six-piece band arrived in this quiet North County coastal community for a month of rehearsals, in an elegant oceanfront mansion, with American producer Stan Cornelius.

In mid-April, Cornelius and the Soviet musicians will head north to famed jazzman Chick Corea’s Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles, where Vaikule will allegedly become the first female Soviet performer in history to record an album on American soil.

Chalk up another one for Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the Soviet president’s much ballyhooed policy of glasnost, encouraging more openness in Soviet society.

“I have always been very fond of American music, and I like to show my talent to American audiences,” said the 35-year-old Vaikule, speaking through an interpreter. “Before, it would have been very difficult for me to come over to this country and make a recording. But, under President Gorbachev, everything is much easier. I got an invitation and I was able to come.”

All the songs on the album will be sung in English. Contributing songwriters include Michael Sembello, whose “Maniac,” from the movie “Flashdance,” was a No. 1 hit in 1983, and Sam Mosely and Bob Johnson, who have penned tunes for such rhythm-and-blues artists as Bobby Blue Bland and Johnny Taylor.

Once the album is completed--the target date is late May--Cornelius will shop the master tape to American record companies. He hopes to find a willing taker, he said, by the end of summer.

Easier said than done? Perhaps. In the Soviet Union, Vaikule is a superstar. Since her 1987 debut on the state-run Melodiya Records label, she’s sold millions of albums behind the Iron Curtain.

On her most recent tour of the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, Vaikule performed to as many as 40,000 screaming fans a night. She also appears regularly on entertainment programs on Soviet television and is the only pop singer to ever have been interviewed twice on “Vremya,” the country’s nightly newscast.

In the United States, however, Vaikule is an unknown. Still, Cornelius--a Nashville-based producer who has worked primarily

with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs and Glen

Campbell--is confident enough of her potential for American audiences that he’s financing the entire project himself.

“Because of her voice, her style of singing and the type of music she’s doing, I’m convinced Laima could be a success in the West, provided she can sing in English,” Cornelius said. “So, what we’re basically doing now is working on her pronunciation--she’s already got the talent, and I’ve already got the songs.”

The seeds for this unique venture were sown in January, 1988, when Cornelius was in Cannes, attending the annual Midem convention, an international record industry meet. One night, he happened to run into Valerie Sukhorado, general director of Melodiya Records.

“We got to talking, and he came by my suite and heard one of my artists, country singer Bobby Joe Ryman, whom I had brought with me to Cannes,” Cornelius said. “He must have liked what he heard, because he ended up inviting Bobby and me to Moscow to record an album for his label.”

A few months later, Cornelius recalled, he and Ryman were back in the U.S.S.R., hard at work in Melodiya’s Moscow recording studio.

“In order for (the album) to be more viable, sales-wise, we wanted to get someone who was very popular in the Soviet Union to sing a duet or two with Bobby in English,” Cornelius said. “So, Melodiya invited me to listen to their various popular singers, and Laima was the one who impressed me the most.”

Vaikule was promptly recruited for the recording sessions and, Cornelius said, “she was wonderful.”

So wonderful, in fact, that Cornelius invited Vaikule to record an album in the United States.

“That was last September, and she just arrived a few weeks ago, so you can see how long it took to work out all the details,” Cornelius said. “There was lots of red tape on the part of both governments.

“We had to get approval from two Soviet agencies: Melodiya Records and the state committee on cinematography, which is sending a six-man film crew out here on April 14 to do a motion picture about the project. And we also had to get approval from the U. S. State Department; before issuing Laima a visa, they wanted proof that my financial situation was such that she and her band wouldn’t be stranded here.”

Laima Vaikule was born in the tiny Latvian town of Riga on the Baltic Sea. At the age of 12, she accompanied a girlfriend to a local talent show for young singers and walked away with the big prize: a national concert tour with a traveling Big Band orchestra.

Once the tour was over, Vaikule returned home to Riga and went back to school. Four years later, however, a Latvian pop group heard her sing at a local discotheque and asked her to join them on the road. Vaikule agreed, but, after six years, she dropped out to enter medical school.

“To make a living as a professional singer was a hard struggle,” Vaikule said. “Everything was organized and moderated by the state. The state controlled where you played, what you sang, and how much you got paid--and what I got paid wasn’t very much.”

In 1980, Vaikule gave up her medical studies to set up a dance company and orchestra at the Juras Perle cabaret in Jurmala, a popular resort near Riga. Over the next five years, according to the November, 1988, issue of Soviet Life magazine, Vaikule became a “local celebrity,” regularly performing for foreign visitors at the behest of the Soviet government.

Only with the 1985 ascension to power of Mikhail Gorbachev did Vaikule’s star really begin to rise. Doors that had previously been shut were all of a sudden opened.

Her performance on a nationally broadcast New Year’s Eve program in 1985 was the catapult. Before long, Vaikule was recording for Melodiya and touring the Soviet Union on a regular basis. In 1987, she was picked as her country’s representative to the annual Bratislava Song Festival in Czechoslovakia and won the top prize, the Golden Lyre Award.

“The difference before Gorbachev and since Gorbachev is enormous,” she said. “Television has become very generous to young singers and dancers. There are special programs on almost every night, where people can find out about young performers.

“We also have more discotheques, nightclubs and performance halls than ever--and the pay is starting to be really good.”

Indeed. In the past, Soviet performers were paid a state-set fee for their concert appearances that was the same for everyone, regardless of his or her popularity.

But now, Vaikule said, “a singer who is very popular can charge as much money as he is able to get from the nightclub or hall, according to how famous he is.” Vaikule’s fee for a one-night performance now averages 7,000 rubles, or roughly $9,000--a 10-fold increase over what she got paid just five years ago.

Still, the financial rewards of pop superstardom are not quite what they are in the United States. Although her debut Melodiya album sold millions of copies, Vaikule receives no royalties; she was merely paid a one-time recording fee.

“There’s no royalties, no percentage,” she said. “I would have gotten paid the same if my album had sold five copies.”

Vaikule is optimistic, however, that in the future “it will be the same as it is in the United States, where the more records you sell, the more money you get,” she said.

“Even now, for my next (Soviet) album, I’m negotiating with more than one record company, and they’re offering more money, even royalties. They don’t do this for everyone, but maybe someday they will.

“And maybe someday,” Vaikule added with a laugh, “Soviet singers can become millionaires, just like American singers.”