I still remember the day my dad introduced me to the Beatles. It was a bright morning in Vilnius, probably one of the first days of spring, and we were walking to our neighbourhood supermarket to buy our Saturday newspapers and milk.
Whenever I entered the shop, my attention would be drawn immediately towards a little corner on the right, dedicated to music records and films. The shop was managed by a lonely middle-aged man, who would always sit there, watching the same films on his tiny TV over and over again. But on that day it was my dad who noticed it first — a bright red CD with a big yellow 1 on the cover.
He immediately bought it and, when we came back home, played it. I loved it. He had loved the Beatles all his life and Let it be would make his eyes strangely sad. And rock music in general, actually. Apparently, it had all started in the s. If you were lucky, you could hear the sounds of the Beatles, the Animals or the Rolling Stones on the radio. The music was hardly audible and just when you were about to figure out that complicated riff by Keith Richards, it would disappear.
The limited supply and the huge demand made them madly expensive. Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident, said once that jeans and rock music brought the Soviet Union down more than anything else.
The absurdity of the bureaucracy and controlled media created a vacuum in which underground culture could thrive. No one believed in the image of a happy and prosperous Soviet Republic of Lithuania.
