Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground

(Paperback)

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The inspiring and poetic memoir of the young New Wave musician whose improbable Cold War heroics opened the clandestine world of Leningrad punk and rock to the West.

Joanna Stingray was only 23 years old when she first set foot in the USSR and started meeting now-legendary musicians and artists of the Soviet underground like Boris Grebenshchikov, Sergei Kuryokhin, and Viktor Tsoi. By 1985, she was writing and recording with them, and smuggling their music to the West in order to produce the groundbreaking album Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR. This is her testimony of youthful fortitude and rebellion, her love story, and proof of the power of music and youth culture over stagnancy and oppression. The book, written with her singer/songwriter daughter, Madison, includes Stingrays extensive collection of photographs, artworks, and interviews with the musicians.

Reviews

Business and cultural pioneers dont set out to light the world on fire but end up doing so through ingenuity and determination. While we often think of globalization as factories and container ships, the exchange of goods and ideas between nations starts with one person finding something people in another nation would value. Joanna Stingray was that one person who brought Soviet rock music to America and did so in remarkable fashion.
Forbes

Thanks to a resourceful Los Angeles singer and songwriter who heardand likedtheir brand of Russian rock, the bands are now playing to a faraway audience. [...] The album is the brainchild of Joanna Stingray a.k.a. Joanna Fields, 25, who has been exploring the Soviet Unions unofficial and unheralded rock world since 1984.
Newsweek

Eight trips later she had smuggled enough tapes of Kino and other groups out of the Soviet Union to produce an album, Red Wavea kind of Greatest Hits of Socialist Rock. At first the Soviet press denigrated Stingrays tales of the brave little American miss helping the oppressed Soviet musicians as a self-serving fantasy. Now, though, inspired by glasnost if not by greed, Soviet officialdom has cut a deal with her to produce 10 albums of unofficial music for consumption in the U.S.
People Magazine

The music on Red Wave which ranges from the ska-tinged pop of Kino to the brooding, introspective songwriting of Grebenshchikov was recorded mostly in cramped living rooms transformed into home studios with borrowed two-track and eight-track equipment. The lyrics, sung in Russian (a translated lyric sheet is provided), are not overtly political. But veiled reference to politics shine through, as does a keen awareness of progressive Western rock.
Rolling Stone

Author Bio

Joanna Stingray is an author and musician from Los Angeles, California, who lived for many years in Russia. She became the first American producer of underground Russian rock n roll when she released the double album Red Wave 4 Underground Bands from the USSR a compilation of music smuggled out of the USSR by Joanna in 1985. A frequent traveler in and out of Russia, Joanna was interrogated by the KGB and FBI (both thought she was a spy) and in 1987, she became an enemy of the State her visa blocked to keep her from entering the Soviet Union to marry Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparyan. After months of intervention by the U.S. State Department, she returned to Russia, married Yuri and in the early 90s became a television host, a recording artist, and well known rock personality throughout Russia. She has published several books in Russia about her time in the music scene as well as much of her photo collection. Her video diaries and interviews of bands and their musicians is the only archive of this clandestine, bygone world.

FREE TO ROCK, the 2017 documentary expos directed by Jim Brown and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, features interviews with Joanna Stingray, prominent American musicians who toured the Soviet Union, and several important Russian musicians. It reveals to the world the dismantling socio-political effect of soft power, and discovers how American rock n roll and the release of Red Wave during glasnost contributed to the ending of the Cold War.

Madison Stingray is the author of two books as well as songs, poems, and short stories, the common theme of all being a strong female narrative and an attempt at human solidarity. She graduated from Georgetown University magna cum laude and received her Masters degree in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge in England. Growing up, the Leningrad Underground Rock days were stories that became her fairytales, and her contribution to putting those adventures in print is to inspire others that extraordinary things can happen to anyone who fights for something.