CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
MONSTERS OF
MOSCOW
One of the highlights of my career, and a high-water mark for Pantera, happened during a break from the first batch of studio sessions for Vulgar Display Of Power. The Soviet Union was in a state of collapse, and on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the president and Boris Yeltsin became the head of the new, independent Russian state. When that happened, Mark Ross, who was still fairly new to the game but clearly possessed the right genes for A&R, had a stroke of genius.
‘Derek, I think it would be great if we could stage a free concert in Moscow to celebrate the new freedoms of the Russian people,’ he said.
‘Fuck yeah!’ I replied. ‘Let’s do it!’
‘But how to hell do we get it done?’ Mark countered. ‘Things are happening over there now, but there are going to be changes soon. We could do it now, but if we wait more than a month or so, it might be too late.’
It’s hard enough to get the proper permits and stage a festival concert in the US in less than a few months. To get bands, managers, and labels on board, negotiate a big concert event with Russian promoters during a time of turbulence and transition, find a place to accommodate tons of people, and get the permission of the government and the cooperation of the police and military seemed impossible.
‘Derek,’ Mark said after a pause. ‘Would you mind if I asked my dad if he could help us make this happen?’
Mark always walked a slippery slope between being a record company employee and the son of the guy who ran the company. He always tried to downplay the family connection, but this was one time he wanted to exploit it.
‘If you feel comfortable doing that, it could only help,’ I said. ‘If he can open the doors, I’d be happy to step in and take over. And then we could work together to make it happen.’
Mark talked to his dad, and Steve thought it was a great idea. He allocated four million dollars for booking the bands, getting the show cleared, and making it happen. He wasn’t just being benevolent. As a brilliant businessman and strategic capitalist, he viewed a less restrictive marketplace in Russia as an opportunity to directly import records to stores over there. He understood that introducing live Western music to a mass audience was a good investment.
We approached the biggest, most energetic rock bands we had access to—AC/DC, Pantera, and Metallica, who were on Elektra. The final band was The Black Crowes, who made the bill more diverse. Mark helped out with the scheduling and venue coordination, and I handled the more political tasks. I knew that certain people would have to be paid off to prevent the project from stalling or grinding to a halt, and I took the lead with the behind-the-scenes negotiations. I talked to a few people under the Warner umbrella, one of whom worked in the international department and had been to Russia before. He was Marty Payson, the CFO of Warner Music Group, and, like Sharon, he was involved in Jewish dissident causes.
‘Whatever you’re thinking Russia is going to be like, put it out of your mind, because what you’ll experience is the complete opposite of what you’re expecting,’ he explained. ‘Be businesslike but compliant. Never challenge anyone’s ego or authority.’
I thanked Marty for his advice and, amid fears of winding up in a Siberian chain gang, finalized my presentation. Sharon, who had been to Russia before on a covert mission to help Jews who wanted to leave the country, came along to lend support. We flew to Paris on the Concorde and then switched to a 747 from the 70s to go from Paris to Moscow. I was expecting to see a modern, major city airport. It was more like a packed, dingy rock club. The walls were spray-painted with political slogans, the floor looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a year, and the place stank of mildew, sweat, and fear. Our Russian contacts picked us up in a smelly, beaten-up limousine and drove us to our hotel. During the ride, we looked out the window and thought this must be what it’s like to travel through a heavily bombed Third World country. The highways were normal enough, but when we exited onto the regular streets, it looked like we had entered South Central. Buildings were falling apart and debris littered the sidewalks. I had assumed Russia was a powerful country with a modern infrastructure. It was so strange to drive through this sad, crumbling place. There were old women on the sidewalks selling the shoes off their feet, and merchants peddling bags of potatoes to customers lined up for blocks.
We got to the hotel and checked into a room where the former secretary of state Jim Baker had just stayed. We were advised by an ambassador for the US government not to say anything political or private in our room, since it was surely bugged. Sharon said that this was true—every time she had gone to Moscow on reconnaissance missions, she was warned about Russians spying and asking leading questions that would betray her confidants and get her in trouble. She urged me to stay quiet and listen and took the lead when we were at the hotel. From the inside, the place was nice enough. The beds were comfortable, and the restaurant was decent, but one look out of the window confirmed that we were surrounded by poverty. If that was what the infant seeds of democracy looked like, I feared Russia had a long, hard road to climb to break the chains of communism.
We met with the people who were helping us organize the concert and were advised to import hundreds of workers from Belgium, Poland, and Romania to construct the stage and the surrounding buildings. I would have liked to hire Russian workers to help them overcome their extreme poverty, but we were warned that there were too many logistical issues. Everyone who applied for a job would have claimed to be an expert, even if he wasn’t qualified to build a birdhouse, and we would have been wrapped up in red tape and government work permits. By hiring workers from outside the country, we would be dealing with a smaller pool of people with proven track records for constructing stages for major events in impossibly short periods of time. And, since they weren’t from Russia, the government didn’t have to be involved.
With the preliminary planning wrapped up, we flew back home and scrambled to continue our work. The event organizers over there got approval to build the stage at the Tushino Airfield, an open-air military location that could hold more than one million people. By the time we had the bands booked, the place secured, and the staff in place, there were just three weeks left to make sure the facility met safety standards—not that Russia had any, but we needed to make sure everyone who flew in would be able to perform, get around safely, and leave without being hassled or hurt. That was harder to guarantee than we thought: the police and military were handling security, and, depending on who we talked to, we were greeted either with optimism and joy or pessimism and hatred. Some of the old-guard military had been raised to despise American and Western music, and we wondered if they had an axe to grind.
There was excitement and tension surrounding the whole event, which was called Monsters Of Rock: Moscow—a reference to a yearly festival in England at Castle Donnington that ran from 1980 to 1996 before being resurrected by Live Nation as Download in 2003. There was also a Monsters Of Rock tour in the United States in 1988 that featured Kingdom Come, Metallica, Dokken, Scorpions, and headliners Van Halen (with vocalist Sammy Hagar). Even though they played second on that bill, it was widely accepted that Metallica plowed through the more mainstream-sounding bands—even Van Halen—and made a mark on the scene as prominently as a cement casting at Mann’s Chinese Theater. We hoped the Moscow concert would give them the overseas presence they enjoyed in the States, though we doubted they’d wipe the floor with Pantera or AC/DC.
Fans in the crumbling Soviet Union were familiar with the bands on the lineup from black-market tape trading, but they’d never dreamed of actually seeing them live, and their excitement and energy couldn’t be contained. The event was free, and we expected up to a million people to show up for it. At the eleventh hour, however, the show was in jeopardy of not happening. Mark and his team were told in no uncertain terms that the concert would be canceled unless some of the people who were in charge of the event were paid off, including the mayor and heads of the army.