Joanna Stingray
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Joanna Stingray

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Joanna Stingray is an author and musician from Los Angeles, California, who lived for many years in Russia. In 1984, while touring in the Soviet Union, she met and befriended Boris Grebenschikov, a revered musical poet (who many Soviets called the ‘Russian Dylan’) and soon became the first American producer of underground Russian rock n’ roll when she released the double album Red Wave — 4 Underground Bands from the U.S.S.R., a compilation of music smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. by Joanna in 1985. A frequent traveler in and out of Russia, Joanna was interrogated by the KGB and FBI (both thought she was a spy) and in 1987, she became an enemy of the State — her visa blocked to keep her from entering the Soviet Union to marry Leningrad guitarist Yuri Kasparyan. After months of intervention by the U.S. State Department, she returned to Russia, married Yuri and in the early ‘90s became a television host, a recording artist, and well known rock personality throughout Russia. She has published several books in Russia about her time in the music scene as well as much of her photo collection. Her video diaries and interviews of bands and their musicians is the only archive of this clandestine, bygone world. Stingray’s Red Wave is, in fact, credited by Russians for helping pave the way to the cultural opening that collapsed state control. Months after it appeared in the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev decided the Red Wave bands should be allowed to become “official,” launching the bands to notoriety by 1987. “FREE TO ROCK,” the 2017 documentary exposé directed by Jim Brown and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, features interviews with Joanna Stingray, prominent American musicians who toured the Soviet Union, and several important Russian musicians. It reveals to the world the dismantling socio-political effect of “soft power,” and discovers how American rock n’ roll and the release of Red Wave during glasnost (“cultural opening”) contributed to the ending of the Cold War. To listen to Joanna Stingray’s songs written with her Russian friends, go to: joannastingray.com, or Vimeo for a selection of her music videos.
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