Original Pressings That Could Land You in a Soviet Jail

Back in the USSR of the 1950s and 60s, hipsters, desperate for decadent rock ‘n’ roll, cut illegal records using X-ray film

Take out your
earpods
for a sec – really – so I can tell you a crazy story. (Or smack you – you should be more aware of your surroundings.)

Music today is, of course, a commodity
almost as readily available as water on tap – click a button or two and pretty much anything you can think of is yours to listen to.

Now imagine another place and time, the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s, where no music was allowed. (OK, I exaggerate: state-approved music was allowed but not even parents wanted to listen to that dreck – anything actually good was forbidden.

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Western radio stations were jammed, rock music was banned, records were confiscated at the border.) The authorities tried to seal off all of that Western decadence outside the Iron Curtain.

But the pressure of rock ‘n’ roll was hard to contain, and inevitably the wall leaked. A lot. Especially in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), a Soviet port town dripping with incoming Western indulgence. Ships arrived with smuggled records (and worth-their-weight-in-gold Levi’s jeans, as well as just about anything else cool from the West) in sailors’ duffel bags and diplomatic pouches.

Sooner or later you could find somebody who had smuggled in the latest Elvis or Beatles 45 record, and if you had enough roubles, and were willing to risk getting busted, that vinyl could be yours.

But there were too many stilyagi (style-hunters) and not enough illicit records to come close to meeting demand. So, as always, kids got clever. Soviet hipsters figured out that cutting a vinyl record wasn’t that difficult (the primitive machines weren’t restricted), if you could accept lousy sound quality.

And these folks were so desperate for good music they were prepared to tolerate just about any quality, as long as it wasn’t government-approved military marching bands or corny songs celebrating the wholesome wheat farmers of the eastern steppes.

The problem was the medium. Proper vinyl for record production was restricted in the USSR, so some other inexpensive and available material had to be found to cut the records. Somebody figured out that used X-ray film could work.

They were a bit floppy, but you could cut the groove into them, burn a cigarette hole into the middle, hack them into a circle, and drop them onto your record player. The best part was they were free or nearly so – hospitals threw them out, so you could dumpster dive for them.

These were the Soviet days of samizdat, the clandestine printing and distribution of censored, banned or unauthorised books. It wasn’t a stretch to do the same with music.

So Roentgenizdat (a portmanteau of ”

roentgen

“, or X-rays, and ”

izdatel’stvo

“, meaning publisher) was born. Nicknamed “bones music”, it was banned in no time, and by 1958 you could do time if the authorities caught you with it.

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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.

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