Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground

by Joanna Stingray, Madison Stingray

Overview

A memoir by an American who almost single-handedly introduced Soviet rock to the free world, [...] Stingray, who wrote this memoir with her daughter, Madison, nicely captures her daring amid an atmosphere of liberation and fear, and she's a study in moxie and enthusiasm.
—Kirkus Reviews

As one of the first American musicians to break through the Soviet scene, and one of the few women to be seen as an equal amongst Leningrad’s pantheon of rock superstars, Stingray’s perspective on the development of late Soviet rock is probably the single most important source for those who want a birds-eye view of late Soviet youth culture, and Stingray’s stories are as entertaining as they are relevant and illuminating.
—Alexander Herbert, author of What About Tomorrow?: An Oral History of Russian Punk from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot

Wild and vivid — a rollicking memoir of romance and rock ‘n’ roll in an era of upheaval and transition. From Los Angeles to Leningrad and back again, Joanna’s story is borne along by her infectious, headlong enthusiasm. It’s quite a ride.
—Patrick Radden Keefe, creator of the Wind of Change podcast and author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

The history of Russian rock music could have been very different without Joanna Stingray. Joanna was friends with rock musicians, recorded songs with them, shot their videos and brought them clothes and instruments from the West. Her video footage, capturing young icons of Russian rock like Viktor Tsoi, Sergei Kuryokhin, Timur Novikov and Boris Grebenshchikov, is rare evidence of the golden era of the Soviet underground.
—The Moscow Times

Red Wave is a warm and conversational autobiography about a lost world, peopled with courageous artists risking their freedom for the ideas of expression, art, and rock ‘n’ roll. [...] We root for her and her friends to overcome bureaucracy, oppression, isolation, deprivation, and the heavy footsteps of the KGB. [...] In a readable and personable way, Red Wave helps shine some light into this remarkable corner of rock history.
—Tim Sommer, Guernica

Joanna Stingray's appearance in St. Petersburg in the early 1980s must have been God's response to our unconscious prayers. Her naive bravery, curiosity and generosity created a kind of a lifeline for us rockers: she brought in things we needed to play our music, and took out not only our recordings but the very message of our existence. Had it not been for her and her Red Wave, it would have taken Aquarium many more years to have official records on Melodiya and Kino to start touring Europe. This fearless maiden broke through the siege that looked hopelessly unbreakable. She threw a life-saver into our waters and she changed everything. No matter how many times we thank her — it's never enough.
—Boris Grebenshchikov (Aquarium), 2018

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781733957922
Publisher:	DoppelHouse Press
Publication date:	09/22/2020
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Joanna Stingray is an author and musician from Los Angeles, California, who lived for many years in Russia. She became the first American producer of underground Russian rock n’ roll when she released the double album Red Wave — 4 Underground Bands from the USSR — a compilation of music smuggled out of the USSR by Joanna in 1985. A frequent traveler in and out of Russia, Joanna was interrogated by the KGB and FBI (both thought she was a spy) and in 1987, she became an enemy of the State — her visa blocked to keep her from entering the Soviet Union to marry Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparyan. After months of intervention by the U.S. State Department, she returned to Russia, married Yuri and in the early ‘90s became a television host, a recording artist, and well known rock personality throughout Russia. She has published several books in Russia about her time in the music scene as well as much of her photo collection. Her video diaries and interviews of bands and their musicians is the only archive of this clandestine, bygone world.

“FREE TO ROCK,” the 2017 documentary exposé directed by Jim Brown and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, features interviews with Joanna Stingray, prominent American musicians who toured the Soviet Union, and several important Russian musicians. It reveals to the world the dismantling socio-political effect of “soft power,” and discovers how American rock n’ roll and the release of Red Wave during glasnost contributed to the ending of the Cold War.

Madison Stingray is the author of two books as well as songs, poems, and short stories, the common theme of all being a strong female narrative and an attempt at human solidarity. She graduated from Georgetown Universitymagna cum laude and received her Master’s degree in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge in England. Growing up, the Leningrad Underground Rock days were stories that became her fairytales, and her contribution to putting those adventures in print is to inspire others that extraordinary things can happen to anyone who fights for something.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

I still remember the day I fell down the rabbit hole. It was April 1984, and I had just landed at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. Everywhere I looked, it was dark, cold, and lifeless, and walking through the concrete halls I felt empty and tense. It seemed like I was walking forever, farther and farther from home and the palm trees that had been the bookmarks to my life.

I arrived at the customs area with long lines of grim people waiting their turn silently. Everywhere I looked there were motionless soldiers, more like mannequins or wolves than real people. Were they even breathing? Was I? I inhaled. On my tongue, the cigarette smoke mixed with the warm odor of a hundred bodies packed together.

The next three days that followed, I was still falling. Moscow out of the bus window was a grey and sullen ghost, yet full of life. People in black or dark blue raced through the city streets. I remember thinking that this was a place to which I would never come back, an evil empire of despair behind the Iron Curtain. My father, for what felt like the first time, was right.

On the fourth day, I arrived in Leningrad to more monotonous views of a drab country. The dirty glass of the bus made it feel like a moving prison, the rote history from the watchful guide like the morning prayers for a flock of fallen angels. During an afternoon break back at the ‘tourist’ hotel I decided I had had enough, and through a maze of maneuvers I landed at the feet of the father of ‘underground’ Russian rock n’ roll, the magical Boris Grebenshchikov. I remember being in his apartment, and he was this real person in front of me with color in his eyes and his cheeks. I was listening to Russian rock, this crazy soundtrack to life and love and loss, and I felt it – I had finally arrived in my Wonderland.

From that moment, my whole life changed. I found myself in Leningrad’s underground rock music and art scene, a chaotic, captivating world – a piece of the Soviet Union tucked away like a heart beneath the ribs. From the moment I met Boris and all the other creative pirates, I was hooked on this place that turned misery into music and suffering into song. The next four years of my life I spent continent-hopping across the Atlantic, alternating one week in that enchanted land of contradictions and fairy tales with three months in Los Angeles trying to claw my way back.

All that creative energy and powerful emotion drove me to want to share Leningrad’s beautiful music and art with the West. I smuggled out my friends’ music and released a double album title Red Wave – Four Underground Bands from the U.S.S.R. “Music has no borders” became my mantra.

As I fell head over heels into the crazy tea party, in love with the guys, the city, and the country as well, I found a way to warm the coldness on the streets of communist Russia, to peel back the masks to see expressions of individuality and life. It was clear to me that the reason these musicians could be so creative and artistic was because they had nothing else to do to distract them. The American dream had been abandoned for sitting in front of the television like a vegetable in a microwavable dinner, but in the Soviet Union these guys still had to make up their own dreams to entertain themselves.

By 1987, the U.S.S.R. was in the thick of glasnost and perestroika, and it was unclear what the final destination culturally would be. By that time, I had become a hero to the Russian youth and an enemy of the Russian state, had my visa blocked and my wedding missed, but by the end of that year I had somehow managed to marry Yuri Kasparyan, and Gorbachev had managed to divorce himself from the chains of the old guard. The dramatic changes left everything and everyone, including me, waiting to see what would happen next.

What scared me was that in Mother Russia, the one thing that never changes is the unpredictability of what’s to come.

For a dozen years, from April 1984 through April 1996, I was obsessed with Wonderland and its people, who infused the city with an electricity even when the power would inadvertently cut out. I tried to spend as much time as I could soaking it all in, until the rabbit hole would spit me out and close, seemingly forever. The following story is my own recollection of those experiences in Russia, occasionally supported by press articles and some of the many taped interviews I conducted during those times, and my memories of all the adventures that I got to share with the most wonderful cast of characters.

Table of Contents

Dedication
Introduction
Book One: 1984–1987
Interlude: Interview with Boris Grebenshchikov
Book Two: 1988–1996
Epilogue: 1996–2020
Acknowledgments
In Memoriam
Further Listening

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Rock is for young people. It’s an opportunity to open up a road into the future and breathe deeper. And all thoughtful people understand that it’s not just young people fooling around. They are captivated by this music. If some of our rock bands like Aquarium and Kino were released in the West on the Red Wave album in June 1986, why shouldn't they have been released in Russia?

—Mikhail Gorbachev, 2019, reflecting on his decision that led to the Red Wave bands being allowed to become “official” by 1987

Editorial Reviews

Business and cultural pioneers don’t set out to light the world on fire but end up doing so through ingenuity and determination. While we often think of globalization as factories and container ships, the exchange of goods and ideas between nations starts with one person finding something people in another nation would value. Joanna Stingray was that one person who brought Soviet rock music to America and did so in remarkable fashion.
—Forbes

Thanks to a resourceful Los Angeles singer and songwriter who heard—and liked—their brand of Russian rock, the bands are now playing to a faraway audience. [...] The album is the brainchild of Joanna Stingray a.k.a. Joanna Fields, 25, who has been exploring the Soviet Union’s unofficial and unheralded rock world since 1984.
—Newsweek

Eight trips later she had ‘smuggled’ enough tapes of Kino and other groups out of the Soviet Union to produce an album, Red Wave–a kind of Greatest Hits of Socialist Rock. At first the Soviet press denigrated Stingray’s tales of the “brave little American miss helping the oppressed Soviet musicians” as a self-serving fantasy. Now, though, inspired by glasnost if not by greed, Soviet officialdom has cut a deal with her to produce 10 albums of “unofficial music” for consumption in the U.S.
—People Magazine

The music on Red Wave – which ranges from the ska-tinged pop of Kino to the brooding, introspective songwriting of Grebenshchikov – was recorded mostly in cramped living rooms transformed into home studios with borrowed two-track and eight-track equipment. The lyrics, sung in Russian (a translated lyric sheet is provided), are not overtly political. But veiled reference to politics shine through, as does a keen awareness of progressive Western rock.
—Rolling Stone

From the Publisher

2020-06-23
A memoir by an American who almost single-handedly introduced Soviet rock to the free world.

Joanna Fields was a young Beverly Hills wannabe pop star when she followed her sister on a school trip to Leningrad in 1984. Offered a chance to meet with some local musicians, she thought she’d wow them with her music; instead, she discovered a robust underground rock scene that was bravely defying censorious authorities. Enchanted by the likes of Boris Grebenshchikov, whose samizdat cassettes were massively successful and earned him a reputation as the Soviet Union’s answer to Bob Dylan, she looked for ways to spread the word. Working some industry connections, she produced a 1986 compilation, Red Wave, which presaged the thaw of glasnost and perestroika that inspired more cultural exchanges. (Grebenshchikov would later record a well-received album with Western rock acts.) But Fields was watched by the FBI and fell in and out of favor with Soviet authorities, which denied her a visa to marry another popular musician. (She officially changed her last name to Stingray to exploit a loophole that allowed her to reenter Russia.) With the end of the Cold War, Stingray remained in Russia, becoming a popular musician in her own right and introducing U.S. and U.K. acts to Russian audiences. Stingray, who wrote this memoir with her daughter, Madison, nicely captures her daring amid an atmosphere of liberation and fear (David Bowie and Molly Ringwald each wanted to adapt her story), and she’s a study in moxie and enthusiasm. But without the Cold War intrigue, the book’s second half is much drowsier, larded with dry tales of video shoots and Stingray’s efforts to get a newly liberated Russian society to combat littering.

An earnest, only intermittently engaging tale of an unlikely rock-world champion.

Kirkus Reviews