It’s Moscow, the late 1950s. You are at home and you want to dance. Dance to something wild, full of life, sex, abandon, something free of politics. But that kind of music you won’t find in any clubs and those kinds of records are banned. Your friend says she knows where to find some. So you leave the apartment, take a subway, then a tram, then walk. You reach a street in the west of the city. Your friend walks along a row of shops as if looking for someone. She speaks to a gang of kids—stilyagi—dressed in garish approximations of American fashions. They nod in the direction of an alleyway a little further along the street.
Your friend catches the eye of a man stood furtively on the corner. “On the rib?” she whispers. “Jazz? Tango? Rock’n’roll?” asks the man. “Rock’n’roll. Bill Haley.” The man disappears. Ten minutes later he returns and asks you to follow him to the end of the alley. From his coat he pulls out a roll of circular film. He peels off a sheet. They’re discs cut from X-rays: one of a fractured skull, the other a broken hand. You pay him a few roubles while your friend stuffs the rolled discs up her coat sleeve. The man vanishes. You walk, then it’s back on the tram, the subway, home. There you put the records on. The first sounds like American swing. You ask your friend, “is this Bill Haley?” “Nah.” So you put on the second. It sounds like a tango buried in an avalanche of sand and gravel. “We’ve been ripped off.” You laugh. “Guess we’ll have to make do.”
From the late 1940s until the mid-1960s, this was how you got hold of music that wasn’t banned by the Soviet state. Muzyka na kost’iakh—“music on bones”—it was called. A black market of samizdat records, made in secret on lathes in back rooms, dachas and apartments, etched into discarded X-rays bought cheaply in bulk from hospitals who couldn’t store them. The records are the subject of Bone Music, a fascinating new illustrated book by the British musician Stephen Coates.* He first came across bone records a decade ago, when a St. Petersburg flea market find turned out to be a rare bootleg of Bill Haley & The Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” cut into an X-ray image of two hands. It set Coates and his collaborator, photographer Paul Heartfield, on a quest to tell the history of samizdat records in the Soviet Union and the people who made them.
Since 2013, the pair have produced a touring exhibition, an online archive, a documentary film, a BBC radio programme, and several publications. Bone Music is the latest iteration of the project, and brings to light new material about the origins of bone records in 1930s Hungary. The book tells the stories of bootleg producers and dealers such as Boris Taigin and Ruslan Bogoslovsky (aka the Golden Dog Gang), Kolya Vasin, Mikhail Farafanov, Rudy Fuchs, Nick Markovitch and Sophie Török. Of banned musicians such as Vadim Kozin, ‘Eddie’ Rosner, Alla Bayanova and Isabella Yurieva. Bone Music is a history of technical ingenuity, censorship, courage, tragedy, and a profound love of music.
At the end of World War Two, there was a flood of American goods into Eastern Europe. Western jazz records found new fans in Russia. Following Churchill’s Fulton speech of 1946—“an iron curtain has descended across the continent”—the advent of the Cold War severed relations. Jazz became proscribed, or only permitted in a highly controlled and ideologically staid form. Certain types of Russian popular song were banned altogether. Radio broadcasts which carried western music were blocked by an extensive network of government signal jamming stations. Musicians whose work was not deemed to be in the interests of the Soviet project went into exile, or were thrown into gulags. But that did not kill the music. Demand grew because of the difficulty of finding it. (A lesson the censorious never seem to learn.) A bootleg economy was born.
According to Coates, the first X-ray records were likely produced in 1930s Hungary by sound engineer István Makai, who was commissioned by poet and society figure Sophie Török to make records of music and spoken word performances, which he cut to radiography film using a custom-built lathe. Radiography film has a top layer of coating which is thick enough to take the grooves needed to record an audio signal. In the absence of raw vinyl from which to press original records, it offered a cheap alternative, although the discs were fragile and the quality often poor. (Buyers in Russia joked that they sounded like sand, but fidelity mattered less than having the music.) Each disc was a one-off, copied ‘live’, straight from the source to the film. The X-ray images provided a plausible camouflage, as well as giving the bootlegs their name.
How Makai’s technical know-how made it to Russia, or whether Russian bootleggers discovered the processes themselves, is unknown. Coates locates the first lathe in St. Petersburg in 1946, a German Telefunken machine brought to Russia by Stanislaw Philon, probably as a war trophy. Taigin and Bogoslovsky—both music crazy kids—discovered that Philon was making prohibited records in the back room of his shop. They became obsessed with making their own lathe. Remarkably, the pair figured out how Philon’s equipment worked, and built their own version in secret, allowing them to start a rival business. The knowledge soon began to spread from St Petersburg to Moscow and beyond, creating a burgeoning black market. Taigin and Bogoslovsky called their operation the Golden Dog Gang and learned how to separate the top coating from the film beneath, which allowed them to began incorporate their own images—satirical, saucy, surreal, pop—onto their discs.
Jazz and later rock’n’roll were highly sought after, but Coates is careful to point out that the story of bone music is not one about repressed Soviet citizens yearning for the sounds of Western freedom. Most bone records contained Russian songs, not even necessarily anti-Soviet in sentiment. They were sung by emigre musicians over tango rhythms or gypsy music. (The tango had become popular in Russia during the 1930s.) Ballads, ‘criminal’ songs, street songs, poems, satires, folk tales, and raunchy tunes were all popular. It wasn’t the song that the authorities objected to, driving the music underground, but the singer, whose decision to leave the homeland was regarded as a betrayal.
Bone records were popular among stilyagi, rebellious, extrovert youngsters who risked mockery and punishment for dressing in American-style clothes. (The look was a hybrid based on 1940s Hollywood musicals such as Sun Valley Serenade, and ‘50s rock’n’rollers. Thick crepe-sole shoes and narrow trousers, patterned knitted sweaters, neckties cut from curtain fabric.) The records circulated among the children of the intelligentsia or party officials, those with access to money and influence, and among working class kids too. Dealers were mostly selling the records out of a love of the music, and to make a little money, although as the samizdat market grew, unscrupulous gangs inevitably got in on the business. The penalties for producing and selling bone records were steep. Public disgrace, property seizure, incarceration. Bogoslovsky of the Golden Dog Gang did three separate stints in prison camps. Fuchs did two years. “When I came out,” he says in Bone Music, “I started again, from nothing––no money, no equipment, no friends, nothing. Some they broke but some they didn’t, it just made them stronger.”
Technological innovation eventually killed the trade. In the 1960s, tape machines became affordable, almost instantly ending the X-ray record business. “Music continued to be censored,” writes Coates, “but now a new kind of underground production began: that of ‘magnetizdat,’ the widespread clandestine sharing and sale of bootlegs on tape. A street culture of illicit recording was replaced by a home culture of illicit recording.”
Bone Music reproduces photographs of some two-dozen X-ray records. Each one was handmade. It is hard to forget that people put their lives on the line to make these discs, which makes the images of them all the more haunting, macabre, tender, nocturnal. A skull stares out at the reader. Pairs of skeletal hands offer themselves, as if in friendship. Pelvises spin, spines bend, a rib cage seems, oddly, to glow with life. These are the parts of the body that we put at the service of music: the head for listening, hips, hands and back for dancing, the heart beneath the ribs, for whatever emotions the music might evoke. “They are ghostly images of pain and damage,” writes Coates, “inscribed with the sounds of forbidden pleasure: fragile photographs of the interiors of Soviet citizens layered with the music they secretly loved.”
*The book is published by Strange Attractor, founded and run by Mark Pilkington and Jamie Sutcliffe. It produces books about the outer reaches of art, literature, pop culture, and belief, and is one of the most mind-expanding and original independent publishers operating in the UK.
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—Paste is the new album by Moin, minimal post-rock from Joe Andrews, Tom Halstead and drummer-composer Valentina Magaletti. My favourite track is ‘Hung Up,’ featuring the voice of New York literary legend Lynne Tillman whose latest book is Mothercare.
—I’m only a couple of chapters into Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s blockbuster Hollywood: An Oral History. So far I have learned about eye injuries from klieg lights, Douglas Fairbank Sr.’s high-pitched voice, how nobody used to drive in Los Angeles, and how everyone loathed know-it-all sound recordists at the dawn of the talkies. I also learned about ‘the 108’. This is a slapstick move invented by Ben Turpin, which involved doing a front flip and landing on your rear with your legs in the air. Turpin would do this for kids outside the studio gates, straight onto the concrete sidewalk, well into his late sixties.
—Can’t wait for Enys Men, the new film from Mark Jenkin, director of Bait.
This month, Roulette in New York is staging a series of concerts in tribute to Derek Bailey, the guitarist and pioneer of free improvisation. It’s organized by John Zorn and you can find out more here. You can also enjoy commentary on Bailey from musician and writer David Grubbs here; listen here to ‘Domestic Jungle’, an inspired session, recorded by Bailey at home, improvising over the top of London pirate radio broadcasts; and read an essay I wrote on him donkey’s years ago for frieze here. Finally, if you’re a musician and you’ve never read Bailey’s book Improvisation, or seen his TV series on the subject, then see above. Like his music it is simultaneously open-minded and trenchantly opinionated.