Success Spoiled Soviet Rock, Musician Says

A theme common to American music bio films from “St. Louis Blues” to “Jailhouse Rock” is that of an artist struggling through adversity to develop his craft, only to lose his soul when, at last, success strikes. And that, according to Soviet rock musician Vasily Shumov, is pretty much the scenario of what has occurred with the entire Soviet rock music scene in recent years.

Shumov spoke Tuesday evening in a UC Irvine Arts and Lectures event at the university’s Student Center. In heavily accented English, the 30-year-old Muscovite musician related his experiences as a pre- and post- glasnost rocker.

Where playing rock music was once branded as fascist, and bands could only be heard by exchanging homemade underground tapes, Shumov and his rocking contemporaries are now stars, with official record releases, concerts and radio shows.

He said it has all but ruined the music.

“It has all changed. All this atmosphere of rock music, all the ideas, messages, the people listening and finding something in the songs more than all this music for dancing. There was something more, something spiritual. Now in the last two years, that’s completely gone,” he said.

Like Westerners, Shumov said he was first hit by the sounds of the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks and other ‘60s-rock giants. But where the ensuing media explosion helped promote those groups in the West, listening to rock was a clandestine activity in the Soviet Union. The music was regarded as decadent, and none was released in the country. Instead, a trickle of records were smuggled in, sometimes brought by African and Middle-Eastern exchange students. Songs would be disseminated not by radio, but by fans exchanging the records or tapes.

“The music would go from one person to another directly, like a virus,” Shumov said. He isn’t the only one to draw such comparisons: As recently as four years ago, some Soviet officials were likening the spread of rock in the Soviet Union to AIDS.

Anything related to rock was a precious commodity. As a youth, Shumov covered the walls of his room with every rock photo he could get his hands on, no matter how poorly reproduced. “I had pictures of Jimi Hendrix, of some bands who I don’t even know who they were--just that they were rock musicians.”

He learned English, he said, largely to understand what was being said in the rock lyrics. The first Soviet bands chiefly covered Western hits, with just a rough approximation of the lyrics. Shumov said he has a recording of a band at the time doing the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “and it sounds like a reversed language.” As quaint as that may seem, such local efforts were of tremendous importance to Soviet rock fans. According to Shumov, “People were really ready to die for this.”

Before long, he said, bands were doing their own music with Russian lyrics and found almost immediate resistance.

“Although the song lyrics were very romantic and not social, even then there was censorship,” he said, “It wasn’t that the lyrics were anti-communist, but they (Ministry of Culture officials) were against it in general because it was out of (their) control.”

Soon it was decreed that before performing, bands would submit their lyrics and even between-song comments for approval in advance. Band shows could also be only 20% a group’s own material; the rest had to be “official” music by members of the Union of Soviet Composers.

Shumov became an active musician during the second wave of rock that hit in the late ‘70s, one influenced by punk and such bands as the Talking Heads, Police, the Stranglers and Madness. The punk influence certainly didn’t soften the officials’ opinion of rock. Shumov said bands like his had to contend with charges of being dissidents, fascists and inspired by the Western secret services. Some musicians were jailed as profiteers for smuggling instruments into the country, which they did of necessity because there were no Soviet instruments available.

Denied the chance to record officially, bands would record their music at home on cheap tape recorders and clandestinely distribute copies. Shumov and his band, Centre, recorded 16 such albums. It was only after perestroika that he learned how widespread and influential those albums became.

“We took a long trip by plane to play in a city in Siberia, and there I came to understand they knew . . . all the 16 albums we had recorded in my room. Hundreds of people there had heard it.” (An album of Shumov’s music was issued in the U.S. last year on the Gold Castle label.)

But while Soviet rock music was once made as an underground labor of love, Shumov said that in the last four years of freedom it has now become “an industry,” with arena-size concerts glitzed with flashing lights, in which the musicians might as well be lip-syncing.

Performers have gone from earning 70 rubles a month to 70,000, he said, though the problem of being rich in the Soviet Union is that there is nothing to buy. Some have abandoned their homes and moved to Western nations. Others won’t tour unless they are guaranteed limos, caviar and five-star hotels. Bands clamor for the status of having their music issued on CD, though virtually no Soviet citizens own CD players.

“They became 100% moneymakers and all their ideas are finished,” Shumov said. One such casualty, he said, was his own band, and he now works without them. “There are very few musicians now who will experiment in their music,” he claims, saying most choose to make mindless disco tracks. And with the advent of a commercial television station in Moscow, there now exists a situation that might sound familiar: “If you have money you can become a popular artist--it’s like a rule. You can pay for a video cooperative to make a video, and pay for it to be on TV so many times. So some musicians I had never even heard of existing would be on TV five or six times a day, and they became popular.”

Shumov told the audience, “Each of you could come to Moscow, exchange dollars for rubles on the black market, make a video and in six months become a very popular artist, even if you can’t sing or play guitar.”

Look eastward, Milli Vanilli.