Hippies in the Baltic [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 157-176]

170
MARK YOFFE
But the times have now changed, and the stormy emotional years
of the '70s have been left behind. Kalninsh himself has now become an
acknowledged master of Latvian music and a member of numerous republic
and all-union committees and music unions.
The most important factor that assisted the emergence of Baltic rockand-roll from the underground and fostered the national development of
this music were concerts and festivals.
It should be said that, in contrast to their fellows in art such as painters
or writers, the rock musicians were in the most disadvantageous situation.
Having painted a picture, you can show it to your friends; having typed
a book, you can circulate it in samizdat; but with music it is a different
matter, especially since rock-and-roll music is a mass medium and not
chamber music. Therefore the musicians need a stage, an auditorium, and
at least some elementary apparatus. Moreover, rock-and-roll presumes a
certain loudness-it is not quiet music. But in the Soviet Union they don't
like any kind of noise, and so a particular war was waged against loudness,
and the authorities persecuted and particularly hated rock-and-roll because
of it. In noise they apparently hear a threat-a threat that under cover
of this noise some terrifying, irreparable changes will occur. And so they
forbade loud playing and there were the inevitable semi-secret requirements
on the permissible number of decibels.
As a result, by the end of the '70s many musicians in the Soviet Union
had come to the conclusion that in the struggle for their existence they
needed a special form of samizdat, intended both for reading and for performance and listening.
The first category included all sorts of translations into Russian,
Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian from Western journals that dealt with
rock music news and discography, i.e., lists of records and audio tapes of
various musicians and groups, and finally the most important item-informational bulletins, published illegally by fans. In these bulletins music lovers
received news of the underground musical life of the Baltic area, and read
reviews of groups, individual musicians, concerts and recordings. Sometimes
these bulletins carried something like manifestos, frequently harsh and
nihilistically cynical (this was especially the case in the era of punk rock
in the late '70s) credos that expressed the philosophical and social orientation of the groups.
The second form of rock samizdat involved musical scores and texts
of songs, which were so necessary for performing and studying. They were
often transcribed aurally from records.
The third form of this samizdat was copies of records and tapes. The
underground Soviet tape-recording culture has long been famous for recordings of Russian bards and various emigre singers-Canadian Latvians, American Estonians, and so on-but when rock-and-roll entered the culture it
really reached its heyday. We know little about this underground rock