The moment Billy Joel brought rock to Soviet Russia and made history
Ever since music collided irreversibly with activism back in the hippie days of the 1960s, a debate has waged over whether rock and roll music can truly change the world. Whatever the truth of that matter, the Soviet Union certainly feared that it could, throughout the mounting cultural conflict of the Cold War period.
Like virtually every other aspect of Western culture, rock and roll fell under heavy restrictions behind Eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain. From the relatively conservative rockabilly of the 1950s to the defiant abrasion of punk rock that arrived some years later, rock music – particularly American rock music – was explicitly banned in the USSR, and its state-owned Melodiya label were prevented from sharing those sounds with Soviet audiences, for fear that rock might sow the seeds of rebellion among its population, undermining the communist way of life.
Seemingly, though, even the ever-watchful eye of the Soviet state could not totally eradicate rock and roll. Through a complex series of bootleggers and music smugglers, the music that was revolutionising the West soon made it into the USSR, albeit through scratchy bootlegs and lo-fi tape-to-tape recordings. Officially, rock was forbidden in the Soviet Union, but that didn’t stop its people from getting their hands on the records.
By the time that the pop age of the mid-1980s rolled around, the state seemed to realise that they were fighting a losing battle against Western influences, and so Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the policy of Glasnost – essentially, allowing more Westernised influences into the USSR, including rock music. In 1988, Bon Jovi’s New Jersey became the first American rock album to be officially released in Soviet Russia, but one year prior, the nation hosted none other than Billy Joel.
Joel had fostered plans to visit the USSR ever since his successful trip to Cuba in 1979 – seemingly hatching a plan to visit all nations that the USA declared enemies. However, it wasn’t until the Glasnost era that those plans were actually able to come to fruition. So, in 1987, Billy Joel, along with his wife and child, made the trip to Russia, where the ‘Piano Man’ songwriter planned to perform six shows, split between Moscow and then-Leningrad.
“It was the great unknown,” Billy Joel said of the tour during a Newsday interview in 2014. “We were terrified. It was still the Cold War. But we were literally offering a musical bridge to our cultures, and we knew that was important.” Still, that tour of cultural importance didn’t always go exactly to plan.
After all, this was the first experience of live rock music that the many people in Soviet Russia had ever encountered; on the very first night in Moscow, Joel had to instruct the audience on how to act, constantly urging them to move closer to the stage. Things didn’t pick up on the second night, either, when Joel became so frustrated with the house lights being left on for his set that he famously flipped a keyboard in a huff – not exactly the actions of a cultural diplomat.
Nevertheless, Joel went on to complete the rest of the tour, his image as a bringer of peace only slightly impacted by his onstage outbursts. Regardless of which way you spin it, his 1987 visit to the USSR was nonetheless revolutionary.
You could even go as far as to say that Joel’s visit was instrumental in breaking down the barriers of totalitarianism within the USSR, opening up its population to an entirely new way of thinking, feeling, and expressing themselves. It is no surprise that the Berlin Wall was toppled almost exactly a year later, in doing so continuing the domino effect which eventually led to the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Billy Joel, of course, cannot be credited with single-handedly taking down the communist nation or its surrounding republics, but he did play a major role in shifting the sands of the Cold War and dismantling the kind of barriers that had been set on both sides of the conflict. In the end, then, what’s one flipped piano?
