PLAYING THE SOUND OF FREEDOM FOR A MILLION PEOPLE
AC/DC had just finished our last gig of the world tour in the Barcelona Olympic Arena. Crowd’s going mad. We were in the dressing room feeling good, manager rushes in—we’ve just had a call from Russia.
Us: “Who the hell do we know in Russia?”
The manager: “No, from Russia itself.”
Us: “You mean the country?”
The manager: “Yeah, the country.”
Us: “Piss off.”
Actually, he wasn’t kidding. Boris Yeltsin had just outcouped a coup and was standing on a tank promising the young people who had stood by him anything they wanted. “AC/DC!” they screamed. So they phoned us and asked us to be there in three days. Now, my charity and imagination stretch only so far, meaning how much? And how are we going to get twelve trucks and six buses from Barcelona to Moscow and set up in three days? It would be easier to shoe a camel.
Anyway, some mention of gold and all the caviar you could eat seemed to do the trick. (Our manager liked caviar. I won’t mention his name, because he was a dyed-in-the-wool twat.) Now, how the hell were we going to get there? “No problem!” said the voice on the phone. “We fly down three Antonovs to pick you up.” Well, they flew in next morning. Probably the first Russian military aircraft in Spain since the Civil War. The band flew Aeroflot and, yup, it’s as bad as they say. Outside toilets, hammer-throwing stewardesses who tell you to “pees off” in Russian, all the cheap vodka they can sell you. And our air crew were cranky because the coup had failed. We took off. The pilot did a barrel roll just to prove the plane really was an ex-Tupolev bomber. He needn’t have bothered. I mean, I’ve never been on an airliner with a Perspex nose and a tail-gun position.
We made ourselves comfortable in our bolted-in deck chairs, and off we went. I threw the air hostess a smile and she threw me a bowl of hot Stroganoff. As we approached Moscow, the stewardesses seemed to look much smarter. They must have shaved before landing. Or was it the effect of the vodka . . .
Anyway, wow! Here we were in friggin’ Moscow! Who woulda thunk it, me, Brian “Dunston-on-Tyne” Johnson? We got to passport control expecting the worst. The rest of the lads, worriers all, said to me, “Jonna, you go first.”
The lightbulbs in Russia are all 11½ watt, so it all looks a bit, well, Russian—as gloomy as Gene Simmons’s next career move. The guard fella took one look at me and screamed, “TOVARICH!”
I said, “No, my name’s Brian.”
Then all these other fellas came and picked me and the rest of the band up on their shoulders and carried us through to the main arrivals hall. We couldn’t believe it—there were thousands of people, who were supposed to be the bad guys, cheering and shouting. We were put into our cars—the whole point of this story—which were ZIL limos. The real deal. The ones in the movies (the ones that separate the proles from the Politburo). I wonder who has sat in this bugger before me. The cars were just as ugly as American Cadillacs and just as daft. The ride felt like two wrestlers were shagging each other in the boot. We had our own escort—a magnificent fella on a Harley, I swear, with a buffalo head with horns instead of a helmet and a hide down his back. I’m sure he was a descendant of Genghis Khan. Chrissie Hynde wouldn’t have liked it, but I wish I’d had my camera.
The gig went ahead as planned at Tushino military airfield. Our crew was magnificent and TimeLife were there to record it. We were told it would not rain, as they had aircraft spraying the clouds with “Russian secret vepon.”
Our dressing tent was just that—with duckboards and two 11½-watt bulbs. The tour manager kept coming in and saying, “There’s half a million out there, and they’re still coming.” Bloody hell, that’s a lot of comrades.
Then, half an hour later: “Lads, there’s over a million. The authorities are getting nervous, so they’ve drafted in thirty thousand armed soldiers.” I thought, are you fuckin’ kidding me? That’s dangerous. I really needed to take a leak, so I went outside and peed against a concrete pillar with a rusty ball on top. I was admiring all the old and new aircraft at the airbase in the gathering gloom when two big buggers with proper guns started shouting at me, “Nyet, nyet, capitalist riock ’n’ riolla, nyet!”
They were quite peeved. As I pissed, I nearly shat myself. After our translators had calmed them down with much talk and a carton of Marlboros, I asked what the problem was. “You just pissed on Sputnik.”
Pissing aside, it was the biggest concert anyone had ever played. The mood of the crowd was cautious at first, then very feel-good, and then, when the rock ’n’ roll started, to these people it was the sound of freedom.