Cradle of rock
A new Finnish book explores the history of rock in St. Petersburg.
Published: October 3, 2012 (Issue # 1729)
SERGEI CHERNOV / SPT
Finnish author Tomi Huttunen pictured at the Mitki art group’s studio in St. Petersburg last week.
Perestroika is back. Interest in Russian rock music in Finland is on the rise again, says Finnish author Tomi Huttunen, whose recent book on Russian rock is the second in Finland after Artemy Troitsky’s pioneering “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” published in Finland at the height of perestroika in 1988 under the title “Terveisiä Tšaikovskille” (Tell Tchaikovsky the News).
Huttunen, whose book is called “Pietari on rock,” a pun that can be roughly translated as “St. Petersburg Means Rock,” came to St. Petersburg last week with a bus full of about 30 interested Finns from all around the country including remote Lapland as well as eastern and western Finland.
They walked around places made legendary by the Leningrad rock musicians of the 1980s — including former locations of the Leningrad Rock Club and the bohemian hangout unofficially known as “Saigon” — and attended a concert and a party at the Mitki art group’s studio featuring Vladimir Rekshan of the local 1960s/70s rock legends Sankt Peterburg, as well as Alexei Zubarev, guitarist with the art-rock band Sezon Dozhdei in the 1980s and Boris Grebenshchikov’s BG Band and Akvarium in the 1990s.
The trip was arranged to conclude a series of book events that began in March with a concert and discussion with DDT frontman Yury Shevchuk at the University of Helsinki, where Huttunen is a professor of Russian literature.
Huttunen, 42, encountered Russian rock when he first came to Leningrad in 1986. “I was 15 and it was with a high school group in a bus full of drunken Finns,” he says.
“It was late autumn. We came and saw the empty Nevsky; we thought there was not a single man in this city, there were only some cars, but then there was a huge queue for an ice-cream stand. It was very cold, and there were people queuing for ice cream.
“We had too many rubles and didn’t know what to do with them. We went to Dom Knigi and there, apart from the portraits of Gorbachev, we saw records on sale and one was Akvarium’s ‘white album.’”
The freshly released vinyl LP was the first official release by Leningrad’s leading rock band fronted by Boris Grebenshchikov, culled from its two underground DIY tapes as a Soviet propaganda answer to “Red Wave,” a compilation of St. Petersburg rock released by the then aspiring U.S. singer Joanna Stingray in the U.S. earlier that year.
“I played it at home and started to translate the lyrics by ear, using a small tourist dictionary,” Huttunen says.
“It turned out many years later that I hadn’t understood anything in the lyrics, but the translations turned out to be very interesting. I started to develop my Russian from there.
“Then I wrote a student essay in Russian, and I wrote about some grass, some hallucinations, something in your palm and this turns into something else… It was my idea of communication in Russian. My vocabulary was fully based on Grebenshchikov’s idiom in the 1980s.”
The 1980s saw the explosion of Russian rock, and Leningrad was its cradle.
The Finns, Huttunen points out, were there in the very beginning, with filmmakers Ria Karhila and Cristian Valdes shooting Akvarium’s legendary performance at Tbilisi ’80 rock festival in 1980. The resulting documentary — featuring an interview with Grebenshchikov — was first shown on Finnish state television later the same year.
Nautilus Pompilius, Dzhungli, AVIA and Pop Mekhanika performed in Finland in the late 1980s, when Soviet liberalization advanced and groups formerly belonging to the underground were finally allowed to travel abroad.
The co-credit is given to Dmitry Konradt, the photographer responsible for documenting most of the historic moments of St. Petersburg rock at its height in the 1980s. He supplied more than 60 photos to illustrate the book. “It’s not just my book, Dima Konradt is the second author, so Russians can perceive it as well by looking at the pictures,” Huttunen says.
“It’s an author’s album by Konradt, too. The visual line implements the plot; and much of what I wrote was based on the photographs that we selected together with Dima.”
The 174-page book is built on the historical principle, according to Huttunen.
“In the beginning I wanted to explain to the Finnish reader that St. Petersburg rock is exceptionally literature-based,” Huttunen said.
“I have a joke [in the book] that ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll’ translates into Russian as ‘Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky.’ I have liked the idea for a long time, and I reviewed lyrics by Shevchuk, Grebenshchikov, Mike, Tsoi and so on to find out how often Pushkin or quotes from Pushkin are featured in them. It is a distinctive feature of St. Petersburg rock that it has its roots in 19th-century literature. Then I go on to the formation of [the group] Sankt Peterburg in the late 1960s and the phenomenon of [its frontman] Rekshan and discuss his lyrics.”
Huttunen also writes about Kolya Vasin, an artist, historiographer and Beatles expert, because the John Lennon Temple of Love that he founded at 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa is well known among Finnish tourists to St. Petersburg.
Speaking of Finnish visitors, he goes on to explain aspects of everyday life in Soviet Leningrad, such as fartsovshchiki (illegal dealers in foreign goods), Galyora (a gallery around the Gostiny Dvor department store where they resold goods obtained from Finnish tourists), Brod (a slang name for Nevsky Prospekt, stemming from Broadway) and various Russian slang names for the Finns themselves.
Huttunen compares Russian rock’s poetry tradition to what was happening in Finland in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“There was a very strong poetry school within rock music, both in Finland and in Russia,” he said.
“There were [singer-songwriters] Jussi Leskinen, Dave Lindholm and Tuomari Nurmio in the 1970s and Hector, who translated Bob Dylan and Donovan, and then Ismo Alanko, Kauko Röyhkä and Eppu Normaali in the 1980s; there were very many similarities, and it would be very interesting to do a comparative analysis of the lyrics.”
According to Huttunen, Nurmio came to Leningrad in 1985 where he met Zoopark’s Mikhail “Mike” Naumenko backstage and wrote the first foreign article about the Russian musician.
Huttunen confronts the popular view that Russian rock’s poetical strength stemmed from the lack of good equipment, tracing its roots to the Soviet school program of classical literature and more recent samizdat literary works that were distributed from peer to peer.
“It takes a long time to explain to a Finn where ‘Alexander Sergeyevich [Pushkin] with his mouth torn’ comes from, or some Gogol motifs in the Leningrad lyrics at that time,” he says. “Of course, much was inspired by the Modernist poets of the early 20th century, even if they all deny it. Grebenshchikov knew poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak very well and it can be seen in his lyrics. And you can’t speak about Shevchuk without speaking about Joseph Brodsky. Poetry met rock.”
Huttunen argues that Western rock artists influenced by poetry found a more vivid response in Soviet Leningrad.
“Why was there such strong interest in George Harrison out of all The Beatles? Then Dylan, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Jim Morrison?”
“St. Petersburg is Rock” includes 30 pages of Russian rock lyrics with parallel Finnish translations done by Huttunen, who sang his translation of Akvarium’s early 1980s song “Why Doesn’t the Sky Fall Down” (“Pochemu Ne Padayet Nebo”) during the event at Mitki’s studios last week. However, the book lacks any lyrics written by Kino’s late frontman Viktor Tsoi, as Huttunen failed to get permission to reproduce them from his heirs. Obtaining permission to print some of Mike Naumenko’s lyrics took 18 months.
“The readers of the book want to listen to the songs, but it is impossible to listen to them without translation, because the lyrics are so important,” Huttunen said.
“When an American band comes to Finland, nobody is interested in what they are singing about; they are interested in what they are doing and how they play. With Russian bands, everybody starts to ask what they’re singing about. They feel a text tradition at once and think: ‘It sounds like the lyrics are important here.’”
Unlike earlier generations of rock musicians, bands such as Auktyon, which emerged in the late 1980s, are more “listenable” for Finnish audiences, according to him.
“Many of my students like Auktyon very much, because it’s avant-garde rock, rather than more traditional folk rock or Mike’s rock ‘n’ roll or New Wave,” Huttunen says.
“They have something that is their own; you can’t explain where it comes from. Auktyon’s collaborations with [the late émigré artist and songwriter Alexei] Khvostenko are very interesting historically. In short, I wanted to write the history of late Soviet culture from the point of view of rock music.”
Some of the songs mentioned and translated in the book can be listened to on the publisher’s website.
However, translations are not enough to allow for a full understanding of certain aspects of life back then, and further explanation was needed.
“How to explain the song ‘Dreams of Something Bigger’ (‘Sny o Chyom-to Bolshem’) and why Akvarium was not allowed to perform on television because it was too daring,” Huttunen says.
“It can only be understood in the context of the late 1980s. It’s difficult for a Finn to understand what was daring about it.”
The book concludes with an explanation of the rock musicians’ current political stances, which, Huttunen says, is especially interesting for Finnish readers.
“Why do they ask Grebenshchikov and Shevchuk about what happens in this country? Because nobody asks our (Finnish) rock musicians about political issues. That’s what I am trying to explain; why they are addressed about this and what their answers are.”
According to Huttunen, interest in Russian rock music and culture is experiencing a rebirth after perestroika in the wake of mass anti-fraud protests and the imprisonment of members of feminist punk group Pussy Riot.
“In spring, we did a presentation for the book in Helsinki, it was just fabulous,” Huttunen said. “Everybody came to the university and there was no space in the room, about 100 were left outside. Everybody wanted to see Shevchuk. He was shown on every television channel and he was interviewed, of course, about the political situation but also about music.
“He was asked whether there was freedom of speech in Russia. Pussy Riot was a hot topic and it influenced interest in Russian rock music and the modern history of Russia and, in my view, it’s right, because it should be discussed from the point of view of contemporary culture and art.
“The Finns are not explained what Pussy Riot is. One should know some history to understand, for instance, conceptualism. And speaking about conceptualism, [Siberian punk band] Grazhdanskaya Oborona and the history of punk is very important, and how Pussy Riot’s work is connected with [late Moscow poet] Dmitry Prigov.
“It’s interesting for me to see the upsurge of interest in Russian culture now, it was not the case before in Finland. It is as if they decided that artists and rock poets will tell us what will happen. The book is an attempt to answer.”
“Pietari on rock” by Tomi Huttunen with photographs by Dmitry Konradt is published by Into publishing house, Helsinki, Finland, 2012.