That old devil music

Two weeks before the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, the American funk-rock band Mother’s Finest was to headline a concert in East Berlin. But getting there was no easy feat: To cross from West Germany, a Western democracy, into the Soviet-occupied German state, the band’s bus passed under a foreboding watchtower and through a zig-zag barrier. Not far away lay the infamous “death strip,” where the earth at the foot of the wall’s eastern side was sown with explosive mines meant to slow defectors’ escape—or in the paperwork-saving version, just kill them.

A multiracial group out of Atlanta, Mother’s Finest consisted of two white members and four black members, including lead singer “Baby Jean” Kennedy, who owned the most soulful pipes this side of Chaka Khan and used them to slay the band’s hard-driving, bass-thumping tracks. (A couple have Christian themes; you would be well-advised to find and play “Truth’ll Set You Free.”)

Leaving a free country for a land of repression is bracing for anyone, and as Mother’s Finest crossed into communist territory that late October day, the bandmates kept their eyes wide open. “We pulled our tour bus through the U.S. checkpoint, and at the German checkpoint they had us pull over a big trench like at an oil-change garage,” band leader Glenn Murdock told me.

When the bus was over the trench, East German guards inspected its undercarriage using mirrors and dogs. Then they ordered the band off the bus and let the dogs sniff through the interior. Then the guards put the band back on the bus, and a German officer with rows of ribbons on his uniform climbed aboard.

“Who is ze leader?” the officer demanded.

Murdock sheepishly raised his hand.

“To ze back of ze bus!” the officer shouted.

“I didn’t know whether I was going to be arrested or shot or what,” Murdock told me. “He closed the curtain, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and put his finger to his lips: ‘Shhhh.’ He then pulled a Mother’s Finest album out of his coat.”

“You vill sign?” he asked, now smiling.

Stunned (and relieved), Murdock scribbled his name on the album cover. The officer then called every member of the band back to autograph his record. When he left, he whispered to Murdock, “Next time I vill have a different record for you to sign!”

Then, he put his communist border guard face back on and shouted, “Let them pass!”

Many books have been written on the part rock music played in the 1960s tumult in America, with one of the best being Peter Doggett’s There’s a Riot Going On. Of course, Michael Allen and I had written some about this, particularly Woodstock, in our A Patriot’s History of the United States. After Woodstock and specifically after Altamont in December 1969, when Hell’s Angels security guards stabbed one Rolling Stones concertgoer and three others died in accidents, rock never regained the same level of awe and respect in America it once had.

But that was America. Things developed far differently in Europe, particularly in Soviet territory. Although scarcely noticed by Westerners, a genuine thirst for American and British rock music had arisen behind the Iron Curtain. After World War II, the Soviet Union broke promises Josef Stalin made at Yalta, then Potsdam, and what was supposed to be a free Eastern Europe remained under the Soviet boot, mostly through puppet dictators. Yet as Stalinist repression continued, a desire for Western freedom took root among the people.

A major medium for the freedom message was music—and not just any music. It was rock ’n’ roll.

Picture-Alliance/DPA/Associated Press/Photo by Peter Kneffel

I RECALL recall sitting in a Baptist church service in my youth listening to a preacher rail against rock, then a fairly new phenomenon. “The first thing that starts movin’,” the preacher said with a disapproving scowl, “is your pelvis.”

The message was clear: Rock ’n’ roll was the devil’s music, and nothing good—certainly nothing Christian—could come from it.

Undeterred and not long later, I took up the drums. My mother had insisted I play piano, but my heart was always … well, beating for the skins. Over the course of a couple of years, I built a drum set, one piece at a time. I learned my licks from Ringo Starr—one of the best drummers ever, for a number of reasons—and soon found myself playing in a variety of bands from jazz to rock. I made it through college, but literally the Sunday after I got my B.A. in political science from Arizona State University, I was headed for Peoria, Ill., in a van to play rock music. Even then, though, I carried that preacher’s comment in my head.

There is no doubt rock ’n’ roll was—and is—used for a lot of frivolous and unclean purposes. For example, most of the time my band played in bars, its purpose was to sell more liquor. But I never gave up my Christian faith, and indeed after some time I began to wonder about the origins of the music.

Clearly the music itself wasn’t inherently bad. There were plenty of Christian rock groups such as Stryper and, later, Skillet, the Newsboys, P.O.D., Kutless, Tree 63, Avalon, and many others. The medium can definitely serve up a gospel message.

Over time I became less interested in these theological origin questions. Instead, I grew more interested in the effect of music on secular society.

Mother’s Finest in 1989 Ian Dickerson/Redferns/Getty Images

IN 2010, I began work on a chapter of a book called Seven Events That Made America America, where I looked at our past to find important moments that are almost never addressed in traditional textbooks. This work had, in fact, sprung from another book that I more or less fell into—a biography of the keyboardist/singer from the ’60s psychedelic-rock group Vanilla Fudge. I met Mark Stein over the internet when I complimented him via email on a charity concert in New York he participated in for the rescue dogs of 9/11. Mark and I talked at length, as I had loved the Fudge growing up and patterned my drumming after the legendary Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice. One thing led to another, and Mark eventually asked me to help him write his autobiography.

How could I refuse the key individual in my favorite group growing up? Along the journey, Mark set me up with almost 100 interviews of rockers, from Billy Joel to Three Dog Night’s Chuck Negron to Deep Purple’s Ian Paice to Alice Cooper and many more. While working on that book, I came across research on rock’s impact on Eastern Europe and its communist youth. This story, I thought, needed to be more fully told. That’s how one of the chapters in Seven Events became “A Steel Guitar Rocks the Iron Curtain,” which then became a documentary, Rockin’ the Wall.

Construction begins on the Berlin Wall in 1961, separating family, friends, and neighborhoods. Hilde/Ullstein bild via Getty Images

It didn’t hurt that as a professor of American history, I had taught about the Cold War for nearly 30 years. Still, as soon as I dove in, the research and interviews took me in directions I never dreamed. Via Facebook, I connected with Leslie Mandoki, a Hungarian rock drummer/activist who had fled his native country due to repression. Mandoki had become a major music producer in Germany, writing and performing ads for Audi and Volkswagen. He toured with a group of all-stars that included Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull (who is a believer), Jack Bruce (the fabled bassist from Cream), David Clayton-Thomas, the gravelly-voiced singer from Blood, Sweat, & Tears, and dozens more.

Mandoki’s story was among the most captivating. As a teenage rock drummer, he chafed against the Tito-communist censorship. Even though Yugoslavia never remotely approached the brutal totalitarianism of East Germany or the USSR itself, it was still … well, communist. And it remained repressive, not tolerating any challenge to the communist authority of its dictator, Josip Broz Tito.

“All our lyrics had to be approved,” Mandoki recalled. “So like all other rock musicians, we developed a technique called the ‘rat tail.’ This was where you wrote one set of lyrics that seemed to be favorable to the regime, but which every listener understood them to be exactly the opposite.”

I knew what he meant. Bruce Springsteen’s famous song “Born in the U.S.A.” was an anti–Vietnam War song. But not many realized it, largely because Springsteen (like Mick Jagger) was almost impossible to understand except for during the famous chorus, “BORN … in the U.S.A.! I was BORN … in the U.S.A.!”

Leslie Mandoki performs at a 2010 concert in Munich. Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images

Mandoki’s band would hold concerts on a few hours’ notice, attracting audiences via flyers hastily pinned up at the five major universities. However, the concerts almost always followed the same script: The band would play a few innocuous songs, then move into music critical of the regime, at which point the police would literally unplug their amplifiers.

“Leslie,” one police officer friend told Mandoki, “you need to quit this. I have never heard the end of one of your concerts!” Mandoki experienced what many artists felt: the tension between merely entertaining and delivering a message.

Ultimately, Mandoki knew he had to leave or at least choose among the Hungarian Bermuda Triangle: girls and goulash, submission to the communists, or escape. He chose escape, getting directions through a railroad tunnel from a relative (slipped to him in a letter hidden inside a sandwich). During his flight, he eluded tunnel guards, evaded dogs, and was almost killed by trains that were too large for the tunnel. When he came out on the other side, he saw a sign that said “Danger! Electricity!” in Austrian German.

That was when Mandoki knew he was safe.

What made him risk his life for freedom? Rock music, he said. “The music was so incredible. And we didn’t want to be like Americans. We wanted to be Americans!”

Construction begins on the Berlin Wall in 1961, separating family, friends, and neighborhoods. Bettmann/Getty Images

NOTHING SYMBOLIZED the division between free countries and the Soviet Bloc more than the Berlin Wall, on which construction began at midnight on Aug. 12, 1961. Workers ripped up streets between East and West Berlin, and by the next day a barbed wire barrier divided the city. Four days later, as armed guards stood in place, workers used concrete blocks to construct almost 96 miles of walled barrier, most of it 12 feet high. Barbed wire remained in front, and later, after East Germans tried desperately to crash westward through the gates to freedom, workers put those minefields—the death strip—in place. Over time, citizens of free Germany—and the watching world—covered the west-facing wall with graffiti, most of it celebrating freedom or expressing disdain for the communists.

What made it so stunning was how fast it went up—in many places, literally overnight, and where you went to sleep the night before was where you stayed for the next 20 years. To ensure those trapped in East Germany did not leap from windows and land on the free side, the communists ensured that west-facing apartments close to the barrier had their windows walled up.

Freedom-loving people were not dissuaded in their efforts to escape, despite machine gun towers, mines, barbed wire, and dogs. Guards had shoot-to-kill orders. Nevertheless, over 5,000 fled to freedom while the wall stood. Some ran (and many were killed), some used hot air balloons or ultralights, some dug under the barrier.

But while a physical barrier did frustrate thousands of attempts to gain liberty, stopping messages of freedom flowing from the West proved a different story.

Behind the Iron Curtain, music was smuggled in via X-ray cans, or on cassette tapes or the rare physical LP. Someone would obtain a tape of a Western band and have two to four hours to make copies and return the original to its owner. Once you had a copy, as one music aficionado noted, “You closed the drapes and put it on and just listened. No talking. Just a lot of listening.”

Gabe, a Romanian rock-lover I spoke with, acquired as many Western records as he could, paying a full month’s salary to buy one single album, Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

Another band that starred in our film was Mother’s Finest, the band that counted that Checkpoint Charlie guard among its fans. Mother’s Finest played the same clubs I did with my old band in the 1970s, and we knew each other from sitting in on each other’s sets. Well into their 60s by 2010, Mother’s Finest continued to play to huge crowds in Europe, where they were always more popular than in America. (One of their albums was called Black Radio Won’t Play This Record.)

Construction begins on the Berlin Wall in 1961, separating family, friends, and neighborhoods. Patrice Habans/Paris Match via Getty Images

Others, including Jimmy Haslip of the Yellowjackets, told of playing before Eastern European crowds in which people would literally weep because they got to hear Western rock. Haslip recalled playing in Bulgaria, where a soldier, who spoke no English, came out to introduce them: “I don’t know what he was saying, but tears were rolling down his face.” Haslip himself teared up as he told us this story.

Rockers, including Mark Stein and Vinny Martell of Vanilla Fudge, music producer John Van Tongeren, legendary producer George “Shadow” Morton, Toto’s David Paich, and Haslip, who had played in the East told of being in Europe or watching on television and crying as they saw the joy on the faces of the people who eventually ripped the wall apart. As Shadow said, “Rock ’n’ roll shrank the world!”

Europeans had a different vantage point. Tatiana Fenner, a Moldovan woman who was a young girl at the time, told us: “I was atheist. I was not communist but I was atheist. They banned many things—newspapers, books. But for some reason the Russian authorities let in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I came to Jesus,” she said, “and am baptized because of Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Apparently, God uses everything: talking donkeys, water for wine, even a controversial and—many would say—blasphemous musical.

Ullie Kampelmann, then an East Berlin teenager, spoke of attending rock parties while she knew she was being surveilled by the Stasi—the German secret police.

“Have you ever seen your Stasi file?” we asked her.

To our surprise, she pulled it out of her bag. It was easily an inch thick: a file on a teenage girl who never engaged in any revolutionary activity at all. Like Mandoki, Kampelmann made a harrowing escape. She decided she was no longer safe after learning that a Stasi agent had been in her boyfriend’s room. The agent took nothing, but in a clear action designed to intimidate, he had scratched the young man’s Yes album unplayable.

Kampelmann had a friend from West Berlin. He agreed to help her escape. She got into his car, which had a rear tire compartment. They took the tire out, and she hid in the tiny, cramped, hot space for the two-hour trip to freedom. At the crossing, she heard East German guards opening the doors, checking, even opening the trunk—but they never opened the tire compartment. Soon after, her friend knocked on the compartment and let her out. They had made it. She opened her eyes to “bright colors, everywhere!”

This, by the way, was one of the more consistent reports we heard from every rock ’n’ roller. East Berlin was drab: gray, gray, gray—over and over again. “You could see it in people’s eyes,” Jean Kennedy said. “They were dull. There was no life there.”

What we learned in filming the documentary was that many of those who loved rock music and who were inspired to leave or resist communism did not know what the lyrics meant. Most couldn’t speak English that well. Yet they knew it was the sound of freedom. How?

American music—rock, folk, jazz, blues, country—follows a similar structural pattern. A band starts together, playing a couple of verses and a chorus, but then something different happens: You get the solo! After that, the band coalesces again, playing the rest of the song together. It is a musical depiction of America: We can cooperate, we can do things together, but we never lose our sense of individuality and freedom.

Solos are not written out. They just happen. This, then, was what the East European youth knew intuitively during the Cold War. As every one of them told us, “Rock ’n’ roll is freedom.”

An estimated 150,000 fans from all over East Germany attend a Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin in 1988. DPA-Zentralbild/Picture-alliance/DPA/AP

It was Bruce Springsteen himself who added to this point an exclamation mark when he played East Berlin in 1988, the year before the wall came down. As the communists saw it, Springsteen was an anti-Reagan dissident, so they were happy to let him in.

Springsteen played a couple of songs then made a short speech: “I am not here to praise or blame any government,” he said. “I’m just here to play rock ’n’ roll.” Then he launched into “Born in the U.S.A.,” and 80,000 communist youths jammed their fists in the air and sang along. One could just see the commissars smacking their heads, realizing they had made a terrible mistake.

Early in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, a major internal battle took place at the Voice of America/Radio Free Europe offices over whether or not to beam rock music behind the Iron Curtain. “Some thought it was degenerate music,” said Joe Morris, a lawyer for the VOA. “But everyone else said, ‘This is what the kids listen to. They won’t hear your political messages if you don’t hook them with rock.’”

The East Europeans we spoke with corroborated the critical importance of Voice of America/Radio Free Europe. People would gather together to tune in, Leslie Mandoki said. “But if someone came to the door, you not only switched off the radio and put it away but turned the dial back to the approved communist station so no one could tell you had even been listening to Voice of America.”

By the late 1980s, due to pressure from Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had already begun loosening restrictions on missionaries in Russia. I recounted in an earlier article how Reagan regarded sharing the gospel with Gorbachev part of his assignment from God (“God, the Gipper, and Gorbachev,” Sept. 24, 2022). But Gorbachev had one more scene in the drama.

A few years after the Berlin Wall fell and communism in the USSR was history, Mandoki had become such a celebrity that he was feted by figures such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bill and Hillary Clinton. He also became friends with Gorbachev, who visited Mandoki at his home.

“We could keep out books,” Gorbachev told Mandoki. “We could keep out television. But we could not keep out rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll was fundamental to bringing down communism.”

Well, then. Maybe rock isn’t the devil’s music after all.