Boris Grebenshchikov Interviewed by Joanna Stingray
Part One
“I hope that all this music which is being created will change the way of thinking…the young people here will try and discover what they are, who they are and they will do what they want to do and do it how they want it to be done and they will discover themselves – to begin to live! That is what I am hoping for – to awaken them, to make them free in their own lives.” —Boris Grebenshchikov, April 1984
Boris Grebenshchikov, a founding father of Russian rock music, has been creating music for over fifty years. He began with an acoustic guitar from his grandmother at age 10, started playing electric guitar at 15, and formed the band Aquarium while studying applied mathematics at Leningrad State University. In the 1970s and 1980s, Aquarium held many “underground” concerts in apartments since rock and roll was regulated by the Soviet Union. They were one of the first bands in Russia to record and distribute their music on ¼-inch tapes with covers designed by Grebenshchikov and his band.
Grebenshchikov has been labeled a “foreign agent” by Russia due to his outspoken opposition to the war in Ukraine. His books sold in Russia are required to have a label that reads: “This book quotes the works of B.B. Grebenshchikov, included by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in the register of foreign agents.” He currently lives in London and recently worked on the album Heal the Sky alongside Western musicians to benefit the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine.
The following interview was conducted in two parts in 1984 by Joanna Stingray, an American who smuggled Aquarium’s music out of the Soviet Union. In 1986, their songs were released in the Western world on the album Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR. Her memoir is Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground.
Joanna: When did it all start?
Boris: I remember singing all the time when I was 4 or 5 and then around the beginning of the ’60s (I was about 10) there was some kind of new vibration in the air. I felt something was happening but I didn’t have the words. It was all this new music — what they now call rock ‘n’ roll. Then finally in 1965 I heard The Beatles and it was like a puzzle coming together. Everything from that moment was decided. I found for myself what I was doing here and what I would have to do. It was only a matter of finding out how to do some things, then doing them. Because till I heard The Beatles I was a normal Russian boy like everybody else but after I was never the same. I had my purpose — I didn’t know exactly what it was but I knew I had some things to do. I felt I was chosen or something.
When did you switch from singing in English to Russian?
One day I was listening to a song from the John Lennon and Plastic Ono Band called “God” where the song says, “that is a concept by which we imagine our pain” and I was very affected. I was young and impressionable and I was thinking about that song a lot. It touched something and I realized that to leave such an impression on somebody you had to sing in your own language. All the bands at that time were singing English lyrics — even people who didn’t understand the words were singing in English. Anyway, I realized that if I lived in Russia I had to sing in Russian. So I formed my own band. I got together with my friend who wanted to play the drums, I played guitar and we began writing songs. We didn’t think about amplifiers or knowing how to play but just wanted to really do something and we wrote songs in Russian. That’s how it started.
Were there any problems with the government when you first started playing?
When we first started playing there could be no problems because we were below that level [where] troubles could begin. We were just young boys playing. Troubles began to appear around 1978 when we became known and people wanted to listen to us. Looking back, I don’t even know if there really were problems. Things that I considered bad at the time now don’t seem too bad at all. The things that happened, happened precisely the right way.
What did happen?
Well, it was just the problem of how to get my songs registered and get permission to play at some hall or institute. Every hall and institute had its chief in charge and this man wanted to have papers saying everything was legal, because if he didn’t and something went wrong, he’d have trouble. So registering was the first problem because the people checking my lyrics couldn’t understand them, so they didn’t want to touch ’em. Once there was an older woman checking my lyrics and she said, “I don’t understand it — it’s too difficult for the people,” and when I questioned why and explained that she could look in some magazine or something and read all these modern poems which weren’t any easier to understand than my lyrics, she replied, “But that is poetry and you are singing popular songs so you have to sing it simple — now take away your lyrics and bring them back again when they are really easy to understand.” So that was my first battle, but after we became popular that problem kind of disappeared because the people who were answerable to all this stuff held me in some respect and they already knew I was somebody so they just read my words and said, “Ah, that’s poetry, that’s Boris, that’s okay.”
So you were still unofficial but could play in halls and institutions?
The difference between an official and unofficial band in our case is that when you’re professional you must tour around Russia constantly… Sure you get some money but you’re like a slave in this show business industry and without the profits that artists in the West get. So we’re unofficial and we don’t get any money but we are completely free. We can play if we want to play and we don’t play if we don’t want to. We have no equipment but it’s not our problem — it’s the problem of the people of the halls who want to book us. We say to them, ”We don’t get any money so you find the equipment and if it suits us, we’ll play.”
So even if you could become official you wouldn’t want to?
No, we’ve turned down many offers. I’m a free man and I intend to stay that way.
So what’s going on now? Are you allowed to play in concert halls?
It depends. As I understand the official policy right now, they don’t quite know what to do with all this rock music. Some officials want to ban it while others understand that that’s no way to solve the problem but instead you have to find out what’s happening and make it work for the government, not against it. So while they fight and have battles over it they send out statements to the halls stating the problems of underground bands and that they must do this and this and this. But when it comes down to business, every director of a club of culture or hall wants to have money and to have money he has to sell tickets and to sell tickets he must have some act whom the people will like enough to fill the hall (usually about 1300 people). The official entertainers don’t fill the halls because everybody is fed up with them. So every director wants some unofficial band to play.
Doesn’t this get the directors in trouble with the government?
No because we have Rock Club. Rock Club is an organization sponsored by the government for all unofficial musicians. They sometimes let bands play and borrow equipment. Rock Club makes the whole thing semi-official.
You were fired from your job in 1980…
At the time I was working as a mathematician in a biology institution and the band went to a music festival for the weekend and we were christened the first punk band in Russia. We were then thrown out of the festival, and when I got back to Leningrad I was fired from my job.
Did they say it was because of the band?
Yes, a letter was sent out to everyone saying that the band Aquarium plays anti-Soviet works and behaves like no Soviet citizen can behave and they are the black sheep of all the music and public enemy #1. After I was fired from my job I became a free person and I was very happy.
What else happened as a result of your music?
They also fired me from Komsomol (a youth organization) and although it was okay when they fired me from my job, I was very angry when they fired me from Komsomol. How dare they! So I reinstated myself with a big scandal. I made them realize they did the wrong thing even according to their own papers. [The people from the university] wanted to throw me out of everywhere at that time…They wanted very much to get rid of me as a potential troublemaker.
So what’s in the future?
I feel like I just have to do some quota of what I can do and while I still have some music in me — potential music — I gotta just put it out, record it. Basically speaking, I think what we’re doing here is reconstructing the whole history of rock ‘n’ roll only in Russian idioms and in Russian terms. We are creating rock ‘n’ roll for Russia [but] we are doing it in five or six years — instead of 30. In the beginning we were practically all alone, but now all these new generations of bands are beginning to grow up [come of age] — like Kino, Strange Games and Zoo.
What do you think of the new young Russian bands?
A couple of them are brilliant. They project so much energy when you see them in concert and compared to all the videos I’ve seen of Western bands, very few Western bands match that energy. I think it’s just a question of what we do and do not have — all these good things you have: fantastic amplification and all this electronic stuff. We lack very many things but we compensate by going for it all and doing it. It’s the same thing as knowing about music because people in Russia who are interested in rock music know everything about music even though they have very little access to information about it. Anyone who wants to know it, knows it, and they usually know it better than people in the West.
What do you think about people in the West hearing your music?
Some already have and it’s a source of constant astonishment that people who do not understand Russian are still listening to the music. From another point of view — when I was young and all this rock ‘n’ roll took place, people in Russia were listening to Western bands and some generations grew up on songs that practically nobody understood. So I think it can be reversed. Why not have new generations of Americans and Englishmen growing up on Russian lyrics? Yeah, I like the idea. Why not?
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Find interviews from 1986 with Boris Grebenshchikov here in Part Two.
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