the Common Place

Artem Troitsky, shown here bumming a cigarette off Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparian while lead singer Viktor Tsoi looks on, wrote the book on the 80’s underground rock scene in the USSR. He also seems, from what I’ve read, to be one of the few really independent journalists left in Russia. In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, he recounts how Back in the USSR came to be written, and shares his views on the Russian music scene, then and now:

“But if we’re speaking about the songs, I was more interested in the lyrics, rather than the music. I really think that poetically Russian rock is at least not worse than American, although it’s absolutely different, of course.

“So when this paradigm of the 1970s/80s Soviet rock that was dear to me disappeared, evaporated, inevitably I lost my interest in it. But speaking about the music itself, I always say that we have some quite likable guys, whose work I treat with sympathy and understanding.”

One of the most “likable guys” of that era has to be Viktor Tsoi, who I personally think can hold his own as a songwriter on any territory, though of course given the challenges of the times a lot of the recordings are pretty rough. It seems, thanks to the Knackered Hack, that I am now part of a not-secret plot to bring the cult of Tsoi to the West.

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(Still dealing with post-flu lassitude, not up to much intellectual effort, but here’s a roundup of some Jonathan Richman artifacts for the common place book.)

Though my husband, the Bicycle Repairman, accuses Richman of being “Raffi for adults, ” he definitely has a place in the secret history of the 20th century. He’s been called a proto-punk for his his first album with the original Modern Lovers: The classic “Roadrunner” from that album is supposedly the first punk song, and it’s been covered by everyone, including the Sex Pistols. Though what Sid and Johnny were doing singing  about driving by the Stop’n’ Shop on a suburban highway late at night with the AM radio on, I’ll never know.

Here’s an extended tribute to Roadrunner  by Laura Barton in the UK Guardian: The car, the radio, the night - and rock’s most thrilling song.

I especially wanted to preserve this item in my commonplace book: Jonathan’s letter to Creem magazine in December 1973.

(letter via rockcritics.com )

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