Matthew Orr: Hi, you are listening to The Slavic Connexion, and this is our first recording in Russian. I have a privilege to introduce our today's guest, very interesting and famous person, Seva Novgorodsev. Seva, welcome to the show!
Seva Novgorodsev: Good afternoon, gentlemen. And ladies!
MO: I've been preparing for this interview for two weeks, so I tried to select some questions which hopefully will be of some interest to you. To begin with, I would like to ask how your attitude to the United States has changed throughout your life? When you were a young man in Leningrad, then in Italy, when you were serving in the Navy or played in Dobry Molodtsy band… How this attitude has changed? And afterwards, when you became a stateless person etc?
SN: I was growing up being an Americanophile. I adored America, I had a crew cut hairstyle, I played jazz on a saxophone, listened, of course, to Willis Conover  on the Voice of America wavelength – that was a person who was known to anybody in Eastern Europe and in Russia, he had one hundred million listeners. But in America nobody knew him except his producer and the technician who recorded him. This continued until about 1967. That year I, being a saxophonist, decided that I definitely needed a certain mouthpiece, American Otto Link # 5*. And in order to get it, I went and passed the exams at Intourist -- I already spoke English by that time. I studied all winter, and then I was sent to Intourist, to the deluxe tourist department:  I was working as a tour guide for four hours in the morning, and four after lunch. So I worked for 45 days in Intourist, and for some reason I cured myself from my love for Americans. I met many people who spoke faster than they thought. This syndrome is called “how do I know what I think before I say it?”. They had all kinds of cliches in their speech all the time. You would tell them something interesting, and they like: "Is that a fact?". So I began to move away from American influence in the sense of communication. But, of course, in terms of music and everything else, this influence remained, and only when I went abroad and began to live in England, the British fully occupied the niche of people who influence me. But now I returned as if in the days of my youth. Around me are Americans who do not annoy me at all.
MO: Do I understand correctly that this is your first time in the USA?
SN:  I was in New York a couple of times, for 5 or 7 days, but in principle, I am in the United States away from New York for the first time.
MO: At least, for the first time in Texas.
SN: That's for sure!
MO: Good. I would like to ask about the Soviet Union and about rock and jazz in the Soviet Union. These are genres that – if you look them up in Wikipedia – considered to be an American invention. Were the
МО: Were these genres generally perceived as something American in the Soviet Union?
SN: Totally! I played in a big jazz band conducted by Joseph Weinstein, and 90 percent of our repertoire were arrangements copie from the tape records. This is a very complicated process, and we had only a few musicians with absolute hearing who could transcribe an orchestration from tapes recorded from the air -- with all its rattles and noises  and so on -- so that it sounded like the original when we played them. Basically we played all your big bands material, you name it, because we were under American influence, it started long before I got into the band. I followed the band, and I remember all these [media] campaigns against them [for playing American music]. So the origin was clearly American. As for rock, the picture is more complicated, because the Beatles paved the way, so it was British influence, after them there were the Rolling Stones, Shadows and all that. They firmly established the English, so to speak, brand. It can be said, all of them before the Eagles. The  Eagles noticeably won back the American audience. And afterwards, there were Queen  etc -- as the Russians say, “Kvinov lyubish?” [="Do you like Queen" in parody Russian accent]… So rock is considered to be less America-influenced.
MO: In a recent interview you mentioned how the Soviet Union produced a lot of absurdities and idiotisms, like the slogan "Communism is our aim" on an artillery academy. That was very funny and I know there's dozens if not hundreds of such examples. When you begun to noticed these?  Was it when you were very young?
SN: Oh yeah. We laughed, of course, but these so-called "army idiotism", this list [samizdat collection], it appeared a little later, and I read it with pleasure, because it became the quintessence of everything we thought about, but we had no such material. For example, a student comes to a [military training] lecture in jeans. And the [military officer] teacher says to him: “Comrade cadet, why did you come to the lecture in the pants of the potential enemy?” Or the remarkable quote that the atomic bomb always falls into the epicenter of the explosion.
MO: That's so funny. I know that after some time you decided to leave [the USSR], and this happened, if I not mistaken, after you were fasting for 21 days?
SN: Generally, yes, fasting played its role. I was fasting, and had an insight and understanding of the Universe because of that, I left the stage, I stopped making money by this musical prostitution. For about several months I was sitting at home and did nothing, but last year I played in such a strange place: near Leningrad there is the city of Pushkin, the former Tsarskoye Selo, where [poet Alexander] Pushkin studied at the Lyceum  and wrote a lot of poems about it. There was the former royal stables. It was built in the form of a horseshoe, a semicircular building. Under the Soviet rule  a dance hall was made there with a capacity of 1,800. They made a hardwood floor and all. I got this place, I gathered a Leningrad rock-and-roll band named the Myths to play – they still exist in some form -- and we played there. That place was special because we were not controlled. These five or seven uncontrolled places for musicians remained as if from the tsarist time: during the reign of the Tsars musicians played there during the royal walks in the park, and this tradition remained after the revolution. Therefore, [the right to play at] this site was very carefully passed from hand to hand, and I got it, and we were not under control of the Department of Culture, and may play something that the others were not allowed to play. We had some success, playing for the crowds of 2,000, and the management -- the heads of these gardens and parks -- loved us very much because we made a plan for them. Over-fulfilled even.
MO: I know that your first shortwave broadcast on the BBC Russian Service begun in 1977 under the name of "Pop Music Programme From London", but it was later renamed to Rock-Posevy. How did that happen?


SN:  All the best names were invented by my listeners, not me. There was no DJ genre in Russian when we started, so I learned from my English colleagues, the stars of BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 – I had my heroes there whom I listened to every day, trying to convey their technique into Russian language. It was quite difficult at times, because nobody, myself included, had that art of speaking for the given number of seconds. If you look at my old scripts, you see the remarks that you have 32 seconds to introduce the next music, and you should start from the third second and finish on the thirtieth, to allow some time for mixing. So I wrote scripts first, measuring with a stopwatch how many words should I utter,  what speed etc. At the time BBC recorded the shows in the imperial fashion.
MO: What does it mean?
SN: I had to bring for copies of each script: one for myself, the other for the producer, the third for the studio manager operating the mixer and the fourth for the studio manager operating The Grams. The Grams were enormous machines, like Studers – I don't remember which brand they were – and a dedicated operator turned a record for a quarter of a turn in the opposite direction, put on the needle and pushed a button on time, so the machine accelerated to its full speed for that quarter of a turn. But that meant that we had to rehearse the whole show. Sometimes it was a 40-50-minutes rehearsal of a half-hour program sometimes had to rehearse forty minutes, sometimes a full hour, so that all these foreign-language people knew where to start what. Of course, it all went down in history, now no one records it that way. I later signed up for courses to have access to the self-operated DJ studio. People came to us from Radio 1, taught in such a studio to do programs for Africa or for the Air Force, and I also squeezed n there. So I learned gradually how to speak, how to move the knobs, how much to say, so that the music sounded exactly when necessary.
MO: Probably only after that you began to feel really the owner of the program?
SN: Yes, there is different dynamics, you see, when you pull all the handles yourself, you can speak with the movement of your hand, slow down or speed up, or, [speeding up the voice] and so on. So that's how the DJ genre was forged in Russian.
MO: I like one of the letters you read on air. That's related to what we talked before, so let's listen and then discuss. I thinks this is a recording from 1984.
BROADCAST RECORD:  Hail to the Comrade Novgorodsev! Rot Front Seva!  I am a Central Russia Rock Fan,  your regular listener over the years. First of all, I want to thank you for your great shows. Many thanks for including the songs of my favourite bands. In short, I can't think of what we would do if there wasn't you. And apart from the good shows, there are great ones! For example, the heavy metal overview of the past year.  I got it on tape and listen to it daily, over and over again. In general, everything is perfect, from the choice of the bands to the decent portions of  the good English humor. Keep up the good work or make it even slightly better! Just please do not forget we have great rock bands here, too. Not to mention my fav Mashina [Vremeni], who you  won't play anyway,  there are, like one of your listeners from Leningrad noted already, tons of the great bands, and many of them correspond perfectly to the provocative and counter-revolutionary purpose of your shows.  St Petersbourg guys give me a lot of joy recently: Aquarium, the Trumpet Call, Strannye Igry, Pepel – aren't they good enough?  Of course, Grebenshchikov [of Aquarium] and Barinov [of the Trumpet Call] are not compared with Andrei Makarevich [of Mashina Vremeni], but still. And that Moscow's Mukhomor that you played on the New Year's Eve Show? And Primus? And Kino, who are insanely popular here now? And of course these guys from Cherepovets, named the Rock September? But what the point in naming them all if you avoid playing their music? Not good, Seva, not good at all!
MO: There's a few reasons why I liked this letter. There's a lot of hope and a lot of energy in it, but also there's a hint of criticism: " Not good, Seva, not good at all!" I know that you listened to the Mashina Vremeni and Boris Grebenschikov's Aquarium and many other Russian Rock musicians, and it's very interesting for me, how did you -- then, and even today – related to people of the younger generation, who were about 15-20 years younger than you, who created and listened to this Soviet underground music. Did you consider yourself a part of this generation, or were they different people for you?
SN: I always say that I resembled a teacher at school who goes three lessons before his class. This is first of all. Secondly, if you listen to the voice [on the record],  it doesn’t sound quite like mine now. This is because the BBC had a magic machine called a compressor, which squeezed the voice and made it thick so that it could pass through short waves better. And thirdly, I have always loved letters, where they criticized me — because if you scold yourself in public, there will be those who will want to stand up for you. And then, I would have been above this: well, scold, if you want. Therefore, we had such an open game. In all these letters there is a hint, in a very Russian way, between the lines, that only those who know understand. Therefore, I often did not even include the letters of praise: it is not interesting to listen how you praise yourself. But such letters with a critical hint.. they caused, firstly, trust - because if you scold the presenter, and he would still read it on the air, and secondly, they create some kind of dramatic tension. So yes, I listened with pleasure: almost forty years have passed ...
MO:  Did you consider yourself as a peer, roughly speaking, of these people, or more as a kind of predecessor?
SN:  At that moment I had to be of the same age, I had such a role. Although I was, what, twenty-something older, one generation older, there should have been a rock'n'roll truth. And in rock and roll, you can neither allow yourself to pose anything, nor praise yourself;  it should be - like in a street gang, like the hooligans among themselves, there had to be a certain truth. This is the rule that I tried to follow, and that is why, apparently, someone had the confidence and the feeling that that was theirs.
MO: How often did you listen to Soviet rock music at that time?
SN: It began to come to me after 1980, after the infamous Tbilisi festival, where Grebenshchikov and Mashina Vremeni caused a scandal, after that they were smashed and beaten [in Soviet media]. But by the year 1984, they had nevertheless risen, and already they could not be kept by any censorship frameworks. So at this time ... And then Joanna Stingray, an American, came to St. Petersburg and took out the tapes of four groups  -- Aquarium, Kino and two others. And she published them in California as Red Wave album. And since this album was published in the West, I could officially request it through the BBC, and I had it, and broadcasted it, because it was not me secretly digging up something there [but an official edition]-- and for the BBC it was very important. This was, of course, a significant breakthrough, because it was then that the underground rock music, officially released in America, has been broadcasted on the BBC for the first time ever.
MO: I would like to ask for young people of my generation: how and for what do you want to be remembered?


SN [Alexander] Pushkin has that poem where he says:
And many years will I favored with the people
For waking up good feelings with my lyre,
[Because in my cruel age I praised Freedom
For mercy for the fallen called.]
So that's how I'd like to be remembered.
MO: Wonderful. And finally, I wanted to ask what are your impressions of our city, Austin, of our state of Texas -- as this is your first time in Texas?
SN: You can always judge a country by dogs walking along the street. Your dogs are all very friendly. And I understand why they are friendly: because the owners treat them very well  -- and the owners greet us when we walk down the street, although they have never seen us before. For me, this is a huge indicator of mutual culture and the climate that people are trying to create, because the world is under pressure from all sides, and they resist this pressure by respecting each other -- behaving civilized, cultural, with love and respect towards each other. This is a very strong indicator for me. My wife said, "I feel at home here."
MO: Thank you, this is great. Austin is often called the world capital of live music. Did you, by any chance, had a time to listen to some live music?
SN: Not yet, but all our contacts here, for example wonderful Michelle Daniel who works in your university or her husband James, they all are musicians. So I understand that even if you are in Language Department, you can't really be far from live music.
MO:  Do you still listen to rock music?
SN: I must confess, I never listened to rock music. I listened only to what I needed for the program. Just imagine having  10 records in front of me - all this week's releases. It is impossible to listen to all of them. I had a method: I put a vinyl record on a turntable, and played 10-15 seconds from each track. And since I was a musician for a long time, and my ears were trained, it could immediately hear where's an interesting composition, where are fresh harmonies, where's a quality recording, and so on, and I quickly chose from this. And later those programs that I already did, they somehow sprouted in my head. The natural reaction of any person: no one wants to listen to new music. Listening to a new music is how I always say: if a herd of cows is on a green meadow, and a new cow comes to them, they will initially kick the newcomer for three days
MO: That's an interesting paradox! 
SN: Nobody wants anything new. And I had to do it every week. But then, when the years went by, I was in Moscow recently, and I got to Rock FM, a radio station playing only rock music. And I suddenly felt moved, because this is what I went through and what I absorbed. In general, any person listens to the music that they listened to when they were 18-19-20. This music remains with us forever. For me, it's those American singers with beautiful voices and jazz big bands. 
MO: I completely agree that music from youth remains for life. 
SN: If you had to listen to some wild rap or garage for work, you would get used to it, understand it, love it and so on - this is just how I got into rock music. 
MO: Seva, I would like to thank you for being with us on the air, I was very pleased not only to meet you, but also to talk, thank you very much! 
SN: Thank you, I wish you lots and lots of successful podcasts!