I can't remember the day here in 1990. I wasn't in town to see the funeral and the mass hysteria at the cemetery. The news reached me in New York in a cross-country phone call from Los Angeles, and the words were hardly audible through the sobs of Joanna Stingray, an American-Russian pop singer and a mutual friend. But I do remember very well the anniversaries that followed. There was no way you could forget the day or misplace those kids then. They were all over. On the streets and in parks, coming from all over the country, sleeping in train stations and basements. All in black, people throughout the city and the nation were mourning their Last Hero. The vigil in the cemetery continued day and night for years. I wonder if they're still there.
Tsoi, the leader of Kino, at the time the biggest Russian rock band by far, was not the first of the rock idols to die. Neither was he the last. Resting in peace in the city's cemeteries -- Tsoi in Bogoslov, Mike Naumenko of Zoopark in Volkov, Sasha Bashlachev (or Sashbash, as he was known) in Kovalev -- the musicians that made Leningrad/St. Petersburg the capital of Russian rock have turned it into its graveyard and pantheon.
Untimely deaths are as inseparable from rock and roll as sex and drugs. They started back in antiquity with Buddy Holly's plane crash and continue into the present.
These deaths effectively pave their victims' path into sanctity. Rock'n'roll is all about image, after all, and nothing changes an artist's image as much as an early death. It's like the aging survivors of a war who feel almost inferior or guilty thinking about those who died... Cruel and unfair, the rule wouldn't give up its grip.
The late 1980s death wave in Russian rock caused Vladimir Shakhrin of the rock group Chaif to come up with a song which was both a tribute to the dead and an anthem to the living:
"You die today and tomorrow they'll say you were a poet," he wrote. "Cry about him while he's still alive, love him the way he is."
I made a phone call to those who know and found out that the vigil at Bogoslov cemetery continues.
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