UK Release date : Monday, September 30, 1991
CHOBA B CCCP
By Paul McCartney • Official album • Part of the collection “Paul McCartney • Studio albums”
Last updated on September 1, 2016
UK Release date : Monday, September 30, 1991
By Paul McCartney • Official album • Part of the collection “Paul McCartney • Studio albums”
Last updated on September 1, 2016
Previous album May 13, 1991 • "Mighty Like a Rose" by Elvis Costello released globally
Interview Jul 21, 1991 • Paul McCartney interview for People Magazine
Concert Jul 24, 1991 • Denmark • Copenhagen
Album Sep 30, 1991 • "CHOBA B CCCP" by Paul McCartney released in the UK
Single Sep 30, 1991 • "The World You're Coming Into / Tres Conejos" by Kiri Te Kanawa released in the UK
Album Oct 20, 1991 • "Liverpool Oratorio" by Paul McCartney released globally
This album was recorded during the following studio sessions:
Jul 20, 1987
Jul 21, 1987
Jul 22, 1987
Written by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller
4:03 • Studio version • C
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Eddie Cochran, Ned Fairchild
3:04 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Lloyd Price
3:18 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew
3:00 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Sam Cooke
3:15 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Richard Penniman / Little Richard, Albert Collins
3:13 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Duke Ellington, Bob Russell
2:51 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Guitar, Producer, Vocals Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer Nick Garvey : Bass Henry Spinetti : Drums
Session Recording: Jul 21, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, Roy Hayes
4:14 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Arthur Crudup
3:48 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by George Gershwin
4:58 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew
3:43 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Guitar, Producer, Vocals Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer Nick Garvey : Bass Henry Spinetti : Drums
Session Recording: Jul 21, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Ellas McDaniel
3:55 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Guitar, Producer, Vocals Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer Nick Garvey : Bass Henry Spinetti : Drums
Session Recording: Jul 21, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Written by Bob Shelton, Joe Shelton, Sydney Robin
3:34 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Midnight Special (Prisoner's Song)
Written by Traditional
3:59 • Studio version • A
Paul McCartney : Bass, Producer, Vocal Mick Green : Guitar Chris Whitten : Drums Mick Gallagher : Piano Peter Henderson : Recording engineer
Session Recording: Jul 20, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
Session Mixing: Jul 22, 1987 • Studio Hog Hill Studio, Rye, UK
From Wikipedia:
Choba B CCCP (also known as The Russian Album) is the seventh solo studio album by Paul McCartney, originally released in 1988 exclusively in the Soviet Union. The album consists entirely of covers, mainly of rock and roll oldies (similar to John Lennon’s 1975 album Rock ‘n’ Roll). With the addition of an extra track, the album was released internationally in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Background and recording
Following the tepid reaction to his 1986 studio album Press to Play, McCartney spent much of the first half of 1987 plotting his next album. In July, he got the urge to get back to his roots by singing some of his favourite hits from the 1950s and over the course of two days, with three other session musicians, McCartney recorded twenty-two songs, thirteen of which would be chosen for the eventual album release in the USSR the following year.
During the recording sessions 22 songs were recorded, but originally only 11 were put on the album. A second Soviet pressing, released in December 1988, increased the song total to 13 by adding “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday” and “Summertime“. The 1991 worldwide CD release contained 14 tracks by including “I’m in Love Again” (first released in 1989 as one of the B-sides to McCartney’s “This One” single) as a bonus track. Two more tracks from the sessions saw official release: the blues jam “I Wanna Cry” as another of the “This One” B-sides and “It’s Now or Never” on the NME double-LP/CD The Last Temptation of Elvis in England in February 1990.
Six songs from the sessions remain unreleased: “I Saw Her Standing There” (Beatles song), “Take This Hammer” (an American folk song), “Cut Across Shorty” (Eddie Cochran), “Poor Boy” (Elvis Presley), “Lend Me Your Comb” (Carl Perkins) and “No Other Baby” (The Vipers). The last of these would be re-recorded by McCartney for 1999’s Run Devil Run.
Album title and cover
The title Снова в СССР is Russian for “Back in the U.S.S.R.” – a famous Lennon–McCartney song from the Beatles’ 1968 double album commonly known as the White Album. The title is often taken as if written in Latin letters (“choba b cccp”), but it is Russian, written in Cyrillic, transliterated Snova v SSSR, and pronounced in Russian roughly snova v ess-ess-ess-er.
The cover of the album was designed by Michael Ross. McCartney’s photograph in a red star, the USSR’s symbol, was taken by his wife Linda and was first featured inside the gatefold album cover of Ram.
Release
McCartney intended Снова В СССР as a present for Soviet fans who were generally unable to obtain his legitimate recordings, often having to make do with copies; they would, for a change, have an album that people in other countries would be unable to obtain. Accordingly, McCartney never intended the album to be sold outside the USSR, and mirroring the situation as it had been within the Soviet Union, it was a popular import or bootleg album in other countries. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Снова В СССР was given a worldwide release in 1991, reaching number 63 in the UK and number 109 in the US. Curiously, the title is misprinted on this release as СНОВА Б СССР (Б is the Cyrillic equivalent of the letter B in the Latin alphabet, rather than the B, equivalent to V, of the original).
The Russian album includes liner notes in Russian, from text that was originally in English by Roy Carr of the NME.
Rhapsody praised the album, calling it one of their favourite cover albums. […]
From The New York Times, January 12, 1989:
Not long ago, music fans in the Soviet Union had to search the black market for European and American pop recordings and pay exorbitant prices for them. But now, for once, the tables have been turned.
Paul McCartney has released an album exclusively in the Soviet Union called ”Back in the U.S.S.R.” as his tribute to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s moves toward openness. The record, believed to be the first Soviet-only release by a Western rock star, has been slipping into the West and has been commanding $100 to $250 a copy in the United States and is reportedly selling for as much as $:500 (about $885) in London.
Just as Soviet record shops have long carried pirated pressings of Western recordings – including some by the Beatles, whose disks were not licensed for release there until 1986 – counterfeit copies of Mr. McCartney’s LP are expected to arrive in shops specializing in rare rock records within two weeks.
The bootleg versions will sell for about $10. One Manhattan dealer said he expected a pirate version of the Soviet recording on a compact disk filled out with other McCartney tracks that have been issued in Europe but not in the United States. Manager Says He’s Astonished
Richard Ogden, Mr. McCartney’s manager, said in a telephone conversation from London that he was astonished to hear the prices the disks were fetching. He did not sound amused.
”We’re trying to decide how to deal with this,” he said. ”We still have absolutely no plans to release the record in the West, but we’re not happy about Paul’s fans having to pay $200 for the disk if they want a copy. Today we are mailing members of our fan club letters telling them not to pay those prices because if we can find a way of sorting it out with the Russians, we’ll make the record available to them ourselves.”
The record, which was released in November by the Soviet Union’s state-run Melodiya label, contains Mr. McCartney’s performances of some early rock classics as well as a few hard-driving arrangements of pop standards, many drawn from the repertory he sang in the Beatles’ formative years. Exports Are Forbidden
The first pressing of the record had 11 tunes running the gamut from Elvis to Ellington – ”That’s Alright (Mama),” ”Kansas City,” ”Twenty-Flight Rock,” ”Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” ”Bring It on Home,” ”Lucille,” ”Ain’t That a Shame,” ”Crackin’ Up,” ”Just Because,” ”Midnight Special” and ”Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”
But when the initial run of 50,000 copies sold out almost immediately at 4 rubles each (about $6.60 at the official rate), Melodiya pressed another batch with an extra song, George Gershwin’s ”Summertime.”
Melodiya’s licensing agreement with EMI, the British company for which Mr. McCartney usually records, gives the Soviet concern the right to press 400,000 copies of the LP and prohibits Melodiya from exporting it. A 2-Day Oldies Jam
Mr. McCartney recorded the songs in London with a small band of British musicians in two days in July 1987. The sessions were essentially an oldies jam in which Mr. McCartney and his sidemen cut 20 tunes live in the studio with no overdubbing or post-production work.
Four of those that eventually landed on the Soviet disk were released in late 1987 as filler tracks on two British 12-inch singles. But neither these nor the other songs on those releases (”Once Upon a Long Ago” and a collaboration with Elvis Costello, ”Back on My Feet”) were released in the United States.
”From our point of view,” Mr. Ogden said, ”this record was not meant to be a commercial venture. We’re earning virtually nothing from it, and we are donating part of what we earn to the Armenian earthquake appeal. But the record is something Paul made for fun, and releasing it only to the Russians was a gesture from him to them.”
Mr. McCartney has declined to discuss the project publicly but offered his reasons for releasing the disk in the Soviet Union in a one-paragraph liner note, printed in Russian on the LP jacket:
”When I was very young, I asked my father if people want peace. He answered, ‘Yes, people everywhere want peace; all the unpleasantness is usually from politicians.’ It always seemed to me that the delight Soviet people took in Beatles music was an affirmation of my father’s words, and that people all over the world are brought closer together by many common interests. With the issue of this record – prepared specially and exclusively for the Soviet Union – I am extending the hand of peace and friendship to the Soviet people.”
That Soviet fondness for Beatles music was among younger listeners who, according to articles published in the 1960’s, traded tapes of Beatles songs recorded from Western short-wave radio broadcasts. The Soviet Government, however, was less admiring. In December 1968 (around the time the group released its ”White Album”), an article in Sovetskaya Kultura, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Culture, declared the Beatles to be a symptom of the West’s decline. The article, by A. Martinova, contended that the Beatles’ popularity reflected the soullessness of a consumer society. ”Philistines must have their idols whom they can admire,” she wrote, ”whose lives they can live as if they were their own.” How the Disks Travel
Within a few weeks of the release of the Melodiya disk, copies began turning up, 10 to 40 at a time, in the American shops that specialize in that sort of thing. One Houston dealer offered the disks for $100 to regular customers who had entered a raffle. A dealer in Maryland advertised the disk at $250 in a Beatles fan magazine. And a New York record shop that specializes in collectible records sold out its first shipment of 40 copies, at $100 each, in 10 days.
”If an American goes to Moscow and buys a record in the shop, there’s nothing we can do about that,” Mr. Ogden said. ”And if some of the Russian people are developing entrepreneurial instincts, well, that is what Mr. Gorbachev says he is trying to encourage.”
Those seem, in fact, to be the two routes copies of ”Back in the U.S.S.R.” take to the United States. One American who recently returned from the Soviet Union said there was not a copy to be found in the Moscow record shops he visited. But in a back street near his hotel, he was able to buy as many copies as he could carry for slightly more than the 4-ruble official price.
The other route is more circuitous. ”We have a customer who is a Soviet emigre,” said one New York dealer who spoke on condition that he not be identified. ”His friends in the Soviet Union are charging him $20 each for as many disks as he wants. He is selling them to us for $60, and we’re selling them for $100. We sold eight copies to a dealer in New Jersey who we think is selling them for $200.
”Why are we charging $100? Well, we wanted to price them at a level where they wouldn’t fly out of here in a day but also where they wouldn’t be sitting around forever,” the dealer said. ”Yes, some customers have complained. But I just tell them that in a year, these will probably be listed in the Beatles collectors’ guides at $500 a copy, and they buy them immediately.”
Notice any inaccuracies on this page? Have additional insights or ideas for new content? Or just want to share your thoughts? We value your feedback! Please use the form below to get in touch with us.
