Saturday, September 12, 1998

They're all shook upski

By KIERAN GRANT -- Toronto Sun

Elvis lives! Or should we say, "Elvis kH3Hb!" This Elvis also surfs and plays the balalaika.
 
Yes, the King is alive and well, and living -- thank you very much -- in the hearts of four weird Russian emigres calling themselves Red Elvises.
 
The Moscow-bred, L.A.-based surf-abillies are at the Horseshoe Monday night. They are in town to support the film festival's Six-String Samurai -- the band wrote the soundtrack. They are also releasing an album, I Wanna See You Bellydance.
 
So what gives? The Red Elvises take Elvis-impersonation to the illogical level, dressing up The King with Soviet iconography and churning out rip-roarin' Russian folk-rock.
 
"We're trying to take all these things like Elvis, surf music, traditional Russian music and make fun, have fun, and the people watching will have fun," explains Red Elvises manager and spokesman Vladimir Goncharov over the phone from L.A. "It will develop from there."
 
The seeds of Red Elvises were planted in 1989 when singer-guitarist Igor Yuzov met actor-turned bass-balalaika player Oleg Bernov at a Soviet-American peace march in Moscow.
 
That event prompted the pair to move to L.A. and form a Russian folk outfit, Limpopo, "a very famous band on the children's music circuit," according to Goncharov.
 
"Wherever Igor goes he starts a band," the manager says. "He started a rock 'n' roll band in the army, before they got shot down for being too wild. And Oleg was very wild and loud. We didn't like him very much at first."
 
After splitting with Limpopo, Yuzov and Bernov recruited guitarist Zhenya Kolykhanov, a Russian friend then living in Texas, and American drummer Avi Sills. The group then fused their love of '60s surf-guitar pioneers like Dick Dale, with an oddball sense of humour that embraced and parodied the American dream.
 
"We knew of Elvis in Russia but it was the fat, old Elvis," says Goncharov with a laugh. "We saw that image and we didn't like it. We were like, 'What the hell's the big deal with this, we have a whole bunch of those in Russia.' Then we saw the early Elvis."
 
It was an inspiring moment. "Igor claims that he came to him in a dream," Goncharov explains wistfully. "He wrote very funny lyrics and Zhenya came and turned everything upsidedown and makes it tasty."
 
Funny or tasty, the formula is infectious. In Toronto last June to play a Russian-Ukranian wedding, Red Elvises scored an impromptu Horseshoe gig at the North By Northeast festival and turned it into a jam-packed triumph.
 
Red Elvises' first and second albums, Grooving To The Moscow Beat and Surfing In Siberia, also grabbed the attention of indie filmakers Lance Mungia and Jeffrey Falcon, who enlisted the band to lay down the musical backbone for their acclaimed "post-apocalyptic, Chinese spaghetti-western movie" Six-String Samurai.
 
The film debuts Monday at the film festival's Midnight Madness and features an appearance by the group.