Coming Soon: How Rock Rolled Up the Iron Curtain

****UPDATE: Link to trailer has been fixed.

Most (good) history books correctly portray the collapse of communism as due to the efforts of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. But there were other subversive elements at work, not the least of which was rock and roll, which bled through the Iron Curtain at an unstoppable level. In Seven Events that Made America America, I examined rock’s part in not only providing a source of hope and optimism for those youth locked under communism’s grip, but also how it became a subversive force within the East Bloc. Through interviews with American rock and rollers of the “Golden Era” (1965-1990), I found an awareness on the part of the musicians of the oppressive nature of communism.

England’s Savoy Brown and me (in the “Jaws” t-shirt)

After I had sent the book off, Marc Leif, a documentary director and superb editor, and I got together to discuss a documentary film based on the rock chapter. As a professor, I’d never raised any money in my life, but now I had to raise a considerable sum to make a movie about rock and roll! We began filming in January 2010, with one of our first interviews being Leslie Mandoki, a Hungarian student leader who crawled through a sewer to escape communism. “We ALL wanted to be Americans!” he insisted. (Mandoki has become quite successful, not only in mainstream European rock, but as the music director for Audi and Volkswagen). As he thrived in the West, Mandoki soon traveled in circles with some well known people, including Bill Clinton and Mikhael Gorbachev, and was surprised to hear Gorby tell him that “we couldn’t keep out rock and roll.”

Soon, Marc and I found our interviewees were divided up mostly into rockers and “witnesses”–those who had lived under communism. We found people who had bartered with rock albums, a Romanian collector who knew the street value of almost any LP, and a Ukranian woman whose life was changed toward Christianity by the rock opera “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” (“They banned Bibles and closed churches, but they let in rock and roll,” she told us.) We found a German women who had traded a Spooky Tooth LP for electronic equipment–almost a week’s wages. But we also interviewed Joseph Morris, who was legal counsel for the Voice of America, and who recalled that while some argued that no rock should be sent over the airwaves because it was “degenerate” music, others insisted that while it was bad, rock was effective as a subversive tool. Morris and others challenged these views, successfully, noting that in fact rock was the essence of freedom–it epitomized freedom. Marc and I had already noted that rock, arguably the greatest music medium in the world in the 20th century, essentially appeared and thrived without a dime of government support!

But behind the Iron Curtain, it was a much different story: the communists first tried to co-opt the rockers. Moscow literally created a “Ministry of Rock.” (Cue Jack Black). As a young musician, one could get food vouchers and rental assistance if you played what “The Man” wanted. In other countries, bands were tolerated, but occasionally their concerts shut down. Usually, groups had to submit their lyrics to censors before performances (then changed them as soon as they got on stage to subtle anti-communist barbs). The East Germans never did get the inherent criticism or irony in the name of a band called “SS-20.” No matter what they did, the Soviets couldn’t stop rock. When Billy Joel became the first American rock and roll artist to play Moscow, the guards were armed with tranquilizer darts in case a riot started!

Most of our interview footage is complete, including a terrific interview with “Mother’s Finest,” a black funk-rock band out of Atlanta who played in East Berlin two weeks before the Wall came down. On one of their last entries into the East zone, a German officer came aboard their bus and demanded papers. He took Glenn Murdock, the band’s singer, to the back of the bus, then, carefully . . . extracted a Mother’s Finest album from his coat for Glenn to autograph.

Perhaps a fitting monument to rock’s place in the defeat of communism should be a statue of an electric guitar!

Rockin’ the Wall will be out in August and the website/trailer can be seen here.