Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  At first, the Soviet hierarchy attempted to ridicule the Beatles, describing Ringo Starr as Tarzan and “a monkey” and claiming the band was “already out of date” in 1964. 64 Copycat bands proliferated, including Falcon, Guys, Little Red Devils, and dozens of others. Alexander Gradsky, later called “The Old Man of Moscow Rock,” was just fourteen years old when he went “into a state of shock” after hearing the Liverpudlians for the first time. Gradsky went on to form the Slavs with Mikhail Sholokhov, the grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and the band became the top rock act in Moscow. Everywhere, rock caused rebellion. Several Western bands played Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1966, sparking violent scuffles. Hollies singer Graham Nash saw “all this shooting outside the hotel.”65 Authorities halted further tours, and when they canceled a concert in Riga, protesters held a six-hour demonstration with banners proclaiming “Free the Guitars!” In spring 1967, tours resumed, including a Rolling Stones appearance in Warsaw where some fans experienced ticket problems. Irate kids stormed police barriers and provoked the police to respond with tear gas and dogs. Inside the Palace of Culture, where the show took place, the Stones stopped in mid-song when they noticed that the Communist Party elites were sitting in the first rows. Keith Richards grabbed drummer Charlie Watts and said, “Stop playing, Charlie.” Pointing to the Party members in the front, he shouted, “You f——ing lot, get out and let those bastards in the back sit down front.”66 Needless to say, the Stones were not invited back to the Soviet bloc.

  Rock bands were at the center of the Prague Spring, particularly the Primitives, one of the earliest Soviet-bloc psychedelic bands. As Alexander Dubček liberalized Czech society, the likelihood of intervention by the Soviets grew, culminating in the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 20, 1968. Of course, oppression just fueled the protest singers’ fire. Marta Kubišová, the singer for the Golden Kids, penned the anthem of the Czech resistance with her “Prayer for Marta,” which was followed by the shocking self-immolation of Czech student and martyr Jan Palach in January 1969. Another leading Czech protest song, by Moravian singer Karel Kryl, was 1969’s “Close the Gate, Little Brother,” which became so popular that Kryl toured Czechoslovakia performing three concerts a day and selling 125,000 copies of the song despite the fact that he had no manager and no agent.

  Dubcek was replaced by Gustáv Husák in 1969, whereupon the Beach Boys and the Tremeloes were invited to the annual festival in Bratislava. After a spectacular ascent, the Beach Boys had drifted far behind the Beatles in their popularity in America, as critics panned them as shallow and unimaginative. Their onetime leader and songwriter, Brian Wilson, battled mental illness and schizophrenia, exacerbated by drugs, and was unable to travel. His bandmates thus looked at the European tour as a means to regain their momentum, and in turn Czechoslovakia welcomed them as a sign of the return of “Spring.” In June, in front of a packed house at Lucerna Hall, after knocking out their hits “Sloop John B” and “Barbara Ann,” the Beach Boys dedicated the song “Break Away”—about individuality and freedom—to Dubček, who was in the crowd. The tour reinvigorated the Californians, but even if “Spring” hadn’t returned, the Communist states quickly realized that the juggernaut called rock and roll could not be ignored.

  East Germany, which couldn’t control Western radio signals like Radio in the American Sector and Radio Free Europe’s show Compass, instituted DT-64, which played rock, as did Hungary’s Csak Fiataloknak (For Youth Only), or the Hungarian “Amateur Hour” show, Ki Mit Tud (Show What You Know). Western bands continued to arrive, including the Animals, who played six Baltic cities in Poland in 1966, and the Rolling Stones, who played Warsaw in 1967. An East German reviewer warned that these bands were the voice of a “new Fuhrer.”67 When they arrived at the airport, the Stones were greeted by an army of fans and later, at their concert, they found three thousand ticket holders joined by another eight thousand people who wanted in without paying (an example of socialist principles in action, some would say). A fracas broke out, followed by a mob rampage quelled only by riot police. (In the act, one policeman was killed.) Nevertheless, a high-level official promised that “the trumpets of the Beatles are not the trumpets of Jericho which will cause the walls of socialism to come tumbling down.”68

  Hungary, the first Iron Curtain nation to roll up the fence in 1988, was the vanguard of rock liberalization, most notably due to the band Illes. Following the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Illes performed its original tunes in Sgt. Pepper-type uniforms. When interviewed in England, the band criticized the Hungarian government, and when it returned home, found its concerts sharply limited. Illes was banned from television appearances, and its new album was prevented from being released. The band reemerged after a year, apparently contrite, and released a new album dedicated to Angela Davis—but this was a façade for reviving the assault on freedom in Hungary through lyrics that challenged the Communists to look in “their own backyard.” A song called “If I Were a Rose,” referring to the street that had been crushed beneath tank treads during the 1956 uprising, slipped through the censors long enough to be recorded by a leading female singer, only to have the copies confiscated upon release. Another song critical of the Stalinist era, “Europe Is Silent,” was not released until 1983, and was not played on state radio for four years after that.

  In the Soviet Union, despite a relentless propaganda campaign against Western dress and music, young people continued to favor pop music and “hippie” attire. Pictures of Jagger and Hendrix were pasted over Communist slogans on walls. Nikita Khrushchev could rant all he wanted about how rock sounded like “static” or the sound of a trolley car, but that did not diminish the burgeoning market for Western music in Lenin’s heartland. Following Beatlemania, the USSR tried co-opting the new medium to create “state” rock groups and sponsor-approved “variety shows,” a kind of Ed Sullivanski. Melodya, the state-run publishing house, released some of the Beatles’ sheet music, and by the 1970s, the state allowed hits by some Western artists, including Elvis Presley and Tom Jones, to be disseminated throughout the USSR legally. Soviet youth clubs had been established to contain the conflagration, but they hardly worked as planned. By the late 1960s, hundreds of rock bands had appeared in Moscow, including Hairy Glass, Nasty Dogs, Symbol of Faith, Bald Spot, and the Best Years. Perhaps the greatest limitation to the expansion of rock was not direct state interference, but the dearth of guitars and drum sets, most of which were imported. When the first guitar shop opened in Moscow in 1966, the entire stock sold out in minutes.69 A massive electric underground developed, run by the fartsovshchiki (“hustlers”), who hung out around Western tourist sites and cultivated contacts with smugglers. The authorities tolerated concerts, but even then musicians weren’t necessarily safe from intrusions by the police. At a Winds of Change concert in the late 1960s, government thugs routinely came on stage to seize instruments. Censors unplugged acts in mid-performance. Bands from the Baltic states (which would lead the resistance to Moscow in the early 1990s) emerged as the leading rockers, in the process eliciting a massive migration to Latvia as the center of Soviet hippiedom. State-sanctioned beatings were administered and heads shorn, yet nothing seemed to quell the rebellion emerging from the guitars. Slowly, Western visitors began to notice the hundreds of hippi on Soviet streets. Massive illegal concerts took place in woods and forests; musicians, required to submit lyrics to censors, shrugged them off and performed in bars, clubs, canteens, even dorm rooms without publicity so as to avoid authorities. Bands struggled, not only with police, but with pathetically obsolete equipment making the amplified sounds that emerged even more grating on Soviet ears, accustomed to decibels one-tenth that put out by even primitive amps.

  The Curtain came under constant pressure from inside and out. Blood, Sweat & Tears performed in Romania in 1970, greeted by chants from fans of “U-S-A.” After that, authorities watched the group’s concerts intensely. At another stop, officials turned dogs on the
crowd, and afterward, all remaining Blood, Sweat & Tears shows were canceled. In 1977, Czech rockers sparked a riot when a concert was canceled, leading to a rampage of burning, window-smashing, and bottle-pelting of police that would have brought a smile to Jerry Rubin’s face (except the cops were commies!).70 A similar East Berlin concert, intruded upon by police, erupted in a bloody reaction against the cops when the concertgoers “turned on the security forces, beating them, stripping them, and setting their uniforms on fire.”71 Hungarian and Polish punk rockers openly mocked the “fat, bald idols” of state-sanctioned bands. The state brought the Hungarian Coitus Punk Group to trial for referring to Stalinist extermination camps and Soviet nuclear weapons in its songs, and its members were thrown in the slammer for two years.

  Ironically, to the west, American groups met with hostility at their European concerts. Frank Zappa recalled, “When we first started to go to Europe in the sixties, there was some of that . . . with all the student activism and all that crap. We had a bunch of riots then. But then it all died down.”72 By the 1980s, however, the Mothers of Invention found it had returned. With “the anti-American sentiment around, it is hard to go on-stage and do what you do with the emotional freight that is attendant to European attitudes toward American foreign policy.”73 So while American rockers paid a price for merely being from the United States—where artists and audiences alike were free to bash the United States—East bloc rockers yearned for that degree of liberty, which indeed came in fits and starts.

  Even Poland, under tighter control than Hungary and Czechoslovakia, nevertheless experienced a “punk explosion” in the early 1980s. When the American metal band Iron Maiden began its tour at the Torwar Sports Hall in Warsaw, the crowd unfurled a “SOLIDARITY” banner. Polish punk proved the most abrasive and courageous in East bloc rock, with bands producing songs such as “The Ape Factory” (the equivalent of Pink Floyd’s 1979 attack on education, The Wall). A Polish band named Locked Ward had its logo, a giant “O” and “Z,” displayed as the “Z” scrawled through the “O,” a sign of anarchy, while another band renamed itself SS-20 after a Soviet nuclear missile. At a live concert, the Perfect changed its approved lyrics to “Don’t be afraid of [Polish dictator Wojciech] Jaruzelski.” 74 That little trick got the band banned. It was no use. Other groups instantly filled the void. When Toilet sang, “I am a tank, I am a tank, my only purpose is to destroy,” they were not referring to American machinery. And just like the earlier bloody battles between the “mods” and the “rockers” in Britain, street violence between the “punks” and the “poppers” (those who preferred more mainstream rock) swept through Poland. The Communist government was incapable of picking sides or of stifling the growing social criticism by either group.

  But in a closed society, the dynamics for sustained artistic criticism were vastly different from those in the West. Without sponsorship by the state, a band had to face economic reality (whereas in the West, private patrons and fans could usually keep even the least commercially successful genius alive for a while). Some musicians, including Zbigniew Hołdys, the Perfect’s bass player, complained that even as bands ranted against the “establishment,” the same government they criticized was raking in the cash from the concert halls where these groups performed. (Nevertheless, it was an ironic turn on the not-unfounded gripes of American musicians that they did all the work while the record companies got all the profits.) Over time, Hołdys himself would apologize for antigovernment sentiments expressed in concerts. This, of course, only lent greater credibility to the “genuine” artists who refused to “sell out.”

  Within the press, articles expressly discussing rock music were mostly banned. However, just as the written samizdat expressed the language of liberty, so too did the magnitizdat, a do-it-yourself recording circulated to eager listeners. Not surprisingly, a rock and roll band, the Plastic People of the Universe—who took their inspiration from none other than Frank Zappa—had been at the forefront of the Czech Charter 77 movement in 1978. But getting to that point for the Plastic People reflected the pitfalls of Iron Curtain rockdom and provided an interesting glimpse of what happens to state-sponsored artists. A “state” band had official sanction and received instruments from the government. Certainly the lure was understandable, since state groups were permitted to play concerts and clubs, and, because of their professional status, receive higher (and regular) pay. It came at great cost. Charged with protecting “the red rose of Marxism,” bands had to submit their lyrics to censors months before they could record them. One Czech singer battled the bureaucrats for days about his hair length, which, he argued, was necessary to “sell” good Communist music to the proletariat in the West. Renegades gave up official sponsorship for support from local clubs, and even fire brigades, to pay their bills. The Plastic People of the Universe began as a sanctioned band, whose repertoire of saucy Western material cost them their protected status in the fall of 1970. They dropped out and started their own music festivals, which attracted large crowds and police attention. During a concert in 1976, Plastic People and other musicians were arrested: the band members were given eight- to twelve-month sentences for disturbing the peace, and the government harassed the band and its fans for the remainder of the decade.75 A similar fate awaited the German musician Klaus Renft Jentzsch, whose band Renft had touched off the Leipzig riot. Jentzsch was summoned before East German officials in September 1975, and they informed him that his group had been declared “no longer existent.” When Jentzsch asked if that meant “banned,” the commissars said, “you no longer exist.”76 Within a year, two members were in jail, and one had emigrated to the West, but the East German Ministry of Culture quietly established a Sektion Rockmusik to try to put a Communist spin on rock by infusing lyrics with solid Leninist phrases.

  Wolf Biermann, who had already been banned, slipped bootlegs of his songs to West Germany. Labeling himself East Germany’s “officially recognized state enemy,” Biermann holed up in his apartment to write. CBS Records managed to sign him, and, more miraculously, found a way to get sound crews inside East Berlin to record him. Here was a die-hard believer in communism forced to hide out in his flat in Communist Germany, while his supposed class enemy, the capitalists, sent its lackeys to tape his songs. Granted a travel visa to perform in Cologne—under the provision that he not sing “Stasi-Lied,” an anti-secret police song—Biermann arrogantly told the audience that East Germany was “the better Germany,” provoking cat-calls, but then proceeded to play “Stasi-Lied.” The “Better Germany” was not amused and revoked his citizenship. As Timothy Ryback observed in his history of rock behind the Iron Curtain, “Biermann, a proclaimed Communist, found himself banished to the capitalist West, forcefully exiled from a county that used machine guns and barbed wire to keep millions of citizens from fleeing.”77 The unfortunate Biermann had to make do with a 350,000-mark villa in Hamburg and another half-million marks in record sales, even as East German police were turning the dogs anew on concertgoers at Alexanderplatz. But his exit sparked an exodus of high-profile entertainers, who demanded to leave. The East German government accommodated them rather than allow them to dissent at home.

  Of course, that failed as well. Large-scale rock riots broke out in East Berlin in June 1987, following a concert across the Wall by Phil Collins, David Bowie, and the Eurythmics that featured massive loudspeakers aimed eastward. When security forces tried to disperse the thousands pressed against the Wall on the eastern side to listen, violence erupted. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, the Communists concluded, and in June 1988 when Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson were scheduled on the western side, the East Berlin government slated Bryan Adams, the Wailers, and Big Country, enlisting figure skater Katarina Witt as the moderator. Pink Floyd’s concert was uneventful in East Berlin, but the restrictions evident in the East led Le Monde to sum up the dueling concerts with an editorial about liberty called “East Berlin Loses the Rock War.”78

  The surrender documents wer
e all but drawn up when the Communists invited Bruce Springsteen to perform in front of 160,000 people. While the German propagandists had actually read Springsteen’s lyrics and knew about his signature antiwar song, “Born in the USA” (he “uncompromisingly points out the inequity and injustices in his country,” noted Neues Deutschland approvingly), the thousands of young people did not get the memo. Here were the flowers of communism, waving American flags, raising their clenched fists, and singing along, “Born . . . in the USA! I was . . . born in the USA” as though they really wished they had been born in America!

  Soviet attempts to control rock by co-opting it through state-approved VIAs (“Vocal Instrumental Ensembles”) were hardly any more successful than the Hungarian, German, or Czech variants. Offered generous financial support, the VIAs tugged at the underground, and while they muffled the protest of rock a little bit, they also spread the music into the factories and towns. But for every officially sanctioned VIA, “a thousand amateur rock-and-roll outfits hammered out covers of the latest Western hits,” with estimates putting the number of nonsanctioned bands at 100,000.79 One such group, Tsvety (“Flowers”), managed to conduct national tours without caving in to state VIA requirements. Led by Anastas Mikoyan (who later took the name “Stas Namin”), Tsvety broke the Moscow ice. Then Mashina vremeni (“Time Machine”) jumped in, blending a Soviet style with Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple sounds. Initially employing lyrics with double entendre, the band soon moved to outright scorching social criticism. “Battle with Fools,” for example, proclaimed that if one killed all the fools in Soviet society, no one would remain. The songs immediately spread throughout Soviet youth courtesy of the black market. Unable to defeat Time Machine, Soviet authorities finally made the group a state-authorized band.