#11 | July 5 - 16, 1997  

by Mark Ames

I had just hung up the phone on press secretary Nikolai Pronin, when two clean cut punks barged in-one wearing a studded dog collar around his neck, the other with dragon tattoos running up his forearms-staring at me with a vacant menace.

"Hey," one said dryly. I assumed that their glazed expressions reflected their grim experiences as low-rent hit men, and that things were going to get bloody real fast-like.

After a long, uncomfortable pause, the two punks told me why they'd come. They wanted to show me the "real underground."

"All you write about in your bar-dak is pop shit," one of them, Sasha, said. "We want you to see a real underground club... if you're interested."

Of course I was interested, although I was skeptical. I've been to a few underground places in Russia-a shitty punk club featuring the most atrocious punk bands I've ever seen; a squat in Leningrad full of sick babies, flies, and filthy hippies; and Limonov's rather interesting headquarters, which featured a mixture of erotic fascist femme fatales, and Satanist twerps squeaking "heil Hitler" for cheap shock effect. He had the avant-garde Right cornered, but there wasn't much there for me.

Moscow is already so "underground" in reality-sin, vice, decay, crime, the sounds of raw mid-century industry and State-imposed Nihilism are the rule-that to try to bottle undergroundish elements in a club would be almost crude, redundant. Underground clubs or hangouts make a lot of sense in the West, where boredom and middle class morality force a disaffected few to seek forbidden pleasures, a thrill or two. But in Moscow? The underground in the West grew out of a need to escape from the Normals; but since there is so little here that is normal or boring ABOVEGROUND, why the need for an underground club? The chaos and nihilism ABOVE ground explain why Moscow's clubs are for the most part so cheesy and commercial compared to the West's. Night clubs are for escaping, and if trashing a warehouse interior and stuffing it full of pierced, shaven-headed freaks in rubber outfits creates a sense of escape in San Francisco, then here in Moscow, decking out a club in flashy Italian furniture, Europop lighting and mirrors, and inviting in the designer label set is the best way to escape harsh reality.

Taibbi and I met the two punks, Sasha and Pasha-a kind of techno Beavis and Baht-khed-in a metro station in central Moscow last Friday at 11:30 pm (I agreed not to tell exactly where this club is-exclusivity is central to a club's undergroundness, and thus its survival). I arrived five minutes early, to a crowd of about 50 guys, mostly skins and a few industrial/techno types in baggy shirts, chains, and baseball caps. There were only about five girls in the whole crowd. No one could have been older than 20, making me feel particularly avuncular. They were mulling around the platform area, frightening passersby just by their presence. With so many skins around, you'd expect someone to get stomped, violence to flare...

We followed Sasha down to a back street, where the bunker/club was located, in a torn-out basement. In terms of setting and character, the club had everything a true underground spot demands: thrashed interior, graffiti (in this case, dayglo drawings of an alien sawing another alien's head off, and a raggedy ann doll swinging from the gallows, neck broken; various "welcome to hell" slogans; and the totally misplaced "no drugs problems" scrawled in black paint). The weirdest element, though, had to be the skins. Half of them were dressed in blue and white-striped Adidas sweat outfits and Nike shoes.

"This must be some kind of Heaven's Gate thing," Taibbi observed. "These guys are planning to shed their containers on the dance floor tonight."

It was strange. For skins, they looked tame. They lacked that juvenile hall/ raped-by-my-uncle look that most American skins have. What's more, they seemed too tolerant. American skins demand loud, fast, mindless thrash metal guitars, whereas this was a solidly techno club (ie: no live music, only DJs). Skins usually fight other white guys; these skins had simply come to dance and to get away from the Normals above ground. At one point, Sasha passed out copies of the previous "Jewish Issue" eXile, which I thought might spark a pogrom. Instead, they read attentively, going through the club guide and arguing over the crossword puzzle. When the industrial music came on, the guys rushed to the dance floor and some even started slamming, though no one got hurt.

All the elements were there for something ugly and evil to have happened: skins, track suits, cheap alcohol, hidden underground club, loud pulsing music, and five or six girls in skimpy clothing... But no, not even a boys-will-be-boys gang rape... nary a stomping... The no-drugs policy, admitted as official graffiti on the walls, was for me the most annoying part. How can you oppose the Normals by taking up where Nancy Reagan left off?

I'll never forget this Butthole Surfers show I saw at a small club in San Francisco. They came on stage, tape loops and drums and police megaphone blaring... two naked women in green body paint started to dance wildly in front of a huge screen showing close-ups of sex change operations, surgeons tearing the patient's genitalia apart. A few people ran from the room vomiting; one of the naked dancers began to trip too hard, and required medical attention; a few fights broke out near the pit; nearly everyone inside was frying hard on shrooms or acid, as Gibby Haynes wailed about "licking the shit off the walls" or "giving head when you're six years old." After the show, it was hard reintegrating into Normal world. I guess that's the least you can expect from an underground club: it should dislocate you so much that you need a few hours to readjust to normality. In the case of last Friday, however, as much as I liked the club, I was sort of glad to get back above ground.