A Conversation with Filmmaker Jim Brown – HuffPost 5.28.14

Mike Ragogna: Hey Jim, you put together the footage for the DVD/Blu-ray portion of the A Matter Of Trust release, a remastered, expanded monster celebration of Billy Joel’s ’87 Russian tour. In retrospect, what do you think about A Matter Of Trust‘s importance at the time and the significance of its being reissued now?

Jim Brown: A couple of things: First of all, rock ‘n’ roll had been outlawed in the beginning in the Soviet Union. In a way–and I’m making a larger film about this–rock ‘n’ roll became a way to protest the government and to stick up for individualism. It gathered crowds, the Soviet Union wasn’t into religion or anything that gathered crowds other than their own communist politics. It was a very controlled society, and I think that rock ‘n’ roll offered a wonderful window onto Western values, especially American values and was actually tactically used by the United States through Radio Free Europe and Voice Of America. Billy came along at, I would say, a perfect storm kind of time for accomplishing what he wanted to do, and that was that when Gorbachev came into power he realized that the teenagers in the Soviet Union did not have a lot of faith in the Soviet Union or the Communist Party. Basically, they had resentment, they couldn’t understand why there wasn’t more transparency, why they couldn’t have Western clothes, blue jeans, and especially rock ‘n’ roll. Gorbachev didn’t want to end communism, he wanted to rejuvenate it. I think through glasnost and perestroika he created policies that allowed for more transparency, more freedom of going, and very much more rock ‘n’ roll. So as that got rolled back, Carter had believed in cultural diplomacy, he had sent The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band over there, there was a period during Brezhnev and Andropov after Khrushchev died where it was kind of hardliners.

Just before the Olympics, they opened up and let Elton John come but he was only allowed to play acoustically, it was just him and a percussionist and no electric instruments, but when Billy came the mood had really chang0ed. He was the first to come of that era from America with a full-blown tour. He didn’t want any restrictions, he wanted to be able to go on the same kind of tour that he put on in Madison Square Garden, with the same lights and sound and no restrictions on what he played. No one had been able to do that before. His team made quite a few visits, I’d say eight to ten, setting this thing up. He was in the middle of the Bridge tour, they’d been out a year and at the end they added this element. I think in terms of what it accomplished, the Americans that went over there realized that the Cold War was pretty trumped-up, as Billy said this was a country that loved Americans, the people loved America, and in terms of technology they had a hard time doing toilet paper, considering they were a supposed to be a nuclear threat. He just realized there was a tremendous love between the people of the countries. I think the Soviet people realized that they had also been fed propaganda of who the Americans were.

He went over there with his beautiful wife Christie Brinkley, and his daughter, which I think was an ultimate matter of trust, and basically showed them what Americans are like and what American music is like. He went into sports arenas, one in Moscow and onheh in Leningrad that were really not set up for the kind of concert that he puts on, as a matter of fact there were no orchestra seats. Billy as a performer is very dependent on interaction with the audience. The first show he was sitting there and the Communist party members were in most of the good seats in front, sitting very properly, and then he noticed that some kids were rocking out in the back, so with permission from the authorities, he went up like the Pied Piper and brought people down to the front to create the environment that became standard for the rest of the shows. Before that if people had stood up in their seats there were usually KGB guys pushing them back down, telling them to sit there at an Elton John concert and politely listen. In terms of what it did, I think Billy was at the forefront of the spearhead of a marvelous time. I think rock ‘n’ roll created distrust with youth of the Soviet Union and it allowed them to rebel against the Soviet Union’s politics consistently. The Soviet Union and its leaders really had to acquiesce to rock ‘n’ roll. First it was outlawed, then they had some American performers who were socialists, but when Billy went it was no holds barred. The two groups worked collectively to put on the concert which was “A Bridge To Russia.” I think Billy wanted to touch people, I think his real motivation was, having grown up in the cold war era being very afraid of nuclear extinction during the biggest military buildup in history, I think ten trillion dollars on each side, he thought that maybe music could create a crack in that. I think it did. I think it did. There were repercussions after he left, Czechoslovakia…The Rolling Stones came and played…

In Russia, rock ‘n’ roll artists were allowed to move freely, not just have official bands, it was a lot less restricted, suddenly, to Americans. I’m sorry to give you such a long-winded answer, but to get where we are today: Up until recently I would think that if you had asked anybody in Russia what their freedoms were compared to under the Soviet Union, especially rockers, they would say, “Much greater.” There’s a guy in our film who basically talked about how his dreams came true after the Soviet Union fell down. He can now travel pretty freely, people are not checking his set list, the Minister of Culture is not registering every song. Much more freedom. Now, could they overtly play protest music? Well, some did, and there are some who do it today, but basically the attitude today has been somewhat changed by the Ukraine position. A couple of rockers have spoken out against Pussy Riot and against the Ukraine, but I still think that even though there’s some fear of censorship, it’s much freer than it was before. You’re free to play at venues and concerts and the KGB is not going to take you and shave your hair and stuff like that, which is the kind of thing that happened in the past. Any form of capitalism in the past was restricted. You could not have Western records, you could not make a profit selling these bands. There were tremendous bootleg rings going on before Billy came, and the people that bootlegged those records were seen as capitalists and sent to Siberia. I think rock ‘n’ roll changed things in the Soviet Union a great deal. I recently saw a video of Putin singing “On Blueberry Hill,” and I think Medvedev, before his inauguration had a Deep Purple concert. Rock ‘n’ roll, I think, did give people a window on the West, a window on freedom. What they did with is when the Soviet Union fell was they fell into corruption and greed, I would say. They went from one bad system to maybe not a very good system.

MR: Do you think Billy considered the ripple effect he might have been creating at the time?

JB: I think he understood some things because his team had been over there. Even though Eisenhower and Carter had first opened up cultural diplomacy with the Soviet Union, Reagan was also for cultural diplomacy. There’s a guy in the film who he had appointed as a cultural diplomacy ambassador and he briefed Billy and Christie and the band about what they were getting into. The tour manager and other parts of the crew had gone over there several times, so I think they gave Billy a pretty good picture of what conditions were like before he went over. The Soviet government wanted him to come, Gorbachev wanted him to come, so I think he had an idea of what some of the restrictions were on rock ‘n’ roll, I think what he didn’t know was how many friends he would make and how ravenous the population there was for American rock ‘n’ roll and American values, and how gregarious the people were and reached out to him and his daughter and his wife and the band members and others. I think that really melted his heart.

MR: How do you think the trip affected Billy’s creativity after he got back?

JB: Well, he wrote “Leningrad,” which was very much reflective of his experience there and the friend in the documentary, Viktor. He told me that it was perhaps the most important thing he did in his life, he can’t think of too many others to top it. I think he did it for his daughter. I think he had grown up in a very polarized area. He had just become a father, and I think he did fear nuclear meltdown between the two countries. He had gone to Cuba before with Columbia records and done a tour there and he had seen that music broke down a lot of barriers and gave people a window into our culture, and he took that experience and thought, “Gee, if I go to Russia and do this, it might have some effect.” At the time he couldn’t really talk about it too much because if he had announced going over there to help the cold war he would’ve been laughed at, so he kind of kept it under wraps, but he talks more freely about what his true motivations were in the documentary. Also that band, which I think was one of his greatest bands, was coming to a point where people were shifting. It was a finely tuned band that had been out on the road for a year, they sounded great. I would say Billy was at the peak of his songwriting, at the peak of his performing ability, and at the peak of that tour. So not only did it capture something that’s of social and historic relevance, but it also captured some very, very good music by Billy Joel who is just a terrific entertainer and was totally blown away by the experience. He talked about how those experiences he was having in the Soviet Union and the way people were interpreting his songs allowed him to kind of reappreciate his own body of work and understand his songs better, because of the way that they were interpreting them, especially a song like “A Matter Of Trust.”

MR: I’m sure the bar personally got a little higher for Billy regarding his own songwriting afterwards.

JB: Yeah, he puts his heart into everything. Perhaps at the beginning, he put his heart in too much, he went over to Georgia at first, which is a very pretty area, he wanted to see some Georgian singers and hear their tones as a method of healing and so forth. He got into a little singing thing with them and they kind of got roped into doing a concert vocally, but they didn’t have much of a PA system so he blew out his voice. He arrived in Moscow already having given quite a bit in Georgia. The first night of the tour was a little touchy with his voice. To my knowledge nothing in that tour was overdubbed or rerecorded, I think what you’re getting is pure Billy, and it’s very, very good. And of course his band is great, he always has a great band. You’re getting some very exciting performances because as an entertainer the audience is a real catalyst for him.

MR: When your film was played for Billy and Alexa Ray, what kind of feedback did it get?

JB: I’ve heard he likes it a lot. Billy was pretty hands-off during the whole making of the film, we interacted with his team quite closely, Steve Cohen is his lighting director and artistic director and is basically an executive producer on this film, Billy’s business manager Jeff Schock brought us the archives, he was a coproducer on both the concert and the documentary, they pretty much gave us free rein. I was not asked to change anything, or anything like that. I think I told a story that everybody was glad to get out for the first time, one they hadn’t been able to tell fully when they went over there in the eighties, and we were also able to include a lot of music that was not afforded in the first concerts which were an HBO hour-long show and we had to rebuild all of the material which had been shot on 35 millimeter cameras and recorded on multitrack systems but had at that time only been transfered from 35 millimeter to one inch, so you couldn’t see the real beauty of the shots. It was shot wonderfully, Wayne Isham is one of my favorite concert directors, he was the king of concerts during that time. He did a great job, he had a real a-list crew on the concert, I still work with some of those guys. I think they captured it, they captured the interactions. Billy had a documentary crew there who did a wonderful job and they also were able to get behind the scenes when Billy got the chance to go out and meet people. It was a perfect media event, there were press conferences that were international, literally hundreds of journalists following him around, plus the documentary crew and hundreds of people that he had brought over on his own dime. He knew there was no way of making a profit, he could only take rubles. There was no way that you could take a large amount of money out of the Soviet Union, and that wasn’t his motivation. Billy’s a real history buff, he wears his heart on his sleeve and I think he was really just trying to be good for mankind.

MR: As a multiple Emmy award-winning filmmaker, how do you think this stands up to your other works?

JB: It was a thrill to work on something so historic and with a star as great as Billy. Always as a film maker we’re looking for a good story and good characters. I think we got both. Most of my work is in music, and we’ve got one of the best musicians in the world at a time where he was under some pressure to do something really wonderful and he pulled it off. To me it was honor to work on something so exciting and have such a clear storyline. There was a book written by John Reed that had a lot to do with Marxism and the start of the Soviet Union called Ten Days That Shook The World. In a way, that was what Billy did. He had probably about ten days over there that shook the world.

MR: Jim, you get the traditional question. What advice do you have for new artists?

JB: Well, it’s interesting, I was a gala for my friend Peter Yarrow, from Peter, Paul & Mary for his high school, which was the school for the performing arts that was featured in Fame. He was reminding the students and very famous graduates that attended this gala that to be an artist is to move people with art. That’s the first goal. To invite them into worlds that they haven’t been into, to show them things, move them emotionally, these are really the most important things we can do as artists. The things that a lot of people become concerned about, like fame and money, are really not the job of being an artist. Being an effective artist is to make people feel things and see things and perhaps even change things in the way the world is and to be a catalyst for that. I think the best music comes from those catalytic situations. There was a lot of good music made in the sixties because it was catalytic, a lot of good music came from the Soviet Union during that time period because it was catalytic. There’s probably a lot of good music coming around all over the world today. I think sometimes we in America get over concerned about the professionalism of the music business and less concerned with the idea of what it means to be an artist. I think that would be my advice to young artists; I teach it at the film school at NYU, at Tisch, I’m constantly reminding people that the fame and the glamour that gets celebrated in American life is really secondary to our mission of informing and getting people emotional about things and trying to teach them things.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne