Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   6

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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
raised those hippies’ hackles was the philosophy behind it. 
Folk  music aimed to galvanize the masses with a message; 
electric rock, as far as the crowd was concerned, was sound 
and fury signifying nothing. Alas, Dylan had made his 
choice and his set lasted three songs before getting tangled 
up in boos. Contrary to the criticism of the day, critics re-
gard the night at Newport as a kind of rock-and-roll bar 
mitzvah for Dylan, where the diminutive, quietly indignant 
boy wonder stepped into a persona decidedly larger—in not 
only  sound,  but  also  theatricality,  literary  scope,  and  cul-
tural relevance.
✖  ✖  ✖
Who, Where, When:
 Elton John, Russia, 1979
During the Cold War, about the last thing that the West-
ern world would’ve lent to its Russkie rivals was a rocket. 
Odd, then, that the fi rst Western pop star lent to Russian 
audiences was the Rocket Man. As part of his 1979 comeback 
tour (partially in response to slumping sales following his 
“retirement” from live performances a distant two years pre-
vious), Elton John and percussionist Ray Cooper sashayed 
through the Iron Curtain to play a handful of dates around 
the U.S.S.R. Red audiences were tickled pink by their fi rst 
encounter with Western rock decadence—but the Old Guard 
was surely spinning in their graves. Elton isn’t much of a pro-
letarian, after all. . . .

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10
 Stalin 
(a.k.a. Th
  e Original Man of Steel)
Th
  e Basics: Joseph Stalin is stirring proof that if you get into an 
organization at its very beginning, you can rise to great promi-
nence even if you happen to be an evil, tyrannical murderer 
whom no one ever liked. Stalin 
became a Marxist in the late 
19th century, and although 
Lenin mentored him for a long 
time, he grew to mistrust him, 
and other Communists thought 
he was crazy. But Stalin man-
aged to hang around the circles 
of power. After Lenin’s death, 
he muscled Leon Trotsky and 
others out and took the reins 
himself. He went on to consoli-
date his power in the late 1930s 
by killing everyone who’d ever 
said or thought anything 
vaguely negative about him. 
Unfortunately, he also threw 
the country into a disastrous 
famine with his farm collectiv-
ization projects, and he sent millions to Soviet concentration 
camps known as 
gulags.
 In short, he was pretty horrible.
✖  ✖  ✖
Although he took great pains to hide it, Stalin was not, techni-
cally, Russian. Born in Gori, Georgia (which later had the plea-
Joseph Stalin, 
Man of God
Before he was an atheistic ty-
rant, Josef Stalin was, oddly 
enough, a seminarian. He stud-
ied at a Georgian Orthodox 
seminary in Tifl is for fi ve years, 
between 1894 and 1899. He 
left the seminary either be-
cause of poor health (his mom’s 
story) or revolutionary activity 
(Stalin’s story). Either way, Sta-
lin clearly didn’t take much of 
what he learned to heart. That 
is, assuming he had one.