ROB TANNENBAUM (journalist; co-author, I Want My MTV) The Moscow Music Peace Festival, which featured Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Skid Row, the Scorpions, and a few Soviet bands, was Doc McGhee making the best of a very bad situation. In 1988, he was convicted of helping to import twenty tons of marijuana, which is a whole lot of marijuana. I mean, a huge amount of marijuana. He got a $15,000 fine and a suspended sentence of five years, and as one condition of his probation, he started the Make a Difference Foundation, which promoted anti-drug messages. Doc then found a way for him and his bands to personally benefit from running this anti-drug foundation, and the way he did that was by bringing them to Russia, where rock bands didn’t exist. Russia was, except for China, the largest untapped market in the world, and Doc had to imagine, if all went well, that Bon Jovi would sell another fifteen million copies of Slippery When Wet there.
OZZY OSBOURNE Doc McGhee came around to my house and he says, “We’re going to Moscow! I’ve got a private plane.” And he asked me to this Moscow peace summit thing. They were just in that perestroika stage over there. Whatever that means.
DOC MCGHEE Remember that the kids in the Soviet Union were being put in jail for listening to this music. They would trade cassette tapes on street corners and most of it was Black Sabbath and Scorpions, Deep Purple, stuff like that. They maybe got a little bit of Bon Jovi. Probably not. It didn’t seem like it. But it was really just Ozzy and the Scorpions that were in Russia.
ROB TANNENBAUM Doc didn’t have any delusions. He was taking them to Russia because he thought they could sell more records and make more money. He was a businessman and hair metal was a product. Like weed was a product.
RUDOLF SCHENKER The Moscow Music Peace Festival was organized by our manager, Doc McGhee, and Stas Namin, who was a big name in Russia—he was a music guy, and his uncle was the inventor of the MiG, the fighter jet. Also, his grandfather had been a leader in the Soviet Union. The two of them put this thing together.
KLAUS MEINE The whole Moscow Music Peace Festival was really like a Russian Woodstock. For us as a German band, with all the success we experienced in the United States, then to go to Russia, was a very emotional thing. Because our parents, their generation, they went to Russia fighting. And we came to Russia with guitars instead of guns.
RUDOLF SCHENKER One year before, we had played ten shows in Leningrad and now we were playing this festival together with Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne, Cinderella, Skid Row, Mötley Crüe, and a few Russian bands like Gorky Park and Brigada S. You know, we had a much better chance to look into the Russian soul. We felt the whole situation was changing in the young generation. Playing the Peace Festival was for us a fantastic chance to see the changes from ’88 to ’89.
ROB TANNENBAUM Doc is a very genial guy. Welcoming, hilariously funny, and gregarious—until he’s not. He’s short and stout. He looks like a man to be reckoned with. You don’t fuck with Doc.
MARK WEISS He’s always chill. He’s a listener, you know? He listens and then, behind closed doors, he acts.
DOC MCGHEE We never had any permits or anything. Gorbachev and his people never said yes, never said no. Later on, it was told to me by people very close to him that that’s exactly what it was. He wanted it to happen, but he couldn’t condone it.
LARRY MAZER Obviously, Doc was in the news for the whole marijuana thing. The concert was part of the settlement.
SHARON OSBOURNE I think it was something about a car that was loaded down with drugs. I can’t remember the deal. I don’t know whether he was arrested in Florida or Arizona, some fucking state. But it looked good to the state that Doc is trying to do this, trying to do that. “Look at the good we’re doing!” He got a gold star for fucking putting this show on.
TICO TORRES (drummer, Bon Jovi) It was an anti-drug thing and I think there was more drugs on that plane than in the whole country of Russia.
JEFF LABAR That plane ride was the longest, funnest plane ride I’ve ever had.
ROB AFFUSO It was supposed to be alcohol- and drug-free. But we take off and everybody starts smoking joints, opening beers, it becomes a party.
ZAKK WYLDE We went from LAX to Newark, picked up a bunch of guys there, then went from Newark to Heathrow, then Heathrow to Moscow. So it’s like thirty-plus hours of just boozin’.
KLAUS MEINE They picked us up in London. I don’t know why we had to go to London to go to Moscow—they could have picked us up in Germany, dammit! But we were the last band that boarded the plane, and we got on and there were a lot of people drunk or drugged out or whatever. But there was a very special vibe.
DOC MCGHEE It was “Make a Difference” … but then it was also a “Make a Different Drink” kind of thing, too. So, you know …
SHARON OSBOURNE Doc had some doctor that was traveling with us that had all the shit. It was like being on a plane with two hundred gremlins. And you know how you never put water on a gremlin? It was like, you never give these people alcohol. And the joke of it was, it was meant to be against drugs and drink, this whole festival. Because this was getting Doc a get-out-of-jail-free card. So anyway, we go and, Jesus Christ, the plane ride was a fucking nightmare because everybody was doing coke. Everybody was drinking.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO I think the only people that were sober on that were Mötley Crüe. That’s pretty crazy.
ZAKK WYLDE Ozzy was sober then, too, and mom [Sharon Osbourne] was with him. So he was on his best behavior.
OZZY OSBOURNE We got on the plane and it was like the bar in Star Wars. We were at the back and people were swinging on the bloody bins at the front, just crazy. We were supposed to be the sober American rock ’n’ roll bands. I was sitting next to a journalist, I can’t remember his name, but he turned to Sharon and he says, “Do you think there’s alcohol on board?” I wet myself laughing. Everyone had gone to the duty-free shop and loaded up for the flight ’cause there wasn’t any on the plane.
ROB AFFUSO Sebastian was just so hyper, you know? I was excited as well but he couldn’t contain it. A couple hours before landing, Ozzy … it’s pitch-black in the plane and he says to Sebastian, “Do you ever shut the fuck up?”
SHARON OSBOURNE Sebastian must have been the youngest one there. He was just a kid. And he was trying to keep up with the big boys and of course he couldn’t. And so he was singing, singing, and, you know when you over-sing? It’s like, “Shut the fuck up, kid. We all know you can sing. Now shut the fuck up!” And of course he wouldn’t. Ozzy was going insane and going, “Put something in his fucking mouth so he can’t sing!” And I remember Sebastian was laying full-out on the floor of the plane singing.
JEFF LABAR Skid Row had roommates and not their own rooms. Sebastian was rooming with Rob and I think Rob kicked him out, so he spent the rest of the week with me.
MARK WEISS Before we got off the plane I went to everyone and I just screamed at them. I said, “Look, this is history in the making. I want to document this. This is the Beatles landing in America, you know?” I quickly ran in front of everybody and down the steps and I waited for them to come down. And as they walked down one at a time, I would snap their pictures.
RACHEL BOLAN We landed at what I believe was a military airport, so we never got a stamp on our passports, nothin’. We went in and it was basically like walking into someone’s house.
JEFF LABAR We’re like, “Wait a minute—what the hell just happened here?” We just got off the plane into a 1950s movie. Everything was dark and dank and no color. It’s like, “This is like a black-and-white movie.”
RACHEL BOLAN Everything was just so dank and gray. And I mean, this hotel was decrepit, man. Turn on the lights and you’d see hundreds of cockroaches go run and hide, you know?
JEFF LABAR A gigantic historic Moscow hotel from hell. They had terrible toilet paper, so Doc made sure we all had a lot of toilet paper. We brought so much with us. We brought our own doctor, we brought our own food, we brought our own catering, we brought our own toilet paper, we brought our own water … everything to sustain all the bands for a week.
WAYNE ISHAM (video director) All these bikers came and surrounded the hotel, and Ozzy was there and he had to come out and talk to them.
TICO TORRES They sat in the front and revved their bikes and kind of woke up most of the people that were in the hotel.
WAYNE ISHAM It was like in Mad Max, and Ozzy was the guy who speaks to all of them.
RACHEL BOLAN The KGB followed us everywhere, anywhere where there were cameras. Like, if you were filming a segment for MTV, the KGB would follow you around. And the militia was always not far behind.
JEFF LABAR I remember seeing guys on the rooftops across the street watching us with binoculars.
SCOTTI HILL Randy Castillo, the drummer from Ozzy’s band, was my running partner over there. I don’t know how but we wound up in this stairwell in the hotel, and we came to the top and walked out into the hall and there was a room there, like a surveillance room. Like something out of a movie. And it was no secret that we were being watched, eavesdropped on, all that. And we were like, “Wow, this is like cloak-and-dagger shit.” That got us all pumped up so we were like, “Let’s go see what else we can find!” And we found another stairwell and we found our way up to a huge balcony with a beautiful view of Moscow. And you know of course we’d been drinking. And we kept going up and the stairwells kept getting more and more narrow. We got to the point where it was a ladder going straight up. And we popped through the top and we were in the tiny little bell tower of this giant hotel. There were four little windows up there, all the glass was broken up. And I remember there was just a folding chair. And we felt like the first guys on the moon.
JEFF LABAR The dumbest thing I did was dropping my pants in Red Square.
KLAUS MEINE Skid Row, they were the first band on and Sebastian went out onstage and was just screaming, “Hey motherfucker! Take this!” You know? That was quite something.
ROB AFFUSO I never did a concert at eleven a.m. like that. And of course, we’d be up all night with everybody else in Moscow drinking. That made an eleven o’clock show kind of difficult. But we went out and did it.
SCOTTI HILL We played two days in a row. And the morning of the second show I remember our tour manager coming into the hotel room and putting Rob Affuso in the shower and shaking me out of bed. Because we weren’t moving. But we had to get to the show. And I was hurtin’, man. I was hurtin’ real bad. So I get to the show, get changed, I’m walking to the stage and, you know, you feel it coming. You start sweating, you get that feeling in the back of your throat. And it’s like, “Here it comes. I’m just gonna let it rip before I go up there.” So I puke, and then I walk up the stairs to the stage and my guitar tech at the time, he puts out some water for me. He goes, “There’s two glasses of water and one glass of vodka. See if you can guess which one the vodka’s in.” It’s like, “You motherfucker!” But playing hungover was just how it was done for a long time.
WAYNE ISHAM It was so interesting, this dynamic between all the bands.
SHARON OSBOURNE Doc had promised everyone spots, you know? He’d be like, “Yeah, sure, you can play when it’s dark.” Fucking this and that. And so everybody had been going with the thought that they’re going to close the show. And of course Bon Jovi closed the show. And with the greatest respect to Bon Jovi, the Russians had no fucking idea who he was. But it was being filmed for MTV, and MTV knew who he was.
WAYNE ISHAM There were a lot of egos because that’s what it’s all about. Poor Doc had to deal with all of them.
SHARON OSBOURNE All I can remember is Ozzy saying, “Tell Doc I’ll just shut up and play where he wants me to play if he gives me coke!”
DOC MCGHEE We were doing an MTV broadcast and MTV wanted Bon Jovi to be the headliner, because at that time they were the biggest rock band in the world. So then we had Ozzy, and he actually closed, and the Scorpions were just before Bon Jovi. And in the broadcast we had to flip-flop it for MTV and Bon Jovi closed.
RACHEL BOLAN The fans kinda knew the Scorpions, but Black Sabbath was really big on the Soviet black market. So between every song of just about every band, until Ozzy got on and probably after he got off, everyone was just chanting, “Ozzy! Ozzy!” They didn’t care about anyone that was there except for Ozzy. But they really enjoyed just having a full day of music, which is something that probably most of those people never did before.
STAS NAMIN (co-organizer, Moscow Music Peace Festival) When Ozzy Osbourne appeared, the fans bum-rushed the stage, and somebody even threw a bottle onstage. The guarding troops were ready to start suppression, and the festival had to be stopped. I asked the general to let me talk to the crowd and came onstage. I said, “You are humans, not pigs. Look around and block those who don’t behave themselves properly. And now if you still want the festival to go on, back up three steps, sit down on the grass, and relax.” And they did.
JEFF LABAR It was like feeding starving children! It was unbelievable.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO The experience was just unparalleled. To be a twenty-four-year-old kid in Moscow, where apparently they’re supposed to be, you know, the devil, the enemy, all that stuff? And there you’re in Lenin Stadium, playing in front of seventy-five thousand people, watching the Olympic torch get lit for the first time since the 1980 Olympics, when we boycotted them as a nation. It was wild, man.
ZAKK WYLDE I was mostly hanging out with Snake, getting blasted, and we were just laughing our asses off, going, “I can’t believe we’re here!” Compared to being in Jersey, with Dave working at Garden State Music and me playing guitar at home alone, it was pretty insane.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO I’m not a political person by any stretch. But I could feel the enormity of the moment.
LARRY MAZER These kids had seen freedom for the first time and they were not gonna stand for this fucking communism thing at all. I came home and I said to my wife, “I’m telling you right now, the Soviet Union will be over within five years.” But I was wrong. It was over in three.