The peculiar moment when Elton John covered Motown in a Soviet restaurant
It must have been a sight to behold, catching one of the West’s biggest stars, Elton John, unleashing a rollicking Motown rendition in the socialist superstate during the depths of the Cold War.
Even the impregnable Iron Curtain couldn’t resist rock and pop for long. For years, Jazz, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and outlawed Russian émigré artists all found their way into the Eastern Bloc via novel clandestine means, the Soviet black market famously littered with roentgenizdat records made from discarded X-ray prints. In response, the communist authorities introduced the Vocal and Instrumental Ensemble, state-sanctioned groups permitted to play shows under the watchful eye of the ‘artistic director’, ensuring the material was subversive-free.
But Soviet kids wanted the real thing. During Leonid Brezhnev’s premiership, the state began to slowly allow Western stars in, Cliff Richard playing 20 shows in the Soviet Union in 1976, and Boney M performing several dates two years later. Fancying his chances, John reached out to the communist state and simply asked to play there.
“They want Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Nana Mouskouri and Pink Floyd,” he told the Associated Press at the time. “In fact, they told us the only reason more people have not played there is because they simply haven’t asked permission.”
After some negotiations between John’s manager, John Reid, and London’s Soviet embassy, a final approval from a cultural officer witnessing an Oxford show resulted in the settled deal of eight sets in the USSR, four in Leningrad’s Great October Concert Hall, and another four in Moscow’s Rossiya Concert Hall. Little money was to be made, John accepting as much as $1000 per show despite his superstar stature around the world.
After five months of planning, John and his team arrived in Moscow on the morning of May 20th, 1979, in a scorching 30-odd Celsius heatwave with zero in the way of air conditioning. Following a press conference in the Amusement Palace and a stay in the Metropole Hotel, the Western entourage boarded the ‘Red Arrow’ train to Leningrad to kick start the tour in earnest.
It was during his time in the old imperial capital that John performed an impromptu yet memorable set on the Russian tour. Asked to fill in for the house band at the Hotel Evropeiskaya’s restaurant, John treated the curious crowd to a zesty take on the Motown classic ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, featuring John’s sound man Clive Franks on bass, Lem Lubin on guitar, and touring percussionist Ray Cooper fulfilling drum duties.
Allegedly, John was so nervous that he asked the translator present what the Russian word for “help” was.
He more than got away with it. Long before the 1980s Glasnost era, which invited many of the day’s music stars to a rapidly changing Soviet nation, John proved the most consequential in easing cultural relations between East and West.
Many musical ‘firsts’ would take place around the tour, the Soviet Melodiya label officially issuing his A Single Man album and overseeing the first USSR satellite link-up with the West for John’s 28th May Moscow show, but it’s likely the off-the-cuff restaurant jamboree was where pop’s electric universality was felt the most starkly between audience and a very anxious performer.
