Glasnost

Looking over the Beatles explosion on iTunes today. Just the names of all the songs bring back so many memories. If life were a musical the background in mine easily could have been the Beatles catelog. There are many stories associated with many songs, but one jumped off the page today.

It would have had to have been in the late 80s during the time of Gorbachev. As relations between our two countries were warming, in a cultural exchange between the United States and the U.S.S.R., a group of folks from Siberia, mostly involved in culture, came to Alaska for a week.

Several musical groups were involved. I went to one concert billed as a folk exchange. It was quite an event at the Performing Arts Center in Anchorage. Among the Russian acts coming was their most famous rock group Stas Namin. The folk event was advertised specifically saying the rockers would perform in their own concert, but would not be at the folk concert.

We sat through several performances, that were meant to showcase various types of music in each country. A Baptist church choir, a group of peasant folk singers who traveled their country gathering and recording the music, as much a research project as it was performance art. A Yup’ik Eskimo dance group from Bethel, Alaska, and another Eskimo group from Siberia. I recall noticing this young performer with the Bethel group who stood out, given the background of hoping young people learn and preserve their culture. He was very animated and obviously, not only good at it, but enjoying it.

Throughout the concert, there was a rock band setup in the background, drums and other equipment, but no one ever went near it.

The whole event raised many emotions in the audience, at least it did in me. We had grown up fearing that country, fearing a nuclear World War III; we built bomb shelters and even the interstate highway system fearing these people; we had endured the Cuban missile crisis right at the brink, and yet here they were on our stage with our performers and they were just people, just like us. I remember hoping people were feeling what I was feeling about seeing this fear come to an end. I had felt silly enough hiding under a school desk in an atomic bomb drill, and felt even sillier thinking about the futility of that maneuver now.

The concert reached the end of the scheduled performances in the program and then the master of ceremonies came out and said something about we didn’t want to announce this but here they are: “Stas Namin.”

The Soviet rockers ran out onto the stage and picked up their instruments from that setuup in the back and then roared into some heavy rock and roll. As I think back on it now, I only remember one song. The rest of what they played was I think a mix of a couple of their songs in Russian and some familiar Western songs.

The song I remember came up this way: After Stas Namin had played a short set, the leader, whom I later found out is named Stas Namin, spoke in halting English about a young man from America who had impressed the group while they were in Alaska.

Then he called up that kid from Bethel and handed him a microphone. The band immediately played the oh, so familiar first notes of a Beatles song that brought a roar from the crowd, Mind you, this was mostly an older crowd, many of whom had grown up with the Beatles.

Out of the introductory notes, the Yup’ik Eskimo boy from Bethel, Alaska, fronting for the greatest Soviet rock band from deep in Russia, broke into the first phrases of the Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R.” The audience immediately came to its collective feet. The woman on my left grabbed my hand and I grabbed the one to my right. This was happening all over the auditorium. Where you could see, there were huge smiles on faces and here and there a tear on a cheek. What rushed through my mind was all that time wasted and how politicians sometimes get locked into things that we common folk could solve in a moment. The kid from Bethel belted out that song with the Soviet rockers, singing the song like he had done it all his life, the audience swaying to the beat. When they finished, they had left the audience exhausted, there was silence for a moment while we all tried to process what we had just seen, and then this huge roar of applause built gradually from us. I noticed leaving the show how many people were quiet, lost in some thoughts of their own, perhaps like mine.

It was something you wished John Lennon could have seen.