When you grow up in a Soviet intelligentsia family they raise you like a samurai. You have to be good with the sword and you have to be good with the flute. When I was six my parents sent me to classical piano school where they make you sit at the piano for hours a day. If you didn’t play right, the teacher would beat you up. I hated it. All I wanted was to play soccer. But then two years later, I closed my eyes and my fingers just started rolling over the keys. Just hands, no thinking. When I opened my eyes, I saw my fifty-six year old Russian teacher was in the corner crying.

       When I turned thirteen, I picked up a guitar and started playing punk rock in a Young Pioneers castle. Everybody wore red silk scarves, and they were supposed to be teaching you about communism, but our supervisor was a really bad alcoholic, so he was happy we just made our own music and he could drink. It was a beautiful time to be a musician, because the USSR was falling apart and music was powering the movement.

 

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