Boris Grebenshikov
It’s one of the rare moments in Michael Apted’s documentary The Long Way Home when the subject of the film–Russian rock star Boris Grebenshikov–actually says something in Russian. He’s singing in a London studio with the man who was to catapult him to Western fame, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. Grebenshikov’s tenor voice is smoky but sweet: Ona moya drama.
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Inspired by smuggled-in recordings of the Beatles and Bob Dylan–and by his own desire for meaning beyond the Soviet Union’s next five-year plan, Grebenshikov had been making his own rock music since the early 1970s. He and an amorphous group of friends who called themselves Aquarium performed impromptu concerts in apartments and warehouses. Tapes of their work were passed hand to hand across the country’s 11 time zones. The KGB regularly hauled Grebenshikov in to question him about drug use and his “foggy” lyrics, and he eventually lost a university job teaching applied mathematics. But his underground fame grew by leaps and bounds as people turned to his obscure yet optimistic songs for some perspective on Soviet life. In Grebenshikov’s songs, the soul was an “electric dog” sinking its teeth into communal apartment walls, and the long February of Brezhnev’s rule was “only our dance at the edge of spring.”
But those songs were all sung “backwards.” Though some of Aquarium’s songs had been smuggled abroad on the 1986 compilation Red Wave, what seemed to ensure Grebenshikov’s success in the West was his near perfect fluency in English. Backed by some well-meaning Americans who’d “discovered” him, by CBS Records, and ultimately by the cash-hungry openness of glasnost, Grebenshikov decided to record Radio Silence in the language of his rock ‘n’ roll idols. What happened to him afterward remains a cautionary tale for any foreign star who hopes to ride his steed down Main Street USA.
Dai mnye napit’sya zheleznadorozhnye vodi
Let me drink plenty of railroad water again.
“I just looked around me, and songs started pouring out,” he said. “And then I forgot all about this American track.”
