Berkeley rocker Carlin a hot item in icy Russia
Alex Carlin arrives in Warsaw on Friday, Dec. 20, for a onenight stand. The next night he is playing Moscow, with no sleep in between. Then he’s on a trek for four days by train into a Siberian winter in Russia. Deep Russia.
“Your eyeballs freeze when you go outside,” says the 62yearold Berkeley rocker, “and your internal organs tell you that you shouldn’t be there.”
But Carlin goes there because any place that was part of the Soviet Union is where he has found an audience that appreciates a skinny Boomer in a singlet belting out American hard rock classics. In return, he writes and performs sitespecific songs his fans can relate to, like “Hangover From Hell” and “I’m Not an Alcoholic,” delivered in alternating English and Russian.
For seven years, Carlin has toured the frozen tundra, and when the ice thaws he works the summer motorcycle festivals.
The stops on his Russian tours are too far apart for driving, so he opts for the train. The rides between gigs average three days, which holds his number of annual dates down to about 100 shows in a yearround circuit that runs from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, crossing 11 time zones.
“I’m not saying it is any big deal,” he says. “James Brown was doing 300 nights a year.” But it is also true that the hardestworking man in show business never played Krasnoyarsk or Vladisvostok in February, when it is minus 30 degrees.
“It’s the wild, wild East,” he says. “There is no such thing as bar hours. It’s completely a 24hour society, and I’m a night person.”
The son of stage actor and director Joy Carlin, he grew up in the Berkeley hills and got a degree in Russian literature from UC Berkeley. Not everyone can find a use for that diploma, but Carlin did. After graduating in 1985, he went to the Soviet Union as a street performer “when I still had all that grammar in my head,” he says.
Carlin always had bands to anchor him in Berkeley, having been a founder of the power pop band the Rubinoos and a member of the psychedelic garage band Psycotic Pineapple. He still plays solo shows or with Psycotic Pineapple when he visits his mother for the holidays in the Berkeley hills, but he is gone before Christmas, booked for private parties in Moscow through New Year’s.
“He really likes the people in Russia, and they really like him,”
Hardworking musician hits bars amid the frozen tundra during dead of winter — even Siberia