Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground (Doppel House Press), by Joanna and Madison Stingray

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Few rock albums are “daring” in any real sense, but Red Wave: Underground Bands from the USSR was one of the bravest. The 1986 compilation of Soviet groups put the musicians at risk in a nation where “official bands,” licensed to perform and record for the country’s state-owned record label, were carefully scrutinized for any hint of subversion. To play outside the system ran the risk of arrest.

The California woman responsible for that comp album tells her story in Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground. Joanna Stingray was an also-ran rocker in her homeland but, as a Beverly Hills kid, was connected just enough to deliver on her chutzpah. She visited Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire in 1984, seeing at first an unsmiling gray place whose monotony was broken only by the painted onion domes of Eastern Orthodox cathedrals, “psychedelic in a stormy sea of dominant colors.” She began to detect a richer culture, hidden “like the heart beneath the ribs,” and found its manifestation in the rock musicians with whom she fell in.

Some of those musicians, including Boris Grebenshchikov, would later record for Western labels—an impossible dream in 1984 on the eve of an unexpected glasnost. Those musicians had listened to rock on short wave radio, obtained some albums on the black market and cited Elvis, Dylan and The Beatles as primary influences. Stingray was floored by their thoughtful profundity—theirs was not a “wave” floating on shallow fashion statements—and makes the keen observation that oppression, coupled with lack of distraction, nurtured their art.