Gorky Park
They were championed by Bon Jovi and tasted success, but Russia’s first rock export were doomed from the start.
Championed by Bon Jovi, Russian rockers Gorky Park were a rock’n’roll
symbol of East meets West and the 80s Cold War thaw. But, due to no fault of their own, they didn’t stand a chance.
The Moscow Music Peace Festival was pitched as ‘the Russian Woodstock’. Organised by Bon Jovi/Mötley Crüe manager Doc McGhee and held at the 100,000-capacity Central Lenin Stadium in the Soviet capital in August 1989, the event featured some of the West’s biggest hard-rock acts, including Bon Jovi, Scorpions, Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne.
It was ostensibly a meeting of two great cultures, a microcosm of world events that had seen a deep thaw in the Cold War between the US and the USSR, although the potential to sell vast numbers of records in a newly liberated market didn’t escape any of the visiting bands. That it culminated in a bust-up between Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe (over fireworks) that saw Crüe drummer Tommy Lee punching McGhee backstage suggests that the Peace Festival didn’t quite achieve its stated aims.
For Gorky Park, the event was something they’d been building towards. The Russian group had flown back from their adopted base in New York, along with the other bands appearing, on a chartered Boeing 757. “Everyone was so excited, so open,” says Gorky Park guitarist Alex Belov, who still sounds enthused by the event almost 30 years on. “It was a great show, a landmark.”
The Moscow Music Peace Festival was Gorky Park’s big bow on rock’s world stage. They had recently become the first Russian band to sign to an American label, the first to be played on MTV, the first to show that life behind the Iron Curtain wasn’t that different from the way it was on the rest of the planet.
They were being swept along by the tides of history. It was the era of perestroika – that shining, optimistic moment when it looked like decades of tension were coming to an end and the East would be welcomed with open arms by the West like a long-lost relative. Gorky Park were more than just a heavy metal band – they were a beacon of hope that burned brightly, if briefly. But, like perestroika, they were ultimately doomed to fail.
“At the Moscow Music Festival, everybody was patting us on the back and saying: ‘You know, the world will be different now – there will be no wars, we’re gonna be all one family,’” says Belov. “Did it come true? No.”
When Gorky Park began in the mid-80s, Russia was part of a bigger superstate, the Soviet Union. Life there was pragmatic rather than brutal. Alex Belov grew up with his family in a cramped apartment – one room, six people – in central Moscow. “Then we moved to the suburbs, to a bigger flat,” he says. “This had three rooms.”
Belov had classical music drilled into him early. He began playing violin when he was seven years old, and attended music school for seven years. But Western rock’n’roll was tugging at his sleeve. Kids born in the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s could only hear The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple via fifth- or sixth-generation cassettes copied from people who had gone abroad and brought back records. “They had all kinds of noise on them, but we still loved them,” says Belov.
Belov formed his first band at the age of
14 with a couple of friends. They mimicked Western bands: Zeppelin, Purple, Queen and others. His first proper band was Moskva, which also included future Gorky Park singer Nikolai Noskov. According to the guitarist, their sole album, UFO, “sold over ten million copies” when it was released in the early 80s. He says he received 90 roubles (a few months’ rent) in return.
A home-grown rock band like Moskva were too much for the Soviet authorities. The Deputy Minister Of Culture for the ruling Communist Party attended a gig in Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea, where the crowd began jumping on the seats and chanting the band’s name. The apparatchik was unimpressed.
“The next day, he went back to Moscow and we got forbidden from playing,” says Belov. “I had to play illegal nightclubs with my friends. That lasted almost three years.”
Two things happened at roughly the same time that proved to be Belov’s salvation. The first was the onset of a pair of groundbreaking new policies instigated by incoming Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev: perestroika (‘restructuring’) and glasnost (‘openness’). These reforms were the biggest things to shake up Russia in 70 years, slowly lifting the iron hand of the Communist Party.
The other life-changing event for Belov was meeting Stas Namin. An iconic figure in Russian music, Namin was the USSR’s own John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Malcolm McLaren rolled into one. He had been playing in rock bands since the mid60s, frequently falling foul of the authorities for his troubles. As recently as 1985, the Stas Namin Band had been punished for playing a festival without the Ministry Of Culture’s permission.
Perestroika allowed Namin to breathe easier, and in 1986 he set up the Stas Namin Centre (SNC) in Moscow’s Gorky Park area. The SNC was a mix of artistic community, production company, radio station and musical hothouse. It was there that Gorky Park the band came together.
Talking to Classic Rock, Namin takes much of the credit for assembling Gorky Park. He says the idea came to him in 1986, when Yoko Ono gave him a copy of the novel Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith. Cruz Smith was also the author of a book called Gorky Park, and it was this title that struck him as the ideal name for a Soviet band playing Western-style music – the perfect export for the dawning of this new era.
“But I had no idea of the style of music they would play,” says Namin. “In December 1986, on an invitation from Peter Gabriel, we went to Japan. There was a huge festival at a stadium in Tokyo. Among the performers was Little Steven. When I felt the hard-rock drive of his performance, I knew the export band had to play hard rock. There were many varieties, but the one that was most popular was the so-called glam rock.”
Gorky Park’s line-up included the guitarist and drummer from another band Namin had assembled, The Flowers, plus bassist Sasha
Minkov. They were joined by Belov and his former bandmate in Moskva, singer Nikolai Noskov.
“Gorky Park was my brainchild,” says Namin. “I spent most of my time and energy on its promotion because I had a global career in mind for them. It was my idea for them to perform in America. I thought there was no unbridgeable gap between us.”
Perestroika had opened up Russia to the rest of the world – and vice versa. In grand capitalist style, the movers and shakers of the Western music industry had turned their gimlet eyes eastwards, wondering if there were roubles in them there hills.
One of these people was Dennis Berardi, head of US guitar company Kramer, who, at Stas Namin’s behest, offered to co-manage Gorky Park. Berardi was exactly the kind of person Gorky Park needed in their corner. He passed their tape on to one of his connections, Bon Jovi manager Doc McGhee, who in turn handed it to his star clients, Jon Bon
“There Were people Who Would have made really big money, and because
of ThaT, The band spliT up.”
alex belov
Jovi and Richie Sambora. “They said it sounded hot, really up to date,” says Belov.
alex Belov remembers setting foot in America for the first time in the summer of 1988. It was, he says, even weirder than the movies. “New York was a different world, like being on the moon. Back in Russia we couldn’t even dream, and all of a sudden we were in the United States, partying with Bon Jovi.”
The patronage of the world’s biggest hard-rock band didn’t hurt. When Gorky Park returned to the US in 1989, it was to record their self-titled debut album for Bon Jovi’s label, Mercury Records. Slippery When Wet producer Bruce Fairbairn worked on half the tracks, while Jon and Richie even wrote a song for their new Russian friends, the glasnost anthem Peace In Our Time.
Bon Jovi weren’t the band’s only champions in the US. Belov had met Frank Zappa via Stas Namin when Zappa visited Russia in the late 80s. Because Belov spoke English, he was assigned as Zappa’s driver. Zappa returned the favour by appointing himself Gorky Park’s unofficial mentor for the next few years.
“They were making their name for themselves over there, and they were one of the things that were brought to his attention,” says Frank’s son Dweezil Zappa. “I think it was a combination of musical and cultural things that drew him toward them. What was unusual at the time was this fusing of Western rock’n’roll with Russian cultural influences, from classical music to folk. They had a different kind of a sound because of their background. It wasn’t like they were trying to be a Russian Bon Jovi – they had their own thing, with an American production edge.”
Frank Zappa passed on nuggets of wisdom he’d learned from 25 years in the music industry: what to do, what not to do, when to talk, when to shut up. He invited the band to his house in
Los Angeles. “Every time he did a new recording, he would invite us to his house,” says Belov. “We were at his place a hundred times.”
By the time their debut album was released in 1989, Gorky Park had already become the first Russian band to be played on MTV. The video for their debut single, Bang, ladelled on the Soviet kitsch: Belov and his bandmates high-stepping like Russian army sergeants in front of the Kremlin, while hammer and sickle and stars’n’stripes flags flapped in unison behind them.
The album itself was a mixture of Western ambition and Russian intent, a Red Square military parade soundtracked by Def Leppard. Gorky Park weren’t forging a new sound – songs such as Hit Me With The News and Sometimes At Night could have been written by any mid- to late-80s American hard-rock band, with all the clichés that entails – but the mere appearance of a band from behind the former Iron Curtain on Headbangers Ball was a victory in itself. Suddenly the Cold War seemed like a distant memory.
Gorky Park initially expected to stay in the US for a couple of months to promote their debut album. They didn’t go back to Russia for five years. “We started touring and we couldn’t stop,” Belov says with a laugh.
During that time they released a second album, 1992’s Moscow Calling, which refined and modernised the sound of their debut. By that time, things had changed within the band. They had acrimoniously parted company with both
Stas Namin and original singer Nikolai Noskov. Bassist Alexander ‘Big Sasha’ Minkov stepped up to replace the latter. “The record company told us it would be a good idea to get an American singer, but we decided not to,” says Belov.
Whether or not an American singer would have made any difference is open to debate.
Three years is a long time in rock’n’roll, and the world had moved on. To those Western rock fans who did remember them, Gorky Park were a novelty act – the guys with the funny-shaped guitars and commie flags.
It was typical Russian stubbornness that kept Gorky Park going. The same characteristic also came in useful when their management company collapsed. “They took money from an investor, over a million bucks, but they didn’t spend any of it on the band,” says Belov. “Their company collapsed and they filed for bankruptcy, so we had to sort all that stuff out.”
Lawyers told Belov that the investors had ties to the Mafia. “We came across the Russian Mafia back home at points,” he says. “They’d sometimes ask us to play parties. They were just normal, acted normal, although we knew it was heavy stuff.”
When Gorky Park did return to Russia, in 1994, they barely recognised it. The old Soviet Union had been dismantled, but the golden glow of optimism that had hung in the air when they left back in 1989 had faded to a muted grey.
Coming home did have its up-sides. They were greeted like heroes returning from a long war. On a 20-date tour, they played giant hockey arenas from the Ukraine to the far-flung reaches of Siberia, even if the plummeting rouble meant they earned next to nothing for them.
In Russia they also found a new business partner, who helped the band buy a studio in Glendale, California. There they recorded two more albums, 1996’s prog-tinged Stare and 1998’s keyboard-heavy Protivofazza. Both albums included several songs written by Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider of the band Eleven, while jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth guested on Stare.
The band’s fleeting success in the US might have been a distant memory, but their fame in Russia was still huge. That brought its own problems. In 1999, bassist Minkov left the band to pursue a solo career. Soon, only Belov was left of the band’s original line-up.
“You could say it was down to temptation,” says Belov, who finally called time on the band in 2001. “There were people who would have made really big money, and because of that the band split up. Bands who are way more famous than us split up.”
Minkov subsequently reinvented himself as a Russian-language MOR crooner. Belov has continued to carry the Gorky Park flag. He still plays the band’s songs live during his own shows, and also at those of his wife, the singer Olga Kormukhina. “One of the most famous female rock singers in Russia,” he says proudly.
Gorky Park have reunited for sporadic one-off shows during the past 20 years, most notably during the closing ceremony of the 2016 Winter Olympics in Sochi. There have been other Russian bands since, but none have come close to Gorky Park’s international success, as fleeting as it was.
“I think we put Russian rock music on the map,” says Belov. “We wanted to bring at least a small part of Russia to rock music.”
Belov is aware that Russia is a major presence on the world stage once more. The country hosts the football World Cup this month, although that is overshadowed by escalating tensions between East and West, a hardliner in the Kremlin, and poison attacks on Russian dissidents in British cities. Today, Gorky Park’s hands-across-acrossthe-ocean message seems as out of step as their old balalaika guitars.
“Everything that happens in the world is all based on money,” Belov says. “Politics isn’t based on ideology, it’s based on money. The biggest money made is made by war – arms and everything.”
For once, he sounds sad. “Perestroika didn’t stand a chance. Peace didn’t stand a chance.”
“back in russia We couldn’T even dream,
and all of a sudden We Were in The uniTed sTaTes, parTying WiTh bon Jovi.”
alex belov