The Smiley Smile Message Board

I 'm looking at a BBC documentary called "How The Beatles Rocked The Kremlin". This from a site:

http://extravagantcreation.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/how-the-beatles-rocked-the-kremlin/

"The most fascinating part of the film, for me, was seeing how bootleg Beatles recordings were made by transferring their songs, which had been recorded on tape recorders from foreign radio broadcasts, into cut grooves on used radiographic film, i.e. old, discarded x-rays of, mostly, lungs.  The resulting “flexi-disks,” which could be carried on one’s person hidden inside a coat sleeve, were sold on the black market, at great personal risk to buyer and seller from the Soviet authorities, for three rubles a pop.  The flexi-disks were referred to as “ribs” because of the x-ray images on them."

Here's another link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8232235.stm

Does anyone know of any Beach Boys "ribs"?? :)


/B

I don't know of any Beach Boys "ribs", or indeed any Beach Boys records that were ever available in the Soviet Union legally, although I'm sure there was some way people managed to hear the music if the Beach Boys were scheduled to play what would have been the Soviet Union's first rock festival in '78 in Leningrad.

If there's a rock music scene that's criminally under-appreciated in the "Western world", it's the Soviet one. Their trends basically were roughly six to eight years behind the big ones in music on the other end of the Iron Curtain but they had a lot of the same ideals. Psychedelia was common in the early 70s, and bard or "folk" music in the 1960s. New wave and metal were common in the 1980s. Stas Namin's group managed to get bookings in the United States in the mid-1980s and were very warmly greeted. Gorky Park was also pretty popular on MTV in the late 80s as well, especially after Bon Jovi championed them.

Never seen/heard of even one.  There are tons of Polish Flexis on Ebay, tho, with practically any artist you want, including the BBs...

The Polish bootleg cassettes from the late 80ies and early 90ies were a real treat as well. And from every artist one could imagine they would make them. Especially the passing of a musical hero, could cause huge series of reissues. I remember that when for example Freddy Mercury died, literally every album, ans solo stuff was available. But the same would happen when Zappa died. And these were made by several small businesses. Quality differed drastically from very good, to very very bad. If it would make it easier to fit the music on the tape, they would make a different tracklist, or simply leave a song or two out (for example: no clue why, but I bought the "12 inches of Snow" album by Snow, but as there wasn't enough space on the cassette, they left one track off and called it "11 inches of Snow").
I think I have 4 different "pressings" of the Still Cruisin album for example.
I bought lots of those while on vacation in Poland where we went for many years. Very cheap for western standards (as CD's were too expensive for the average buyer at the time). But very illegal. Somewhere during the 90ies I suspect the cassette market slowly ended there as well (or selling them became too risky), and one could only get the more expensice tapes, or the by then more common CD.