Rivushchie struny: The Peculiar Role of Russian Garage

Earlier this year, the Moscow club IKRA held a small festival entitled “Back to the CBGB” in honor of the NY club (below) that ran from 1973 until 2006.  During that time it gave birth to a spectacular generation of musicians, including – among the more famous – The Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and Blondie.

On the day it closed down, the NY Times declared:  “It’s the most famous rock ’n’ roll club in the world, the most famous that there ever has been, and it’s just as famously a horrendous dump.  It’s the archetypal, the ur, dim and dirty, loud, smelly and ugly nowhere little rock ’n’ roll club.  There’s one not much different from it in every burg in the country.”

Given the ubiquitous of the club’s “type,” one has to wonder whether it reflected less of a local scene than something universal:  more a state of mind than a place…  which brings us to the Moscow festival.  Below is a report on the event from Russian television.

There’s the same sense of geographic nonspecificity:  this needn’t have been in Moscow – and in any case, it’s an evocation of somewhere else completely.

In addition, when asked to namecheck relevant bands of the era when CBGB operated, the audience members start listing anything and everything.  Either because their sense of history is a little shaky or – once again – because it doesn’t matter.

They’re asked what – in their minds – the spirit or “aroma” of that now-empty place would have been like.  Along with illegal substances, both body fluids and related byproducts come to mind, together with the more decent and laudable “blood, sweat, and tears.”

One of the bands that performed at the CBGB gig, Rivushchie struny, has just released a new album.  Their slightly misspelled name could be translated, perhaps, as “Rip-Roarin’ Strings.”  One of the band members is the brother of famous musician and actor Petr Mamonov.

This link to a slightly older generation means that Rivushchie struny are playing “new” material that’s reminiscent of the Stooges or Captain Beefheart. It’s being offered to us in 2008 – at a time when many of the musicians from the late 1970s have long since fallen out with each other, reunited, and played entire comeback tours.

In fact the Moscow press has said Rivushchie struny “recall the type of rock used by the Soviets to scare the locals:  it’s dirty, dumb, and loud.”   To Russian ears that same sound, more dirge-like than anything structured, might suggest Auktyson.  The lyrics, too, revolve around everyday themes that evoke late Soviet bohemia:  little sex, much alcohol, and a general sense of purposelessness.

Other exponents of what Russians commonly bundle together as this kind of garage rock would be Moscow’s Cavestompers, Lazy Bitches, and Cretin Boys... or any other “fans of good ol’ three-chord, three-minute punk.”

The Russian press also view Rivushchie struny through parallels from the past, in particular the wantonly intellectual traditions of rock music under the Soviets.  At that time – when CBGB’s was wreaking havoc – Soviet rock was developing a very smart, if not condescendingly “intelligent” pose.

The Moscow bands who now define themselves as “garage” are trying to reverse the type of comparisons that used to be made between the (unruly) Stones and (well-kempt) Mashina vremeni.  They want more of the former and a great deal less of the latter:  “They play a wild type of rock, something between punk and psychodelic, with lyrics on all kinds of unsavory topics…”

The band’s vocalist Vova Terekh said recently:  “I really don’t know who needs all this [new interest]!  We’ve been playing this kind of music for 15 years.  The new wave of fashion for garage rock…  it’s the first time in my life when things rolled ’round in my direction, and not the reverse!”

Terekh tells long stories about how he no longer drinks, having passed through a protracted period of alcohol abuse.  It’s these kind of tales that make one question any claims to “rebellion” in Russian garage.  It is heavily inspired by a (long-past, long since canonized) American phenomenon, which in Russian eyes is tied not to a specific time or place, but to a purely corporeal experience.  That experience, in turn, is imagined as a realm of dirt and bodily release.   It’s a place of wanton (self?) soiling.

The sounds of a past aesthetic – the echoes of Auktsyon and Zvuki mu – are most evident in the closing track (above), “Pink Chlorite.”  It quickly falls apart but still slouches onwards for several minutes in a way that suggests the self-indulgence of the early 70s, rather than the tight, insistent structures of punk.

Malcom McLaren once admitted that punk was, perhaps, less of a rebellion than a chance to (briefly) kick and fight in the face of stronger, conservative norms:  it allowed one “to be a flamboyant failure rather than a benign success.”  The bodily decadence of Russian garage seems even to have sidestepped any flamboyance, confusing instead pleasure with physical resignation.

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