BY ZACH DUNDAS
zdundas@wweek.com

photo by Basil Childers

Red Elvises, Starbugs, Electric Living

Berbati's Pan
SW Ankeny St., 248-4579
10 pm Friday, May 19.
Cover.

Yevstigneyev on the musical diet once prescribed for young Russians:
"Always classical music or old-fashioned dance bands. Our parents would give us tickets. We'd sell them and buy champagne with the proceeds."

Temkin on rock economics in the U.S.S.R.:
"My parents, who had good jobs, made 120 rubles a month. A vinyl record cost 70. So on Sunday you'd go to the subway stations and trade reel-to-reel tapes. You'd go home with one and make a copy, then bring it back the next week and get something else."

From the corner of the basement, it looks and sounds like rock American-style. Two guitarists maul loud red-meat chords. A brimming glass of wine teeters on the fresh-faced bassist's amp. The drummer looks like he could vaporize his smallest cymbal, no bigger than a milk saucer.

These four fill a Sellwood basement with a brand of rock that's in no mood for excuses. There's a hint of something "alternative," but this feels dirtier, like it was dragged across a barroom floor for its own damn good. Pretty fun, and after a couple of beers, even more fun.

One guitarist steps to the mic, uncorking a stream of foreign vowels punctured by whipcrack consonants. Andre Temkin shrieks in Russian, trilling and hissing like a house afire.

The Starbugs: two Russians and two Americans, a Molotov cocktail of straight-on Yank rock (courtesy of guitarist Dave Curtis and bassist Josh Paz) and earnest perestroika pop. With only a few party gigs and one Berbati's showcase on their résumé, they're still a little rough. At their best, though, they stampede like a well-oiled offensive line, guitars bristling, Paz and drummer Alexei Yevstigneyev plowing with plenty of force behind.

Finally. Superpower cooperation that works.

"We have beer and wine only, sorry."

Temkin apologizes on behalf of his friends Sergei and Grigori, just back from a liquor run, who have opted not to add to the mausoleum of empty vodka bottles upstairs. Instead, they break out Bridgeport and refresh Paz's red wine. Another spectator (another Alexei, a musician pal of Temkin's from St. Petersburg days) springs around the basement barefoot, proclaiming the band "absolutely fabulous," even seizing the mic for a verse.

This exuberant atmosphere plays well with the Starbugs' music, especially the cheerfully bloody free-for-all between Curtis' throaty English and Temkin's acid Russian.

"It's really interesting when he sings," says Curtis, a veteran of Portland bands Nymph 9 and Thistle. "It's definitely something completely different from what you hear on 94.7."

"I don't even know what the lyrics are, or what they mean," adds Paz. "If I had to guess, I'd say that it's like the blues. He's definitely working something out."

Although Temkin spits words like a punk, his singing holds more melancholy than simple teen angst. He and Yevstigneyev--both in the States for around five years--grew up in a passionately musical culture. Although Communists demonized rock as Western depravity, they found their way to sounds that spoke to restless kids in an unraveling country.

"There was always lots of music in St. Petersburg," says Temkin, who grew up in that elegant city when it was still called Leningrad. "But pop music...well, you were searching for something that was hidden. So, yes, we did bad things back in 1982. You'd get a friend with a hundredth-generation tape of Lou Reed or the Beatles and copy that."

"I remember the first time I saw Led Zeppelin," says Yevstigneyev, who's from Khabarovsk, 11 time zones from St. Petersburg. "A three-second clip in a propaganda film about the 'destruction of capitalist Europe.' I was like, wow, I have to see more of that.

"And KISS, well, we never heard them. But there were these stories of them killing chickens on stage. These guys would try to sell you photocopies of pictures that were so bad, you couldn't tell what was in them. They'd say, 'Oh, that's KISS.' And you'd go, 'Hm, OK.'"

For most of American rock's self-appointed prophets of rage, "oppression" means a girl broke up with them once and they hated their high-school principal. This Soviet stifling made slightly more potent fuel for rebellion.

"Rock was a form of social protest," Temkin says. "Music wasn't the first thing. The lyrics are the biggest deal."

"God, man," Paz chimes in. "My mom cut me off from MTV when I was a kid, and I thought that was bad."

While Temkin honed his lyrical tastes, Yevstigneyev hammered away on borrowed drums for a band called Prosto, which visited Portland in 1992 on Lewis & Clark College's invitation. "I figured here I might be able to at least buy a drum set," he says.

After the typical formative period of jamming, partying and hanging out, Starbugs became a more serious endeavor late last year. Paz joined up a few months ago, filling out the lineup.

"Now that we've got a solid bass player and we've been writing some more songs, we're ready to go," says Curtis. "We're ready to play out, ready to record, ready for all of that."

While nuances may occasionally disappear in translation-- "They try to teach us Russian when we're all drunk, which never works," Curtis says--the Starbugs seem intent on pushing and pummeling their way through Portland's music scene. It would also seem that the hardest part is already behind them.

"You had to do everything," Temkin, who now works as a sound engineer, says of the old struggle to rock back home. "There were no distortion pedals for sale. If you wanted a distortion pedal, you had to build one.

"Lack of rock made us love these things even more."