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The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s Angriest Newspaper. Skip to main content. Memoir of a Russian Punk, while working in a San Francisco bookshop. By the time Ames. Eddie-baby has been granted that honor for a second time. But this time his parents really got mad at him; Captain Zilberman's last visit made a deep impression on them, and they wouldn't give Eddie any money. Memoir of a Russian Punk is an autobiographical novel and Eduard Limonov remembering his mutinous adolescence is truthful and uncompromising in depicting the wallowing on the bottom of the.
- A protester is arrested during a demonstration in front of the Russian consulate in support of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, Friday, Aug. 17, 2012 in New York. A Russian judge found three members of the provocative punk band guilty of hooliganism on Friday, in one of the most closely watched cases in recent Russian history.
- Far more than a mere how-to, the Pussy Riot founder’s new book is a memoir, a history, an inspiration—and, yes, a gleeful, swing-for-the-fences call to action.
By Joanna Stingray and Madison Stingray
416 pages, 150 black and white illustrations.
September 2020. Paperback.
Ebook also available.
$26.95 | 9781733957922 (pb)
$25 RED WAVE album limited edition tote bags and t-shirts
The story of the American musician who opened the clandestine world of Leningrad punk and rock ‘n’ roll to the West
Joanna Stingray’s inspiring and poetic memoir, written with her singer/songwriter daughter Madison, introduces Western audiences to the legendary musicians of Soviet rock through her improbable Cold War heroics as a young New Wave musician who, in 1985, produced Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR with music by her new friends that she had smuggled to the West. This is her incredible testimony of youthful fortitude and rebellion, her love story, and proof of the power of music and youth culture over stagnancy and oppression.
Wild and vivid — a rollicking memoir of romance and rock ‘n’ roll in an era of upheaval and transition. From Los Angeles to Leningrad and back again, Joanna’s story is borne along by her infectious, headlong enthusiasm. It’s quite a ride.
– Patrick Radden Keefe, award winning staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
“You are the mother of Russian rock!” a fan shouted as Stingray promoted her new autobiography at a Moscow bookstore. […] The California musician aroused the suspicions of the KGB and the FBI as she bravely championed the Soviet underground in the 1980s. The Red Wave LP, released in America in 1986, introduced western audiences to Russian rock and helped end the Kremlin’s censorship of homegrown groups.
– The Guardian
Includes Stingray’s extensive collection of photographs and interviews with musicians.
MORE PRAISE
Memoir Of A Russian Punk Artist
An American who almost single-handedly introduced Soviet rock to the free world… Stingray, who wrote this memoir with her daughter, Madison, nicely captures her daring amid an atmosphere of liberation and fear, and she’s a study in moxie and enthusiasm.
– Kirkus Reviews
Business and cultural pioneers don’t 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
The muse of the Soviet music underground.
– ForbesRussia
Joanna Fields was born in California brought up to mistrust Communism, so as soon as she could, in 1984 she went to the Soviet Union. She met underground rock musicians like Boris Grebenshchikov and his band Akvarium, banned from releasing music or playing official concerts and thought someone should get their music out to the West. Joanna has now written an account of her tape smuggling years as she shuttled across the Iron Curtain and released a groundbreaking double LP called Red Wave, featuring four underground bands and music that many in the West simply thought didn’t exist. Of course she needed a code name. She chose Stingray.
– BBC Newsday, Rock ‘n’ roll through the Iron Curtain, listen to full clip here.
It’s hard to find a more drab and yet more romantic period in the history of the Soviet Union than in the 1980s. Life as people knew it was falling apart and yet there was also a growing hope that something new and exciting would rise in its place. That sense of cognitive and emotional dissonance was perfectly captured by the underground music of that time, produced by young non-conformist musicians in what was then the city of Leningrad. What was it like to live and make music in that period of hopeful despair?
–Russian Television, Rock in a Hard Place? Watch the full English-language interview with Joanna Stingray here.
Many Cold War narratives in the West feature a great deal of objectification and exoticism. Your book is entirely different, and you seem to understand and genuinely fit into that time and place….
– Interview with Sasha Razor on Los Angeles Review of Books.
Joanna Stingray: Hero Of Global Commerce – And Soviet Rock Music
– Forbes
The music on Red Wave – which ranges from the ska-tinged pop of Kino to the brooding, introspective songwriting of Grebenschikov – 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, 1986
Thanks to a resourceful Los Angeles singer and songwriter who heard – and liked – their 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 Union’s unofficial and unheralded rock world since 1984.
– Newsweek, 1986
Some rare footage was gathered by Joanna Stingray, an American musician and producer who traveled to the Soviet Union in 1984 and ensconced herself in the world of Leningrad’s most popular rock musicians. Stingray would go on to befriend artists at the vanguard of the Leningrad scene, including Boris Grebenshchikov, the front man for the band Akvarium, and Victor Tsoi, the late Soviet rock icon accused recently by Russian State Duma member Yevgeny Fyodorov of collaborating with the CIA.
– The Atlantic
ENDORSEMENTS
Joanna Stingray’s appearance in St. Petersburg in the early 1980s must have been God’s response to our unconscious prayers. Her naive bravery, curiosity and generosity created a kind of a lifeline for us rockers: she brought in things we needed to play our music, and took out not only our recordings but the very message of our existence. Had it not been for her and her Red Wave it would have taken Aquarium many more years to have official records on Melodiya and for Kino to start touring Europe. This fearless maiden broke through the siege that looked hopelessly unbreakable. She threw a life-saver into our waters and she changed everything. No matter how many times we thank her — it’s never enough.
– Boris Grebenshchikov (Aquarium)
As one of the first American musicians to break through the Soviet scene, and one of the few women to be seen as an equal amongst Leningrad’s pantheon of rock superstars, Stingray’s perspective on the development of late Soviet rock is truly one of a kind. This memoir is probably the single most important source for researchers who want a birds-eye view of late Soviet youth culture, and Stingray’s stories are as entertaining as they are relevant and illuminating. Stingray has managed to capture both the atmosphere of the final decade of the U.S.S.R., and provide a lively contrast to the Western music industry that will be referenced and appreciated years to come. The importance of this work cannot be stressed enough.
– Alexander Herbert,author of What About Tomorrow: An Oral History of Russian Punk Rock from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot and Punks Around/Punk in a Foreign Space
Stephen Stills and I performed in Moscow in the late 1980s, and we did our best to encourage and help local Russian bands. It was there that I met musician and songwriter Joanna Stingray, who showed great passion about how music could ‘change the world’. She instinctively understood the power that rock and roll music brings to people. The audience in Moscow craved the music and what it represented.
– Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
Joanna was like a tornado. Just imagine someone could drag Tsoi, Kuryokhin and Grebenshchikov into her vortex and like a tractor pull the Russian underground to the West. A breath of fresh air and bright hopes — it’s all Joanna!
– Yuri Kasparyan (Kino)
Red Wave became the deus ex machina that played a crucial role in making Soviet rock music legitimate and accessible by the media and society. Its release forced the Soviet authorities to hastily lift all barriers and restrictions that had kept Russian rock bands in their underground reservation.
– Dr. Anna Kan, Soviet Union culture historian, London
Joanna Stingray went to Leningrad in search of herself. And there she found not just herself but a few other very important people in her life. She became their prophet in the West. But Soviet people traditionally trusted prophets only from outside of their homeland. The Red Wave stirred by Joanna came back and brought well-deserved attention to its heroes. These memoirs strike you with their openness, lively straightforwardness and, most importantly, their honesty. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know how it really was.
– Konstantine Ernst, CEO Channel One Russia
Rock is for young people. It’s an opportunity to open up a road into the future and breathe deeper. And all thoughtful people understand that it’s not just young people fooling around. They are captivated by this music. If some of our rock bands like Aquarium and Kino were released in the West on the Red Wave album in June 1986, why shouldn’t they have been released in Russia?
– President Mikhail Gorbachev, 2019, reflecting on his decision that led to the Red Wave bands being allowed to become “official” by 1987
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Joanna Stingray is an author and musician from Los Angeles, California, who lived for many years in Russia. In 1984, while touring in the Soviet Union, she met and befriended Boris Grebenschikov, a revered musical poet (who many Soviets called the ‘Russian Dylan’) and soon became the first American producer of underground Russian rock n’ roll when she released the double album Red Wave — 4 Underground Bands from the U.S.S.R., a compilation of music smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. 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 Leningrad 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.
Stingray’s Red Wave is, in fact, credited by Russians for helping pave the way to the cultural opening that collapsed state control. Months after it appeared in the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev decided the Red Wave bands should be allowed to become “official,” launching the bands to notoriety by 1987.
“FREE TO ROCK,” the 2017 documentary exposé 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 (“cultural opening”) contributed to the ending of the Cold War.
Memoir Of A Russian Punk
To listen to Joanna Stingray’s songs written with her Russian friends, go to: joannastingray.com, or Vimeo for a selection of her music videos.
Memoir Of A Russian Punk Movie
Madison Stingrayexpresses herself as a storyteller. She has written songs, poems, short stories, and now two full length books, the common theme of all her work being a strong female narrative and an attempt at human solidarity. She graduated from Georgetown University magna cum laude and received her Master’s 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. Her first album,”Stingray — In Your Eyes” is out on iTunes, Spotify and others. Check her out on iamstingray.com.