Podolsk-87
September 1987: the largest festival of the Soviet underground, and the performance that Oblachny Kray fans still return to. Lineup, recording, full video and photographs in one place.
Key facts
- Festival
- Podolsk-87, September 11–13, 1987
- Place
- Green Theatre, Podolsk (near Moscow)
- Scale
- Over 20 bands from 15 cities
- Audience
- About five thousand, in a venue with a formal capacity of 3,500 (per the festival archive podolsk87.ru)
- Also on the bill
- DDT, Nautilus Pompilius, Zoopark, Televizor, Kalinov Most, Brigada S, Veselye Kartinki
- Oblachny Kray performed
- September 12, 1987
- Lineup
- Sergey Bogaev (guitar, vocals), Oleg Rautkin, Nikolai Lyskovsky, joined for the festival by Dmitry Leontiev of Autodafe (drums) and Andrey Lukin of Zapasny Vyhod (bass)
- Recording
- Album "Concert in Podolsk"
The performance
By the band's own history, Podolsk was the peak of its live career: the strongest lineup the group ever had, Rautkin swinging his mic stand, and Bogaev finishing the set by smashing his "Ural" guitar on the stage. The concert was recorded and later circulated and released as the live album "Concert in Podolsk". Read the full story in the band history.
A living legend of the Soviet rock tape underground — Arkhangelsk's OBLACHNY KRAY — began with an agonizingly long tune-up: no joke, only the fifth concert of the band's entire history! Bogaev was dressed in black leather trousers and a black T-shirt proudly emblazoned with a blue "Metallica" across the chest — tall, lanky, and drunk. In his hands trembled a red "Ural" guitar.
Never quite in tune, KRAY launched in anyway. Barefoot and ferocious, Rautkin flew onto the stage, pulled off his signature two-metre leap, landed in a puddle, and flapped like a wounded pheasant. After that mishap, his stage persona for the rest of the show combined unrestrained fury with skittishness. Meanwhile the sound engineer (Misha Simonov), swearing under his breath, wrestled agonizingly with a complicated mix, and by the fifth song (of seven played) unexpectedly cracked it — after which "Sad Story" suddenly crashed down in all its epic glory on a crowd that had considerably cooled off by then. The contrast was phenomenal: in a matter of seconds the sound went from complete crap to nearly the most powerful mix of the whole festival. The dazzled theatre broke into a unified chorus of "My Soul Is Full of You," and in this atmosphere of unrestrained musical monumentalism, both a badly fumbling Bogaev and all the other fruits of KRAY's freewheeling sloppiness somehow got lost in the mix.
The concert ended with "Mother of Order," during whose finale KRAY got thoroughly lost, but the sheer power of the sound turned it all into a kind of programmatic cacophony on a Beethovenian scale. On the final chords, Bogaev tore the "Ural" off himself, grabbed it by the strap, slammed it against the floor a couple of times with indescribable fury, and then hurled it across the entire stage like a harpoon, putting everything that had built up inside him into the throw. Tracked by a dozen video cameras, the "Ural" triumphantly completed its flight, its neck slamming into a PA speaker. There was a deafening roar, caps flew through the air, the equipment's owners groaned, armband-wearing stewards scrambled about, and presiding over it all was a proud Rautkin, still bellowing into the mic like an incantation: "That's how it's done! That's how it's done!" On this delirious note, Saturday's afternoon concert came to an end.
From a 1987 eyewitness account of the performance
Multi-camera film with the soundboard mix
The best-quality record of the performance: several cameras and the sound taken directly from the sound engineers mixing desk (28 min 38 s).
Full concert video
Fragments: Russian Folk Song, Mother of Order. All videos
Recording: track list
- Opening Remarks (Comet)
- Union of Composers
- My Afghanistan
- Our Common Bitch
- Monster Attack on the Biped Individual
- A Sad Story
- Russian Folk Song
- Mother of Order (1917)
- Closing Remarks
Photos
