The band will play a three-hour concert with two different lineups at Tochka on Saturday. In a rare chance to see the Naive of past and present, most of the original lineup -- Kochetkov, Ivanov and guitarist Ruslan Stupin -- will play an hour-long set with songs from the band's first two albums: "Switchblade Knaife [sic]" and "Beer for Naive." This will be followed by a set from the current lineup, led by Ivanov.
Kochetkov, who now lives in San Francisco, has not played with the band for 14 years. He traveled to Moscow especially for the gig. In an e-mail this week, he wrote that the concert will be "awesome." The band "is like a family," he said. "You can't run away from it."
The band's founders, Kochetkov, now 39, and Ivanov, now 40, began playing together as an antidote to the daily grind of the army, where they were serving as radio interceptors monitoring military planes.
"Naive started mostly because we didn't want to become hazing victims," Kochetkov said. "I bought my first guitar with money from selling punk and metal vinyl. I brought that guitar to the army."
"Until our superiors began to understand what type of music we were playing, they were actually supportive and even let us play for the troops," Ivanov said in a recent interview.
Despite the band's military origins, Ivanov declares himself a pacifist.
"I personally am against violence and I tried never to touch any weapons during my service," he said, "For this reason, I was given jobs like feeding the pigs and washing the dishes."
Naive released its first single, "Tanks-Punks," and its debut album in 1990. The band caught the attention of Tim Yohannon, owner of a San Francisco-based punk fanzine and record label called Maximum RocknRoll. He was impressed by Naive's video to "Tanks-Punks" and arranged for "Switchblade Knaife" to be released on his label -- the first Russian punk record to come out in the United States.
In 1991, Naive performed in front of the White House in Moscow during the failed coup. Despite their anti-communist stance, they had to run from an angry mob after chanting "Boris [Yeltsin] is an asshole!" from the stage.
In its lyrics, Naive rails against life in Russia and commercialism in the music business, sometimes referring to specific events. For example, the now-defunct Russian edition of British music magazine New Musical Express (NME) printed an interview with Ivanov in a column sponsored by a soft drink, without the musician's knowledge or permission.
"When I asked them why they did this, they basically treated me like I should understand that I am a nobody and that I was lucky that they even printed it," Ivanov recalled.
"This was completely unacceptable, so I wrote a song called 'NME Fuck Off,' and two months later the Russian version went out of print. Naive always tells people that we shut that magazine down!"
Naive plays Sat. at 7 p.m. at Tochka, located at 6 Leninsky Prospekt. Metro Oktyabrskaya. Tel. 737-7666.
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