Boris Grebenshchikov - Early Years (1953-1979)

Early Years (1953-1979)

Boris Grebenshchikov was born on November 27, 1953 in Leningrad. He co-founded Aquarium with a childhood friend, Anatoly "George" Gunitsky, in 1972 as a post-modernistic theater-centric effort that involved poetry and music. Gunitsky provided absurdist, highly symbolic lyrics to some of BG's earliest songs.

Despite an eventual graduate degree in Applied Mathematics, Grebenshchikov had always been a voracious consumer of culture, especially music. His school-years enamorment with The Beatles eventually extended to include a deep appreciation of Bob Dylan, which slowly transformed Aquarium into a low-fi electric blues band that moonlighted in acoustic reggae. The first song he managed to play on guitar was The Beatles' "Ticket to Ride"; his first public performance, in 1973, featured him performing songs by Cat Stevens.

The first six years of Aquarium's history lacked cohesion as Grebenshchikov and his various bandmates followed the Soviet equivalent of the hippie lifestyle: playing apartment jams, drinking the low-quality port wine available from the Soviet stores of the time, and intermittently travelling to remote gigs, even hitchhiking on rail freight cars.

Youthful philandering was heavily frowned upon by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regime; decent recording facilities were out of reach because experiments in non-standardized self-expression were routinely suppressed as a matter of policy. The several homebrew 2-track recordings hacked out over those years (Temptation of St. Aquarium (Iskushenie Svyatogo Akvariuma), Count Diffusor's Fables (Pritchi grafa Diffuzora), Menuet for a Farmer (Menuet zemledel'tzu), and a motley crew of "singles") were of necessity extremely unprofessional, but already showcased the off-kilter wit, showy erudition, and a pervasive interest in Oriental thought and mysticism that eventually became BG's trademarks.

The year 1976 also saw the recording of BG's first solo album, On the Other Side of the Mirror Glass (S toy storony zerkal'nogo stekla), and a dual album with another prominent nascent Russian rock-n-roller, Mike Naumenko, All Brothers are Sisters (Vse brat'ya - sestry).