US/USSR Friendship Tour
Few things I've done in my nearly twenty years of musically running the roads have been as overwhelming, complicated, or as thrilling as my recently completed US/USSR Friendship Tour. Joining with my Russian compatriot, Gregory Gladkov, we undertook a 25-concert 30-day of the US in April-May and just completed a similar tour in the Soviet Union. Logistically we had to transport four people (a road manager and translator in addition to us) around our "friendly" skies for the American portion and in Russia we were nearly 15 people (my family joined our quartet for the first two weeks, plus a Russian tour manager, her two kids, and a six person Russian film crew). Traveling with just myself and my ever-faithful roadie, Tom Slothower, from now on is going to seem the height of comfort and ease! Thousands of people were able to join us in the course of the two tours, but, as you might suspect, some observations are in order even for those who managed to spend an evening with us...
Gregory arrived on my doorstep in early April and we immediately launched into preparation for the concerts. Deciding early on that we wanted to perform together as much as possible we were able to present possible material with more complex textures and designs. Gregory's knowledge of traditional Russian music is astounding and the pool of sounds and cultures from which he was able to draw provided me an opportunity to experiment with unexpected instrumental combinations and sometimes forgotten skills. We were quick to jump into one another's original songs and quickly found that the entire tour would be spent exploring new material, re-writing and refining. In truth, the concert was "ready" by the first stop but additions were happening throughout. The collaboration had, from the first, captured our imaginations.
And that seemed to carry over into our audiences as well. Having grown up, as many of us have, under a school desk in a Cold War-era air raid drill, our first views of the Soviet Union were framed in fear and suspicion. This collaboration, the first of its kind with folk singers from our respective lands, was not only musical but, for many, cathartic. For some it marked the end of an era, for all of us it hopefully is another hopeful sign of a long-delayed beginning.
The most exciting aspect of the American half of the tour for me, though, was the collection of sponsors who brought us into their communities. Some were seasoned veterans and others were venturing into their first, terrifying events. But the work they did and the variety of their perspectives was as exciting as the concerts themselves. Many people who wanted to see this happen in their town (especially smaller towns...places that we'd specifically earmarked for inclusion) didn't have the money, the connections, the personnel, or the experience to pull of an event of this size. So people formed coalitions. In one of our stops, for example, a small college, a community peace group, and a United Auto Workers local jointly sponsored the evening show. The mayor showed up and made Gregory an honorary citizen and all the local schools sponsored an afternoon family concert free to the entire town. Now that's a community event!
Particularly gratifying to me was my opportunity to bring the tour to St. John's and our Swayed Pines Folk Festival. In many ways it was my early days (however brief!) in SJU's environment of creative risk-taking and cultural ecumenism that started me along the road that came full-circle to this year's Folk Festival. It was also the closest to "home" that I was able to bring Gregory, with old friends and even my Father joining us for the event.
In mid-July Tommy and I and our families and a ridiculous amount of luggage rendezvoused at Kennedy Airport and slipped into the Atlantic skies en route to Helsinki. A day of acclimation later we boarded a train for Leningrad (recently re-named St. Petersburg in public referendum) and our first stop in the half-dozen cities we'd visit. Gregory, his wife, Marina, and an entourage of Leningrad friends, sponsors, and musicians met us with embraces, flowers, and a fleet of vans at the station and whisked us away for the cook's tour of that beautiful, gritty town. It was immediately clear to us we were going to see this country in a way few foreigners (and even fewer Americans) ever get a chance. At once, we would be privileged (being a musician, especially a composer, is a highly honored profession in the USSR...what a switch, huh?) and familiarity...we would be staying in hotels where Russians, not foreigners usually stayed. We'd not be on the requisite Intourist package but would be staying with, eating with, traveling with, partying with Soviets. And it was incredible...in every sense of the word.
Nikolai, our self-appointed Georgian party host in Leningrad, quickly initiated us into the fine art and ritual of toasting. It is a highly structured and wonderfully eloquent tradition I immediately fell in love with. Flowers were the order of the day at concerts...after the show, after particular songs, sometimes in the middle of songs. Russians are generous with their roses...roses that still have scents! Peter, Will, and I were treated to a number of Russian banyas (the elaborate and invigorating sauna) and hosted in every imaginable place...by workers in a glass factory who had folk groups sponsored by their unions, a bon-fire cook-out singing party hosted by musicians in Smolensk, a group of grandmothers who sang us flax-harvesting songs, to the major press conference sponsored by the Moscow Committee for Peace. Few things will last in my memory, though, as fondly as the all-night train ride into Moscow at the end of the tour with a dozen Russians crowded into our compartment singing Beatles songs all the way home...
Our audiences were wonderful singers, too, especially in the smaller towns outside of Moscow and Leningrad. In one town I began "Poost Fsyig Da Bood Yet Solntze" ("May There Always be Sunshine") and the audience simple commandeered the song and, as I sat on the front of the stage, sang it in its entirety, verses and chorus, on their own uninvited and uninhibited. It was an inspiring and recurring theme. Russians love to sing and they love their music. Music that tells of the beauty of their towns, their histories, their bravery in time of adversity. They have a true sense of ownership of their culture and, from my experience there, a working knowledge and respect for the many cultures that make up their Union. For though we did not travel outside the Russian republic Moscow, especially, provided a kaleidoscopic tour of the ethnic and racial diversity of that land. Georgians and Armenians were constant companions at our meals and parties. But there were Natives from the far north, Azarbaijanis, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and scores more that I could not name who would stay hours after concerts to chat. This without even mentioning the huge Syrian family who stormed the stage one night in Moscow and danced around my dulcimer in the middle of a song!? Most people had never seen a hammer dulcimer, none had ever seen an autoharp and few had seen an American folk singer since Pete Seeger's visits in the 1960's. None had seen an American and a Russian share the stage. The theaters were, without question, some of the most beautiful I'd ever seen and one of the wonderful things the government there has done is keep cultural events plentiful and financially accessible. Most events (be they concerts, ballet, theater, film...) cost about one ruble (or 5¢ in US terms). Consequently, our audiences were incredibly diverse and an electric sense of discovery was alive at every show.
Moscow TV sent a film crew along for the duration documenting the tour for a subsequent special that might find its way to US television. Simultaneously, I was visiting recording studios in Moscow and Leningrad recording songs with Gregory and a variety of other Russians singers (from very traditional singers to the "Russian Bruce Springsteen"). Hopefully I'll be able to add musicians and singers from this country and extend the US-Soviet collaboration one step further.
It was a particularly interesting time to be in the USSR. Gorbechev's famous address to the Communist Party Congress, his summit with Bush, the anniversary of the death of populist singer Vladimir Vitsotsky, the erupting conflict in Yugoslavia all occurred during our trip. It occurred to me, once again, how much our world views are shaped (and in some cases fabricated) by our government and media. Gorbechev, for instance, is an easily-digested Western-style Soviet leader but has little or no meaning to the average Russian. Perestroika, the word alone, will serve as the cornerstone of any sure-fire joke there. The prevailing view I encountered seem to be that the changes were inevitable, and Gorbechev lacked the courage to fulfill his promises. The entire country, as it teeters on the edge of its traditional and its international economies, seems to calculate costs, wages, and the future in a variety of fashions. "Is this in dollars, rubles, or hard rubles?" There is not the evident disparity between the haves and have-nots so evident in capitalist societies, though, as their society opens and the possibilities of a "better life" flood their TV's and political rhetoric, many will travel to both ends of the economic spectrum, as they have, say, in our society. Our two countries have, militarily, bankrupted our respective economies and they simply cried "Uncle!" first. Their future is hard, at best. But with a history that goes back well over a thousand years, they have a sense of purpose that places them as part of a process. "We will not see good times in our lifetime but, perhaps, if we work very hard, in our children's," I heard time and time again. It is a kind of long-range perspective that highlights the differences in our cultures. While some visitors report finding the Russians emotionless and cold, I found them particularly friendly and helpful. Proud, humorous, and well versed in their own history, they constantly rewarded me with small acts of kindness that made the travails of everything from sound system problems to scheduling fiascoes seem properly trivial.
So as their country enters a world economy (increasingly dominated by multi-national corporate takeovers) with an essentially non-convertible currency, no one really knows what to expect from the future. We could learn a lot about economic equality and affordable cultural events from them. They could benefit from the wild-eyed imagination we tend to bring to our endeavors. In a world in which we forget about winners and losers, us versus them, and who's Number One we can finally come out from under our old school desks and forget that a US/USSR Friendship Tour is an unusual thing.
ADDENDUM:
As this original article was written immediately upon returning from my trip...and three days before the August coup that toppled and return Gorbechev to power, a few additional observations seem in order... In the days immediately following the coup I was in fax contact with my friends in Moscow...most of whom had joined the thousands at the barricades in front of the "White House", the Russian Parliament building. Our earlier discussions of the possibilities of such a coup usually centered around, not the possible outcome but, rather, how the Russian people might react. "We have nothing in our national character that tells us how to go out onto the streets. We see the Czechs and the Germans and we greatly admire them and hope we, too, would rise up together, but we don't know..." And, indeed, for a town of 9 million people the crowds in the streets during the coup were far from remarkable in size. But the results, in fact, speak for themselves. The veritable dismantling of the Union, the minimalisation of the Central Government, the dismantling of much of the Party apparati, the ascendancy of Boris Yeltsin as a leader of international prominence...all this and more with remarkable swiftness and almost no bloodshed. But we, in this country, tend to view revolutions as events rather than as process. ar that tells us how to go out integration happened and almost no bloodshed. But, as we learned from the Czechoslovakians, the Germans, the Poles, the Yugoslavians, the Romanians, and more: this is only the beginning. Wountry, tend to view revolutionan eventa The future will tell the true story. In the meantime, however, it could do us well to join in the revolutionary fervor sweeping the globe. Rather than merely conclude, "we won," this is an opportunity for re-examination and recommitment. These are rare and ripe times. Let's hope that history judges that we used them well.