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| UPDATED: 6 / 25 / 2002 |
  Nostrovia, baby! Russki rockers Mirumir warm up Portland for the legendary Russian band Aquarium.Russian rendezvous A musical meeting in St. Petersburg repeats itself in Portland Most Portlanders will draw a blank if they hear the name Boris Grebenshikov. But sidle up to any Russian you meet here, ask about Grebenshikov, and you’ll quickly learn that he’s Russia’s biggest rock star. A local Russian language newspaper — cluttered with ads for chiropractors, cellphones and auto glass repair — has the legendary Grebenshikov’s face splashed across its cover. A poster for his band, Aquarium, is taped to the window of Restaurant Russia, located on a scruffy stretch of Southeast Foster Boulevard where Portland’s burgeoning Russian community has been setting up shop. “Everybody knows of this group,” restaurant co-owner Nadia Pereverzina explains in a husky Russian accent. “They were underground. They were persecuted for a very long time. But people went anyway — into very dirty places — to hear them. In Russia, everybody counted on Grebenshikov. He was a pioneer.” Grebenshikov, whose subversive rock music draws from Russian folk traditions, has recorded nearly 70 albums in his pre- and post-perestroika career. Until the cultural loosening brought about by perestroika and glasnost, Aquarium’s music was driven underground. Grebenshikov’s poetic, symbolic lyrics (sometimes compared to Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen) are intensely meaningful for his fans. Yelena Hansen, a program director for a local social service agency, will be in attendance when Aquarium performs for the first time in Portland. She first heard the band in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early ’80s. “They were huge pop stars for young people,” Hansen says. “They were really famous — not just because of the music but because they had their own political agenda. At that time it was very brave. It was a revolution in music.” Here at home … Portland’s own Russki-American rock combo, Mirumir, will open for Aquarium. The rambunctious punk rock band, an evolution of the now-departed Starbugs, comprises three Russians and two Americans. Mirumir’s name is an ironic usage of a Cold War-era slogan that means “peace to the world.” Led by charismatic Leningrad exile Andre “Angry” Temkin, the band is a high-energy blend of bohemian bombast and international intrigue. From fist-pumping rock anthems to mock-serious love ballads, the band delivers most of its songs in Russian. Mirumir has an equally enthusiastic acoustic project, the Very Shaggin’ Band, whose specialty is Russian folk music — played, they explain, for the purposes of seducing women. Mirumir rehearses in the KaratePro building in Southeast Portland, a warehouse divided into rehearsal spaces for bands. Inside the dim studio, the hyperkinetic Temkin takes a break, looks up with a satisfied sigh and says: “You know what would be perfect life? Get up. Go on long run in the park. Then rehearsal. Play guitar. Then party all night! Ha ha ha!” Temkin, who emigrated from St. Petersburg, has lived in Portland for seven years. As a teen-ager, he met Grebenshikov in a St. Petersburg coffeeshop called Saigon, where dissidents and artists gathered. The record stores in St. Petersburg at the time sold only classical music, Temkin explains. “You could see classical music concerts every day, supercheap, but that was it,” he says. “Rock tapes were distributed from tape recorder to tape recorder. If your friend had a copy, then you could tape it. “It was always very, very hard to get into his concerts because the government was not allowing people to do that. I’d heard that if you asked musicians you could get them to come over to your place — you could collect some money and give it to the musicians.” So, Temkin approached Grebenshikov in the cafe and asked him to play in a friend’s tiny apartment. “I did this kind of thing for a while,” Temkin says. “Several concerts. Different places, different locations. I almost got myself in trouble with the special police; the government didn’t let you do this kind of thing because we were supposedly making money — but there really was no money being made.” Hello again Years later and 5,006 miles away, Temkin will have a chance to play with his rock idol. And this time everyone gets paid. Temkin’s Mirumir comrades are bassist Roman Tchamkin, a mustachioed music major from Moscow; the devilishly suave drummer and songwriter Alexey Yevstigneev; introspective American guitarist Eli “Scotty” Scott, and the fetching Natasha Fox or “the American girl with the Russian name.” Never far from a 10-watt power horn, her comrades say she is picking up the Russian language like a native daughter. The band brought Fox into the Mirumir fold, Temkin says, because they liked her personality. “We thought, ‘Hey, this girl is kind of cool.’ So we just hang out couple of times. See bands. I was like, ‘Can you sing? You’ve got a really great personality. Why don’t we (his voice trails off) … And we were all of a sudden new band.” Yevstigneev says Russian teen-agers in Portland are just starting to catch on to Mirumir, too: “You have Russian punk rockers on one side and American rockers on the other. It creates a certain charge. “It is just starting. They live in the outskirts, so it takes them awhile to get downtown. But we feel it. It’s definitely starting.” Contact Michaela Bancud at mbancud@portlandtribune.com. |