Pavlov had even included snippets of Sanskrit on a recent song, “Dance in Extazy”—a catchy, propulsive tune with rapid-fire lyrics set against a wah-wah guitar backdrop. At the end of the song came his crowning touch, the ultimate Pavlovian marriage of East and West: a recording of the Swami chanting the Krishna mantra, set to a rap beat. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare…
“Rap is rhythmic chanting, and the mantra is rhythmic chanting,” Pavlov told me. “The only difference is that hearing the name of Krishna purifies you. It purifies everything around it, the animals, the trees, the people. So, just by listening to MD&C Pavlov, you’re getting some purification!” he concluded, beaming as if he’d just won the lottery—or, more accurately, given me the winning celestial numbers.
I’m not particularly a fan of either rap or Hare Krishna, but I really liked hanging out with Pavlov. The guy exuded happy energy, and on top of that he was making music nobody had ever heard before. His new record, called “Ze Best,” was getting airplay, and he spent his nights bouncing all over the city, playing gigs with his “girls.” In the artistic hothouse of post-Soviet Moscow, Pavlov was a rare and quirky bloom, and when the 2005 trip rolled around, I wondered just how famous he might have become by now.
Pavlov and I spoke on the phone soon after David and I arrived in Moscow. He seemed surprised (and characteristically excited) to hear from me, and we made a plan to meet the next afternoon at the Dinamo metro station.
When David and I arrived, Pavlov wasn’t there. We waited, and then waited some more, and after a while I started getting anxious. Where was he? Had I misunderstood the plan? The platform was empty, save for a heavyset guy standing a few yards away. At last, it dawned on me: Was that Pavlov? We peered at each other, and when I uncertainly said, “Heyyyyyyy,” his face creased into a smile.
“Ah, it’s you,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.” We hugged, and as we pulled apart I noticed that he had a lazy eye, which I didn’t remember from before. As we started walking, I noticed his gait had changed too—less spry, more deliberate. He was giving off a very different physical vibe, one that didn’t seem totally attributable to being ten years older.
We walked to a nearby studio, and Pavlov took off his coat to reveal bright green overalls, an orange T-shirt, and a neon-orange checkered button-down. He wore tinted glasses, as well as a lanyard around his neck with his cell phone attached, giving him the look of an exceptionally colorful tech nerd. I asked him how things had been going since we saw each other last.
After 1995, he said, his career began soaring. His “Dance in Extazy” video won Video of the Year at a festival of Russian regional TV shows, he got a commercial gig creating musical presentations for the chipmaker Intel, and in 1997, he founded the Festival of Soul and Funk, a three-day extravaganza with shows in multiple Moscow clubs. Through it all, he kept performing and making new music, and in late 1997 he took another trip to New York City.
“I needed to recharge my batteries, to hear some new stuff,” he told me. While there, he played with the legendary jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers and went to numerous clubs. “I would walk around the city in this orange outfit,” he said, laughing, “and people would go, ‘Hey, Orange Man from Moscow!’” He even made deals with New York record labels to send him their latest releases, so he could pitch his own TV show about funk music back in Moscow.
The TV show never got off the ground, but Pavlov began hosting a radio show called Funky Time. Broadcast in nearly two dozen cities and towns, “it was the only radio show about funk music in Russia,” he said proudly. Flush with his growing success, he moved out of his parents’ apartment in 1999, rented his own place, and built a makeshift recording studio inside. Then, as a treat, he booked a trip to Thailand with one of his dancers, a beautiful young woman named Polina who’d been performing with him since the early 1990s.
On their first day in Bangkok, the couple visited a Buddhist temple and wandered around the city taking pictures. On the second day, getting ready to cross a busy street, Pavlov looked left, as one does when traffic travels on the right-hand side. In Thailand, however, traffic travels on the left. Pavlov stepped off the curb directly into the path of an oncoming bus. He never even saw it.
The impact nearly killed him. An ambulance rushed the gravely injured Pavlov to a Bangkok hospital, where he underwent three operations. He was in a coma for nearly a month; it was unclear whether he would ever recover.
Almost as soon as the accident happened, friends and fellow musicians in Moscow began planning a benefit concert for Pavlov, who had no way of paying the $1,000-a-day hospital bills he was incurring. “They didn’t raise too much money,” he told me with a shrug. “But more important was the good energy they sent. All of Moscow was praying for me.”
When Pavlov finally awoke from his coma, he was flown back to Moscow to continue recuperating. “I had my fourth operation after I got back,” he said. “During that one, they held a special service at the Krishna temple. They lit a sacrifice fire, and chanted special mantras.” For a man whose stage act is all clever wordplay and high irony, there’s no hint of that irony when he talks about the power of prayer. “It definitely helped,” he told me earnestly.
The accident and surgeries left scars running across Pavlov’s scalp, but he told me he had no memory loss, save for not remembering the accident itself or the comatose weeks that followed. He referred vaguely to other lingering health problems, though he refused to elaborate or dwell on them.
“Hey, I’m alive!” he said, throwing his arms wide in a pose I remembered well from 1995. “That’s what matters.”
Pavlov spent a full year recuperating in Moscow hospitals before finally being allowed to go home. Spending a year in the hospital would be a discombobulating, depressing experience for anyone. But as soon as Pavlov got out, he went right back to work. “First thing, we released the CD I’m Back”—a compilation of dance and funk tracks he’d recorded before the accident. “There’s one track at the end that goes, ‘People ask me where I was—I was on vacation! I had a good vacation! I got healthy!’” he told me, laughing. “For those who know what happened to me, they know what I’m talking about. Those who don’t, don’t.”
He also resumed doing commercial presentations for Intel, to pay the bills. “We go in and do this rap about Inteclass="underline" ‘Pentium 4 is the most powerful center of your digital world!’” he exclaimed, waving his hands in excitement. “Then we get someone from the audience to come up and say, ‘I love Pentium! I want Pentium!’ and right then, during the presentation, we make a mix of that.” A sound engineer would then burn a DVD for the audience member to take home as a funky, Intel-branded souvenir.
As startled as I’d been by Pavlov’s physical changes, little else seemed different in his life. He was still making music, still a vegetarian, still a Krishna. But the music scene around him had changed dramatically. In 1995 he was an anomaly, but now Moscow was flooded with rappers and DJs—some of whom were too young to remember their predecessor’s heyday.
“They’re like, “MC Pavlov? Who’s that?” he laughed. “They maybe have heard of Public Enemy, but that’s about it.” He was still able to find work in clubs, though now he was switching his focus from rap to funk music. “Russia wasn’t ready for funk a few years ago,” he said, “but it’s time now!” We’re gonna teach the people!