Boris Grebenshchikov - Classical Years (1980-1988)

Classical Years (1980-1988)

BG's big break (or, in retrospect, his and the band's "watershed" moment), however, came in 1980, when Artemy Troitsky, the first public Russian rock critic and the enabling figure in many a Russian rock musician's carrier, invited Aquarium to perform at the Tbilisi Rock Festival.

The festival was a state-sanctioned attempt to channel the then-burgeoning Russian rock music movement into a controllable ideological vessel. It featured a laundered line-up of government-approved rock bands, but also Kraftwerk, whose performance was accompanied by frisbees being launched into the public. Members of the jury (the occasion was officially an artistic contest) were not amused. A covert KGB-bound report pinned the shenanigans on Aquarium, which caused BG to lose his day job at a backwater design bureau (of a kind that employed the majority of technical specialty graduates in the Soviet Union; Russians called them P.O. Box (Pochtoviy yaschik) because their street addresses were never revealed), and membership in Komsomol, the Young Communist League, which was a career kiss of death for a Soviet citizen in 1980.

The band's underground profile, however, had continued to rise sharply over the next 7 years, post-Leonid Brezhnev KGB-fueled reactionism and Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika notwithstanding. This was both due to talent, and the scarcity of supply - Western rock music was still officially banned at the time. Over the first five albums, the band attracted guitarist Alexander Lyapin, considered to be among the best rock guitar players of Russian origin, the pianist Sergey Kuryokhin, renowned for the impressive speed and virtuosity of his playing and boundless avant-garde experimentation, and Igor Butman, a world-class jazz saxophone player and one of the reigning kings of Soviet jazz.

The first Aquarium music available in the "west" was in 1986 when a double album entitled "RED WAVE, 4 UNDERGROUND BANDS FROM THE USSR" appeared in record stores in the U.S. Besides Aquarium, three other bands, Kino, Strange Games and Alisa were recorded on a four track machine, smuggled out of the country and released by a small record label from Hollywood, California. During this time, bands in the USSR were either officially sanctioned or were not allowed to play in public or record in professional recording studios. In 1986, when the record was released in America, Aquarium was immensely popular throughout the Soviet Union, but were forced to play at underground clubs and private gatherings.

By the time Aquarium disbanded amid internal squabble in 1987, they had 11 "official" records under their belt and were considered a living legend of Russian rock. BG himself was likened to Bob Dylan, not least because of his borrowing amply from Dylan stylistically in his earlier years. Railway water (Zheleznodorozhnaya voda) off the 1981 Blue album (Siniy albom), for example, is a spitting image of Dylan's It takes a lot to laugh off the 1965 Highway 61 revisited.