Profile of Boris Grebenshchikov on Famous Like Me

Boris Grebenshchikov (Russian: Борис Гребенщиков) is one of the most prominent members of the generation which is widely considered the "founding fathers" of Russian rock music. Due as much to his personal contribution as to the undisputed and lasting success of his main effort, the band Aquarium, he is a household name in Russia.

Colloquially known as "BG" (after his initials), Grebenshchikov was born in 1953 in Leningrad. He co-founded Aquarium with a childhood friend, Anatoly "George" Gunitsky, in 1972 as a post-modernistic theater-centric effort that involved poetry and music. Gunitsky provided absurdist, highly symbolic lyrics to some of BG's earliest songs.

Despite an eventual graduate degree in Applied Mathematics, Grebenshchikov had always been a voracious consumer of culture, especially music. His school-years enamourment with the Beatles eventually extended to include a deep appreciation of Bob Dylan, which slowly transformed Aquarium into a low-fi electric blues band that moonlighted in acoustic reggae. The first song he managed to play on guitar was The Beatles' Ticket To Ride; his first public performance, in 1973, featured him performing songs by Cat Stevens.

Early years

The first six years of Aquarium's history lacked cohesion as Grebenshchikov and his various bandmates followed the Soviet equivalent of the hippy lifestyle: playing apartment jams, drinking the awful port wine available from the Soviet stores of the time, and intermittently travelling to remote gigs, even hitchhiking on rail freight cars.

Youthful philandering was heavily frowned upon by the Communist Party regime; decent recording facilities were out of reach because experiments in non-standardized self-expression were routinely suppressed as a matter of policy. The several homebrew 2-track recordings hacked out over those years ("Temptation of St. Aquarium" (Iskushenie Svyatogo Aquariuuma), "Count Diffusor's Fables" (Pritchi grafa Diffuzora), "Menuet for a Farmer" (Menuet zemledel'tzu), and a motley crew of "singles") were of necessity extremely unprofessional, but already showcased the off-kilter wit, showy erudition, and a pervasive interest in Oriental thought and mysticism that eventually became BG's trademarks.

The year 1976 also saw the recording of BG's first solo album, "On the Other Side of the Looking Glass" (S toy storony zerkal'nogo stekla; the name is in fact a reference to Lewis Caroll), and a duo album with another prominent nascent Russian rock-n-roller, Mike Naumenko (web site in Russian), "All Brothers - Sisters" (Vse brat'ya - sestry).

BG's big break (or, in retrospect, his and the band's "watershed" moment), however, came in 1980, when Artem Troitzky (web site in Russian), the first public Russian rock critic and the enabling figure in many a Russian rock musician's carrier, invited Aquarium to perform at the Tbilisi Rock Festival.

Classical years

The festival was a Party-sanctioned attempt to channel the then-burgeoning Russian rock music movement into a controllable ideological vessel. If featured a laundry list of party-proof bland rock bands, but also Kraftwerk, whose performance was accompanied by frisbies being launched into the public. Members of the jury (the occassion was officially an artistic contest) were not amused. A covert KGB-bound report pinned the occassion on Aquarium, which caused BG to lose his day job at a backwater design bureau (of a kind that employed the majority of technical specialty graduates in the Soviet Union; Russians called them "P.O. Box" (pochtoviy yashik) because their street addresses were never revealed), and membership in Komsomol, a Young Communist League, which was a career kiss of death for a Soviet citizen in 1980.

The band's underground profile, however, had continued to rise sharply over the next 7 years, post-Brezhnev KGB-fueled reactionism and Gorbachev's perestroika notwithstanding. This was both due to talent, and the scarcity of supply - Western rock music was still officially banned at the time. Over the first five albums, the band attracted guitarist Alexander Lyapin (considered to be among the best rock guitar players of Russian origin), the now deceased pianist Sergey Kurekhin (web site in Russian; reknowned for the impressive speed and virtuosity of his playing), and Igor Butman, a world-class jazz saxophone player and one of the reigning kings of Russian jazz.

By the time Aquarium disbanded amid internal squabble in 1987, they had 11 "official" records behind their belt and were considered a living legend of Russian rock. BG himself was likened to Bob Dylan, not least because of his borrowing amply from Dylan in his earlier years. "Railway water" (Zheleznodorozhnaya voda) off the 1981 "Blue album" (Siniy albom), for example, is a spitting image of Dylan's "It takes a lot to laugh" off the 1961 "Highway 61 revisited".

Going West

Perestroika has ushered in a new era of opportunity for rock musicians; several of the more prominent ones got breaks in the West. BG's came from Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame). Stewart-produced "Radio Silence" was released in 1989, featuring covers of Alexander Vertinsky's "China" amid songs by BG, including a song written to Sir Thomas Malory's "Death of King Arthur". Annie Lennox and Chrissie Hynde helped out, as did several of BG's bandmates from Aquarium.

The name of the album proved self-ironic in the extreme as it hasn't made so much as a dent in the charts. Part of the failure can be attributed to the fact that unlike the Anglo-American rock-n-roll culture, the Russian song tradition heavily emphasizes lyrical complexity over hooks or drive, which reinforces the not entirely fair comparisons between BG and Dylan.

BG issued another English-language album, "Radio London", in 1990, which consisted of demos, but had some very appealing material to it.

Returning East

Disillusioned in the possibility of exporting the Russian song-writing tradition to the West, BG returned to Russia and entered a "nationalistic" phase. The year 1991 saw him come out with a "Russian album" (Russkiy al'bom), backed by an all-new, eponimous BG Band. The album featured a line-up of songs very "Russian" in both lyric and tune, and wasn't met with much public appreciation. BG was defiant, however, and went on record as having flipped a bird off the stage toward someone yelling demands for him to perform songs from the Classical period. His career since has proved time and again that he is not fond of rehashing the past, however glorious.

No matter the defiance, the Aquarium brand was too strong to eschew and even the next two albums, one mostly filler ("Ramses IV's favorite songs" (Lyubimye pesni Ramzesa IV)) and one all B-sides ("Sands of St. Peterburg" (Peski Peterburga)), were attributed to Aquarium. By the time of 1994's "Kostroma Mon Amour" BG's mastery of nationalistic melody and lyric has grown to new heights, and a new band lineup was going full steam.

The band's next three albums (effectively BG's solo albums published under the band's brand) - "Navigator", "Snow lion" (Snezhniy lev), and "Hyperborea" - also have a stylized Russian feel. Navigator especially is widely recognized as a classic example of Russian song-writing. The songs are melancholic bordering on heart-rending; the lyrics are either drenched in post-Byron splean, or full of BG-branded variant of Russian irony steeped in a sense of separation between self and the world.

And back to basics

As of 1997, however, the Russian nationalism seems to have run its course for BG. His 1997 album "Lilith" is still majority Russian in lyrical theme, but is recorded, by way of a chance meeting, with his former idol Dylan's one time back-uppers, The Band. In 1998 BG, who was by then settling into a cult classic status in Russia, played a one-man-and-his-guitar show of 70's and 80's songs to a small audience of fans in a San Francisco bar, and decided to return to reggae-n-rock-n-roll roots.

1999's "Psi" features just that, as interpreted through a post-modernistic lense with ample, highly inventive use of keyboard-triggered samplers. 2002's "Sister Chaos" (Sestra Haos), 2003's "Fisherman's songs" (Pesni rybaka), and 2005's "ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM" feature the same, painted by sparse touches of Armenian (Givan Gasparian on "Northern Wind"), Indian (the entire of "Fisherman's songs") and African (some of "ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM"). Despite all of these having been issued under the Aquarium brand, it is recognized that by now Aquarium is "the people who play with Grebenshchikov".

In a very appealing touch of overcompensation, as technology and funds had begun to permit, sometime in the 90s BG had become incredibly quality-conscious with his records. As the state of sound engineering in Russia left (still does) a lot to be desired, he had begun tracking in London's studios. "Navigator", a predominantly acoustic album with a highly refined, "the-band-is-in-the-room" intimate soft of a mix saw BG sell his car and part of his guitar collection to cover tracking costs. The quality of his recent recordings may give the better of Western singer-songwriters a run for their money.

Worth noting

BG has virtually always been able to skillfully combine his interests into a cohesive, if highly eclectic, whole. His lyrics can feature Hinduism, Russian Orthodoxy, and drug use in the same quatrain and not make one blink an eye. The ability has only grown stronger over the years. 1999's "Psi" switches from detailed references to samurai culture to mentionings of a certain carpenter's son to data storage on hard drives, all the while maintaining tight lyrical cohesion.

His output has been rather prolific. Over the 30+ years of his carrier he wrote 500+ songs, most of which were recorded and/or performed publicly. At this point Aquarium has 21 albums in the official discography, approx. 12 "unofficial ones", and about as many live records. Additionally, BG recorded cover albums on material from the two most prominent Russian-language songwriters - Alexander Vertinsky (1994's "Songs of A.Vertinsky" (Pesni A.Vertinskogo)) and Bulat Okudzhava (1999's "Songs of B.Okudzhava" (Pesni B.Okudzhavy)) -, two albums of mantra music with Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors, (1998's "Refuge" and 2002's "Bardo"), and an album of electronica versions of Aquarium songs from late 70's - early 80's with the Russian duo Deadushki. Which left him time to be credited on records by big-in-Russia bands Nautilus Pompilius, Mashina Vremeni and Kino, as well as the UK acts Shakespeare's Sister and Kate St. John. This list is not exhaustive, either.

BG is also known as a student of religion and mysticism. He translated several Hinduist and Buddhist books for publication in Russian, travelled the Orient widely, and is friends with A-list spiritual celebrities. He is just as familiar with the Russian Orthodox tradition (Aquarium web site has had a call for discovery or Orthodox relics going for years), and used to mix them freely in his lyrics. "Russian Nirvana" (Russkaya Nirvana) off "Kostroma mon amour", e.g., is a dual-pointed send-up containing a reference to "sitting down in the lotus posture in the middle of Kremlin". His relentless promotion of Tibetan buddhism in the 90's and his tendency to use buddhist-derived logic with touches of absurdism to avoid answering questions in interviews make him pretty distinct amongst other Russian artists. BG translated several Buddhist texts to Russian. The list of books he translated is quite impressive:

Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche (son of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche) "Bardo Guidebook" - "source material for the "Tibetan Book of Living & Dying" a.k.a. "Tibetan Book of the Dead" Bardo Thodol, in 1995;

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche "Repeating Words of the Buddha" - "the essential points of spiritual practice, inseparable from everyday life.", in 1997;

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche "Rainbow Painting" - "addressing the topics of practices of accumulating and purifying to facilitate unification of view and conduct", in 1999;

Shibendu Lahiri "Kriya yoga" - "authentic teachings and techniques of Kriya Yoga", in 2003;

"The Katha Upanishad", Upanishad belonging to the Yajur Veda, in 2005.

He has a rather unique singing voice. A combination of his natural timbre and a specific vibrato slightly reminiscent of a goat with downward expansion of range and an unusual resonation pattern acquired through training make his voice highly recognizable by anyone who has heard it.

Singles

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