SPIN 1989
LET FREEDOM RING
Article by Jon Bon Jovi
It took a solid year of negotiations before we even got to Newark Airport.
Prior to the release of New Jersey, we met with Dennis Berardi, president of
Kramer Guitars, Stas Namin, a Russian underground hero and musician, and Gorky
Park, a Russian band Richie Sambora and I have written and recorded with. Stas
wanted to get Gorky Park an American record deal, and the reason he approached
Dennis (and a big part of Russia doing business internationally) was
trust.They're a little inexperienced in the international music business--the
industry's just beeen born there. In essence, it's like "Back to the
Future"--you can walk right into Russia and teach the people the future. A
few years before, Dennis had given Stas some guitars and didn't ask for anything
in return. He just said "Here, take them back to Russia. Go ahead." So
Stas, who's sold 40 million records but never had any monetary success in the
West, trusted Dennis and developed a friendship with him.
I met Stas last summer in New Jersey at Berardi's house, and I wanted to meet
this band Gorky Park. I had just taken a bunch of promo shots for New Jersey
wearing a Russian T-shirt. I didn't think anything of it, to me it was just a
clean shirt. But Stas thought it was a big deal that he could take these picture
back to Russia and help us, as an American band, gain popularity there. So we
said, "Sure, go ahead, yeah, great," thinking nothing would ever come
of it. But it did.
Through Kramer, through our mange Doc McGhee, through Polygram, and through that
trust, Gorky Park got a record deal. Richie and I had agreed to write and
produce something for them, wich we did, and they invited us to play Russia. As
it happened, we were planning to do a show for the Make a Difference Foundation
somewhere in the world. So we said, "Why don't we go
there? Why not?" Our attitude has always been to do more than the expected.
Moscow was the unexpected.
Last winter, while on our European tour, we flew to Russia to introduce
ourselves to a country that doesn't have the press or the radio or MTV or
magazines or record stores or anything that we in the West are accoustomed to.
It was really just a three-day press junket that Stas set up, finding anyone who
would talk to us. For newspaper interviews, the guy doesn't come to your hotel,
you go to the newspaper office, where about 20 staff members stand around. You
sip tea, shoot the shit. But their questions are like,
"How much money do you make? Do you own a car? Do you have a house?" I
was sitting at a long table with all these reporters, and I reached over to
shake hands with a music critic. I knocked over my glass and broke it. Everyone
started clapping while I was apologizing, because to them breaking a glass means
good luck.
We went to a TV show that looked like the cheapest cable TV show. There's only
one channel there; the other one seems to always play test patterns. On the show
we talked about the idea of doing the concert, and Stas got our "Living On
a Prayer" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" videos played. We got a
lot of attention; Stas and Doc got their game plan. Stas is wery powerful; his
grandfather was the head of the Politburo. So they talked to the Minister of
Peace, the Minister of Culture and Gos Concerts and got them all involved.
They'd never ever done anything like this before.
Stas is a heavy cat. One night in Red Square, at 3:00 in the morning, he pointed
up to a window in the Kremlin and said "Right up there, that's where I was
as a kid. I was born in the Kremlin." You just go, "Wow, that's a
very, very heavy."
In essence, Stas runs Gorky Park, wich is an actual park. It has an
amphitheater, a minor-league recording and rehearsal studio, and what they
consider a nightclub. It's acres and acres and acres of beautiful land right on
the water, big gates and soldiers. No wonder he doesn't use that big D word and
defect. He's got it pretty good. He's sort of like their Dick Clark or Alan
Freed. Now it was his time to help the kids, to bring rock'n'roll to the Soviet
kids.
Stas took us to Lenin Stadium in the 1980 Olympic Village, wich is on the
outskirts of Moscow. It was covered in snow; we were the only ones there; it was
a really pretty picture that will always be etched in my mind. Stas said he
could make the festival happen. And he and Doc convinced the goverment how
worthwhile it would be. For two reasons. In America, people aren't as impressed
by cause concerts anymore, because of the Live Aid and Amnesty.
It's like "Oh yeah, Another big event." In Russia, the impact would be
greater. Throughout our lives we've been told that we can't go to the Soviet
Union, that the bad guys live there. So in Russia, a show like this would bypass
all the seemingly insurmountable political and cultural differences. And the
proceeds would go to combat drug and alcohol abuse, wich is atleast one thing
the two superpowers have in common.
I wanted to take my father with us. I tried to take anyone who wanted to
experience this, because the Festival seemed pretty historic to me. But my old
man, who's a serious American, said "No way, I don't want to go there. I
have no intention of seeing the place." In their minds, people stil believe
the Russians are the bad guys. But it's getting better every day.
"Our Interpreter, who writes for a magazine, told me that Russian villagers
said, 'We're not interested in the music business, we're not even interested in
the news. Show us some sausage. We forgot how it looks like, let alone get it,
let alone eat it.'"
When we arrived in Moscow on Wednesday, August 9, there was a huge press corps
waiting for us. They've only let that many journalists from around the world on
the tarmac at one time twice before: for Prince Charles and Reagan. And now for
us. It was pretty amazing, but I don't know how it made me fee. For the last
five years of my life, I've been hearing things about our band
that sound like fiction. I can't belive half the things that we've been lucky
enough to experience, so it's all a blur. I don't think that anything in my
career is going to really sink in untill it's over. Then I'll look back on it
and say, "Yeah we did that:"
We didn't have to go through customs but they did take our passports. Our
luggage went straight onto the buses. Nobody questioned anything. In order to do
a press conference, we went into this little nothing room, about the size of a
living room. And they said, "Nobody comes in here, nobody's allowed to come
in here and use these rooms. Only our politicians use these rooms." I was
pretty nervous because I didn't want to say the erong thing,
and the first question they asked was, "With your Italian heritage, did the
Mafia in the past or in the present or does it in the future play a role in the
band?" That broke the ice. I said, "No, no, you don't
understand." I thought , "This guy has seen 'The Godfather' once and
he belives that Sinatra is connected." That's what I get for calling the
tour the Jersey Syndicate.
I guess the Russian impression of America must be pretty disturbed, too, because
my impression of Russia was just tanks running down the street, and bad guys
selling steroids on every corner, giving the kids milk and steroids in the
morning so they can be Olymic athlets. But I thought, "Hey, they're a super
military power, they're super athlets. So they've got to have good running water
and McDonald's. Almost everyone else in the world does." But by isolating
themselves and sheltering themselves, they've lost 70 years of progress in the
world. In the last 70 years, everyone knows the world has changed drastically.
It seems like they missed it.
After the press conference, we went to our hotel, the Ukraina. It was a Russian
four-star hotel, but in America, it would be a no-star motel. But it was a bed,
or so they said, and I was fading. I was one of the lucky ones; my room had hot
water and a shower curtain and only four cockroaches. But the dent in my
mattress would be considered a pothole in New York City. After eating burgers
and pig sandwiches at a makeshift Hard Rock Cafe in
Gorky Park, I went back to the Ukraina to sleep.
On Friday, the fourth day, I decided to check out the stage at Lenin Stadium. It
was huge, as big as a football field, and every inch of it was flown in from the
West. There was a television screen bigger than a small house--a huge fucking
screen--on a field a hundred yards wide. The sound system was three stories
tall. The stage spun, and Peter Max painted the scrims. It was a full blown
Western decadence in Downtown Moscow.
I anticipated 100,000 people at the hotel; I don't know why that didn't happen.
Maybe they were afraid to come. Maybe. I don't know. Last winter, the first time
we were there, we tried to sneak kids in the hotel; common Soviet citizens
aren't permitted to enter the hotels. The authorities found out and grabbed
them, put them in this room. If Wayne Isham, our video director, didn't go and
scream up a storm, I hate to think what would have happened to those couple of
girls that we tried to say were crew, just walking in with cases and stuff. But
Wayne screamed and yelled and panicked and got Stas, and Stas got htem out of
there.
This time, eight months later, I brought this guy wearing a Guns'n'Roses T-shirt
up to my room. He had sneakers on. He was 26 or 27. And he was ready to cry. I
was just blown away by this. I just said, "Here. Whatever you want, man,
take it. Whatever I got, you can have." And he was just trying to ask me
questions. "Do you know Guns'n'Roses? Will you ever come back here?"
His eyes started to well up with tears. He didn't ask me about my
life, he only wanted to know music. And he didn't stay long; I gues he knew he
didn't belong there.
Saturday, the day of the first show, there was another kid, Oleg. This
kid--couldn't have been 18 years old--should come to America, because he would
be one of those success stories waiting to happen. He would own New York.
He wanted to trade things: Soviet military watches for American cassettes,
Russian caviar for T-shirts and film, Soviet Army caps and berets for waist
packs and jeans. He said he bought his way out going into the army, he learned
how to speak English in six months, and he gives a little something to the cops
in Red Square so when all the tourists are there, he can trade stuff with them.
He looked like Michael J. Fox: cleancut, button down shirt (wich is a serious
American giveaway because it's really hard to get button
down shirts in Russia), wore a camera around his neck, sneakers, things that
he'd traded for. He reads copies of Time magazine. That's the kind of things he
wants to trade for, Western literature, especially current media stuff. So he'd
read about Bejing, and wanted to know more about the West. Apparantly, the
official Russian story was: There was a student uprising against the goverment.
Not why, not that people were killed, just that these
rowdy kids got crazy. He hung out a lot with my wife and with Obie, our
recording engineer. Obie's a pretty funny guy. You know the record clubs they
advertise in magazines? Buy 10 records for a penny? He said, "Here Oleg,
send this in. Hey, if you don't buy any more records, what are they gonna do?
Chase you down?" Obie gave Oleg his phone number. "Here's my phone
number, If you're ever in Philadelphia, look me up."
We hadn't been home for three days when the phone rang. It was Oleg calling from
downtown Moscow. He told us what it takes to leave Russia (you can't leave
Russia unless you have a sponsor, money in a bank account and a job in the
country you're going to). He said, "I have only a mother, I don't have a
father. Bring me to America. I'll do anything." Immediately my wife wanted
to adopt him. She said "We have to bring him to America." I said
"You gotta
be kidding me. You're wild, how can you do this?`" Obie said, "Don't
worry about it. I'm bringing him to America." I don't know where that
stands right now. But they'd absolutely fallen in love with this kid, wanted to
bring him home in a suitcase. He made a serious lasting impression on them.
Our interpreter, Alek, was a real intelligent guy who writes for a
newspaper, sort of like an independent magazine. He went on a publicity tour, a
promotional tour for this magazine, to places like Siberia and all the little
Russian villages. He told me that people said, "We're not interested in the
music business, we're not even interested in the news. Show us some sausage. We
forgot how it looks like, let alone get it, let alone eat it. We forgot what it
fucking looks like. Talk to us about food." Hearing these stories I was
completely aghast.
We slipped out of the hotel with Alek. Eight months ago, I know I couldn't have
done that because guys would have been all over me like a cheap coat. We went to
the black market, where they buy and trade records, wich is set up like a flea
market on weekends. They call it a black market, but they don't go to jail for
having it anymore. Three years ago, they weren't allowed to organize. They'd
meet up secretly. They'd hold lists in the palms
of their hands. They'd say, "At 12:00 I'll meet you on the corner. Here's
what I've got to trade, here's what I wanna get." Then they'd eat the list
and be gone. If you were caught with the list--jail. If you were caught buying
one of these records--jail.
Now the black market is set up in a round room that's used as a nightclub where
local bands play all night. They have about 15 records displayed on each table,
90 percent of them from the West, current, very current. They had our record in
there imported from Yugoslavia. Now, Melodia, the Soviet label, is releasing New
Jersey. It's the first Western record ever to be
officially released in Russia. So it's in stores and the kids can afford
it--three or four rubles--because it's an official release. I got a copy of
McCartney's Back in the USSR (wich is worth about $200 in the States becuse it's
only avaliable through Melodia). They had Elvis's greatest hits, wich is sort of
like a bootleg that Melodia put together. They call it That's Allright Mama. It
didn't seem like a lot of people where buying records. People go there to buy
and trade and just get together and talk about music--because the prices are so
high ($80 to $100 for an album), they just look and listen.
I tried to pick up a record just to see what country it was from and the guy
behind the table lost his mind. "Don't touch the merchandise!" It's
like picking up gold there.
Alek goes there just to look because it's so expensive. Sometimes he trades his
father's old standards for some Western rock'n'roll. He's getting access to a
radio program, wants to get records played on the radio. He had a CD player,
wich is unheard of, that he brought in from somewhere in Europe. I had about 10
CD's with me; I gave them all to him. The Atlantic Blues collection, Sign O' the
Times, some Queen, Don Henley's the "Batman" soundtrack. These people
open your heart up so much you'd give them anything.
At 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, August 12, the Soviets got their first taste of New
Jersey. Skid Row opened the show. Every band was there at 1:00 in the
afternoon--we weren't even going on till 10:00 that night--because of the
anticipation. The head of the Soviet Peace Committee, a gray-haired guy in a
sky-blue suitm, made the opening announcements and lit the torch for the first
time since the 1980's Olympics. Here's this very heavy guy telling the kids in
Russian, "Have a good time, enjoy this. You are the future." Even he
had opened up to the idea of exposing the kids to the West.
The Skidscame out: the first think Sebastian Back said was, "Check this
out, motherfuckers." And I thought, "Oh no. They give us charte
blanche and we give them Sebastian." But no one did anything, there was
absolutely no cencorship. They played a good set and were fairly well-received
for a band that had never ever been heard of. But when they went off stage, the
entire stadium started this chant, "Ozzy! Ozzy! Ozzy!" And it kept
building.
We were saying, "Fuck, Ozzy's gonna steal this fucking show. This is wild,
this is great." Ozzy was right behind the stage, and I saw him perk up like
a fucking 2-year old. He was so excited. And I was so happy for him--this guy
who's been in the business 20 years, about to do the last show of his tour. He
was going to go home for a while, going to take it easy.
So Oz had his hands up in the air, knowing that it was his day. But he went on
to a pretty lukewarm reception.And he didn't play bad, he played very well.
Immediately, I had the whole event in perspective. I understood. For 20 years,
they'd seen his picture, for 20 years they'd heard his music--from Black Sabbath
to his last solo album. But he wasn't a real peson to them. He was imaginary.
And in their imagination, he could have been blue and 30 feet
tall. But on that stage he was just a man. He'd been reduced to a mortal. At
that moment, I understood. We weren't just doing a rock show, we had to make an
impression, one that would last. We had to make friends with these people even
with the terrible language barrier and all the preconceptions.
I was in the recording truck watching the Scorpions, the only ones who had the
advantage of having played in Russia before. For me, there was a nervous
anticipation, knowing I had to close the show after such a killer live band. The
first tour I ever did was opening for the Scorpions. But I was always real
dangerous if I was your opening act, because if I found a hole I knew how to
utilize it.
So there it was, right down the center of the stadium, hundreds of Soviet
Soldiers, arm in arm, formed a human barricade to seperate the seas of people.
And I saw the hole. So after the Scorpions, when the hammered out "Lay Your
Hands On Me," I did Rocky Balboa in a full military outfit right down the
middle of Lenin Stadium. Right down the center of those soldiers, in front of
90,000 kids. They were smiling, trying to reach at me, and the Olympic torch
burned brightly over their heads. Going right down the center in a Russian
uniform, that was all it took. I felt like one of them then.
I definetly think the Moscow Music Peace Festival did something for peace. The
American ambassador attended and he had nothing to do with the show. Absolutely
nothing. He showed up and said, "This is something tha we couldn't have
done, politicians could have never done. I can't belive you guys pulled this
off." Because we didn't understand where the red tape was, we just
pretended it didn't exist. "Trust us, trust us, it'll work." When the
ambassador to America is there, you think that maybe somehow he relayed
the message back to the President of the United States. And all of a sudden, in
a roundabout way, the President's aware of who Bon Jovi is. You think, Check
that out. Of course, I'm pulling my own strings, because if he knew anything, he
knew of this event. But you have to build it up in your own mind: Yeah, man, and
I bet he's got the last two albums, too. But it was an amazing feeling.
The trip, the event, really made me think about the freedom in my life. I
learned all the words to "God Bless America." You bet I did. There's a
lot of problems in America, mind you. But I've been just about everywhere and if
I haven't been there yet, I'm on the way this tour. And there's nothing that
even comes close to America. Some guys wrote a constitution 200 years ago and it
still stands up today. That's some insight, foresight. That's pretty amazing.
There's the opportunity to do anything. Christ, that's the basis of my entire
life. You can do anything.
I'll never forget being onstage in Lenin Stadium, that guy from the Peace
Committee to my left in the front row and a girl sitting on a guy's shoulders
waving a huge American flag, the politicians, the soldiers tapping their feet
along with the music, and then over to my right was the fucking Olympic torch. I
felt like an athlete and I felt like a politician and I felt like we were the
focal point of something pretty historic. Of course, we won't remember that the
sound sucked or things like that. You try to forget all that and you make your
mind belive that it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I hope it did
good. And I think maybe it did.