From the TaMtAm to the Taleon Club

Sergey Chernov

Alexei Bovkun died at the end of May. He was the manager of the local rock’n’roll club Pereval. His death was reportedly drug-related. Pereval had closed even earlier (last year)–as have (for various reasons) the other underground clubs: TaMtAm, Art Clinic, Fish Fabrique, Indie, Ten Club, Rock Club, Wild Side, Zasada, Sterkh, Art Club, The Tunnel, and many others. Despite the negative aspects (drugs, brawls, heavy drinking), those clubs supported all that was new and interesting in local alternative music and kept it from croaking. Without them we wouldn’t have such popular rock and pop acts as Pep-See, Tequilajazzz., Leningrad, Deadushki, and Spleen. During the last few months more and more new strip clubs or casinos with saunas and fitness rooms like Taleon or Golden Dolls have opened, while almost nothing is heard of new rock clubs with live music. But–not as loudly as before–the spirit is still alive in such places as student-oriented rock and reggae club Moloko, the eclectic, "fashionable" Griboyedov, the "extreme" Polygon, and, finally, the new "drum’n’bass" club Mama, founded by the organizers of Russia’s first techno club, the Tunnel.

"If you want subculture St. Petersburg style, the full-on, hard-core Tam Tam Klub is where it is at. It’s not for the meek," wrote Lloyd Donaldson, editor of the St.Petersburg Press, in the first-ever review of the pioneering TaMtAm Club in the paper’s second issue (May 18, 1993). Though Donaldson had the name slightly wrong, his instincts were dead-on, even five years ago.

By that time, the hard-rocking club on St. Basil’s Island had existed for almost two years—since June 1991, when founder Seva Gakkel, one of the first Russian underground musicians to get a glimpse of the Western club scene, decided that St. Petersburg needed a venue to nurture the flourishing rock scene.

What followed from this first club was the slow but steady birth (and, in some cases, the subsequent death) of clubs throughout the city, from the rugged TaMtAm and its offshoots to posh casino clubs like the Taleon, state-of-the-art techno venues like PORT, a glut of rockabilly haunts and a smattering of gay clubs like the now-defunct Mayak and Club 69. But if Moscow has been the de facto nucleus of the pop and techno world in the last decade, St. Petersburg has always been, and in many ways continues to be, the cradle of Russian hard rock civilization. And TaMtAm is where it all started.

OLD PIONEER

Gakkel, in his late thirties when he opened the club, was a former cellist for the legendary rock outfit Akvarium. He suddenly realized that rock music doesn’t thrive in sports arenas, but in small clubs, where it recruits its first, young audiences. The St. Petersburg scene of the late 1980s reminded Gakkel of Liverpool in the late 1950s: back then, the Beatles had not yet appeared, but there were already lots of fledgling bands playing in all kinds of joints, creating a petri dish for the breeding of the Fab Four. Gakkel’s genius lay in his creating a club when nobody in Russia had any idea what the word club meant. Back in Soviet times, a "club" was more of a socialist cultural center: a hybrid library, cinema, and sports center with amateur arts and crafts circles—not exactly a recipe for excitement. Besides the fact, in 1991, there was even a whiff of nightlife in the city.

But at TaMtAm there was a sense of danger in the atmosphere. "The local skinheads cleared the dance floor with a dance routine that would turn heads even in London’s cesspool Slimelight Club," wrote Donaldson in his review. But it was just that rowdy but attractive individuality that drew crowds and cultivated young bands.

Fed up with what he considered the lyrical pomposity and sell-out mentality of the Russian rock monsters—especially of his alma-mater, Akvarium, which was then dominating the charts—Gakkel wanted to support sound-focused, off-the-wall bands. But even in 1991 the Russian rock that St. Petersburg had given birth to was already in decline. When Gakkel started TaMtAm, the vast majority of the musicians who played there were fifteen to twenty years younger than he was. Despite the crisis in Russian rock—which in the liberating late 1980s was a stadium-filling sensation, but in the early 1990s gave way to much more digestible lip-sync pop—Gakkel was open to new sounds and new names, thus keeping the rock and roll spirit alive.

DISCIPLES AND RIVALS

Gakkel’s example inspired many in the rock scene who tried, if not to copy TaMtAm, then to create something slightly refined.

In 1992, the Indie club began drawing crowds to the suburban Lenin Palace of Culture near Proletarskaya metro station. Not as radical or raucous as TaMtAm, the Indie Club was co-managed by Nikolai Gusev, the frontman of the ironic theater-rock band AVIA. Gusev took a so-called optimistic approach to entertaining a new generation of youth more oriented toward "fun" than their cautious or dissident older siblings.

Milder bands took the stage while soft porn videos rolled at the bar and university graduate DJ Nikita brought the house down with tapes of the Rolling Stones and Talking Heads. Slightly less motivated than Gakkel, the club founders called it quits in 1994 after a rift with the owners of the building.

The Tunnel club, which opened in May 1993, made a bigger splash—and died much harder. A techno club located in a bunker with its original cold-war-era design, the Tunnel drew on its paradoxical location, plus the help of artists like Timur Novikov and Sergei "Afrika" Bugaev, to attract attention. According to founder Andrei Haas, the club’s philosophy was to foster "cultural recreation for the progressive youth."

It’s difficult to say just how cultural this recreation was and how progressive the youth were, but the club quickly became a target for OMON, the police’s special paramilitary forces, who began to raid the club regularly. In fact, visits from OMON became a regular feature of St. Petersburg club life. Besides spoiling the party at the Tunnel, OMON often raided TaMtAm and, later, Club Griboyedov. During a particularly fierce Tunnel raid in August 1995, a visiting German DJ even lost a few teeth.

March 1994 saw the opening of the Ten Club on the banks of the murky Obvodny Canal. Guitarist Radion Chikunov of the band Ulitsy founded and managed it at a time when only two other rock clubs were active in the city—TaMtAm and the suburban and slightly off-center Wild Side, which the city’s health service closed last year. The Ten Club was famous for its Ten Fest awards ceremonies, in which the best club band in the city received the "Grip Your Cactus" award.

The scene changed drastically with the emergence of rock clubs in the heart of St. Petersburg, in the art commune on 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa. It was no longer necessary to stray from the center of town (TaMtAm was a more than fifteen minute walk from Vasileostrovskaya metro station as the two new Pushkinskaya venues, Fish Fabrique and Art Clinic, were central, comfy and safe. With a deliberately softer repertoire of bands and a slightly higher entrance fee, they discouraged the skinheads that haunted TaMtAm. Fish Fabrique, which opened in September 1994, was modeled after Berlin underground clubs and built with the help of German ex-pats. Founder Oleg "Fish" Labetsky had already spent a lot of time in the West and had experience managing the Russian-German venture Ost-West Cafe, which was closed in 1993 when a patron was taken in for throwing bottles from the club’s balcony. Fish Fabrique’s alternative interior design (the work of Labetsky and Denis Kuptsov from the ska-punk band Spitfire) and weekly English-language film showings attracted students and ex-pats with medium incomes. The club adopted traditions like second-hand fashion sales and celebrated Western holidays like Halloween and Christmas.

Across the courtyard from Fish Fabrique, dissident painter Kirill Miller opened the Art Clinic in April 1995 with a few unorthodox ideas in mind. Its walls were a showcase for the canvas-and-oil ruminations of Miller, among them scenes of nuns masturbating with models of the Kremlin Clock Tower, and of trolls wearing Mickey Mouse shirts hanging themselves.

At the time it was also the only place in town whose regular Saturday night floorshow featured a man peeing in a bucket (furthermore, he could sustain the flow for nearly three minutes).

And for those who had trouble getting into that groove, a "medical staff" of bartenders dressed in hospital blues would patrol the crowd offering up shots of an undisclosed liquor served from a beaker, the effects of which would be, well, more accurately described by medical professionals. The bar, called the Drugstore, was adorned with syringes and catheters. Miller once criticized the TaMtAm as a "pigsty," but the Art Clinic couldn’t boast extreme cleanliness: the crowd never seemed to obey the ‘Don’t piss on the floor’ sign in the restroom. But the Art Clinic, which closed when the Metro did, was a good neighbor to night-oriented Fish Fabrique, which accommodated Art Clinicals who wanted to stay out later and often drifted up the dark, dirty and graffiti-covered stairway to the fourth-floor Fabrique.

THE END OF AN ERA

The epoch of enthusiast-led rock clubs is long gone. TaMtAm was closed in 1996, losing the battle for its building, which was commercially attractive. The Ten Club was also evicted that same year. Art Clinic closed when the 10 Pushkinskaya building, occupied by the Free Arts Fund, was closed for major renovation. The Tunnel was closed in December 1997 when the factory which owned the bomb shelter discontinued the contract. Fish Fabrique, the last of the first-generation underground clubs, will close its doors in two weeks to be converted into a Eurostandard apartment.

Back in the desperate times of shock economic reforms in the early ’90s, only a sheer enthusiast could cope with managing a non-profit project. Now there is a host of nightclubs for every taste and income—lush mafia hangouts, striptease clubs, rockabilly bars and pricey gay clubs—but a few greats are still alive and kicking. The spirit lives on in places like Mama, which inherited director Andrei Haas from The Tunnel, and Griboyedov, which stole the fallout-shelter-club idea from The Tunnel. Managed by the trendy band Dva Samaliota, Griboyedova also combines the best of local rock music with refined techno vinyl spinning. Even Gakkel’s childhood friend and fellow Akvarium member Mikhail Vasilyev has recently launched the cozy club Garage.

"Rock and roll survived in clubs for five years," said Yury Shevchuk, the frontman of mega-group DDT, who organized a marathon festival last year to attract the public to small clubs. These five years have breathed new life in the ailing local rock music scene, providing venues and a starting point for such popular acts as Tequilajazzz, Spleen, and Pep-see, who started at TaMtAm but now have national hits.

Strangely enough, the Russian Beatles of the 1990s grew up entirely outside the scene: Mumii Troll, which has made the girls scream and the unsuspecting public gasp, come from Russia’s Far East. Apparently rock’n’roll will survive, whatever the climate.