Introduction - The Timezone Project
Over a period of ten years, 17 musicians from the USSR and Humboldt County, California collaborated, recorded, and later, performed live concerts of their original music, sung in Russian and English.
In 1982, Timezone was just an idea floating around in my head. Ten years later we would be performing on stage with musicians from Humboldt County and the USSR. This would be known as the Timezone Project.
I’d been playing music with a band of friends in Humboldt County, California for about seven years. We were regulars on the Pacific Northwest club scene, playing Seattle, Bellingham, Vancouver, Victoria, Eugene, Portland, Bandon, Chico, venues in Humboldt County, and starting to penetrate the Bay Area. We played a lot of our own music, a folk-rock style, heavily influenced by reggae. The clubs liked us because we generated a great dance sound. We played at the first Reggae on the River in southern Humboldt County.
I’d also started to read Russian history at that time, inspired by some of the early 19th century fur trader diaries from the California north coast that had been translated into English. I studied the Russian language for two years at Humboldt State University. On a deeper level, part of my obsession was also motivated by the historic tension of the nuclear rivalry of the US and USSR. And what little I knew about that country.
In the midst of that scenario, I began to formulate an idea of US and USSR musicians creating a music project together, rather than letting fear be the reigning element. Far fetched? Maybe. Music seemed a perfect venue for that expression. A few years later, Carl Sagan talked about a joint Soviet-American expedition to Mars - the Red Planet. His message was the essence of Timezone - let mutual collaboration be the defining force, not mutual destruction.
In 1984, I boarded a ship in Japan and sailed to the Soviet Far East. The journey to discover the Timezone Project had begun.
I spent two months in the USSR traveling by myself. It was highly unusual at the time, but possible. Within that trip, I had an embedded idea to try and meet musicians unofficially on the street. No government introductions or approvals. Just street level connections. Go to the USSR and search out situations that might lead to a spontaneous outpouring of music and connection. At the best of times I felt inspired and compelled to ride this dream hard into the future, imagining the possibilities. At the worst of times, I felt it was ill conceived, a pipe dream, and a terrible waste of time, in a large and complicated world.
During those 10 years in forming the Timezone Project, I would meet people in the USSR, on the street, who would share the vision. Musicians in Kiev, Ukraine, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and Moscow Russia. My friends in Humboldt County also shared the vision, though initially, they thought I was on a rather convoluted pursuit that would have unknown outcomes. That part was absolutely true.
The project took hold in Kiev and would evolve from simple music sessions in an apartment among friends and emerge into full-blown Moscow recording sessions in the after hours of a state owned 24-track studio. Several musicians from the Moscow underground music scene joined the project.
I carried tape reels from the sessions back and forth between the US and USSR over several years. On one set of songs, the Humboldt musicians laid down the basic tracks at Humboldt Records, in Trinidad, California, where I lived. In Moscow, we would develop a separate set of song tracks. Both versions would eventually be combined into a 16-track format for accessibility. The latter mixes in Moscow moved to a private recording studio run by Peter Mamonov, of the Zvuki Mu underground performance art group. The studio was in the basement of his Moscow apartment building. I’d met Mamanov personally in the USA when he was on tour with his group.
The final Moscow recordings in 1991 would be interrupted by the coup of USSR generals when they arrested Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev - the leader of the Soviet Union. Massive crowds gathered in Moscow’s Freedom Square in protest. The city was on the verge of chaos. Gorbachev would be released several days later. The riots ceased. The final Moscow recording sessions of Timezone’s Lost Nations album, were completed in December when the Soviet Union collapsed.
I got married in Moscow at the same time as the country was falling into disarray. My wife, Oxana, and I flew back to the US in early 1992 though Siberia and Alaska.
Several months later, we released the Timezone - Lost Nations CD, featuring 10 songs the group had co-created. We also raised money to fly seven of the Russian musicians to Humboldt County to stage three nights of live concerts, backed by Humboldt State University’s Performing Arts Center. The concerts were held on Dec 3-5, 1992 at the Van Duzer Theater auditorium.
Having a full month to write, revise, and rehearse together at the university, the band created almost 20 original songs for the three concerts. The concerts lasted over three hours each night, performed to a steadily growing audience as word spread across the county about the Timezone Project.
In this section of A Hundred Journeys, I will write a series of chapters outlining the details of how this extraordinary project was formed, how it evolved, and who the performers were that ignited its success.
Please stay tuned.
jhg