Hot, Hot, Hot: Brigada S

By PAUL HOFHEINZ MOSCOW

On a Saturday night some 6,000 Moscow teenagers pack into the Luzhniki sports amphitheater, a warehouse-like hall that is usually the venue for hockey matches and basketball games. Off-duty soldiers, their pink faces fuzzy with adolescent stubble, scuffle to get closer to the stage, while packs of young girls giggle at their antics. It might be a concert anywhere in America -- except that no T shirts are for sale, no hot dog vendors trawl the aisles, and, most of all, no one smokes anything stronger than cigarettes.

Through 2 1/2 hours and ten opening bands, the kids have stood shoulder to shoulder waiting for their favorite group. Finally, a short, well-built young man, his hair shaved severely around the sides, appears onstage. He grins demonically and defiantly surveys the crowd. Behind him a swarm of guitarists, horn players, a keyboardist and a drummer troop onto the stage. A drumbeat clears the air, and suddenly the band is cruising through the infectious opening rhythm of The Man in the Hat. The lead singer grabs the microphone and shrieks, "Heading for a meeting/ Across the frozen intersection/ On the night boulevard . . . The man in the hat of no particular fate/ He's neither strong nor weak . . . He's just a man, a man at the sunset."

Meet Brigada S, the hottest, hippest band in Gorbachev's Soviet Union. After a history of often bitter confrontations with police and schoolteachers, Brigada S (or the S Brigade, christened by lead singer Igor Sukachev because he liked the letter S) has become one of the most popular of the new generation of rock bands. Although the four-year-old group has yet to produce an album, the self-described "Proletarian Jazz Orchestra" enjoys a tremendous following. Teens from Tallinn to Vladivostok spray-paint the band's name, with the Russian equivalent of S drawn like a Communist hammer and sickle, on walls of public buildings.

During the Brezhnev era, rock music was carefully controlled through the State Concert Agency, a government bureaucracy that reserved the right to determine which bands could legally perform in public places. Only bands that were officially registered by the agency could receive money for their shows, a ploy that allowed bureaucrats to weed out undesirable groups by choking off their income.

But of course an underground rock scene flourished. Concerts were often a clandestine affair, staged on the spur of the moment in out-of-the-way auditoriums. And despite official discouragement, a few groups like Time Machine, the first band to sing openly about social problems, and the Leningrad-based Akvarium managed to thrive.

When the State Concert Agency relaxed its regulations in 1986, rock bands suddenly could play their music in big halls, with thousands of screaming fans in attendance. The effect was electrifying, and the kids knew whom to thank for the lighter touch. One of the new bands, a Moscow-based group called Grand Prix, introduced a song last year called simply Gorbachev. The haunting chorus ("I understand! Gorbachev!") is less a tribute to the man in power than a defiant youth anthem, undoubtedly the first to use a Soviet leader as an emblem of teenage aspirations.

At the crest of this new wave is Brigada S. "It's almost an accident we became so popular," says Sukachev, 29, who worked in a factory before he could make it with his music. Only two years ago, Sukachev and fellow band members were routinely hauled into local police stations and asked to explain their hairstyles and unusual dress. When the band's photograph appeared in a French magazine in 1986, Sukachev was taken to KGB headquarters for questioning. These days, all that has changed. On a recent trip back to his high school, Sukachev was surprised to hear himself described as the school pride. Says he: "I used to be their shame."

Brigada S has an unusual sound that draws on several sources. As a child, Sukachev listened to black-market Glenn Miller and Andrews Sisters albums, and their influence can be heard in the group's Big Band tinge. In style, the group also owes a tremendous debt to the futurist poets of the 1920s, whose revolutionary verse inspired a generation with its early Communist iconography.

In the past, Soviet bands often shamelessly copied popular Western styles, but Sukachev set out to create a uniquely Soviet sound, something kids could dance to. Although a punk rocker at heart, Sukachev added a four-piece horn section to the driving rhythm-and-blues backup of lead guitarist Kirill Trusov and bass player Sergei Galanin. The result is a slick multi-generational hybrid, the Talking Heads meet Count Basie, the Andrews Sisters on acid.

The punk is in the presentation, which can shock Soviet conformists. Once, Sukachev demolished an enormous poster of Brezhnev onstage, then threw the pieces into the audience. During a number about drug addiction, he often pantomimes a heroine injection. His shaved-sided flop-mop elicits frequent comment on Moscow's streets. "People think I'm a fascist," he says. "I can't think how many times I've been called that."

| His lyrics also speak of a scorching resentment of the older generation. In Don't Follow Us, Sukachev warns his elders that his generation will be different from theirs: "Hey, indulgence sellers . . . We're not the same as you./ We're not the heroes of big polemical battles/ So don't follow us." Another number, the feisty Reptiles, all but declares open rebellion: "We'd be glad, glad, glad/ If some time, any time/ All these reptiles . . . Would disappear forever." Sukachev dislikes assigning meaning to his songs. "I like to stick images together," he explains. "Other people can tell you what they're about."

Sukachev, who remembers having to beg for money to ride the subway, makes more than 3,000 rubles ($4,800) a month from concerts, nearly 15 times the Soviet average wage and more than twice the take-home pay of Mikhail Gorbachev. (Says Sukachev: "If I had his house and his car, he could have my 3,000.") Still, success has its problems. "It's really dangerous when people start to praise you for doing the things they used to slam you for," he notes. The band now risks losing the special edge to its sound that developed from the tension of fighting for the right to play its music.

Like it or not, things are moving quickly for Brigada S. This summer the group will release its first two albums, following the top-selling unauthorized concert disk put out last year by Melodiya, the country's sole record label. There is talk of a U.S. tour as well, possibly in June. "We're hoping to sign a few small contracts," Sukachev admits. Still, he says he wouldn't give up the band's underground years for anything. "Those years are our strength," he says. "We'd be nothing without them."