The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  Our first Russian show was in Rostov-on-Don, in the far southwest. Rachel Polonsky devotes a chapter of her book Molotov’s Magic Lantern to the city—the site of the decisive battles of the Russian Civil War (“Take Rostov at all costs, for otherwise disaster threatens,” Lenin warned his armies)—and its prostitutes. The pre-1917 Rostov was the home of a cosmopolitan, industrial nouveau riche: “The river was fouled with factory waste . . . and the water stank, but the main streets were paved, and electric trams ran along the Garden Ring, past banks, fashionable shops, clubs, insurance companies, cinemas and belle-epoque private residences,” Polonsky writes. The budding bourgeoisie was crushed and scattered by the Bolshevik cavalry army (which included the Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who wrote his Red Cavalry stories about his experiences); then the city itself was left in ruins for a decade after the German occupation in World War II. Rostov-on-Don now has the mix of genuine danger and scruffy sense of irony I associate with cities isolated, troubled, but not without a certain municipal patriotism, like Baltimore or Newark. Three years later, the city would be the main staging area for the Russian incursion into Ukraine: young Russian soldiers understood that “going to exercises in Rostov” meant deployment to eastern Ukraine.

  The bar we were playing was called Nemets Perets Kolbasa, which means “German Pepper Sausage.” It’s the first line of a teasing playground rhyme dating back to World War II:

  German, pepper, sausage,

  Sauerkraut.

  Ate a mouse without a tail

  And he said, “Eat that.”1

  The phrase also appears in the Soviet satiric singer-songwriter Timur Shaov’s song “строим новую страну” (Building a New Country), a mix of defensiveness, criticism, and pride one friend described to me as not unlike the sentiment of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”

  The wall outside the club indeed had a mural of a red pepper, a sausage, and a fat, mustachioed man in a Tyrolean cap.

  The mistress of the house was Ksusia, who was sweet but odd, with a quality of noncommittal disengagement. When asked a question she didn’t know how to or didn’t care to answer, she laughed loudly and quickly, then stared into the middle distance until the subject was changed. She had moved to town a year earlier, working at an office with “strange ugly bad people” before taking over management of this little bar (now with adjoining tattoo shop) owned by a handsome, silver-haired fortysomething named Sergey.

  After an afternoon nap of jet-lagged, disorienting intensity (I had been awake for thirty solid hours by that point), there was a soundcheck and an interview with a local journalist that was not so much about music—not at all about music, really—as it was an interrogation, of the “Russians are like this/Americans are like this” variety.2

  Which, per Custine, is an old anxiety: “I am much struck by the extreme susceptibility of the Russians as regards the judgment which strangers may form respecting them. The impression which their country may make on the minds of travelers occupies their thoughts constantly.”

  “Here the average Russian makes $600 a month,” he said. “How much does the average American make? Russians have the idea that every American loves fast food. Is that true? What is your stereotype of Russia?”

  I mentioned corruption, and he agreed, but “surely there is also corruption in America?”

  “Yes, but I think it happens on higher levels of power and money, and more secretively, not on the level of police and small bureaucrats. You don’t get shaken down by traffic cops.”

  “Ah—more professionals!”

  We laughed. Many Russians, and citizens of other countries in which corruption and repression are the norm, find it frankly unbelievable that the rest of the world doesn’t operate in the same fashion.3 No country is entirely free of corruption, of course, but all exist on a sliding scale between the systemic and the episodic incidences—the difference between countries where it is endemic and considered part of the normal order of things and those where it is infrequent, considered aberrant, and condemned.

  Custine:

  Those who pretend to judge our country, say to me, that they do not really believe our king abstains from punishing the writers who daily abuse him in Paris.

  “Nevertheless,” I answer them, “the fact is there to convince you.”

  “Yes, yes, you talk of toleration,” they reply, with a knowing air, “it is all very well for the multitude and for foreigners: but your government punishes secretly the too-audacious journalists.”

  When I repeat that everything is public in France, they laugh sneeringly, politely check themselves; but they do not believe me.

  “Have you been on public transportation yet?” the journalist continued. “No? Are you scared?”

  “No, I’ve only been here five hours, and I spent four of that dead asleep.”

  “They say Russian women are the most beautiful—do you agree?”

  “You’re going to ask me that in front of my Ukrainian wife?”

  The show was fine, if intermittently interrupted by a hulking, friendly drunk everyone called “Mongol.” Ksusia said the neighborhood’s main trouble is a couple dozen roving drunks. “Sergey has too big a heart. He thinks if they can come here and hear music and poetry they will be cured.”

  She, for her part, finally called the cops on Mongol. (“Actually,” she laughed, “it is just the police academy”—that is, cadets in training, assigned to the drunk patrol.)

  Maria and I had the idea of going to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, the birthplace of Chekhov (and the supposed site of Tsar Alexander I’s self-exile among the conspiracists who believe he faked his own death), on our day off but were discouraged by the dismissive laughter of everyone we asked about beaches in Taganrog. Guess it’s not that kind of waterfront.

  Back at the club that night, a French jazz pianist was leading a trio with two Russians and an American lady sitting in on vocals through an improv set. We met a guy from “the most popular band in Rostov,” whose hit was called “Kill the Niggers.” When we looked shocked, we were reassured that it was some kind of joke, though one that went unexplained.

  After a few rounds of vodka shots with Sergey, we were delivered to the station. We had twelve hours of sleeper car that night, heading due north to the small city of Voronezh, and the compartment to ourselves. It felt like some kind of reward.

  Osip Mandelstam, after the disclosure of his poem “The Stalin Epigram” (“His fat fingers, slimy as worms . . . the huge laughing cockroaches on his upper lip”) in 1933, was arrested and tortured but eventually allowed to choose his place of exile—excluding what were then the twelve major Russian cities. He chose Voronezh, once the center of the People’s Will terrorist movement that had led to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and at the time of Mandelstam’s exile “a chaotic deposit of poor, small houses, wildly scattered over the ravines and hillsides,” according to the poet Victor Krivulin.

  Mandelstam may have chosen Voronezh as a kind of “macabre pun,” a black joke on his situation: Voron means “raven”—“the vans in which the arrested were transported were called by the people ‘black ravens’ . . . or ‘little ravens’ (voronki),” Krivulin explained—and a nosh is a homicidal robber’s knife. Mandelstam ended one of his first poems in exile: “Voronezh—blazh’, Voronezh—voron, nosh” (Voronezh—you are a whim, Voronezh—you are a raven and a knife).

  Mandelstam lived in “the sleepy, sleight-tracked town/Half-town, half-mounted-shore” for three years of poverty and isolation with his wife, Nadezhda. (At one point, his translators Richard and Elizabeth McKane relate, he “resorted . . . to reading his latest poems on the telephone to his NKVD . . . surveillance person.”) He was visited by fellow poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote about the encounter in her poem “Voronezh”: “In the room of the exiled poet/Fear and the Muse stand duty in turn.” A collection of poems, The Voronezh Notebooks, was published only decades after Mandelstam’s death, reconstituted by Nadezhda, Akhmatova, a
nd others from poor copies, scraps, and memory.

  He was allowed to return from exile in 1937, only to be rearrested the following year. “Happy poverty. . . . Those winter days [in Voronezh] with all their troubles were the greatest and last happiness to be granted us in life,” Nadezhda remembered in her last known letter to her husband. Mandelstam died in December 1938, on a train bound for a Siberian labor camp.

  We were picked up in Voronezh by a young punk who worked in market research at an orthopedics company. The talk turned immediately to politics: “Anyone who can think hates Putin. He is just like Lukashenko,” the anachronistic Belarusian dictator.

  We were caught in the choking traffic that we would come to find is the hallmark of second-tier Russian cities. “I have old car. 1985 Lada. Don’t be afraid!” He pulled a heart-stopping maneuver and gestured to the car in front of him: “A new Lada!”

  “Are the new Ladas better?”

  “I think no.” As if on cue, the driver in the new Lada killed his engine in the middle of the street, got out, and opened the hood with a frown.

  Our host and his dozen friends took us past a bronze statue of the “Russian Bob Dylan,” Vladimir Vysotsky4—shirtless with a vest!—and to dinner in a mall at a cavernous establishment that resembled a Medieval Times, with wood-hewn communal tables and heavy benches. Its incoherent decor included taxidermied bears, a mural of wolves playing cards, servers dressed in medieval bodices and jerkins, Brazilian carnival footage playing on TV screens in every corner, and pizza. It was called something that roughly, and roughly accurately, translated as “Confusion Pub.”

  Vysotsky was probably the best known of the bardy (“bards”), an explosion of singer-songwriters in the 1970s who considered themselves poets and spokesmen for a life of individuality, camaraderie, and authenticity. Their unpolished performances of avtorskaya pesnya (a term musicologist J. Martin Daughtry translates as “author’s songs” or “auteur songs”) were widely bootlegged on homemade LPs scratched into x-ray plates—at the time, the most convenient source of hard plastic. These were colloquially called “rock on bones” (rok na kostiakh) or “rock on ribs” (rok na rebrakh).

  The show was in a basement indie cinema with theater seating. It was sweaty as a banya and there was no booze for the crowd, so, despite the show being sold out, the mood was subdued. One of the openers was named Roman, from Belgorod, across the border from Kharkov. Maria misheard this as “a Roma from Belgrade,” which would have been a more substantial trek. He was a slight fellow in glasses and a NOFX T-shirt who sang, of all things, a cover of a song by the obscure Midwestern band Two Cow Garage.

  Is it possible to write four hundred pages about touring and never describe a show? I’m tempted. I’m a mid-career musician who’s played thousands of shows. For me, they’re the least interesting part of the story. The reader will already have noticed that there is a certain repetitive rhythm to the days as they pass. “If it be necessary that I should offer excuses for repetition and monotony, it is equally necessary that I should apologize for traveling at all,” says Custine. “The frequent recurrence of the same impressions is inevitable in all conscientious books of travels.” All the more so for a musician, whose days are organized around a predictable routine—get to show, play show—punctuated by logistical snafus and unreliable strangers. It’s why the details of those strangers and the slow, or sudden, changes in scenery are what I focus on. The bones of the day are indistinguishable.

  People ask, “Do you get nervous before shows?” The answer is not really, not at this point. I get nervous each time I play a show that’s at a new level—the first show for five hundred people, the first for a thousand, the first time on television, the first with a new band, the first on my own. Then once I’ve breached that level, I snap back into equilibrium. Some I’m more excited to play, some I dread, some are clock-punchers. But they all have the same arc. I’ll describe it once, then you can mentally copy and paste this into the hole I gloss over toward the end of each day.

  I usually arrive at the venue around five. We go through a charade of “advancing” the show, which means contacting the promoter a few days before and clarifying arrival times, soundcheck times, and set times. But unless something is unusual, arrival is always at five or six, soundcheck to follow (assuming the soundman is on time, which is a big assumption), doors at seven or eight, show around ten or eleven.

  I pull up to the club and try to park. There’s parking, or there isn’t, or there’s metered parking until six. In some European cities, the club is in a central pedestrian zone, which I don’t realize until some cops run at me, waving their hands and yelling. The club should be open, but it isn’t, so I bang on the black iron doors and the windows covered with posters for upcoming shows. Hopefully one of them has my face on it. After a few minutes someone opens a different door around the corner and says, “Can I help you?”

  “Hi, I’m Franz, I’m playing tonight?”

  “Oh yes, come in,” they say (I hope). “I’m doing your sound tonight. The promoter will be here shortly.”

  “Nice to meet you. My setup is pretty simple: three DI boxes at the front of the stage—guitar, accordion, banjo—and a center vocal mic.” (Two vocals, if Maria is playing.)

  “OK, no problem.”

  As he sets up the stage, I bother him with the Four Basic Questions: Where should I set up merch? Do you know the Wi-Fi password? Is there a backstage area? Can I get a beer? Then I load our bags in, put the instruments on the stage, and take them from their bags and cases. I uncoil the cables, plug one into an instrument on one end and a tuning pedal on the other, then another cable out of the pedal into the direct box that leads to the sound system. I tune the guitar and the banjo. I change the guitar strings if necessary—once a week at least. I strap on the accordion and see what’s broken today. Accordions have hundreds of small moving pieces—they look like a typewriter inside—and are not optimized for hard travel. I have a spreadsheet of accordion repairmen around the world, lonely grouches in their sixties with garage workshops an hour out of town: the sad old men of accordion repair. Between these pilgrimages I do my best with superglue, duct tape, needle-nose pliers, and a soldering iron.

  I pick up the guitar and start playing and singing. The same song each night for the whole tour, usually—that way I’ve got a constant. The sound guy will get the idea and start turning the channels up. If he hasn’t already decided he hates me from the moment I pull out the accordion or banjo, I can move through the other instruments. When we’re both satisfied, I pack up the instruments and re-coil the cables so the opening acts can have the stage.

  Now is my downtime. I’ve usually got about three hours. Sometimes they’ve made dinner for me—as cheaply and easily as possible, but free food is free food. In Scotland it’s often chili. In England, pasta. In Germany, what we simply call “vegan slop” over rice. (In America you won’t get fed. Pizza if you’re lucky.) Anything you can stick in a big pot, turn on a flame, and feed two to ten people.

  Otherwise, I head out and wander around the neighborhood. It’s my last chance for some peace and quiet. Sushi or noodle soup and some hot sake is the ideal preshow dinner: filling but not sleep-inducing, with a little warmth. Mexican or Indian food is absolutely off-limits—too heavy (the only time I’ve vomited onstage, a burrito was the culprit). If I’m overseas, my phone’s on airplane mode, so I can spend some time with a book. Treat yourself.

  If I time it right, I’m back at the club about an hour before set time. I’ve missed the first opening act or two. There are a decent number of people milling around. Mostly people won’t buy merch until after the show—who wants to carry around an LP for another two hours?—but I go lurk by the merch table for a few minutes anyway. Now it’s time to get dressed.

  Country star Porter Wagoner was once asked why he wore sequined Nudie suits. “I don’t know what business you’re in, but I’m in show business,” he replied. I’ve always dressed up for shows. They’re a spe
cial occasion, and you dress up for a special occasion. And it’s a way of making the psychological break between the daylight introvert and the effusive nighttime persona, a way of getting in character. Like Superman putting on the cape. For this tour, I’d brought just one black suit with a white French-cuffed shirt, which I wore with an open collar and a maroon pocket square. I had a pair of pewter cufflinks with the head of a Spanish conquistador on them. They had belonged to my great-grandfather, a clotheshorse in his time. I had a round black-brimmed hat and a pair of $30 black shoes from Target I wore until they fell apart. With luck, there is a back room or a kitchen or at least a storage closet to change in. Without luck, the men’s room. Maria has a couple of dresses (they pack smaller than suits) and a pair of short heels, and she puts on bright red lipstick and liquid eyeliner.

  Now it’s showtime. There are usually a decent number of people in the room, not a lot, but maybe the promoter won’t lose money. They’re young, mostly. Outside of the UK, people over forty don’t really go to bars to see live music. The young men tend to wear black cutoff shorts, a black band T-shirt with white print, slip-on skater shoes, a scruffy beard, and earlobe plugs. The women are usually in tight black jeans, Converse, black tank tops, Bettie Page black bobs and bangs or bleached and chopped and dyed hair. Neither, for some reason, wear socks. Everyone has a can of cheap beer. Some of them sit cross-legged on the sides of the floor, most stand. Sometimes they clap in time.

  “Hello,” I say, “hi there,” loud enough to get their attention, “I’m Franz Nicolay, from Brooklyn, New York, it’s great to be here!”

  I open with an accordion song: “The Hearts of Boston,” usually, a new song, on the record that’s not quite out yet. It’s rousing, with an Irish-sounding riff and a foot-stomping tempo. Maria plays banjo. It makes the point: I’m not just another guy with an acoustic guitar. On the first three songs of the set I play accordion, guitar, and banjo, to set the parameters of the night. I stop in the middle of songs to comment on the action. I tell stories. Like a standup comedian, I only have one or two set stories for each song, but I can play with the length and eliminate beats if I feel like the crowd isn’t in the mood or their English isn’t strong enough. I try not to repeat the stories in towns I’ve been to recently, but that’s not a problem in Russia.