TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.001

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.1 KB | 142 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 110

HOT, HOT, HOT: BRIGADA S


Teens from Tallinn to Vladivostok love all nine members of a
homegrown band whose songs sound like (yes) the Andrews Sisters
on acid

By Paul Hofheinz/ MOSCOW


    On a Saturday night some 6,000 Moscow teenagers pack into
the Luzhniki sports amphitheater, a warehouse-like hall that is
usually the venue for hockey matches and basketball games.
Off-duty soldiers, their pink faces fuzzy with adolescent
stubble, scuffle to get closer to the stage, while packs of
young girls giggle at their antics. It might be a concert
anywhere in America -- except that no T shirts are for sale, no
hot dog vendors trawl the aisles, and, most of all, no one
smokes anything stronger than cigarettes.

    Through 2 1/2 hours and ten opening bands, the kids have
stood shoulder to shoulder waiting for their favorite group.
Finally, a short, well-built young man, his hair shaved severely
around the sides, appears onstage. He grins demonically and
defiantly surveys the crowd. Behind him a swarm of guitarists,
horn players, a keyboardist and a drummer troop onto the stage.
A drumbeat clears the air, and suddenly the band is cruising
through the infectious opening rhythm of The Man in the Hat. The
lead singer grabs the microphone and shrieks, "Heading for a
meeting/ Across the frozen intersection/ On the night boulevard
. . . The man in the hat of no particular fate/ He's neither
strong nor weak . . . He's just a man, a man at the sunset."

    Meet Brigada S, the hottest, hippest band in Gorbachev's
Soviet Union. After a history of often bitter confrontations
with police and schoolteachers, Brigada S (or the S Brigade,
christened by lead singer Igor Sukachev because he liked the
letter S) has become one of the most popular of the new
generation of rock bands. Although the four-year-old group has
yet to produce an album, the self-described "Proletarian Jazz
Orchestra" enjoys a tremendous following. Teens from Tallinn to
Vladivostok spray-paint the band's name, with the Russian
equivalent of S drawn like a Communist hammer and sickle, on
walls of public buildings.

    During the Brezhnev era, rock music was carefully
controlled through the State Concert Agency, a government
bureaucracy that reserved the right to determine which bands
could legally perform in public places. Only bands that were
officially registered by the agency could receive money for
their shows, a ploy that allowed bureaucrats to weed out
undesirable groups by choking off their income.

    But of course an underground rock scene flourished.
Concerts were often a clandestine affair, staged on the spur of
the moment in out-of-the-way auditoriums. And despite official
discouragement, a few groups like Time Machine, the first band
to sing openly about social problems, and the Leningrad-based
Akvarium managed to thrive.

    When the State Concert Agency relaxed its regulations in
1986, rock bands suddenly could play their music in big halls,
with thousands of screaming fans in attendance. The effect was
electrifying, and the kids knew whom to thank for the lighter
touch. One of the new bands, a Moscow-based group called Grand
Prix, introduced a song last year called simply Gorbachev. The
haunting chorus ("I understand! Gorbachev!") is less a tribute
to the man in power than a defiant youth anthem, undoubtedly the
first to use a Soviet leader as an emblem of teenage
aspirations.

    At the crest of this new wave is Brigada S. "It's almost an
accident we became so popular," says Sukachev, 29, who worked
in a factory before he could make it with his music. Only two
years ago, Sukachev and fellow band members were routinely
hauled into local police stations and asked to explain their
hairstyles and unusual dress. When the band's photograph
appeared in a French magazine in 1986, Sukachev was taken to KGB
headquarters for questioning. These days, all that has changed.
On a recent trip back to his high school, Sukachev was surprised
to hear himself described as the school pride. Says he: "I used
to be their shame."

    Brigada S has an unusual sound that draws on several
sources. As a child, Sukachev listened to black-market Glenn
Miller and Andrews Sisters albums, and their influence can be
heard in the group's Big Band tinge. In style, the group also
owes a tremendous debt to the futurist poets of the 1920s, whose
revolutionary verse inspired a generation with its early
Communist iconography.

    In the past, Soviet bands often shamelessly copied popular
Western styles, but Sukachev set out to create a uniquely
Soviet sound, something kids could dance to. Although a punk
rocker at heart, Sukachev added a four-piece horn section to the
driving rhythm-and-blues backup of lead guitarist Kirill Trusov
and bass player Sergei Galanin. The result is a slick
multi-generational hybrid, the Talking Heads meet Count Basie,
the Andrews Sisters on acid.

    The punk is in the presentation, which can shock Soviet
conformists. Once, Sukachev demolished an enormous poster of
Brezhnev onstage, then threw the pieces into the audience.
During a number about drug addiction, he often pantomimes a
heroine injection. His shaved-sided flop-mop elicits frequent
comment on Moscow's streets. "People think I'm a fascist," he
says. "I can't think how many times I've been called that."

    His lyrics also speak of a scorching resentment of the
older generation. In Don't Follow Us, Sukachev warns his elders
that his generation will be different from theirs: "Hey,
indulgence sellers . . . We're not the same as you./ We're not
the heroes of big polemical battles/ So don't follow us."
Another number, the feisty Reptiles, all but declares open
rebellion: "We'd be glad, glad, glad/ If some time, any time/
All these reptiles . . . Would disappear forever." Sukachev
dislikes assigning meaning to his songs. "I like to stick images
together," he explains. "Other people can tell you what they're
about."

    Sukachev, who remembers having to beg for money to ride the
subway, makes more than 3,000 rubles ($4,800) a month from
concerts, nearly 15 times the Soviet average wage and more than
twice the take-home pay of Mikhail Gorbachev. (Says Sukachev:
"If I had his house and his car, he could have my 3,000.")
Still, success has its problems. "It's really dangerous when
people start to praise you for doing the things they used to
slam you for," he notes. The band now risks losing the special
edge to its sound that developed from the tension of fighting
for the right to play its music.

    Like it or not, things are moving quickly for Brigada S.
This summer the group will release its first two albums,
following the top-selling unauthorized concert disk put out last
year by Melodiya, the country's sole record label. There is talk
of a U.S. tour as well, possibly in June. "We're hoping to sign
a few small contracts," Sukachev admits. Still, he says he
wouldn't give up the band's underground years for anything.
"Those years are our strength," he says. "We'd be nothing
without them."