Soviet Union: Tired? Nyet!

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Woodstock, Yerevan style

The ecstatic festival of peace, love and shattering music was a far cry from its Aquarian inspiration. True, there were crowds, of a sort. Over nine days, 79,000 rock fans chanted lyrics, swayed from side to side, and occasionally danced in the grandstands to the thumping sounds and prancing antics of their daringly costumed, idolized performers. But most male haircuts in the audience were trim and short, and there was no topless boogying, unabashed sex or potluck pot.

Still, it would do. For the Soviets, the festival was a mini-Woodstock similar in spirit, if not in size, to the rock festival that attracted some 450,000 fans to a dairy farm in upstate New York in 1969. The unlikely site of the Communist bash: a bicycle racing stadium in Yerevan, Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, a city of 1 million people hard by Mount Ararat.

The celebration, sponsored by the Armenian Ministry of Culture, was the first major rock festival to be held in the Soviet Union. Officials have painfully mixed feelings about pop culture and its musical expression, sometimes denouncing it as decadent, sometimes going along. When the Yerevan festival was approved, young Soviets came from as far away as the Baltic republics, central Russia and even Siberia. They luxuriated in the distinctive sounds of such national pop superstars as Stas Namin, 30, Gunnar Graps, 29, and his Magnetic Band, and Valeri Leontiev, 32, a booted, bolero-suited dancing rocker whose performance falls somewhere between those of Mick Jagger and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The fans got a psychedelic dose of rock antics that any Western teen-ager would recognize: flailing drummers, singers with shoulder-length hair blasting out songs through banks of amplifiers, ice-blue light beams bouncing off a multifaceted prism onto a throbbing stage. A total of eleven bands, putting on two concerts a night, thumped through such Soviet Top of the Pops hits as City Limits Blues, This Beautiful World and Mirror, plus such imports from the West as I Will Survive, and Blue Suede Shoes, both in English.

Like blue jeans, Pepsi-Cola and vintage jazz, Western rock 'n' roll has long since penetrated the Soviet Union. The original impetus came in the '60s with bootlegged records, cassettes and sources like the Voice of America, which beams in roughly an hour a day of rock and pop.

Soviet kids also adore rock because it is their rebellious answer to the kitschy pop tunes and folk songs the authorities want them to hear. Although they often have problems with the censors, some rock songwriters manage to have their say. Garbed in fire engine-red pants and white shirt decorated with a splashy 7-Up emblem, Graps sang: "Since we have nowhere else to make love/ we do it out in the open/ And sometimes the rain washes away the makeup/ from her face—and mine."

They loved it. They loved it all in Yerevan. On the last night of the festival, when the organizers slipped him the word to pack it up, Stas Namin said into the microphone: "Are you tired?"

Back came a roar: "Nyet!"

"It's 1 o'clock in the morning."

Huge cheer.

"What will your mothers say?"

Another cheer.