It’s tough to decide what to admire most about Russian
rock vets Mumiy Troll: the fact
that they pursued a music career
knowing they’d take home next
to nothing no matter how well
their records sold, the fact that
they became the most popular
band in a land where rock was
banned when they were kids, or
the fact that they had the foresight to name themselves after
the only undead creatures that
haven’t been bandwagoned into
the ground in modern times.
Forty-three-year-old singer/
guitarist Ilya Lagutenko first
started using the name Mumiy
Troll for the lineup he put
together when he was 13 and
living in Vladivostok, the port
town 100 miles from North
Korea and China where he got
hooked on Deep Purple, Pink
Floyd, and Sex Pistols records
smuggled into the country by
cruise-ship employees.
“You had a whole genera-
tion of people in the ’70s and
’80s who would practically die
to get a new record,” he recalls.
“And long-play [LP] records
would cost, like, a month’s
salary in Soviet Russia—like,
80 rubles. A Russian engineer
would probably get a hundred
rubles a month. So imagine
the love!”
Back then, Lagutenko was
still a long way from team-
ing with current Trolls—lead
guitarist Yuri Tsaler, bassist
Eugene Zvidionny, and drum-
mer Oleg Pungin—to storm
their homeland, but that fact
probably just underscored the
coolness of having his teen
band publicly singled out by a
local Communist party leader
and lumped in with the likes of
Black Sabbath as being danger-
ous and subversive.
