(All photos courtesy of Susan R. Weinstein)
“Did you bring the things I requested?” Kenny had already been in Moscow for two weeks for pre-production, and it was obviously starting to get to him. His long hair was messy, his beard scruffy and he looked exhausted sitting behind the battered metal desk.
“Yup” I said, pulling a bag from my suitcase. I handed Kenny a carton of Marlboros plus five New York Times from the prior week.
“Yes!” Kenny said, “Civilization. You guys are the best! I’m dying to see how many games out the Dodgers are.” We suddenly realized for the next eleven days we’d have no news from outside. It was a weird feeling.
“You know you smuggled contraband in here.” Kenny said. “No outside newspapers are allowed.” He laughed at our horrified faces. “Don’t worry, our translators told us no one would be opening any bags with the show logo stickers. This country does corruption just right, front and center, no questions asked.”
Standing in that production office in the bowels of Lenin Stadium, Sue and I stared at each other with that we’re not in Kansas anymore look.
In August 1989, three months before the Berlin Wall came down, when communism began crumbling and it felt like a turning point for the triumphant spread of true democracy, I spent eleven days in Moscow working on the first heavy metal concert ever performed in what was then still known as the USSR. The headlining bands included Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, The Scorpions, Skid Row, Cinderella and Gorky Park (a Russian band that was hastily pulled together with the help of MTV because the show needed a Russian PR hook.) This was back when MTV owned the music world, when they premiered every music video and MTV News made stars. The concert was called the Moscow Music Peace Festival and was billed as an international benefit event promoting anti-drug and alcohol abuse, a fundraiser for MADF (the Make a Difference Foundation). It’s unclear if any money was ever donated to charity.
Sue Kroll and I worked in a department of Showtime called Showtime Event Television (SET) that produced live pay-per-view events including boxing, wrestling and concerts. Showtime was a sister company to MTV, both owned by Viacom. Our event team was small, six executives and some support staff, and we all wore many hats to get a live event to air. This Moscow show would be the largest scale concert SET ever produced, so MTV sent news crews to Moscow to cover the lead up to the show and these segments, all airing on MTV, ended with the reporter reminding viewers to order the Moscow Music Peace Festival on pay-per-view. Masquerading as news, they were commercials for the show.
SET planned to air a two-hour pay-per-view concert, edited down from a two-day live performance. The plan, sketchy at best, was for Showtime to front the onsite costs while the USSR would reimburse part of the expenses following the event. Russia agreed to pay Showtime in dollars, not rubles (which had a fluctuating value that no one could figure out.) The band manager also sold the international rights, and it became a giant televised event throughout Europe and Asia, while in the United States it was available on pay-per-view TV, with replays on MTV. His plan was genius. Sometimes crime pays.
The idea for the concert came about because of a drug deal gone wrong. The longtime manager of bands such as Kiss, Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe, Doc McGhee, received a sentence of community service instead of jail time for a drug conviction. It’s unclear who came up with the idea of a music festival as community service. McGhee talked the bands into performing.
In the USSR in 1989 when the Cold War was still a thing, the state controlled all media, news, and travel. And there was no internet. Preparations in the months leading up to the show were more stressful than a normal concert because we had little visibility into the people we would have to work with once there or the site where we would be producing and recording the show. A handful of Showtime and MTV executives traveled to Moscow to conduct a site survey a few months prior to the event, but they couldn’t get confirmation of critical technical details at the stadium. They came back with stories about no power or lighting, a main stage with missing floorboards and doors in the stadium locked with sealing wax and string.
The stage was supposed to be a revolving circle divided in half by a wall with one band facing the crowd performing while another got ready behind the wall. With so many bands, each with their own equipment, this would save setup time between performances. The objective was a smooth flow without interruption. Band after band with no break. During the site survey our engineers discovered the motor beneath the stage was old and rotted with rust. The Russians suggested soldiers could manually turn the stage between performances, but finally agreed to get a new motor by August. The Americans were followed everywhere they went by suspicious-looking men.
The faxes (years before laptops or zoom) from the USSR stated all would be ready. Skeptical is an understatement but we still hoped. Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer became our theme during pre-production. The deal was supposedly with the Russian Minister of Peace as there was some notion that hosting an international music festival would lend credibility to their new concepts of perestroika and glasnost.
By the month of the event, tensions were high because Showtime had sunk a ton of money into this music festival without knowing if the confirmations and promises coming over the fax machine could be trusted. No uplink technology or microwave trucks had been visible when our engineers did the sight survey so there was a question if the show could actually be transmitted from the stadium; there was no fiber. The senior executives who had approved this event were dubious, which made everyone nervous.
The week before we flew to Moscow, the Showtime and MTV teams met for some cautionary instructions led by a stern travel expert consultant type who lectured to a multi-page “Do Not” list. We were each given a hard copy and told to study it carefully. There would be “trouble” for many seemingly normal activities: don’t buy anything on the street, you could be arrested for using American dollars, always use rubles, if you used a credit card the exchange rate would be indecipherable so assume you’ll get screwed, don’t go to the home of any Russian citizen, don’t speak to the militia guarding the stadium, don’t take pictures or drink in Red Square, don’t do drugs. This last one cracked us up; seriously, who would sneak drugs into the USSR? (Apparently, some of the performers plus the crew.)
One of MTV’s audio engineers, a guy with a sleeve of tattoos, a long ponytail and a Metallica t-shirt asked what trouble meant. The consultant in her pinstriped pantsuit looked disdainfully down her glasses at him and his tattoos and said that it wasn’t a good idea to get arrested in Russia. She didn’t elaborate. She also attempted to walk us through a Kafkaesque lesson about how the money exchange policy worked. Upon landing at the Moscow airport, we were to tell the exchange official exactly how much American money we had with us, and it was imperative to keep all the exchange receipts. Upon leaving the country an official would check our American dollars, leftover rubles and exchange receipts to make sure we hadn’t spent any American money while there. If the receipts didn’t add up, “trouble” again. The last thing she told us was that if we got sick, we should not go to a Russian hospital or clinic; go only to the American Embassy. “Carry the address of the Embassy 24/7.” We looked at each other, wondering if we were working on a concert or a John le Carre movie. The rules were endless, don’t bring jewelry, bring a lock to secure your bag when not in your room, don’t go to any private clubs, don’t go out alone, don’t, don’t, don’t.
Few had cell phones but anyway, they wouldn’t work there. There was going to be one satellite phone in the production office at Lenin Stadium for business calls only. There would be one fax machine for outside communication. After the intimidating travel expert left, one of the MTV execs who had been to Moscow for a comedy show the prior year instructed us to under report how much American money we had with us; that way we could spend a few dollars, if necessary, without having to account for it. He also told us to bring specific items to “gift” taxi drivers, hotel and venue workers. Crayons and coloring books for their children, ballpoint pens, Marlboro cigarettes, hair mousse, lipstick, eyeliner, chewing gum, jeans, MTV and Yankee t-shirts. The espionage and money scheme jokes flew fast, as you’d expect from a group of young Americans in the media business about to go on an international adventure who had just received strict warnings which seemed designed to curtail the fun.
I flew to Moscow with Sue, my co-worker and good friend. She was the Director of Marketing, and I was the Director of Programming for SET. I had originally worked on the pay-per-view movie network launch for Showtime and negotiated movie deals but now I was negotiating deals for live events including two with the Grateful Dead, site deals with casinos for sporting events and generally overseeing technical operations (which mostly meant hiring consultants to do the technical work while I made sure it got done). Sue and I traveled together all over the U.S. for concerts and boxing matches, but this was our first international work trip
Our flight was filled with people excitedly speaking Russian because prior to that year Russian immigrants in the U.S. had been unable to visit family in the USSR. The woman next to us hadn’t seen her mother in fifteen years.
At the Moscow airport we were ushered one at a time into tiny rooms while Russian soldiers with machine guns stared us down through a glass barrier. They glared, stone-faced and motionless for many minutes while I wondered if they were waiting for me to crack and tearfully admit, “I did it!” I tried smiling but they stared harder and with more focused menace. Finally a door opened and I was waved through. Sue and I participated in the confusing money exchange madness and stuffed indecipherable receipts we’d been handed by more scary looking men in militia uniforms into our backpacks. We moved in a confused mass of people to the main luggage area. It was smoky with a horrific stench.
“Ugh, what is that?” I asked Sue. She was covering her nose with a tissue. We soon realized it was the smell of Russian tobacco that permeated every indoor area throughout Moscow. No wonder we were told to bring cartons of American cigarettes as barter. We got our luggage and moved to the main pickup hall. Our bags were tagged with the colorful concert logo: MMPF (Moscow Music Peace Festival), designed by Peter Max. Since this was the first large-scale heavy metal concert ever in the USSR, and visible throughout the world, the Russian government was determined not to have any problems. They were rolling out the red carpet to prove to the world how much had changed. What this meant for us was that no one checked our bags.
Through the murky air, we finally saw a person dressed in American clothes holding a sign with the show logo, so we followed him through the chaos. There were families lying on the floor or standing in groups smoking and waiting, waiting, waiting for what seemed like forever. This was a preamble to the long lines we’d see everywhere around Moscow, for bread, for cheese, for milk. Sometimes it seemed that Russians just got on a line and stood there in case there was something they might need by the time they got to the front.
We got in a car that looked like it was from 1970. Driving to the stadium from the airport we passed old gray building after old gray building, dilapidated structures, dark with soot, sorely in need of sandblasting, while ancient cars filled the roads. It didn’t seem possible that this was the country I grew up terrified of, the country I hid under my desk from in first grade air raid drills. A superpower? It looked like a third world country. I guessed all their money went into Sputnik, Kalashnikovs and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (which had disintegrated three years prior to our peace concert).
We went directly to the venue, Lenin Stadium. It was impressive. Built for the 1980 Olympics the U.S. boycotted, it seated one hundred thousand people. I was surprised at the military presence. Hundreds of militia with machine guns were everywhere in organized lines. In 1989, no one saw machine guns in the U.S. The militia stared at us, at our jeans, our sneakers, our backpacks, our logoed t-shirts; it was disconcerting at first, but we soon got used to it. The Russians were fascinated by American clothes and merchandise and willing to trade interesting items for them.
Shortly after our meeting with Kenny, the show’s coordinating producer who’d turned us into smugglers, we were introduced to Erik, the translator assigned to our Showtime team. He was eighteen, tall with a head of thick reddish hair and intelligent blue eyes that darted around taking in everything. Erik was the only Russian wearing American jeans. Most Russians wore polyester, odd-fitting trousers or some kind of imitation khaki fabric. Or baggy fake jeans. Cotton was hard to come by in the USSR. Erik was funny, sarcastic, and charming, and asked lots of questions about NYC, MTV, American sports, and TV production. He spoke without a trace of an accent and had an air of disdain about him, which we quickly realized was not for us but for his fellow Russians. I was curious to find out more.
Our hotel was palatial, clearly once fantastic but long neglected and in disrepair, its former grandeur peeking out as if begging us to recognize what it once was. The halls were dark with faded, peeling wallpaper in an old-fashioned fleur-de-lis pattern and wood wainscoting that might not have been polished since the Bolshevik revolution. On each floor opposite the elevator a babushka sat in a chair at a small wooden table. These were the key women. When you left the hotel, she took your room key and when you returned you showed her your hotel ID paper and she gave your key back. Erik told us everyone in Russia had a job and sometimes tasks were conjured up to keep people employed. That made sense to me because this key woman job seemed totally superfluous. The women were all old, gray-haired with lined skin and sad eyes that had seen struggle and disappointment; they spoke no English and grunted at our smiles, ignoring our daily “Spacebo,” when handed our keys. Faded skirts and sweaters, scuffed black shoes, scarves tied kerchief-style under their chins. Trying to maintain an expressionless demeanor, they stared at us in wonder and suspicion, at our loud voices and laughter, how we came and went at all hours of the day and night in our high-topped sneakers which didn’t exist there. I over-smiled because the key woman on my floor looked a lot like my old Russian Grandma Sonia in the years before she died. I started bringing back something from the stadium each evening, a chocolate bar, an orange. After a few days she smiled when she saw me step off the elevator.
The wooden elevators creaked, the carpets were threadbare, brown or burgundy (it was hard to tell) and our rooms were dingy with itchy blankets and worn sheets. The pillow felt like it was stuffed with hay. The ceilings were ten feet high with elaborate molding, but the paint was peeling, and I assumed it was lead paint flaking off. But I had a Juliette balcony so I could let fresh air in while gazing at dingy buildings. Everything stank of that Russian tobacco.
There was a mouth-watering menu posted outside the hotel restaurant but all they had to offer was cheese and bread and some kind of sausage we all worried was horse meat. But the vodka flowed. Some late nights, after we’d worked another long day, we’d gather at the bar and drink, the engineers, the business execs, the PR team, the roadies, the bands. The running joke was that the water was so bad we had to drink vodka.
Three meals a day were eaten in a makeshift cafeteria set up at the stadium. Everyone dined together at long metal tables. There weren’t many accessible restaurants in Moscow. The bands were actually good sports about it, considering the kind of pampering they were generally used to; they stood on the line with their trays, and joked about being back in high school. But the food was delicious, prepared by A-list English caterers and cooked fresh daily: poached salmon, roast chicken, steak fajitas, eggs benedicts and desserts of every kind. When we went to lunch on our first day at the stadium, a guard at the door checked our photo badges, color-coded and laminated, labeling us as “security” or “crew” or “executive” or “talent”. We quickly noticed that none of the Russians had badges allowing them into the cafeteria. Not Erik, not the militia guarding our offices and trucks, not the onsite Russian technical crew or the nurse. The local people on every event I’ve ever worked, the people who guarded us, took care of us, performed critical, if sometimes menial, tasks, also ate with us. Catering was the same for everyone at events. By the second meal we were grumbling about the unfair treatment and a group of us got together and basically stormed the production office demanding that the Russians be let in. We threatened a slowdown. No one believed we’d do that, but our message got through.
It’s hard to describe watching their wonder as young Russian men in full military uniforms walked down that food line. Erik told us most of them had probably never seen a strawberry, ice cream or a fresh salad. We watched them eat grilled fish, roast beef, spaghetti and meatballs and pancakes as if each meal was their last. They didn’t throw out anything, unlike all the spoiled Americans and western Europeans. I watched a uniformed militia guard carefully fold frosted sugar cookies into a napkin and put them in his uniform jacket pocket to take home.
Every day was sunny for the eleven days I was in Moscow. One afternoon Erik looked up, shielding his eyes from the blinding sun and told me they were “seeding” the clouds.
“What?” I had no clue what that meant.
“They fly small planes above the clouds and spray chemicals, so it doesn’t rain.” He looked at me seriously. I didn’t know if he was kidding. “Well,” he said, with that ironic smile of his. “Chernobyl was only three years ago and just 500 miles from here so living in Moscow is like a daily chemical shower.”
I looked up at the blue sky and the wispy puffs of white clouds and didn’t know what to say.
Erik told Sue and me he was recently out of high school but was hoping to get cleared to attend an American University. Georgetown was his dream. I felt sad for him. We asked him why the Russian militia working the event often seemed shocked by us, staring in amazement at so many ordinary things we did. Erik explained they couldn’t believe we’d “led a rebellion,” that we’d threatened to stop working. That was alien to them. He also said they were amazed by how hard we worked. Many of us were on site until one or two am or all night in the frantic lead-up to the live show, which was standard behavior for any live event. He said most Russians didn’t work that hard because everyone made the same salary, and most never got ahead. That was certainly alien to us type-A Americans.
After a few days Erik told us his story. When he was a toddler, his parents moved to Washington DC. They were journalists, sent to the U.S. to write for a Russian publication. Eric grew up there, loving baseball, the Capital Bullets, the Rolling Stones, Happy Days, and McDonalds. When he was twelve, his parents got called back to Moscow, something they had been expecting. Erik was devastated. Despite being fluent in Russian, he was an American preteen in every way. The day he landed in Moscow he couldn’t check NBA scores and nothing entertaining was on television. There weren’t any good snack foods, no Oreos or Cheetos, his parents sent him to wait in lines after school and things didn’t work. While his parents felt sorry for him, they had grown up in Russia, were happy to be back with their families and friends again and told him he’d learn to get used to it. He never did.
On Erik’s first day of school in Moscow some boys in his class couldn’t agree on what game to play at recess. He’d innocently asked, “Why don’t we take a vote?” Everyone stared at him. After that they found him suspect. He still had his Walkman with the same cassettes he’d had when he left D.C. six years earlier, but batteries were hard to find. We searched the production offices to find him cassettes of newer music, much of it banned in the USSR but smuggled in by the production team. We gave him a ton of batteries; his Walkman had been silent for two years. He said he was feeling more positive with the “opening up”. His biggest wish was to get back to America and eventually become a citizen.
Erik pointed out the handful of KGB agents who hovered around the stadium watching us. They seemed to favor the same clothes, white ill-fitting button-down shirts and polyester black pants, close cropped hair and permanent scowls. We noticed they followed us sometimes when we left the stadium to shop at the mall and along Arbott Street where local musicians performed, and artists sold handmade items. Kenny had been right, these KGB types were following us and ignoring us at the same time. This event was to have no negative PR. We felt oddly emboldened, and it got to the point that we’d sometimes stop and wink at the men trailing us, loving how it aggravated them. We made sure not to carry on when Erik was with us because while we felt immune, we were scared for him. Erik cracked up when we shared our stories of bad behavior.
Within a few days, the draconian “Don’t” list became our guideline of what to actually do. We took pictures everywhere, especially in Red Square, used only American money because rubles bought nothing, and thanks to Erik we spent hours talking to the militia. We traded packs of Marlboro cigarettes for taxi rides, Sue and I bought exquisitely painted porcelain eggs on Arbott Street from an artist our age, Luba, who spoke a little English. She told us about her young son.
“I teach him English so one day he may go.”
She lived nearby and asked if we’d like to see her apartment. Hesitant at first, this was a major don’t, we realized she wanted to thank us for buying her eggs plus a watercolor she’d painted of St. Basil’s Cathedral. I rolled it in a rubber band, and had it framed when I got home. We followed her and her friend to Luba’s apartment, which wasn’t much different than our tiny apartments in New York City. They took us to a restaurant and ordered for us, rolling their eyes at the menu. “Only cheese, only bread.” But the bread was delicious, and we laughed and talked about our boyfriends and clothes, the way women who’ve just met do. Luba’s friend said her cousin lived in New York and owned a clothing store in Brooklyn. I wrote down the name of the store but must have spelled it wrong because I couldn’t find it when I got back. They stared at my pen because they didn’t have ball points, so I gave it to Luba. She asked what was written on it and I said, “Showtime, where Sue and I work.” Luba said it must be a very famous and important place if they made fancy pens with the name.
After eating, Luba’s friend had to leave for work but Luba came to our hotel so we could give her makeup and hair product plus t-shirts for her son. She was starstruck upon entering the hotel and told us it was the most beautiful place she had ever been. We felt ashamed of the number of jokes we’d made about how crappy it was. Hesitant as we entered the hotel, she reached in her bag for her papers to show the security guards at the entrance, papers every Russian citizen carried 24/7. We told her to put them away while we flashed our credentials, and the guards ushered us through. She was fascinated by those credentials; there was no such thing as lamination in the USSR for general use. To her our credentials looked like high-end government badges, despite them saying “MTV and Showtime, MMPF”. Those badges got us into private clubs on boats along the Moskva River, a gambling casino and other restricted places where they were happy to accept our American money. It was years later that I realized those places were filled with Oligarchs and their girlfriends, criminals and KGB. We just wanted fun places to drink. Though Sue and I quickly realized that it felt safer when we went out with a group, including some of the British bodyguards the size of NFL players who had traveled to Moscow to work the show.
So many of us were going to Arbott Street to buy handmade souvenirs and watch the street performers that the MTV crew decided to take Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora there to sing acapella on the street. It was incredible to watch; many of the young Russians knew who they were and were thrilled at the impromptu performance. They signed autographs for hours and the idea of MTV Unplugged was born that day. Oddly, the first MTV Unplugged show aired three months later, in November 1989, the same month the Berlin wall fell.
Teenagers and young adults had been arriving for days from all over the USSR. They took the train from Leningrad. They hitchhiked from Siberia. It was surprising in a country that strictly limited travel. They waited for hours outside our hotel yelling “OZ-ZY!!”
Ozzy Osbourne was clearly the international star since for years his bootlegged music had traveled all over the communist world. He wasn’t interested in signing autographs or speaking to his fans; he mostly complained while his wife took care of things. Thankfully he came alive on stage. And during a live satellite press conference (where the bands answered questions from reporters calling in from around the world) a question was asked directly to Alexey Belov (a member of the Russian band Gorky Park). The remote sound was garbled, and Alexey’s English wasn’t great so he couldn’t understand the question even after asking the reporter to repeat it and he looked a bit panicked. He was sitting between Ozzy and Jon Bon Jovi. Ozzy realized what was happening so he quickly and softly paraphrased the question allowing Alexey to answer. I remember thinking how kind Ozzy was to jump in and help before any of the other band members realized what was happening. It was so different from his biting the head off a bat persona I’d always heard about.
We realized Erik didn’t have a ticket to the show and Sue and I made sure he got one plus an all-access pass so he could come with us everywhere.
A few days before the show, a bunch of us went to Red Square to see Lenin. His coffin was on permanent display in a small structure in the Square. It was surreal to see his face through a glass window in the coffin. The show’s producer was standing next to me, and I heard a whirring sound and saw a bulge in his jacket. In that structure, where photographs were punishable by jail time, where militia were all over the place, this guy was videotaping Lenin’s body. I whispered to Erik to leave and, looking at the camera, he quickly did. Back outside on Red Square, we all kind of laughed and someone produced a bottle of vodka, and we did shots in honor of Curt’s brave stupidity. Oh, and drinking in Red Square? Against the law.
The show’s technical delivery plan was finalized remotely in July, the month prior to the show, and confirmed with our Russian “partners” via fax. A consulting company SET had used many times before booked the satellite path. It was dizzyingly complex. Two separate day-long concerts were scheduled for Saturday August 12th and Sunday August 13th. Each day would showcase the same bands, the same performances. The edit team planned to begin early on the 12th to create the TV show and continue editing throughout the next day’s performances. That two-hour show would then be broadcast in the U.S. via pay per view on the 13th at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. (And it would air various days and times in Europe, Asia, and South America.) The show’s delivery would start via a microwave signal sent from an uplink truck parked at Lenin Stadium to an “undisclosed location” (a military facility) which was the only location near Moscow with international satellite capability. The show would then be uplinked from the military site to an international European satellite, downlinked in England then re-uplinked to a satellite that could be seen by Showtime’s Network Operations Center (the “NOC”) in Long Island, New York. A few hours later the NOC would deliver the show to cable operators across the U.S. via a domestic satellite. While our American consultant had booked the European satellites and transponders, we were dependent on the Russians for the first legs, or “hops” as uplinks were called. And we were in the dark.
Two days before the live concert the microwave truck still hadn’t shown up. The daily production meeting was in a dingy, windowless room at Lenin Stadium. The American and Dutch teams, dressed in jeans, black t-shirts, sneakers, hoodies and tattoos, sat along one side of a long rectangular table facing the Russian team on the opposite side. The Russians wore polyester business suits in dark colors, the women in nylons and pumps. They seemed disdainful of how dressed down we showed up for work. Each time someone spoke a translator translated, Russian to English/English to Russian. It took a long time. We stared across the table, each of us wondering what the other side was thinking. The Russians confidently assured us the microwave truck would be there, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept imagining no truck, no signal, no show—my fault. While logically I knew a failed uplink owned by the Russians couldn’t possibly be my fault, because my job was managing the consultant engineers who had booked and organized the path, fingers would point at me if it failed.
On Friday, the day before the show, someone called me via walkie talkie to say the truck was pulling into the stadium. No cell phones but there were multiple bands on the walkie talkies: food service (English accent), Showtime and MTV (American English) and production team (Dutch). And some group was randomly conversing in French on another band. Switching the dial was fascinating. I walked to the microwave truck’s designated parking spot and watched a dilapidated, rusty truck with a flat tire pull slowly onto the field and stop. The microwave dish on top looked like it was from a 1950s sci-fi movie. The door opened and two huge men with full beards and bloodshot eyes stepped out. They smelled like vodka. I started crying. They seemed perplexed and one of them patted my back, “Nyet, nyet, nyet.”
A backup plan was hastily pulled together. The edit team would complete the two-hour show overnight following day one. An MTV executive would hand carry that show tape on a flight early Sunday morning from Moscow to New York where a car would drive her from JFK to Showtime’s Long Island NOC. That backup tape would be used in the event the satellite delivery plan failed. It was sketchy, a wing and a prayer. But that’s what we were living on.
The live concert was incredible, so much more than we’d imagined in the months we’d discussed and fantasized what a large-scale concert in Moscow might be like. One hundred thousand teenagers and young adults with what seemed like almost as many militia. The show began with the lighting of the Olympic torch, a gigantic and permanent fixture in Lenin Stadium, while the Russian Minister of Peace took the stage and asked the crowd to be quiet and sit down. Erik translated for us. Sue and I were shocked when silence immediately filled the arena and everyone in the stadium obeyed, quietly sitting. It was comical to imagine a crowd at a U.S. rock concert obeying such an order. He then gave an emotional and beautiful speech about peace and the new Russia. It was another sign how much the USSR was hoping this concert would help spread their message of transparency and opening up.
When the Minister of Peace finished, the revolving stage turned, and the first band appeared on stage. Sebastian Bach, Skid Row’s lead singer, shouted into the microphone, “CHECK THIS OUT MOTHERFUKERS!” before launching into their first song,
“I don’t think you need a translation of that,” said Erik with a smirk.
“They gave us the Minister of Peace and we gave them Sebastian Bach,” Jon Bon Jovi said later that night in the hotel bar. Someone told Jon to use that line in the post-show interview the next day. I laughed when I saw the clip air on MTV News.
Hour after hour each band performed to an adoring and ecstatic crowd. I was surprised how many people knew the words to so many censored songs. At first the militia stood stiffly at attention, lining the steps and aisles, watching the dancing crowd, trying to keep people calm and in their assigned seats. But after the first hour they began to relax until you couldn’t tell much difference between the crowd and the soldiers. It was a hot and sunny August day and the militia cheered and drank, danced, fist-pumped the air. I took pictures of young soldiers, drunk and smiling, their collars loosened, hats and jackets off, hugging concertgoers and each other. One hundred thousand young people and not one incident, other than some minor drunken misconduct.
The edit team went to work as soon as the show started. To close the concert on day one, all the bands (Bon Jovi, Ozzy, the Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, Cinderella, Skid Row, and Gorky Park) took the stage for a band jam. Together they sang two Beatles songs: Give Peace a Chance and Back in the USSR. The show ended at 5 p.m. on day one and the editors worked feverishly through the night. It would take hours to edit a daylong concert into a two-hour show for air the next night in the U.S.
An issue arose at midnight. To use the Beatles’ songs, Showtime needed permission from the rights owners for the television airing. We were already over budget. The director’s clear first choice was Back in the USSR but they’d try for both songs. My boss, Jock McLean, had what we called the golden rolodex; he’d managed James Taylor and Cat Stevens at the height of their fame and was the road manager of the Beatles for a while. He knew everyone and it was time to call in favors. Via satellite phone he called Yoko Ono who owned the rights to Give Peace a Chance. Jock explained where we were, who was involved and how the show was an anti-drug and alcohol fundraiser for the MADF (Make a Difference Foundation) and we wanted to use the song but couldn’t pay. She said, “John would have loved the idea of that show. You’re fine, use the song.” The next call was to Michael Jackson who owned the rights to Back in the USSR. I was fascinated watching this and so was Erik. Jock gave the same explanation to Michael Jackson, but he said if we wanted the song we’d have to pay. The televised show would close with Give Peace a Chance.
I waited outside the production truck early the next morning while the editors finished the backup tape. The woman flying it to New York was waiting in a car. Someone exited the truck and handed her the tape. I gave her a hug. “Don’t worry,” she whispered before speeding to the airport. A while later the car returned, and the driver told me her flight was delayed by at least five hours. The tape backup would never make it to Long Island by airtime.
I walked to the edit truck, climbed the steps, and opened the door. The exhausted team was frantically perfecting the show, adding and cutting crowd shots, choosing different angles and balancing the music. They wanted the final two-hour version that would be delivered via satellite later that evening to be perfect. The director saw me.
“We good?” he asked. I stared at his bloodshot eyes and messy hair.
Everyone looked up. I couldn’t do it after they’d pulled that all-nighter. I gave him a thumbs up. I saw smiles and looks of relief and I walked out to look for the driver. I told him not to tell anyone the plane was delayed. The team didn’t need more pressure.
That second day the bands performed the same songs, the same set list for a mostly new crowd. I watched a lot of the performances while trying not to think about the backup tape that wasn’t. The team edited from the second day’s show to perfect their first cut, and that final two-hour version would be the one traveling the complex satellite route from a broken-down truck in Lenin Stadium to American living rooms, via microwave plus multiple satellite hops.
I silently prayed that the microwave truck with the drunk engineers would work. Only a few people knew the backup show tape had been sitting in an Aeroflot plane most of the day on the tarmac.
I was on a satellite phone in one of the production trucks outside the stadium shortly before the final two-hour show edit was scheduled to start its transmission path to the U.S. talking to Dave, a chief system engineer at our NOC. My heart pounded almost as loudly as Mötley Crüe’s performance coming from inside the stadium. I kept a nervous chatter going with Dave while checking my watch because I knew the exact time the operations team was supposed to send the final version of the show via cable to the microwave truck fifty yards away, and then the microwave delivery would hopefully begin. Dave should see the start of the show within four minutes of that, (two minutes for each satellite hop). I held my breath.
“Do you see it?” I asked in a voice not my own. I cleared my throat.
“Not yet,” said Dave. His voice was ridiculously calm. “Relax.”
Relax? Was he fucking kidding me? I thought about having to leave the truck and find Scott, the president of Showtime’s event group, to tell him the backup tape didn’t make it to New York and somewhere along the chain of complex satellite hops the signal failed. Probably from the microwave truck I was staring at through the open door of the truck where I sat, my knee shaking.
“It’s here,” Dave said, in the same annoyingly calm voice. “I see opening credits.” He paused and I could hear music through my headset. “Damn, that’s a big stadium,” he said. The opening shots included views of Moscow and Lenin Stadium. “What’s that big flame?”
“They lit the Olympic torch,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.
“What did you say?”
“Forget the torch. How’s the signal?”
“A little sparkle, tinny, color’s not great.”
“Forget that shit.” I forced calm into my voice. “Not engineer standards. Imagine a normal living room with a normal TV. How will our customers think it looks?” I heard my voice rise. No signal was good enough for engineering, and one traveling like this one was bound to have some issues.
“Yeah. Okay, I guess,” Dave reluctantly admitted.
“Is it in sync?” I asked. With so many hops I worried the audio wouldn’t match the video.
“Stand by.”
I held my breath again as I heard through my headset the Minister of Peace’s speech, but it was in Russian so Dave wouldn’t be able to tell. I waited for Skid Row, listening for Sebastian Bach’s voice.
“What the hell,” said Dave. “Did you guys know he was gonna open with an F-bomb?”
“Was the F-bomb in sync?” I was exhausted.
“Yup. Perfectly in sync.”
“I love you,” I said.
“You people are crazy.”
I stayed with him until the two-hour feed ended, until Dave confirmed he saw closing credits and the signal to goodnight the satellite. He’d have hours before the show’s airtime in the U.S. to do what they could to improve the show’s technical issues.
I went into the stadium and found Sue for the rest of the live show. We listened to Jon Bon Jovi talk about the end of the Cold War and the peace he prayed was coming. He thanked Moscow for such a beautiful weekend. We stood just to the side of the stage when all the bands joined Bon Jovi onstage to perform both Beatles songs together. The entire crowd was on their feet, screaming. I wondered if Michael Jackson could see this if he’d feel bad that Back in the USSR wouldn’t be in the televised show, or any saved version of it. I stood there listening to the deafening sound of the crowd singing along to Beatles songs and watched the Russian soldiers nodding to the music while guarding the stage, their machine guns swaying behind them. Sue and I hugged and cried happy tears as the bands took their final bows to a roaring crowd. I remember thinking I would remember that event, and that moment, forever. We all believed that the world was coming together in a way it hadn’t in our lifetimes, and this concert was a part of it.
When the show ended, I walked to the microwave truck where the two Russian engineers were busy unplugging about a thousand cables. One of them glanced at the flat tire and laughed. They enveloped me in bear hugs, their beards grazing the top of my head. They still smelled like vodka. The one closest to me gave me a thumbs up with a questioning look, his bushy brows furrowed.
“Da?” he asked.
“Da,” I answered with a smile, my own thumb up. “Spacebo.”
They poured three shots of vodka. We clinked glasses and drank. They climbed in the ancient truck and drove slowly away.
Later that night while we celebrated, an editor told me they’d run out of time and the backup tape that went to New York hadn’t been finished; it was missing the credits and the final band jam. They didn’t want me to worry so they hadn’t told me. I laughed and told him that tape was probably still stuck in customs at JFK. We toasted to livin’ on a prayer.
One Moscow night before the show weekend we had a barbecue in Gorky Park and the catering team grilled burgers from London’s Hard Rock Café and handed out Hard Rock Moskva t-shirts. The park was a mob scene with the bands, executives, production teams, Russians, the militia, and an MTV News crew shooting a segment. Everyone affiliated with the show was there and I remember what a clear night it was, how many stars were visible in the sky, the same Big Dipper. A year later the Scorpions wrote their biggest hit ever, Wind of Change, a soulful song, unlike their other heavy metal songs. It became a giant hit and sort of an anthem to the Cold War ending. The song begins, “I follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change, an August summer night, soldiers passing by…” Sue and I watched that Wind of Change video over and over because it contained footage from our Gorky Park barbecue. The video was proof we hadn’t imagined it.
Every so often, a funny memory comes to me. In the elevator at work a few years after the show I glanced at a woman in a tight black leather dress. For some reason I flashed back to the hotel elevator in Moscow when I’d stood with a few of the women who’d traveled to Moscow with Mötley Crüe. Back then no women in Russia looked like that with their manufactured perfect bodies and skin, their glossy hair, gold-rimmed sunglasses, snake tattoos, thigh-high boots, half naked in skimpy tight black leather. There were no shiny boots, no leather clothes in Russia in 1989. I remember an elderly Babushka poking one of the girls’ arms with her finger while staring at her. I was confused until I realized that she didn’t think they were real.
Not long after that Moscow show I got married and then spent five years struggling to get pregnant. As I suffered through numerous medical procedures in the herculean effort it took to finally become a mother, I sometimes thought about Chernobyl and the cloud seeding, the chemical showers we worked under during those eleven days in Moscow, wondering. But it doesn’t matter.
I have a baggie of small colorful tin pins with various hammer and sickle logos and Russian words. Sometimes I put them on a jean jacket and remember trading ball point pens and packs of Trident gum for them. I also still wear the brown leather belt with the raised hammer and sickle brass buckle that was part of the official uniform of the USSR Militia. The gray jacket with the red and gold epaulets and matching hat still hangs in my closet. I traded four MTV t-shirts, pens, batteries and eight packs of Marlboros with a soldier working the show for that uniform; Erik negotiated the trade. I smile remembering how Jock wore his militia belt on his jeans at the Moscow airport and it was confiscated at the metal detectors. The guard shook his head while tossing it into a box behind him. Taking a military uniform out of the country was against the law. Jock was pissed about losing it and asked me if I wanted to trade something for mine, tucked safely in my suitcase.
“No f-ing way,” I said. “What are you going to give me? Marlboros?” He laughed.
“How about a milk bottle from Yasgur’s farm?”
He’d attended Woodstock which took place on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm and Jock had a case of milk bottles he’d bought during the concert, knowing they’d be valuable someday. But Woodstock was his generation’s peace festival. I wanted the belt from mine. “Nope.”
We still had the MMPF stickers on our luggage, so they thankfully tossed our crumpled rubles receipts in a box without glancing at them. I wonder sometimes if Erik ever got back to America; I hope so. When I’m wearing my militia belt on the subway, it occasionally catches the eye of a person who seems shocked to see it. They are usually older and look me in the eye with a question mark hanging in the air between us. I just smile.
Those eleven days went by quickly and it took a while to remember and process what went on there, and the significance of it. How crews from numerous countries pulled together to produce a live concert starring seven bands that brought joy to so many that weekend. It was a first for the USSR. Three months after the show the Berlin wall came down and, like a house of cards, communism started to topple, and Russian citizens realized what was going on in the rest of the world. We’d witnessed what the beginning of that looked like.
Two years following The Moscow Music Peace Festival the USSR broke up and those uniforms became obsolete, a memory frozen in a time long ago, like Lenin’s body, also gone from Red Square.
As a media executive, Susan R. Weinstein often heard that her emails read like stories, so she decided to write outside the office. Her work in both fiction and nonfiction has been published in several literary journals and her first novel is searching for an agent.
