Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  HIGHWAY PATROL IS a bona fide broadcasting phenomenon, boasting seventy million viewers in Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan and, through some unfathomable miracle of syndication, Israel. The idea is hardly unique: most countries with sufficient noteworthy crime entertain and appall themselves with footage retrieved by ambulance-chasing camera crews (Cops in America, Blues and Twos in Britain).

  Highway Patrol is different, however. It has an inescapable frequency, producing a daily fifteen-minute show which is shown at midnight every night and repeated twice the following day, as well an irregular round-up of mafia activity—all too literally, a Greatest Hits. Highway Patrol also has a pitiless attitude to broadcasting the grisliest of material, though they do have their limits, as I eventually find out the hard way.

  Most importantly, Highway Patrol has a firm grip on the pulse of its home city. Post-communist Moscow is a 1990s production of Al Capone’s Chicago—a city where the gangsters don’t bother to conceal their weapons, and where the police don’t bother to change out of uniform when they go to their other jobs as doormen at Moscow’s mafia-controlled nightclubs. Muscovites talk about crime the way Londoners talk about weather, muttering and nodding wearily to each other that it’s bad, it’s going to get worse and nobody’s doing anything about it.

  Highway Patrol began broadcasting in January 1995, the bright idea of television producer Kirill Legat and businessman Dmitri Koriavov. Koriavov, an amiable sort somewhere in his late thirties, is the essence of what is often sneeringly referred to as a New Russian, one who has been clever and/or cunning enough to ride out the uncertainties of the post-communist years, to manufacture cash from chaos. When Mikhail Gorbachev started talking about glasnost and perestroika in 1985, Koriavov was a mathematician at a Soviet scientific institute, where his job was constructing climactic models intended to predict the effects of nuclear winter. In one sense or another, he knew which way the wind was blowing—by 1989, he’d gone into private business, selling computers and importing luxury cars, before branching into television. His production company, Aladdin, makes Highway Patrol.

  When I meet Koriavov at Aladdin’s offices, he is predictably unrepentant about the view his programme presents of Moscow (“A city of opportunity,” he calls it) and the relentless frequency with which it does it—it’s not like he’s making this stuff up, after all.

  “This is real information about our lives in this city,” he says. “It does good, as well, for sure. Two years ago, I used to, you know, drive home after I’d been drinking. But now, never. Because, three times a day, five times a week, I see what results when people do that.”

  Koriavov recalls that the first few weeks of Highway Patrol were characterised by mutual antipathy and suspicion between his film crews and Moscow’s emergency services, but says relations have improved: Aladdin’s offices are abundantly decorated with certificates and awards presented by the city’s police and fire departments in recognition of the illustrations that Highway Patrol has provided of the dangers of smoking while drunk in bed, its stark depictions of the consequences of drunk driving and its role in provoking public response to police enquiries. The relationship is now so close that a lot of the programme’s information about new crimes comes from contacts within the police force. Otherwise, Highway Patrol relies on calls from viewers or their own monitoring of police radio frequencies.

  “We don’t judge,” says Koriavov. “We don’t criticise. We don’t praise. We just show what happens.”

  Koriavov leads me out of his office and up the hall to meet the crew who’ve agreed to take me out for the night. The three of them sit around a table in a small, smoke-filled room, pouring the occasional slug from an unlabelled vodka bottle into shot-sized paper cups. This is what they do until something interesting comes in on the radio or telephone. I’m extended the welcome usually granted to the itinerant angler or visiting surfer: “You should have been here yesterday.”

  It had been, at least from the journalistic point of view, a good one—a black Volvo, driving up a busy road around the corner from the American embassy, had been cut off by a Jeep charging out of a side alley. According to a street full of eyewitnesses, the occupants of the Jeep had fired thirty or forty shots from two automatic rifles into the windscreen of the Volvo, killing both occupants, before driving off and disappearing into the traffic. A classic mafia hit.

  I’m shown the unedited footage by the crew’s reporter/presenter, Vladimir Yemelyanov, a ruddy-cheeked twenty-five-year-old.

  “I wonder who did it,” he muses, to nobody in particular.

  Without thinking, I suggest that it won’t be too hard for the police to find the perpetrators of a murder carried out in broad daylight on a busy street in rush hour. Vladimir laughs a mirthless laugh, and I try to cover my tracks by smiling the sort of smile you smile when you’ve just said something idiotic and you’re trying to make it look like you were joking. The average Moscow police officer gets paid about £100 a month. Moscow is not much cheaper a place to live than most European capitals. So Moscow policemen have to find other work, and a moonlighting cop will find the easiest and steadiest employment from the kind of person who not only wants armed muscle, but a reasonable guarantee that nobody’s going to look too closely at his own day job. A month before I arrived in Russia, a Scottish lawyer was killed by crossfire in a St. Petersburg cafe when two balaclava-clad hitmen attempted to assassinate a local crime boss. Two other men died in the attack, both St. Petersburg policemen working at their after-hours gig—bodyguards to the gangster.

  I talk more to Vladimir while we sit and await the call to action. He gets one of Aladdin’s receptionists to help his halting English through the more complicated questions. He happily confirms that he gets paid considerably better than any of the police officers, firemen and paramedics he follows around, and says he enjoys his job, though he gets rattled and “has some trouble sleeping” on nights after they’ve done a story in which a child has been on the receiving end. He wears a pistol on his belt, and I wonder if that’s because Highway Patrol crews often arrive at crime scenes before the police—their new BMW is quicker than a rusty Lada patrol car.

  “No, the job is not dangerous,” Vladimir says. “But none of us have our own cars, and sometimes we have to walk home late at night.”

  I run a few standard knee-jerk reactions to his job past Vladimir: that he’s a vulture with a camera crew, that he’s making gruesome violence look like an acceptable part of everyday life, that he’s encouraging the weak-willed to emulate what they see on the screen, that he’s profiting from the misfortune of others. I don’t believe much of this myself—Highway Patrol, like other such amoral cultural signifiers as tabloid newspapers, slasher films, gangsta rap and heavy metal, exists because people like it and are willing to pay for it—except maybe for the part about profiting from the misfortune of others, but as that’s a fair, if cynical, definition of journalism, I’m in no position to criticise.

  Vladimir’s heard it all before, anyway.

  “Our programme doesn’t do any of that,” he says. “There are lots of stupid action movies shown on television every day that are much, much worse. It’s just that whenever people see death—I mean, real death, of real people—they are surprised. Nothing more than that. Death happens every day, but people are surprised when they see it. I was surprised the first time I saw Lenin in the mausoleum.”

  THE CREW’S DRIVER, Sacha, puts down his mobile phone and announces that we’re off—he’s heard something from one of his contacts. Vladimir throws me a spare Highway Patrol parka jacket, and while I struggle into it, he draws his pistol from its holster and points it at the temple of Leon, the cameraman. Leon looks up, briefly, finishes his coffee with exaggerated serenity and walks down to the carpark with us.

  Sacha weaves the BMW through Moscow’s comically potholed streets with the bravado of one who believes that the rules of the road were written for lesser mortals. Perhaps they were—policem
en on point duty wave as the famous car passes, and one holds up traffic at an intersection to allow us through against the lights. We fetch up at a police station amid the crumbling tower blocks of Moscow’s southern suburbs. Like every other public building I’ve visited in Moscow, including the office block that houses Aladdin, the cop shop is a dank, musty shambles that gives the impression of having been recently abandoned by a previous owner and hurriedly occupied by squatters.

  The police trot out a singularly gormless-looking youth who has, they explain, been apprehended at the unpromising beginning of his criminal career—he was caught burgling a flat on the same block where his family lives. Vladimir interviews the kid, and then the station chief, but his heart’s obviously not really in it, and his thoughts easy to read on his face: this is no big deal, a dull little morality play, strictly filler stuff, of use only if this turns out to be an especially desperate shift. Whether his disappointment is normal, or whether he was hoping for something a bit more hair-raising to show the visitor, Vladimir descends into a gale force sulk, fidgeting irritably with the car radio all the way back to base. He only cheers up when a motorcycle policeman, evidently no fan of Highway Patrol, pulls us over in front of the White House—the former home of the Russian parliament, which was shattered during the attempted coup of 1991—and books Sacha for speeding.

  The next day means a new shift, and a renewed optimism among the crew that they’ll come up with something really horrible to show me. They explain that they average one call to a proper underworld execution every day, so it’s only going to be a matter of time. Nevertheless, we have to start somewhere, and so we start in what remains of the flat above a Hyundai spares shop, not far from the Aladdin offices. The resident of the flat obviously wasn’t watching last time Highway Patrol warned of the perils of falling asleep drunk while smoking—he’s fallen asleep drunk while smoking and incinerated himself. It looks bad, and smells worse, but there’s a strange calm about proceedings. Firemen quietly lay down planks so that we can walk through the water they’ve sprayed into the place without getting our shoes muddy. A policeman pours me coffee from a thermos while Leon and Vladimir set up for Vladimir’s piece-to-camera. Sacha tuts at me for getting paint on the Highway Patrol jacket I’m wearing, and wipes me down with turpentine—a scene which will baffle Moscow’s viewing public later this evening.

  AS IT TURNS out, this shift yields no decapitated hitmen, kneecapped stool pigeons, cement-flippered informers or horse’s heads in anyone’s beds. There aren’t even any more workaday domestic catastrophes—no road smashes, clumsy drinkers, metro-jumpers or overdoses. We only get called to one more story, and it’s something much worse than any of these, at least insofar as one fatal tragedy can be said to be much worse than any other.

  In a courtyard between three dung-coloured tower blocks, in the snow next to a rubbish skip, somebody has left a baby boy. I get close enough to see how blue the naked form is, and how purple the vestige of umbilical cord trailing from its midriff, before I work out exactly what it is I’m looking at, and then I don’t believe it, and then when I do believe it I don’t want to. The Highway Patrol crew and a forensic scientist in a white fur coat hunch over the dead child; the scene looks like some grotesque parody of the Nativity.

  Vladimir shoots me a look; he’s not enjoying this one, and neither am I: I wander off and stare very determinedly at anything else at all. He and I seem to be the only people here who are remotely perturbed. Leon and Sacha fiddle about with the camera cables. The scientist discusses with someone else whether or not the boy was alive when he was left here, or if perhaps he was thrown from one of the balconies overlooking the square. There’s one policeman in attendance, and he sits in his car, reading a paper, smoking, keeping warm, doing nothing to shy away passers-by—but this is exactly what they do: they pass by. This is a busy pedestrian route, and though people look over, and raise an eyebrow or two beneath their fur hats, they don’t seem any more startled than I might be if someone parked an expensive sports car in my street. Despite what Vladimir had said about death being a surprise, these people are behaving as if a dead child on the footpath is about as surprising as the sun coming up. Nobody weeps or wails. No teeth are gnashed, no garments rent.

  That said, I don’t know the neighbourhood. Maybe people leave dead kids lying around here every day of the week; maybe it isn’t that interesting. Or maybe it’s just that Russia has never been an easy place to live, and maybe Muscovites have an attitude to death hardened by centuries of proximity to it.

  “Don’t know,” says Vladimir, as we drive off. In the end, it doesn’t matter anyway. Tomorrow is Women’s Day, the Russian equivalent of Mother’s Day, and a story like this is hardly going to make for suitable family holiday viewing. So Sacha drives us to a nearby flower market and we take some pictures of that, instead.

  24

  MID-LIFE STRAIN TO GEORGIA

  Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady on the

  Rock’n’Roll Means Well tour

  NOVEMBER 2008

  WHEN UNCUT MAGAZINE called and asked if I fancied this one, I was initially hesitant. It wasn’t because I had any reservations about either of the groups I’d be spending time with. I admire The Hold Steady hugely, and as for Drive-By Truckers, well, sometimes, when a cut from “Decoration Day,” “The Dirty South” or “Brighter than Creation’s Dark” pops up on my iPod at an apposite moment, I think they might well be the best band in the world. It wasn’t even because I already had a trip to the US planned at around this time—to Philadelphia, to write an afterword for another book amid (or so I anticipated and hoped) the first days of the Obama era (I’d chosen Philadelphia partly because of its stature as the birthplace of America’s glorious democratic experiment, mostly just because I like the place). What gave me pause was the prospect of being, for the first time in years, properly on tour—as in sleeping on the bus, massaging throbbing and hungover temples while someone’s drummer soundchecks—even if only for a couple of days.

  Because it’s awful, it really is. Even the bits which aren’t awful—the laughter, the in-jokes, the camaraderie, the odd surreal surprises that touring scatters in your path—only seem like they’re not awful because they represent a fleeting respite from the awfulness of it all. Touring is—well, okay, was—not such a bad way to spend one’s early twenties, when the average male human, certainly, is barely distinguishable from the average male baboon, and is therefore abundantly pleased by the trivial, mindless gratifications offered by this way of life. For grownups, however—for people, that is, like Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady, who have hinterlands, families, friends, lives, interests, the habit of reading unillustrated books—it’s a wretched, detached, deranging and lonely vocation.

  These are, of course, the views of the author, not necessarily of Drive-By Truckers or The Hold Steady, hardcore road monsters all—people absolutely driven to be driven, and a good thing too, as the more people get to see both groups live, the happier our world will be. The fact remains, however, that the piece that follows amounts to a snapshot of intelligent and sensitive adults voluntarily submitting themselves to weeks at a time of a daily regime of twenty-three hours of boredom, irritation, humiliation, drunkenness and fitful sleep erratically redeemed by a sixty-minute (give or take the encores) hit of adrenalised excitement. To which the obvious retort is that it still beats working, and I’m sure that’s true, but not by as comprehensive a knockout as the uninitiated might imagine. It requires truly extraordinary commitment, and an acceptance of ennui verging on the Zen, to resign yourself to a day waiting in a car park to play to a half-full venue.

  All that said—or, rather, all that whined—I’m glad I went (for one reason or another, whatever the story, wherever the location, I’m always glad I went). I got to go to two cities I’d never been to before. In Atlanta, I saw the Coca-Cola museum, which is as brilliant as it is strange. In Tallahassee, I met the single fattest person I’ve ever encountered, the driver o
f a taxi I hailed (his girth was such that the lower third of the steering wheel was completely enfolded by his surfeit of stomach, and he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt because he couldn’t, though as he was essentially his own airbag, I don’t suppose it mattered, much). And I saw two great shows by two great bands, which works out at four great shows.

  “THIS SHIT IS so good,” declares Patterson Hood, brandishing the bottle meaningfully, “that they . . . they put a cork in it.”

  One senses that this is praise indeed for whiskey, where Hood is concerned. He waves dismissively at the lesser screw-capped bourbons huddled on the tour bus kitchenette, and passes the eight-year-old Basil Hayden’s across the aisle. One swig confirms his judgement: high octane honey. Hood, a man gripped by ungovernable enthusiasms even at his most relaxed, has not long ago taken his last bows after a triumphant, riotous performance by Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady at Atlanta’s Tabernacle, and is somewhat amped. Meet the wife (hello). Here’s a picture of my daughter (she’s lovely). You gotta hear the new Jenny Lewis (I have, but carry on). Next to Hood, Drive-By Truckers’ tour manager, Matt DeFelippis, demonstrates the importance of modern communications technology in coordinating the modern rock tour. The Truckers’ other primary songwriter, Mike Cooley, has phoned in lost while attempting to return from a post-show drink. He’s muttering menacing imprecations about the tramp he paid four dollars for erroneous directions, and going so far as to suggest that General Sherman had the right idea when he burnt Atlanta to the ground in 1864: a spectacular heresy from a son of Alabama. Matt sighs, flips open his laptop, calls up Google Maps, and talks the guitarist in. It’s already nearly 3:00 AM, and we still have a six-hour drive to Florida ahead of us, just as soon as all are aboard.