An ironic route to cult status

MOSCOW —  It is one of those bleak November nights when everybody in town starts wondering how in the name of God the citizenry will hold up until May. A patchy layer of snow, gray with soot, turning to slush under an icy rain. Traffic backed up for miles on the Garden Ring, faces of frustration, boredom and occasional laughter seen fleetingly through frosted windshields. Dark since 4 o’clock.

Against all odds, six guys from L.A. get up onstage and start playing smooth Brazilian rhythms, and everybody gets it.

In the song “Motel Room,” the lyrics go:

I love you, my friend.

And though we just met, you’re at least as lost as me.

So let’s close the drapes,

And lose the new day, and see how dark we can be.

Exactly.

“I love their voices. I like their rhythms. I like the moods they create. It’s very good to listen to them at 4 p.m., when dusk falls. Especially now,” said Dariya Chistakova, a 26-year-old interior design student.

Brazzaville, a Los Angeles band due to release its fourth CD next year, “touches some strings of the Russian psyche,” said promoter Artemy Troitsky, who brought the group to Russia last week for dates in Moscow and St. Petersburg. “It’s a mixture of romanticism and melancholy and sadness and passion. You know, all kinds of interesting feelings. Sad and beautiful -- and a little bit decadent.”

It is a function of the increasingly global nature of the music industry -- and perhaps of the despondent human spirit -- that an L.A. band not all that well-known in its hometown should pack one of Moscow’s hottest clubs, the B-2.

Brazzaville has become one of the most popular cult bands in Russia, opening the way for its first tour outside the U.S. -- Thanksgiving night in Moscow, Saturday night at the Red Club in St. Petersburg -- and shedding an intriguing light on the new ways in which music and listeners meet, sometimes in unexpected venues.

Upscale record stores featuring expensive imported CDs have become a fixture in post-Communist Moscow, but Brazzaville, which doesn’t have a major label contract, hasn’t exactly flown off the shelves. Many of the fans at Thursday’s show said they had downloaded copies of CDs from their friends -- or bought discs at Moscow’s Gorbushka electronics market, where tens of thousands of CDs, DVDs and electronic games are sold, most of them illegal copies.

Ironically, Brazzaville could be the story of a local band that found its audience thousands of miles from home, nurtured in part by home computer swapping and an illegal industry that is the scourge of the major record companies.

“Of course, piracy is a huge issue with the industry at the moment. But when you’re talking about a band that’s actually benefiting from the exposure in this bizarre way, it’s oddly satisfying to know that people have discovered the music, even though it’s not exactly legal, and there’s no monetary benefit to it yet,” said band manager K.C. Murphy Thompson of Santa Ynez.

“Brazzaville makes a very interesting case study of what’s happening with the U.S. music industry. They’re a band of musicians who are relatively well known in the industry, individually and collectively, yet the label situation here [in the U.S.] is just so damaged, people are really reluctant to expend money on music that is not easily pigeonholed.

“Brazzaville, when you listen to it, is not really radio, it’s not really pop, and the U.S. labels aren’t necessarily stepping up to music like that. So, we’re thinking, maybe the way Brazzaville comes back to the U.S. is through Japan or Europe or Russia. Maybe they break overseas, where the labels are more experimental and open to different kinds of music, and then you come back to the U.S. with a bit of awareness, and maybe a bit of a following from other countries.”

Russia is one of the fastest-growing centers of entertainment piracy in the world. Industry analysts estimate that two of every three recordings sold in Russia -- about $311 million worth in 2002 --are pirated copies. The number of CD plants has grown by a third in the last year alone. Now, 28 plants -- many of them former defense plants -- have a capacity of producing more than 330 million CDs a year, leading analysts to believe that Russia could be making millions of counterfeits, many of them for export elsewhere in Europe.

“The problem has been mushrooming out of control in Russia. It’s gone beyond being just a little cottage industry supporting the street markets and now has become a giant export business ... and a threat to the profitability of the industry,” said Alexander Vershbow, U.S. ambassador to Russia, who has made piracy a top priority for American diplomacy in Moscow.

When the film “The Matrix Revolutions” opened Nov. 5 at Moscow’s lavish Kodak Kinomir theater as part of a simultaneous global release, “They were already selling bootlegs outside,” Vershbow said.

“We’re trying to make the case to the Russians that this is unacceptable behavior for a country that wants to become part of the international economy and also a member of the [World Trade Organization]. But it’s also ultimately going to hurt them, as it stifles creativity on the part of Russian musicians or filmmakers or software designers, who can’t expect to make a living on their work because the product’s going to be sold illegally,” he added.

David Brown worked for years as a saxophonist for Beck before gathering six of his friends in the industry, many of them L.A. music scene veterans of such acts as Ziggy Marley, Natalie Merchant and the Borrowers, to form Brazzaville in 1998. Characterized by Brown’s stark lyrics and deep, soulful vocals -- often compared to Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, minus the gravel -- Brazzaville is part bossa nova, part Asia, part steamy night in the tropics.

In the last few years, the band had been a regular at places such as the Knitting Factory and the Temple Bar but it had toured no farther than the East Coast. Then came the invitation from Troitsky, a well-known alternative DJ in Moscow and the founder of the Russian edition of Playboy Magazine.

“Brazzaville offers exactly that type of naive, sensual and romantic music that matches so perfectly with the famous Russian sentimentality. It fits perfectly with the mysterious Russian soul,” said Alexei Alyayev, foreign music director at Moscow’s Soyuz Music, which recently released three Brazzaville discs in Russia. “The Brazzaville paradox is that half a dozen guys from California turned out to be closer to the Russian people than anyone may have expected, clearly much closer than the thousands of miles that separate our countries.”

Brown, who recently decamped to Barcelona, Spain, from Atwater Village -- a new family, car and mortgage put him “dreadfully in debt” and fearful of “a prematurely boring life” -- professes to be mystified at the band’s Russian reception.

“I like to write about tragic figures, and the beauty of that, the beauty of fragility,” he said at the old Ukraine Hotel, a looming Stalinist Gothic edifice on the Moscow River. “Maybe there’s something that makes them feel better in my music. It’s funny you ask, because just from my first day being here, I find it to be kind of an intimidating place. Not physically intimidating. It’s just a very heavy atmosphere. And I’ve been a little on edge since I’ve been here. And driving over here, I popped this CD in, and this Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls [recording] ‘Bring It [on] Home to Me’ came on, and it just made me feel so good to hear it, it made it all OK, for just those few minutes.

“Maybe there’s something about listening to melancholy Brazzaville songs that makes the Russians feel better, I don’t know.”

Brown is not much concerned at the possibility that his records may have been for sale for $3 out at Gorbushka: “Somebody wrote to me from Russia a while back. And I said to ‘em, ‘If you have any friends that like our music, copy it for ‘em, and give it to ‘em. I don’t care. And then maybe we’ll get some fans and we’ll come play a show there.’ Not thinking that it would actually happen.

“The whole thing is a huge benefit for me,” Brown said.

As it happens, Brazzaville has become a vehicle by which the industry is attempting to beat the pirates at their own game.

Timed with the band’s appearance, Troitsky’s label, Zakat, put together a licensing deal for Soyuz Records to distribute three Russian-produced versions of Brazzaville’s CDs -- identical to the U.S. releases in nearly every respect, except they sell for $5 instead of $23 -- the going price for U.S. imports that are side by side with them on the shelves.

Universal started producing these so-called Cyrillic versions in 1998 to try to cut into the pirates’ profit margins.

“Nearly all of our artists, from Eminem to Shania Twain to Metallica, have agreed to this. Our artists pretty much go for this because they know that this market is really overwhelmed with piracy, and this is one way we fight the pirates,” said David Junk, managing director of Universal Music Russia.

“We don’t make any money on this. But the logic is there’s an entire market of consumers who buy pirate property every day. At least now we’re directing them toward a legal product. If we didn’t have this on the market, we simply would not be there with anything to buy.”

Brazzaville gets 70 cents for each CD sold in Russia, compared with the perhaps $1 or $1.50 the band would have received for a traditional label deal, Brown said.

“You know what’s going to happen?” he asks. “People will buy the CDs. They won’t buy pirated CDs, because this looks a lot better, and the sound quality’s a lot better than a pirated CD.... And nobody feels like they’re committing a crime when they do it.”

Troitsky is hopeful too. But like everyone else in the industry, he characterizes his own efforts as a holding action.

“The problem of piracy, personally, I think it has no solution,” he said.

“For one thing, how can you expect people to pay $20 for a CD in a country where the average monthly wage is $100? Then add to that the Russian level of corruption here. This is not small-time bootlegging. This is a whole big industry. I mean, I wish the best of luck to Alexander Vershbow, but this issue is doomed.”