"Hmm, Metal," they would say, stroking their chins. "Very interesting."
"My Father is a Fascist" was currently the biggest hit in Leningrad.
After breakfast, we went over to the sports stadium where the concert would take place. Around the makeshift stage were half a dozen British musicians in leather pants, shades, and ear studs; they lolled among the lights, amplifiers, guitars, trunks, suitcases, backpacks, drums, and cases of Perrier that had been trucked in overland from Helsinki. Dozens of film people lurked, waiting for orders from Michael Apted, the director of the documentary. Apted wandered around, the local rock promoter in his wake. The rock guy introduced himself to everyone as Fat Lev. "All you need is Lev, eh?" he said to everyone he met.
Even Fat Lev couldn't supply black paint, though. There were tons of equipment, but no black paint for the stage, not a single can in Leningrad, an industrial city of four million people.
Leslie Woodhead had imported yet another crew to shoot the footage he wanted for the Dean Reed drama-documentary, and his production manager, Craig McNeill, wandered around the sports stadium, with a pair of cowboy boots under his arm, looking for a Dean Reed stand-in. Everyone was drinking coffee and complaining about the hotels and the black paint and the weather, and wondering if the Russian musicians would ever show up.
The Russians were late, except for the cellist, who sat on the stage, sawing at his instrument like a dentist trying to get at a difficult tooth.
Keeping order, more or less, was Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. A small hirsute man, Dave had produced Boris Grebenshikov's first Western album.
The percussionist was Ray Cooper. A big man in a fine suit with a shaved head, Ray kept his drumsticks in a silver champagne cooler. It was Ray's second trip to the USSR: he had been on tour with Elton John in 1979, the first Soviet tour by a Western rock superstar. From time to time, Ray went to the Kirov Ballet with his roadie.
Cooper started testing his cymbals. He made me think of the man in the title sequence of J. Arthur Rank movies. As if in response, Boris Grebenshikov appeared. He was four hours late.
Slim, pale, with big Slavic lips and long blond hair, Boris was thirty-five and he could look incredibly plain, or light himself up and be unspeakably handsome. While Dean was promiscuous with his smile, Boris saved his up, waited, watched, held back, letting it come very slowly. I introduced myself; we had almost met in New York. For a second more, he calculated the smile, then he gave it all away. He had really nice manners.
"Yes, I know your name quite well," he said politely when we were introduced, though I was pretty sure he didn't know who the hell I was at all.
Meeting Boris made me really understand how out of date Dean Reed must have seemed, how much his star had faded. Dean became an official superstar in the Soviet Union because he was American and because of his looks, because he seemed forbidden. He was, in fact, official. He not only spouted the Party line, he was also a believer. But towards the end of his life his music seemed dated; he was yesterday's man. I saw a clip from a TV program Dean made in Moscow not long before his death. He wore a kind of silky waistcoat and a shirt with puffy sleeves, an outfit a disco guy of the 1970s might have worn. Oleg Smirnoff did the translating.
"We are not too old," Dean said to the audience. "I know how old you are and I think we should be symbols to the young people." He smiled. Then he did a little dance routine to the tune from Ghostbusters and the audience, in a desultory way, joined in. It was one of the saddest things I ever saw.
Boris Gribenshikov, the mathematics student who became the first authentic Russian rocker, was young and he was good. His earliest memories were of the distant sound of the Beatles, the illicit seductive crackle of great Western music broadcast by the Voice of America. Boris was a rebel because nothing else gave him peace. If Dean had become a star by joining the mainstream, Boris became a star by inhabiting the underground, the unofficial world. In the years when Dean was on officially approved tours across the USSR, Boris, like a character out of a Dostoevsky novel, wandered the Leningrad streets after dark, looking for trouble and finding it.
In 1980, at a concert in Tblisi, he had famously lain down on the stage embracing his Fender Stratocaster. He got up a legend.
"When Boris lay down on the stage holding his guitar on his stomach, the entire judging committee stood up and left the hall," Art Troitsky said. "The officials said, why did you bring those faggots here?"
People who said they believed in the spiritual wrote to Boris to ask about his karma. Kids regularly crossed the Soviet Union, two, three, eight time zones, to see Boris. They climbed the stairs to his sixth-floor squat on Sofia Pereovskaya Street in Leningrad, where they wrote poetry on the walls and where Boris kept a picture of the Beatles in his place as a kind of shrine. He believed in the spiritual. He believed in the Beatles.
Boris and his band, Aquarium, made great music, they could play any style. It was Boris's lyrics - religious, sentimental, satirical, and utterly Russian - that made him a hero; next to a good melody, which is why Russians fell so obsessively in love with the Beatles, they were crazy about good lyrics. It was a long way from Dean Reed's stuff, the early pap like "Twirly Twirly" and the platitudes of his political numbers.
Boris Grebenshikov was the perfect hero for his generation, for whom the significance of rock and roll was intense, emotional, political in the widest sense, and practically religious. Break the rules, the rock mantra went. Keep the faith. As Art Troitsky put it, it gave a generation its identity.
"It meant fight your parents," Art said. "It meant: you are free to do what you want, no matter what the seniors say. It was a form of fighting back, a reaction to oppression, a catalyst for change. It taught people how to be themselves and how to oppose the rules."
Everywhere in the USSR, kids copied Boris' underground album on to cassettes. A million of them. Ten million. Boris' music was unofficial and hard to get hold of and, therefore, in Soviet eyes, more valuable. Maybe Dean's popularity declined because he had become too easy.
"After Glasnost, from 1985 or 1986, local rock and roll heroes became available to the public," Art said, "and American rock and roll, even if it was Prince and not Dean Reed, became less popular."
"Only in a very provincial and very isolated country, could a figure like Dean Reed become a big star," Art added thoughtfully. "Gradually, Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, got closer to the world community culturally and in a very humanitarian way. In the light of new information, Dean Reed's figure was getting darker and darker."
In 1987, Boris went legit. Melodiya issued an album by Aquarium made from underground tapes and it sold 200,000 copies in a couple of hours. Although no Soviet had ever personally signed a contract for himself and all contractual issues, especially with foreigners, were handled by the state agencies, Boris signed his own contract with CBS Records.
Boris went to America, where he was enthralled and confused; he sat in a closet in an apartment in New York's East Village, listening to music. He sat by a pool in Hollywood and felt disoriented. At home, his fans wondered if Boris had sold out and despaired.
Art had been friends with Boris for a long time, but even Art was a little cynical. He said that within a decade you would hear Boris's music in the elevator of the Moscow Hilton. Even Art's mother liked Boris.
Art Troitksy was unhappy in Leningrad. Like many Muscovites, he despised it and called it the "City of Bad Memories." I didn't like it either and I didn't quite understand why at first, maybe the fact that insistently beautiful cities make me uneasy. I felt that in spite of its beauty, or because of it, I was imprisoned in a mad imperial theme park.
A port city blasted from a swamp by slave labor in the eighteenth century - Peter the Great was obsessed with making a European city - it was gorgeous but crumbling and somehow sinister, like Miss Haversham's wedding cake. Its fartovshiki, the two-bit criminals, hustled you relentlessly.
Still, it was a Georgian wet dream of a city, with its matched sets of pastel buildings and the gilded griffons on the bridges and the pale green Winter Palace iced with snow. In November, when it got dark early and the snow was dirty, it was a melancholy place.
What I remembered best about Leningrad was the freaky wax statue of Peter the Great with his own hair in a glass case at the Hermitage and the waiter at the Metropole Restaurant with jars of black-market caviar shoved in the pockets of his pants under his worn tailcoat. At five bucks a pop, it was cheaper than Moscow. I remembered the fact that, under siege by the Nazis during World War Two, Leningrad's people ate wallpaper paste.
On our one afternoon away from the sports stadium, we went to the Hermitage and when we got back to the hotel and disembarked from the bus, our guide shifted his feet unhappily and refused our gift of Marlboros. It was a kind of protest. All afternoon he had listened to us casually abuse his country, commenting on the bureaucracy and the crappy food and lousy toilets.
Finally, he said, "Are you with the rock concert?"
"Yes," I replied.
He said, "I met Boris once about eight years ago, but he's very famous now. He wouldn't remember me."
That evening, before the concert began, a group of little girl gymnasts appeared at the back of the sports stadium presumably for a practice session. Twirling, spinning, and tossing Indian clubs, they launched their perfect childish bodies into outer space like tiny sputniks. The band was tuning up. The little gymnasts seemed oblivious to the music and I wondered if rock and roll was already unremarkable to these little kids of seven and eight.
I wandered into a dressing room where tinted photographs of the heroes of Soviet sport - ice skaters in spangles, footballers in jerseys stiff with sweat - were on the walls. A member of the Russian band was there.
His hair draped over his ears, he stared into the mirror, reciting his mantra. The room was choking sweet with pot. It smelled like 1968, I thought, and then I left and went backstage, where I had a good view of the band and the audience. The hall was packed.
"Sing it in Russian!" the crowd yelled, and Boris Grebenshikov, dressed entirely in black and in command of the stage with his band around him, sang in Russian.
Twelve thousand people clapped and wept, and some of them pushed up almost to the edge of the stage and linked arms and lit candles. A pale young girl, turning her face up to him, held up a picture of Boris, an icon in a plastic sleeve.
"Sing it in Russian!"
Boris finished the number. He introduced Dave Stewart and Ray Cooper. These were his friends from the West, he said, and they were going to sing some songs in English.
"Sing it in Russian!"
Film crews in sneakers raced silently around the stage and recorded everything. News crews were there, too. Foreigners loved rock and roll in Russia. It was th e sexiest image of the decade. The revolution had come and it sounded good. It sounded great. It was noisy. It was vivid. It looked like us, and you didn't go to war with your own, so we felt safe for the first time in our lives. We Cold War babies knew for sure now that they weren't going to nuke us. The music seemed to literally tear up the terrors of seventy years and toss them over its shoulder with wonderful abandon.
Boys punched the air. Tall girls with fabulous cheekbones and pale big lips, the Slav beauties who had suddenly appeared everywhere in the USSR, waved and sang along. In the best seats, officials clapped politely and tried not to wish they were listening to Tchaikovsky. People threw flowers. People unfurled Soviet flags and the hammer and sickle waved to the sound of Ray Cooper's chimes. A boy in a yellow satin jacket turned his back so everyone could see the slogan on it. It read: GLASNOST '88, as if Glasnost were this year's Woodstock.
In the middle of the swaying sea of bodies, a young Russian soldier in uniform got on to his girlfriend's shoulders and loosened his tie. He made a V-sign. Seeing us standing at the side of the stage, he gestured wildly. He wanted Leslie to take his picture. Then the boy whispered to his friend, who got on his girl's shoulders and the two of them made V-signs and laughed like crazy and yelled and yelled, probably calling out, "Take our picture."
Boris sang his anthem: "Rock and roll is dead, but I'm not yet."
Dave Stewart called out, "I'm from Sunderland, Boris is from Leningrad. We meet. It's just a tiny thing. But it's better than killing each other."
"All you need is love!"
We all sang along and believed for a while that it was really true. All you need is love. How Dean would have adored it all.