Fact #84976
When:
Short story:
American music promoter Bill Graham and Hungarian promoter Laszloh Hegedus put on a rock festival in Moscow, Russia, featuring Santana, The Doobie Brothers, Three Dog Night, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt and others. Tickets are not commercially available. Instead, they are distributed by the Russian authorities to Communist party members.
Full article:
Laszloh Hegedus (concert promoter) : Before Gorbachev, the Russians would invite artists like Elton John and UB40, and a lot of Italian artists, to come to Russia to play a handful of shows. When Gorbachev arrived, Glasnost started, they wanted to be politically a little bit more flexible, so it became possible to do a little more.
There was a special organization at the Ministry Of Culture, called Gosconcerts, which was very strictly controlled by the KGB, with very strict security, and they had to invite the artists. They had to do all of the organization, provide the visas, permits and everything.
In 1986, the ingenious international promoter and impresario Bill Graham contacted me because he was organizing, together with Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple Computers, and Gorbachev and his wife Raisa Gorbacheva who was president of the Soviet Peace Committee, an event called The Russian-American Peace Walk. It was a walk between St. Petersburg and Moscow, which lasted about three weeks, and Bill Graham undertook to organize a closing event.
So Bill Graham called me one day and asked for my help, to produce the closing concert in a stadium in Moscow but with Hungarian stage and production, and catering and everything else that was needed, because he had learned that there was nothing available in Russia to put on that kind of show.
There was a stadium on the outskirts of Moscow, and the Peace Committee arranged all the permits. They had huge power because of Gorbachev's wife being their president. So we brought in the whole production from Hungary.
Bill knew that we had everything because he had used it at some previous event in Budapest, and he had seen us at work several times in Hungary and elsewhere. We had become very good friends.
I spent two weeks with him in Moscow organizing this concert.
It was a very difficult festival because the Russian authorities were scared of these events. They thought it was going to be a revolution, and violence would erupt. Also, they could not satisfy the Americans' technical requirements. They would receive riders and they would not even understand the language. Even after translation, because rock'n'roll has its own vocabulary which a retired Russian policeman could not understand. There were a lot of such policemen working for the Committee. There was also a very poor working attitude among Russian workers. They were used to working just a couple, maybe three or four hours a day, after which they would disappear. There was also a very high level of alcoholism, they would drink so much vodka.
So we had to seek out only the very best workers, the ones who would work hard and who wanted to understand it, and were not drunk half the time. In the end, I managed to find those people.
Another concern was one which we were not able to handle. It was a small stadium and they would only allow 35,000 people in, but as a promoter I knew we could easily get 50,000 people into that stadium. They would not allow anybody onto the grass because they thought it was dangerous to let people close to the stage. So we fought over this. I told them we would have barriers, and it would all be secure, but it didn't matter what we told them, they still kept thinking in Russian standards which involved putting lines of policemen everywhere.
Bill Graham told them that there would be no concert if his artists had to go onstage and play to a line of policemen, because it would destroy the atmosphere. So they agreed to put the policemen in jogging .. training
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There was a special organization at the Ministry Of Culture, called Gosconcerts, which was very strictly controlled by the KGB, with very strict security, and they had to invite the artists. They had to do all of the organization, provide the visas, permits and everything.
In 1986, the ingenious international promoter and impresario Bill Graham contacted me because he was organizing, together with Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple Computers, and Gorbachev and his wife Raisa Gorbacheva who was president of the Soviet Peace Committee, an event called The Russian-American Peace Walk. It was a walk between St. Petersburg and Moscow, which lasted about three weeks, and Bill Graham undertook to organize a closing event.
So Bill Graham called me one day and asked for my help, to produce the closing concert in a stadium in Moscow but with Hungarian stage and production, and catering and everything else that was needed, because he had learned that there was nothing available in Russia to put on that kind of show.
There was a stadium on the outskirts of Moscow, and the Peace Committee arranged all the permits. They had huge power because of Gorbachev's wife being their president. So we brought in the whole production from Hungary.
Bill knew that we had everything because he had used it at some previous event in Budapest, and he had seen us at work several times in Hungary and elsewhere. We had become very good friends.
I spent two weeks with him in Moscow organizing this concert.
It was a very difficult festival because the Russian authorities were scared of these events. They thought it was going to be a revolution, and violence would erupt. Also, they could not satisfy the Americans' technical requirements. They would receive riders and they would not even understand the language. Even after translation, because rock'n'roll has its own vocabulary which a retired Russian policeman could not understand. There were a lot of such policemen working for the Committee. There was also a very poor working attitude among Russian workers. They were used to working just a couple, maybe three or four hours a day, after which they would disappear. There was also a very high level of alcoholism, they would drink so much vodka.
So we had to seek out only the very best workers, the ones who would work hard and who wanted to understand it, and were not drunk half the time. In the end, I managed to find those people.
Another concern was one which we were not able to handle. It was a small stadium and they would only allow 35,000 people in, but as a promoter I knew we could easily get 50,000 people into that stadium. They would not allow anybody onto the grass because they thought it was dangerous to let people close to the stage. So we fought over this. I told them we would have barriers, and it would all be secure, but it didn't matter what we told them, they still kept thinking in Russian standards which involved putting lines of policemen everywhere.
Bill Graham told them that there would be no concert if his artists had to go onstage and play to a line of policemen, because it would destroy the atmosphere. So they agreed to put the policemen in jogging .. training