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Muscovite Beatles tribute band Dans Ramblers are also set to rock the fest — Myspace.com/dansramblersband.
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Twentieth-century nostalgia of a particular kind unfolds on Sunday in Moscow as The Beatles, well, one original member at least, come to town.
“Back in the U.S.S.R.” will be on repeat as the international “Best of The Beatles” festival plays at B1 Maximum, featuring a lineup of Beatles tribute bands from Belarus to Buenos Aires.
Headlining will be a different quartet from Liverpool, The Pete Best Band, whose leader was the original drummer for The Beatles for two years, before he was thrown out of the group in 1962.
Best became a civil servant after leaving The Beatles, but he returned to music and, even though he is 68, continues to tour. The group performs Beatles hits as well as its own original songs.
“Playing up there with Pete Best will be an event in itself,” said Alexei Plyush, the self-styled “John Lennon” of Moscow-based group The Beatween, which will also play the festival. Other groups include Nube 9 from Argentina and Double Fantasy from Minsk.
“With the international bands we have for the festival, the whole event will display a certain Beatles diversity,” Plyush said. “It certainly doesn’t matter that we’re not all English!”
The festival is also being used to promote “Back In U.S.S.R. or On the Waves of Our Memory,” a book by two leading pundits on Beatles nostalgia, Vladimir Ilinsky and Vyacheslav Syomin. Ilinsky, who has his own radio show called “Beatles Hour” on Ekho Moskvy, and Syomin, author of a rock encyclopedia, plan to give a talk that night.
“Our book is about the realities of the ‘60s, when all this was banned, and about today’s ironies when one president [of Russia] hosts Paul McCartney in Red Square and the next admits to having collected Beatles records in his youth,” explained Ilinsky, referring to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.
The Beatles never made it to the Soviet Union — although there was an urban myth that they played a gig for nomenklatura at a Moscow airport — despite that song about their love for Georgian girls.
Soviet authorities clamped down on the Fab Four’s influence from the start with Nikita Khrushchev famously calling The Beatles’ music “cacophonous rubbish,” but the forbidden fruit from Liverpool still made its way into the U.S.S.R. with a hefty trade in samizdat — or illegally self-published copies of censored materials — of Beatles recordings for determined lovers of the sounds of the ‘60s.
The suppression only made them more popular. Fans would wear badges with the famous portrait of Nikolai Gogol as a young, long-haired writer as a way of expressing their affection for the young, long-haired John Lennon, wrote music critic Artemy Troitsky in his book “Back in the U.S.S.R.” about rock and pop in the Soviet Union, and some academics have even argued that it was the mass appeal of The Beatles in the Soviet Union that helped end the Cold War.
Older rockers will play next to musicians born after the death of John Lennon in 1980 at the festival, and the age of the crowd is expected to be just as broad.
“We usually get grandmas and grandpas dancing next to small kids, all generations,” Plyush said.
Best of The Beatles begins at 6 p.m. on March 21 at B1 Maximum, 11 Ulitsa Ordzhonikidze. 921-1557, www.b1club.ru.
AbbeyRoad
BEATLEMANIA ! YEAH !
" Early Beatlemania, of cause, is my message. In july 1965 we visited Moscow and Jalta as tourists, Think we lived att Hotel Metropol. I was a mod, a Beatles fan, from the start of autumn 1963, and had rather long mod hair, as the Beatles. I had a Beatles-singel with me, " I feel fine" (edited 27 november 1964.) A group of Moscow teenagerboys recognized me, as Beatlesmod, and I promised them the Beatles-singel, which I gave them as a gift (friendship between the peoples) outside the hotel, in company with my parents. I think a policeman look upon, but no reaction, so far. So I didn´t observe a certain fear or repression, which other people use to say, rather an interest, and knowledge about the popgroup. Don´t think the parental generation in any country, in USA, UK. etc., was really much enjoyed by the 1960ties youth rebellion, music style, in the beginning, etc., so I think it had to be some frictions in the former SSSR-society too, around The Fab Four. So don´t feel odd ! Was this the beginning to the end of the Soviet Union ? But don´t blame me... (blame Gorby ?). "Perhaps Stalin knew that when you open the lid, things vill happen," ( from Zubok: Dr Zjivagos children/2009), but did Gorby knew that ?
I think The Beatles were and are popular all over Russia, like the rest of the British popinvasion of 1960ties, don´t mentioned swedish ABBA. But how about Rolling Stones, then and The Who and other modbands, or "grown-up beatniks". "Original tough" mods i U.K. ,mean that " The Beatles was a girl´s group, but they invented the collarless jackets. . . but you lived and learn and eventually realised they were great". (Rawlings 2000)
In Sweden The Abba-group, made the rather same journey. (You won´t be prophet....) Chrustjevs generation could naturally not, digging the Beatles, he didn´t dig the Stalin-misery, times either, that was perhaps then his first mission, and more important.
But he like Cuba, and Fidel Castro ,Che Guevara which then and now, also was a kind of youth idols in west, and even in Russia, and the Castro´s still standing, like The Rolling Stones , but as the Stones without a real hit since 1969, when at least ten(10) USA/USSR/Russian Federation administrations had come & leave the political scene.
"Crusse" Nikita S., (Krusse in Swedish) visited Sweden in 1964, and was rather popular among ordin-ary people, always use bearhug, and the former Soviet Union were then still in good progress, in the public opinions. I hope the record was played, spread and perhaps, I was the first mods i SSSR, with the first Beatles-import, and of course I have Paul McCartneys CD from his gig at Red Square in 2004 ,he touring Sweden before Red Square.
We went to Jalta 1 week, then, (At Tjechovs house, (Swallownest?) he had an old swedish telefon from L.M. Ericsson), many looked att my modstyle,i feel like a Beatle in : Hard days night ! (1964) - in most cases in a positive way. Our russian interpreter " Raijsa", translate Tjechovs play " The Gull", with the swedish word for cap : Mössa(n), swedish for the bird gull, is "Måsen". How lovely ! Never mind!
Pete Best was kicked from the Beatles, and instead Ringo Starr play the drums, from august 1962. Best was in the music-business, what I know, his relatives had a music club, named Bazaar (or something), and perhaps were more a rocker than a mod, those two styles, The Beatles tried to balance. Latest version of : The name "Beatles" is said to emanated from the words : insect, Beetle, inspired of Buddy Hollys group: The Crickets, combined with the word "beat". From 1960 Lennon until his dying day, claimed that he invented the name, but Harrison and McCartney recalled the Marlon Brando movie: " The wildone" In one scene of the movie, Lee Marvins character tells Brando´s character, " The Beetles missed you." ! The reference to he " beetles" had been attributed variously as referring to the motorcycle gang or to the (as Paul McCartney called them) "motorcycle chicks.". The Beatles were Rockers in their early years in Liverpool.
Harrison and McCartney suspect that Stuart Stu´´Sutcliffe earlier bandmember, played as much a role in developing the name " Beatles" as did Lennon" (Perone 2009. London)
Good Luck to your Beatlesfestival ! (Hope The Moscow Times won´t back out like "Krusse" at Cuba in 1962)