By: Matt Warnock
It used to be that Rock n Roll was as American as apple pie. That the best rock n rollers grew up in the Deep South, the cornfields of the Midwest and under the sun of Los Angeles. But times have changed, and rock is now a global phenomenon, bringing to the world’s attention great bands and unbelievable talent from every corner of the globe. Case in point is one of Russia’s best rock bands, Pushking, and their latest record The World As We Love It
The record features a who’s who of the rock world, and while many other artists have used guests of this caliber to hide the fact that they can’t play or that the songs aren’t well written, Pushking takes this opportunity to put the icing on the cake. With a strong set list, world-class musicianship and the ability to rock as well as anyone, anywhere, Pushking and their special guests come together to make this album one of the best rock compilations in recent memory.
The World As We Love It Track and Guest Listing
• Night Rider – Billy Gibbons
• It’ll Be O.K. – Billy Gibbons and Nuno Bettencourt
• Blessing Traveller – John Lawton and Steve Stevens
• Cut The Wire – Paul Stanley and Stevie Salas
• God Made Us Free – Graham Bonnet and Dobro Al Perkens
• Head Shooter – Joe Lynn Turner
• Heroin – Jorn Lande
• I Believe – Jeff Scott Soto
• I Love You – Dan McCafferty
• My Reflection After Seeing The Schindler’s List Movie – Koha and Steve Vai
• My Simple Song – Dan McCafferty
• Nature’s Child – Udo Dirkschneider
• Open Letter To God – Eric Martin
• Private Own – Glenn Hughes and Matt Filippini
• Tonight – Glenn Hughes and Joe Bonamassa
• Trouble Love – Alice Cooper and Keri Kelli
• Why Don’t You – Glenn Hughes and Dobro Al Perkens
• Kukarracha – Joe Lynn Turner, Graham Bonnet, Eric Martin, Paul Stanley, Glenn Hughes and Steve Lukather
• That’s All That Love Can Do
Guitar International caught up with Pushking’s Oleg Savilov to talk about their latest record, Russian rock and working with some of the biggest names in rock history.
Click to Buy The World as We Love It from Amazon
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Matt Warnock: How did you choose the guest artists on your latest album? Did you know them before and had you thought about working with them for a long time, or was it a recent decision to bring them on board?
Oleg Savilov: We were acquainted only with Dan McCafferty because we made a video together and recorded one song during Nazareth’s show in Saint-Petersburg, but that was eight years ago. That song was called “I love you” and it was rearranged for our new album.
I can’t say that we only chose the guests, they also chose us to participate on our album. I’m sure that the main reason was the music. The songs suited them, bcause we picked each song specifically for each guest artist. Only three years ago, we couldn’t even imagine that all these guys would agree to participate on one of our records. And if we told people that this was going to happen they would have laughed. Who would believe that this would happen?
We still don’t fully believe that it happened. Just imagine, every musician has a dream to record something and play a gig with someone great, but this can only happen with one in a million people. And we are Russians, this is the second problem. If this happens with a band from any European country, that’s predictable, but we have a double responsibility. There’s a lot of talk in the media concerning our album. Some people are ready to see Russian guys eating black caviar in Courchevel and wasting money, so their idea was, “Yep, I know those crazy Russians, they just bought all stars they needed,” another opinion was “They invited grandpa’s and no one is interested in this music now.”
But, thanks to other people who are not so envious and who kindly support us and share our luck. I can say one thing, all our guests are not poor people and most of them are legends and will stay legends forever. They participated because they love our music, because every song was picked exclusively for each person.
Matt: After recording an album with these guest artists, do you think you will do a project like this again, with a number of guest artists, or was this a one time project?
Oleg Savilov: We’ll see, because it was a great pleasure to play with all these guys, but it was also a time full of negotiations, calls, conferences, contracts, mailing, days and nights spent on studio work, meetings, talking, friendship and finding new brothers . That was a time full of emotions, for sure we miss it and we would like to make it happen again. But I think that making Vol II in a same way is to cover sweets with some sugar, they would lose the flavour.
You know, we have a lot of questions after the record. A lot of people ask, “Who is real Pushking?” So, what is the share of Pushking on the record is it 95% band and 5% guests or 50% and 50% or something else? To avoid hearing that Pushking can’t do something without guests. we will be prepared to give people something new on the next album.
We didn’t have the goal to blow people away with the modern sound. The album is called The World as We Love It, because our guests and the band remember the ‘80s and ‘70s.For example, if you listen to the record, you’ll find that Alice Copper sounds as if he sang “Poison” or “Hey, Stupid.” This is the concept. On the next album you’ll find a more modern, hard rock sound. So when we’re ready to move on from this current sound, we’ll think about making Vol II.
Pushking
Matt: Did you write the songs for each of the guest artists, or did you write the songs first and then brought in the guests after the songs were all written?
Oleg Savilov: Most of songs were written a long time ago. As you know, we picked songs from our previous 13 albums. Sometimes we changed the arrangements and sometimes we changed lyrics. For example, “Night Rider” had another arrangement and lyrics and was called “Love Message,” but it didn’t relate well to Billy Gibbons, lyrically. “Private Own” and “Cut the Wire” were released only in Russian, and they had absolutely a different story, because we never translate songs, we write stories and legends.
Also, there was no problem finding prominent musicians, because we had a selection of around 40 songs selected for the record, and we had a list of people who we wanted to invite. The main difficulty was to figure out how to give the material to our guests. We found a possibility to find a way via light man, concert managers, drummers, session musicians, friends of friends. It was a bit of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on our part to reach out and get a hold of all these guys.
If we contacted musicians directly that might be easier, they are people of art, but you call their assistant or manager, then their attorney, and then their sound engineer. We had some cases where musicians agreed to participate, but their manager refused. Some guitarists couldn’t sing according to their contract, some can’tt appear in videos, some must do this, but not that. You know, sometimes managers decides what artists should sing.
Some guys were on tour, some had studio preferences, some postponed because of different reasons. For example Steve Vai asked us to wait for a month untill he found or not found himself in a melody. The samewith Joe Bonamassa. Steve came to the studio and postponed the record for a week, because he decided that it was not the best day, because something was wrong with his feeling. Then he came back one week later and made a miracle, so it was worth the wait. But we can forget about all the difficulties, because everyone’s participation was awesome!
Matt: What do you think is the difference between rock in America and rock in Russia?
Oleg Savilov: First of all, it’s enough to be popular in America if you want to be popular in the world. Rock in America is rock everywhere! If you’re quite popular in Russia that means that you don’t play rock or you have an obsession that you play rock, but it’s not the same as in America.
We have a strange title “Russian rock.” Frankly speaking, I don’t know who decided that it must be titled like this, because for me rock is rock. There’s no Chinese rock or New-Zealand rock, it’s just rock. But there are a lot of guys who decided that if they take drums, guitars, they can’t play of course, they know three chords and if they’re in leather and have long hair, they can play rock, but they sing only in Russian that’s why they call it Russian rock.
For sure there was some rock that could be titled as “Russian,” during communist times, when rock music was illegal, they were underground and they sang against the government, it was a protest. But now, that’s not the same.
And people here really think that it’s rock music. Rock is substituted in Russia and not in a good quality. You can ask what is the capacity of halls where Metallica or KISS or Nickelback played in Russia and compare it with the rest of the world and you understand everything. I was at a ZZ TOP show in Amsterdam and in Moscow, the capacity of the halls is more or less the same. The show was sold out in both cities, which is great great! But population of Amsterdam is around 750, 000 people and Moscow it’s around 15 million, people feel the difference. ZZ TOP is a legend! So you can imagine what happens with shows featuring only local rock bands.
The only hope that we can change something, because our President loves rock as you probably know. His favorite band is Deep Purple. As a music country, Russia became a fast-food country. This is the result of 75 years spent in a bubble. That is the result of the situation when “comrades” ruled. They needed hymns and marches. Rock was in the underground and people who loved rock were in an opposition but now, there’s no opposition and young people are free to choose, but a lot of the time their choice is already made by the Russian media.
Thank God we had people who supported us, because they saw an international potential in our work, otherwise we had no chance to make the record.
It’s not a secret, their company name is mentioned on the album. “The Guild of Purveyors to the Kremlin” (www.kremlin-guild.ru ), is a non-commercial group of Russian and Foreign production companies in association with the National Park museum, the “Moscow Kremlin”, National Historical museum, National Archive of Russian Federation, Moscow’s Kremlin Commandant Service, Federal Protective Service of Russian Federation.
It makes a wide range of publishing, exhibition and concert programs, which are meant to support the popularity of history, traditions and achievements of Russian and World culture, scenic, performance and vocal arts from best representatives of our modern art school. We all hope that our project is an international event and it will be a part of world art history. This is our aim. To tell people that here, in Russia, there are people who also can play rock at a good level.
Matt: American rock bands have found success with their music in Russia, do you think a Russian band could find success in America?
Oleg Savilov: I think that if Pushking band was born in the States, it would be one of the most popular bands in North America. You know, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown if we’re talking about Russia. Time will show, we are realists and we understand that not all first places in the charts are held for us, but we know that our music, our style, is more common to America, because we grew up on American and European rock.
Our frontman and composer, Koha, lived in the States for two years and three years in Germany, but our music has some Asian and Eastern flavour and we hope that it could also be interesting. We would love if we find good relations with America. Don’t forget, we have 13 CDs more, and we are already working on next one.
