Perm Continued, July 1st, 2011

Hard to talk about Perm. Such a strange mixture of the derelict and the sublime, beautiful northern light and old crumbling buildings, soviet era and ornate old pre-soviet wooden Russian houses with no right angles left, and hideous chrome and glass contemporary monsters. People everywhere walking and drinking, but no one seems to smile. The driving here is Asian, everyone passes in the middle of the two-lane road and cars play a constant game of chicken. They drive as if there is only one rule: to get there as fast as possible.

Downtown Perm

Mosque in perm

Never in my life have I seen so much drinking. Tonight we went for a walk in the crystalline 10:00 summer sun. Everywhere there men, women, teenagers, adults walking with beer, massive bottles clutched in the hands, women on seven inch heels and mini skirts teetering and clutching bottles, it's one huge party everywhere you look, but all the promenades end down along the river like a flowing current, men without shirts and woman in clothing that would make most prostitutes look modest, and small children.

Drinking

Rachelle, Michael, Bill and I walked down to the river No one paid us much mind, the drinking is very earnest, no one smiles, this is something I can't quite understand about Russia, everyone has a stern if neutral expression, even in the most intense celebration they all look so serious, or rather there is no expression at all, perhaps this a result of a totalitarian past...  It is so hard to say why.

Rachelle watching the go-go dancers... the fellow to the right didn't seem to notice them

in fact no one was watching them at all except some children...See Rachelle's photo below.

Photo by Rachelle Garniez

We walked down the promenade, everywhere people dancing and bottles spilling on the ground... We stopped to look at some go-go dancers and then continued walking past two woman with horses and clusters of drinkers, suddenly without warning the horses at full gallop were on us, with Bill between them, they passed at full gallop on either side of him, one horse knocking one shoulder then the one hit the other shoulder so that he spun around...in shock bill lurched back and just then ten feet away someone set off a huge display of fireworks directly overhead, the sound was deafening, shrieks and explosions, debris falling everywhere, none of this seemed in any way extraordinary to the people around us who continued drinking. We then realized we were walking on a short straight horse race path that paralleled the walk way and we had to scramble away as the horse riders rushed back toward us again...

Shortly after this we came upon a small girl with a miniature pony and with a balloon tide to it. I stopped to talk with her, she spoke no English, through gesture and inference we found out that she was thirteen and that she was selling rides to children on her pony. She solemnly gave me the balloon and we fished around to find something to give her in return finally coming up with an American quarter.

Girl with very small pony.

Again I was struck by a seriousness of affect and that combined with her in-between age gave a very strange impression of a tiny adult.  The pony was also truly miniature, it's hooves no bigger then a dog's paw and it was perfectly cared for and seemed quit relaxed. It and had none of the nasty character that I had always heard Shetland ponies had, but it too seemed very somber... We walked on and on past hundreds of clusters of drinkers and revelers it felt a bit like a Breughel painting with men fishing and people playing guitars and the rich midsummer northern light...

July 2nd 2011 Perm

KAMWA FESTIVAL
   Perm, Russia

View from Perm Kamwa festival stage

Artists tents

The stage is on the side of a hill in a beautiful valley surrounded by lakes and hills, so picturesque it was a bit hard to believe, like something from a hobbit movie, there were remarkable wooden houses and churches made of logs with onion steeples with wood shingles like fish scales, everything was very well maintained. The festival was about 40 kilometers from Perm

The bus taking us from Perm was bringing all the bands at once to the show. Many of the musicians came late or disappeared back into the building while we all sat waiting on the bus, which had no air-conditioning whatsoever and was sitting in the direct sun...by the time we arrived at the festival we had been fried to a crisp and there was not too much time before we had to get on stage. 

As we set up on stage they announced us before I was able to tune my guitar or fully set up the instruments, but we launched into the set, there were about 3000-4000 or so people on the audience, many in bathing suits and various states of undress... As far as I could see in contrast to the city of Perm the event itself was alcohol free. For me it was a hard show...all the setup for sound check the day before seemed to be for nothing and I couldn't hear myself, I could'nt get the soundman didn't seem to grasp the situation. In the end, I did the whole show without really being able to hear myself. It is like walking up hill with rocks on one's back. Sometimes when the sound on stage is so bad, it is hard to feel much but anxiety, especially because I knew the sound in the audience was very clear and I had so much trouble gauging my intonation, at these times one plays as much from memory as anything. At the very end Sasha asked me impromptu to play a solo harmonica piece for the crowd, which I did.  

 After the show we spent the evening with the other musicians. Among them an old friend, Nina Nastasia, as well as new people that I had only just heard about over the years. At festivals meeting the other musicians is a gift. I am always astounded by how many people we all know in common and the vast community of people that musicians live in.

Our dear friend Volodya Oboronko

I also met the young poet Vera Polozkova who was co-MC of the event with Sasha. In Russia poets can still be somewhat like rock stars and often appear at big events as celebrities, Vera told me that she often recites for large groups of up to 3000 people.

The evening culminated with a party at the New Museum of Modern Art, which was in a magnificent old building down by the river that had once been the train station. I was surprised and happy to see an exhibit of work by a good friend the Russian artist Alexander Malemid, I also met the owner of the museum Marat Guelman.

Guelman is a powerful person in the Russian art world, a roly-poly man with a beatific smile, and spots that appear to be a record of many meals covering the shirt on his ample belly. He was half shaven and had very crooked designer glasses. There is something charismatic about him, Guelman displays a profound confidence of purpose.

Guelman had decided that Russia for too long had an art world that existed only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and with messianic fervor has set out to make Perm the new and greatest center for art in Russia. This would be a little like deciding that one would make Des Moines the center for art and culture for all of the U.S. and Guelman is a controversial figure, and as he said, he is not always "appreciated" by the inhabitants of Perm.  Guelman lives in Moscow half the time and very much considers what he is doing as enlightening the aesthetic heathens of the Russian hinterlands.

 We all stayed up till very late in the morning and essentially had no sleep that night... The band left around 10:00 a.m for the plane back to Moscow and then caught another to New York. Between the two flights and the lay over, it was 17 hours to get back to New York City. We arrived without the luggage, which somehow missed the connection from Perm.

Please do not bring these items on the plane, bug repellent and hand grenades...

I crashed and slept ten hours straight...relieved to be back in NYC. The luggage came then next day and we leave again in three more days for another tour!

 

 

 

June 30th, 2011 perm.

Arrival in Perm.

Our hotel in perm is a strange Russian 1970's time warp complete with a swingers disco, a bowling alley and photos of "Eminent Guests" in the hallways, with stylish lapels, and flayed and poofed hair.  Dinner started with one of the ubiquitous Russian salads of indeterminate soggy contents. No one could tell if it was salmon or chicken. After the salad we were served a piece of what I call UFA: unidentified fried animal, with fried cheese on top, fried potatoes, and three rolls.  Asking for butter seemed to cause a great deal of anxiety from the servers and a committee of three finally appeared and I was told that if I wanted butter for the rolls I would have to pay extra as it only came with breakfast.

On the first day in the hotel everyone checked into rooms, only to find that by mid-day they were removing all the locks to change them from keyed doors to card doors. This process involved much banging, drilling, and about forty doors open with no security. Trying to explain why this was not a good thing for the occupants seem to baffle and annoy the hotel employees.

This time of year the sun stays up till 12:30, then falls below the horizon, rising again about 2:30. The light in Perm was clear and astonishingly bright.

Directly opposite the hotel is a small zoo. Around 11:00 I walked in. Two guards were standing playing an odd sort of backgammon with plastic coke bottle caps, they spoke no English but waved me in after cautioning me in pantomime to not stick my fingers in the cages...

All zoos seem sad, but there is nothing as sad as a small semi-derelict provincial zoo, any pretense of preservation or science is gone, the zoo consisted of poorly made wood and metal cages with dirty concrete floors and occasional half hearted attempts at mimicking nature by wiring sticks or trees to the ceilings. Broken toys were scattered about in some of the cages: a tip of the hat to the intelligence of the otters of the wolves, these broken green or blue plastic Chinese toys were chewed into bits or pockmarked with teeth holes.  

The animals appeared like flashes of luminous essence in this drab and terrifying place, it was soul piercing to lock eyes with the snow leopard pacing back and forth in a ten by twelve cage, all the grace and beauty that exists in the universe infused into it's being contrasting with the idiocy and cluelessness of the concrete and metal enclosure. If there ever was an example of man's profound lack of divine perception this is it...the big cats stared out at me as I passed: all twitching awareness.  The zoo had hyrax and jaguars and lions and a tiger, the guano filled birdcages had all sorts of fowl mixed together, owls and pheasants and parrots and chickens.

Numerous signs and depictions of bleeding fingers warned visitors that the mistake of poking through the mesh could ensure the wrath of the inhabitants...there were extensive graphic images: don't harass the bears with your dog, or poke the rabbits with a stick.

I walked about the vacant zoo in the late northern evening light, the sun skimming the horizon, listening to the wheezing sound of the jaguar as it paced and the moan of the lion. In one corner there was a large eagle huddled by the front of his cage sticking his head out and makes a pleading sound over and over again with a gaping beak. There were agitated wolves and morose weasels, skittering dwarf mongoose and a few fruit bats and a group of coati mundi.  

To my surprise also two large polar bears, one asleep with his paws around an old bald tire, the other shuffled forward ten feet, then walked backward, like a movie running in reverse as if to erase his steps, then forward again... the whole ritual over and over...A strange and disturbingly unnatural movement, moving forward and back again as if in a trance... Polar bears, tigers, most large predators walk thousands of miles, covering distances, always on the move for prey, in these concrete enclosures they simply go insane. The constant pacing and circular motions a shattered memory of the instinct to move, I watched each animal and saw that each one was broken.

I left the zoo and walked towards the river. The sky was filled with thousands of swallows...in the distance they appeared like a swarm of insects. Beside the zoo were huge dilapidated government buildings, a church and a square, all in various states of disrepair.  

From here was a view of the river far below and far away the highway moved across on a huge bridge stretching to the other side... With the sun setting it was a vast and beautiful view, and brought to mind places I had seen when I was hitchhiking through Montana as a teenager. I was struck how similar and melancholy the largnessof space and the isolated provincial aspect that this place had in common with the American West...  

Above the river was a series of verandas and paths full of teenagers drinking, smoking, groping, kissing, cars and groups of girls, a tent with disco lights and a DJ. Below on the water several cruise boats went up and down the river, in the distance I could make out on the decks groups of dancing figures in the flicking light of the disco balls.  

I walked up through the woods along the river. Below a train sped by and teenagers came and went through the woods disappearing into various abandoned buildings that sat at the edge of the trees below the zoo... At the end of the road there were new buildings, covered in the chrome, glass and granite that seems to be the required construction of modern Russian wealth, turning back around the edge of the zoo I passed a men's club next to a hotel called the "Hotel California" and a beautiful old 19th century wooden house joined to the neon lit strippers club...eventually I made my way back to the hotel.

The windows on the third floor face the zoo, and the sound of the teenagers circling in cars around the city mix with the moans of the lions. Outside the window the sickly yellow street lights glow in front of the steeple of the church, which was lit above by the gradually returning sunlight gently spreading over the zoo.  

 

 

Photos from Kiev, inside the hotel, down by the river, photo of the band Yat Kha...

Kraina Mriy Festival in Kiev... June 26, 2011 Kiev, Ukraine

We arrived at the festival in Kiev this morning after getting up at 3:30 and taking the two flights from Kazan...it was sort of a ukrainian patriotic festival on a beautiful hill top above the town, there were hippies and people doing martial arts and archery and Hare Krishnas and food stalls, and strange pre-Christian effigies. Unfortunately it was also pouring rain and the stage had an half inch of water on it... No one seemed to speak English and the stage manager looked about 24. Any attempt to convey that water and electricity don't mix was met with blank stares and a shrug. Frustrated, we decided to not do a sound check but a line check later before the show if the weather cleared enough to play. We left for the hotel which turned out to be almost a museum of an old soviet hotel...Huge, dingy but fascinating and beautiful in it's own way..with halls full of photos of employees and odd shaped doorways, layers of smells and giant steep steps in the building that you have to drag your luggage up like the stairway in a Mayan temple. Communist architecture seems to often disregard ergo-dynamic function completely. The hotel had a fantastic Ukrainian food in the restaurant on the tenth floor with great salads and dumplings, even though the service was soviet style, that is: there was none...The process took hours to get the food, which didn't always arrive at all. On the 11th floor was "Heaven on Eleven" a gentleman's "entertainment" club with strippers, an odd contrast to the solemnity of the rest of the building. I had a nice walk in the rain by the river and admired the unbelievable dowdy soviet buildings. They had a sad homely charm with laundry hanging from the windows. We arrived at the festival and the stage was still flooded and the sound crew seemed bit lost, but the audience standing in the rain was amazing, roaring with delight and energy and full of excitement. Due to the difficulty of getting the linecheck together, we had a reduced set time from an hour too a bit over 30 minutes, but the adversity of a situation like that always makes me want to do my best, and the audience and the band were so excited, we had a great show with the audience screaming clapping and jumping up and down and as special treat Albert Kuvesin from the tuvan band Yat kha came up and sat in with Joe on his solo on the song "Everybody Loves You" his Tuvan sub-sonic karrgara sounded incredible with the tuba, and the show was a thrill, the rain was still strong but the audience stayed in there, we left the stage with soaked shoes and a smile. It was a very memorable and special show, but now back at the hotel at 11:30 I am drying my clothes and equipment and my soaking shoes and preparing to leave at 4:30 tomorrow morning to playing on national tv in moscow, sadly both Reut Regev or trombonist and Steve Elson our Sax player had to leave, Steve for California and Reut for her own tour in Europe and so we will continue our tour with a much reduced horn section. From the menu at the hotel restaurant: "Potatoes prepared on your desire" " Potato baked in its own grasses" "Ice-cream in your desire"

(note, this blog and the pictures are being done with an I-phone on the run, please excuse typos). We left for the festival at 11:30 am even though we were playing at 3:00 because president Medvev was coming to the show and our tour manager thought that security would be tight and this would create delays. However, I was astonished at the apparent lack of coherent security, even though there were police, military, and strange scary men in black everywhere, there seemed to be some general confusion and lack of structure to the situation and we were waved through to the back stage with very little if any real examination. This surprised me as there has been a fair amount of terrorism in Russia. There was a bombing last year in the airport in Moscow and a number of years back at the WINGS concert, a huge festival in the center of Moscow (we played there a year or two later) a Chechen sucicide bomber blew herself up in the crowd. The airports here in Kazan and moscow have been the only place in all my years of touring where I haven't had my harmonica case searched. (scary to think this country has so many atomic bombs!) Anyway, at the festival there seemed to be a lot of random people walking about back stage and the security in the green rooms (greenroom is what the artists dressing rooms are called) was almost not existent, with flimsy non-locking doors. There was a constant flow of people everywhere. The performance area was actually two huge cavernous stages set together like Siamese twins, this way one band could set up while another was playing and start the second the other band stopped, creating a continuous stream of music from morning to evening. The entire structure of the stage itself was huge, with a warren of greenrooms behind and a cafeteria and many monitors to watch the performers, who were being filmed by multiple cameras some on swooping cranes... Bands were constantly playing and to add to the complexity (and confusion) of the situation, some bands played for ten minutes, some five, some fifteen or twenty, some forty minutes with the best known bands performing for a full hour. The sound was constant and brutally intense, and weirdly louder and more distorted back stage then on stage or out front. About half the bands were Russian and fairly unknown to me, some of the other bands included: Gogol Bordello, Amadou and Miriam Yat Kha, PIL, De Temps Antan, Oquestrada, and other groups from the various republics of Russia. John Fogerty was the final headlining band to go on at ten. In the middle of Gogal bordello's set president Medevev appeared and came on stage and gave a brief speech and then went into the audience to observe. Various musicians and people chosen for the photo-ops were brought to this place and there was a lot of glad handing. Gangbe all got to meet him, and were thrilled, but I was back stage in the green room preparing to do my solo harmonica piece, (something that never came to pass as PIL went over about 30 minutes and my solo spot got cut at the last moment). Or set with Gangbe went very well, though, the band playing before us on the other stage was so loud that my teeth were rattling and they were using a wireless system that conflicted with miy amp mic so that my amplifier wouldn't work, and was cutting in and out. We were about to go on in front of thousands, my amp was malfunctioning and we were 18 musicians about to play (41 separate mic inputs!) and I was without a functioning amp! I was in the boiling sun behind a huge screen and the noise from the other band so loud you could not make out a melody or instrument besides drums and bass... Still, in the very last moment I got the amp to work and when screen between us and the audience went up, all went well... The evening ended with About forty of the musicians on stage playing "I get by with a little help from my friends" by the Beatles. This was a pretty strange and surreal situation complete with singing children, the mayor of Kazan, someone holding up a small globe, dueling solos including tuvan throat singing, kuray flute from bashkortostan, sax, harmonica, trumpet, and a troop of fino-ungaric singers from mordovia, then as we sang the last notes there was a huge display of fireworks that lit up the sky...as an artistic statement subtle it was not, but it was also refreshing in it's sincere and somewhat goofy intentions...We headed back to the hotel around 1:00 where I tried to catch a few hours sleep before leaving for Kiev at 3:30 that same morning... After packing and taking a shower I however found I couldn't sleep and now at 2:55 I am writing this blog! Tomorrow we fly from Here to Moscow then to Kiev , play at another festival and then fly out to Moscow again around three in the morning to perform on a national TV show in Moscow. Phew!

Photo by Rachelle Garniez of sculpture

photo of Gangbe and Hazmat MODINE by Uli Balss

Today we had a long sound check with Gangbe, a press conference with the mayor of Kazan and a short performance with Gangbe in a square in downtown Kazan, another sound check with Andre Makarevich who is said to be "The Bob Dylan" of Russia and then a rehearsal for a group song with about 50 musicians for end of the evening tomorrow...

At the press conference there were numerous questions asked about the cost of the concert (2 plus million) and where the money was coming from, and if the concert was being changed because president Medvedev was attending. John Linden (Johnny rotten) asked the mayor of Kazan to fix the leak in the vent above the table we were seated at, (which was dripping) and after he insulted the journalists saying that they didnt smile, one of the journalists asked that if he could sing for Johnny would he would give him one of his ear rings? He said yes, the journalist sang, and promptly received an earring from john's right ear. In the process of the interviews I also managed to spilled water on Linden who turned and accused me of being and evil American.

One of the journalists asked
me if playing for 250,000 Russians who may not know my band made me nervous? I Had to admit that that I hadn't thought about it that way and was now sorry that I had. Tomorrow security should be intense with the President coming and promoter Sasha Cheparukhin has asked me to play a solo harmonica piece before the presidents speech. (!)

We leave the hotel at 12:30, perform around three, later sitting in with Makarevich and I do my solo piece around seven, then play again with everyone in the festival on the last song, we should be out of there by 12:00 or so, afterwords a dinner for all the artists and then we catch a flight at 3:00 am to Moscow, catch another flight to Kiev, play that night in kieve and fly out again on a 6:00 am flight back to Moscow in order to play on a national TV program. Phew!

I have started this blog for the PRI/BBC program The World.

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Life of a touring band: We are off to meet Gangbe brass band from Benin and play a collaborative set at the "creation of peace" festival in Kazan the capital of Tatarstan. We play for 30 minutes, there will be 10 of us in Hazmat Modine and eight of Gangbe. 18 musicians for thirty minutes...! Most bands get even less time to play at this festival, some only ten
minutes! So far it has been two hours on the Tarmac waiting, then we will have a nine hour flight, with a four hour change over in Moscow, then another hour and a half flight to Kazan...where we will meet up with Gangbe and two of our other hazmaticians, one coming from LA the other from Italy.

June 24th, 2011

Yesterday we arrived after almost sixteen hours of travel..mainly on Aeroflot.

One of the great things about playing festivals is that most of the musicians stay at the same hotel, it's like a reunion, you see old friends from around the world and meet musicians that you have always wanted to meet, everyone is excited and in various stages of jet-lag having flown in from all over. Last night the band went out for a traditional Russian/ Tatar meal, amazing dumplings and thick wild mushroom soup.

This morning we go for a sound check with Gangbe, their sousaphone player is missing half his sousaphone so we are scrambling to find a replacement!

Kazan is fascinating, old wooden houses and soviet era buildings mixed together, dusty and muddy and beautiful. A real mix of architectural languages, with the obligatory soviet sculptures of important mustached men in every square, people seem relaxed and the hospitality has been amazing...

Test of things in Life