Musicians Who Poked at the Iron Curtain (Cold War Rock and Roll)

NY Times ^ | November 8, 2009 | LARRY ROHTER

[a fool in paradise]

Guitars, keyboards and drums did not topple the Berlin Wall. But for the young people who helped bring down Communist regimes across Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989, pop music was a profoundly subversive force, inspiration and vital tool of protest for challenging and undermining a totalitarian state stricter than any parent.

Now middle aged, some of the musicians who played in ostracism during those last gray years of Communist rule gathered in New York over the weekend for the festival Rebel Waltz: Underground Music From Behind the Iron Curtain. Performing at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village... bands from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia commemorated the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall with cascades of sound in the grand tradition of the British and American pop that first motivated them...

The event was organized by government cultural agencies of the five countries represented, as well as the New York Public Library. What united the groups then and now, as became clear during interviews and at a round-table discussion Saturday afternoon at the New School, was their common anti-authoritarian stance. They saw themselves as rebels with a cause, punks whose lyrics railing against the status quo often carried a heavy cost, including surveillance and the danger of being labeled social parasites because their music could not be legally recorded, played or broadcast...

(Michal Kascak)... has vivid memories from the 1980s of listening to a fourth- or fifth-generation illegal cassette that had two songs each by the Talking Heads and the B-52’s... “When my family went on vacation to Yugoslavia, which was more tolerant about such things, I was even able to buy an entire album by each group, which I smuggled across the border under the floorboards of my parents’ car, with their help.”

[a fool in paradise]

The reward, said the saxophonist Arpad Hajnoczy, was to be officially labeled an “ultra-right-wing group” and “always have a white Lada at the corner, watching and following us.”

There's also a great wrap up in the original article where one of the musicians talks of how he thought back in 1989 that he'd always be living under Communism and just cannot believe what transpired and how he eventually got to play in NYC. He says the fall of Communism is much bigger to his than not being played on the radio (in part due to the popularity of Western corporate pop artists now).

[a fool in paradise]

Something forgotten from the Cold War. Western music was verbotten. Frank Zappa albums got in as “jazz” music.

But there were bootleggers who would use old x-rays and a lathe to make LPs...

http://www.collectorsquest.com/blog/2007/03/15/music-on-bones-soviet-x-ray-record-albums/

[tired1]

It would be a mistake to omit Vladimir Vysottsky; a Russian bard and my personal hero.