The featured image above was taken by Mantas Kristijonas Kuliešis for Go Vilnius.
After stumbling upon a bronze statue of Frank Zappa in Vilnius, Lithuania, a traveler begins his quest to discover how it got there, which leads him on a crash course in Soviet history and the plight of artists, who often give cities a creative soul before being priced out.
Standing beneath the giant plinth, the large, deep-set eyes of the bronze bust stared back at me.
My hair dripped as my neck craned, trying to identify the face. The mixture of sweat and the ice-cold water from my dip in the Vilna River stung the tops of my shoulders, like the sharpened points of nails puncturing my skin. The air outside wasn’t terribly cold, at least for early December–mid-30s perhaps. But the brown-green water that rushed through the center of Vilnius was just a few notches above freezing, and, not long before, I’d been completely been naked, shoulder deep in the river feeling as if I was being punched in the gut and poked with a million tiny needles, doing my best to breathe deep and control my body’s fight-or-flight reaction to prevent the onset of panic mode.
Surely, the bust was of some national hero, immortalized in a deep, dark green bronze–perhaps Soviet-era revolutionary. After all, his long hair, pulled into a loose ponytail, screamed anything but Communist Russia. His long chin, gaunt cheeks, and deep-set eyes were those of someone who’d been long in conflict. No matter who he was, the strange starkness of the memorial drew me in, piquing my interest in a strange and alluring way that most other memorials, statues I would have otherwise passed by, rarely do. I crossed a small parking lot and, inching closer to the long cylindrical base of the honor, noticed the name printed beneath the head: Frank Zappa.
Like, “Mothers of Invention” Frank Zappa? I thought. Like… Hot Rats. Baby Snakes. Guitar Frank Zappa? I thought he was from Los Angeles? Anyway, “Zappa” is an Italian name.
Why on Earth am I standing in the middle of Lithuania, staring at a Frank Zappa memorial, I wondered.
Had I known of this statue’s existence an hour or two earlier, I would have asked my sauna guru, a large young man built like a tree trunk, born and raised in Vilnius. He spoke perfect English, thanks in large part to the years he spent playing college basketball at a small university in New England, and grew up not far from the little barrel-like sauna that he owned with a few friends.
The dip in the river was by design, of course; all part of the morning’s plan. After all, saunas are an essential activity in this part of the world, and if you want to do it right, you alternate between the extreme heat and a frigid cold dip. In some places, it’s a fjord. In others, an ice bath. In Vilnius, it’s the river. At least, it is in the heart of winter when the sauna sits on a small dock above the river’s edge.
As the guru used pine fronds to waft the scalding-hot air over my body, he explained how much the city has changed in the few decades since his childhood. Užupis, especially, he pointed out, has undergone such a sea change that what was once a blighted artists’ enclave has become one of the priciest neighborhoods in the city. So pricey, in fact, that many local Vilnians can no longer afford to live there.
Deep breath in, the hot air stinging the sides of my throat, and, breathing out, my lips formed a small circle in an attempt to expel a steady stream of air from my body. He doused a pile of hot stones in water, immediately forcing the temperature in the little barrel up and making it feel as if the little hairs that covered my body were being singed.
I told him about the decade I spent living in New York City, in certain corners of Brooklyn where you could still find cheap places to live, where artists and musicians decamped to vacant factories and warehouses, creating our own little Shangri-La of culture. Those places are now full of the uncreative, of those who swarmed to enjoy the proximity to art, to creative freedom, only to drive up prices and drive out the makers and the doers. After we realized I might be able to make a living elsewhere, my wife and I moved south to an inexpensive college town with a great music scene. We also wanted to start a family, I told him, something that was becoming harder and harder as New York City grew more expensive by the minute. He laughed, echoing the sentiment about his hometown.
Sad, we said, that neither of us could afford to raise our families in these neighborhoods anymore. But we chuckled at how, despite the best efforts of so many of our parents, young people the world over seem desperate to return to the urban life our forebears worked so hard to escape. Vilnius, he explained, was no different.
Wandering through the city after our sauna session ended, we saw the streets through the lens of artists who give a place an identity, only to be shunted aside once it becomes desirable. By this point, it’s a blueprint: the artists find their way into a downtrodden area, taking advantage of the cheap. They create neighborhoods in their own image, building something unique, something beautiful. Galleries and studios pop up, places for friends to showcase their friends’ works. Soon, word spreads, and those neighborhoods begin to draw people whose only interest in art and creativity is proximity. Soon, many of the people who make the art can no longer afford to live there.
Side street after side street, small patches of rough grass sat between the city’s stout buildings and countless churches, their frigid metal slides and jungle gyms waiting for the children of Vilnius to return when the temperature warmed. Groups of high-school-aged kids on their lunch breaks or maybe between classes; boys in small packs with boys, walking a few feet ahead of packs of their female classmates, all of them snickering, giggling in an unfamiliar language. It was nearing afternoon, and the winter sun painted all of Old Town Vilnius’s old off-white and cream-stone buildings in a warm, gentle light. It looks like a pop-up book here, I said to myself. Looking up for the first time in some time, there first appeared the bust of Frank Zappa.
For a few silent minutes, I stood motionless beneath the thin shadow of a fourteen-foot-tall monument to an Italian-American guitar player; a musician who lived and died in Los Angeles. Granted, other than the few big swaths—the guitar playing and the cigarettes and Los Angeles and a daughter named Moon Unit—I know little about Frank Zappa. Maybe he was of Lithuanian descent. Maybe he spent time in Vilnius. Maybe he cut a record here.
Then again, Frank Zappa died in 1993, barely two years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and two years into a decade that would become known to locals as “the Wild Nineties.”
It was a time in history described as if the country were a teenager, only both of its parents died suddenly: newfound freedom, a lack of institutional structure, sorting out the realities of adulthood in real time, making mistakes as it went. These were the realities for so much of post-Soviet Europe, where organized crime syndicates and otherwise unsavory characters took advantage of a suddenly free market and nations lacking in institutional authority. And while some got very, very rich in that era, the standard of living and economic stability for many declined rapidly. Yet, in that decline, a sense of freeform creativity began to bloom in certain areas.
I thought of the New York City of my youth, long before moving to those neighborhoods in Brooklyn; of London and West Berlin in the 1970s, and how all of those places existed on the brink of economic and social collapse; of how it is under these circumstances that art is allowed to thrive. Rents are cheap, civic oversight is minimal; art as a form of protest.
Whether or not this is exactly what happened in Vilnius in the Wild Nineties, I’m not sure. After all, these are the kinds of subjects that books are written about. And I was there for less than a week. But the point remains: in any place struggling to find and define its identity, it is often the artists who give that place its distinct features.
In Vilnius, nowhere is this more apparent than Užupis, the small, Old Town artists’ enclave whose name translates to “beyond the river.” On one edge, Užupis is bordered by the Vilnia River. Another is flanked by high, steep hills. Its third boundary borders an old Soviet-era industrial neighborhood. They are features that have long made Užupis feel like a place unto itself, removed from the larger whole of Vilnius. And for many years, including most of the twentieth century, the tiny neighborhood was the provenance of the destitute, the dangerous.
Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, artists began to take over the blighted neighborhood, creating studios and independent galleries, and moving into the neighborhood’s few apartments, several of which lacked electricity or heat through the early 1990s. Soon, public artworks began springing up. Soon, Užupis became a living gallery. Soon, a group of artist friends gathered over a beer and the rough outline of a constitution, and declared Užupis’s independence not only from Vilnius but from Lithuania.
And while this fiercely independent streak is most evident in Užupis, it is endemic to Lithuania as a whole. After all, they were the first country to declare independence from the USSR when, in March of 1990, they voted to restore Lithuania’s pre-Soviet state. Which is perhaps why the country embraced Užupis’s declared independence (even though Lithuania, along with every other country on Earth, has not formally recognized Užupis as an independent nation).
But two years before their declaration, an old plinth stood near the center of Vilnius. It was hardly uncommon, as these remnants of the Soviet era were all over the former USSR. In Vilnius, many were topped by busts of Soviet heroes and icons.
Armed with a story (one that turned out to be false) about how he visited the United States of America and met Frank Zappa, a local civil servant named Saulius Paukstys founded a fan club in the rock-and-roller’s name and commissioned a sculptor from the area to create a bust of Zappa.
The sculptor, Konstantinas Bagdonas, was known for his busts of Lenin during the Soviet era.
“We were desperate to find a symbol that would mark the end of communism, but at the same time express that it wasn’t always doom and gloom,” Paukstys once told The Guardian.
At first, authorities remained unconvinced that a man who had no Lithuanian heritage and who had never set foot in their country should have a bust erected in his honor. But, after a bit of finagling (some of which, legend has it, involved Paukstys leaning into Zappa’s “Jewish features”), Paukstys talked the city into putting Frank Zappa’s head onto an otherwise empty Soviet-era plinth.
The day of the bust’s unveiling proved to be a watershed moment in the history of Frank Zappa’s unofficial patron sainthood of Vilnius. Zappa’s music rang in the air courtesy of a local military band, the fan club that Paukstys began expanding rapidly, and a local radio station dedicated time to a weekly broadcast of Zappa’s music and his philosophies.
And while the memorial is a short walk from Užupis, the connection that began that day was clear: Zappa’s freeform approach to making music, his rebellious nature, and uncontainable creativity became a beacon for this city, which, despite being centuries old, was suddenly searching for an identity.
Not long after discovering the memorial, I started to wander again, this time, with my head up and my eyes open. And though the sun was now higher in the sky, the air was colder, a bit more biting, and the frigidness of a Baltic winter zapped through my still-wet body. I needed to get back to my hotel to get warm and dry before exploring any more. My phone’s map took me left and right, down countless tiny roads built for horses and carriages only to be paved over in the age of motorcars. Nearing my hotel, I turned down a small alley, not far from Cathedral Square, which is the beating heart of Old Town Vilnius, and noticed light-blue walls dotted with little pieces of art.
Literatai Street is a short, open-air gallery whose walls boast dozens of painted tiles, mini sculptures, and even a set of dentures fastened to the wall. Almost every piece was dedicated to an author or artist, the whole alley acting as a living memorial to the creative. Then, Zappa’s iconic mustache and goatee popped out. And while the small memorial was hardly the massive, dominating obelisk from an hour earlier, while it was just one tiny piece in a small sea of many, it cemented the idea of Frank Zappa’s meaning to this city.
How many more little nods to Zappa, whether official or otherwise, dotted Vilnius? There must be some graffiti here or there, his name or likeness scrawled into the side of some building. Maybe even a third sculpture somewhere. Of course, none of them would be nearly as imposing and official as the giant plinth with Zappa’s bust, which stood as a beacon to all of the city’s creatives, a lighthouse.
Thinking about the artists of Vilnius, the words of the sauna guru echoed around in my head. If he, a middle-class business owner, couldn’t afford to live in Užupis, then how could an artist? I wondered if there was another city in Lithuania where the creatives were flocking, a place cheaper and a bit more lawless, where those wild, abandoned factories proved fertile grounds for underground art scenes to take root. Perhaps they were decamping to another country entirely, it being the EU and all. Berlin, perhaps. Maybe Lisbon or Riga.
My decade in New York was a time cut short by the realization that life as an artist could be so much easier if I just left.
Still, I was standing in the center of an alleyway-cum-art gallery in a city where the street art stood beside marvelous contemporary museums and robust traditional galleries; where the culinary scene has become an icon of this part of the world, as chefs express their visions on the plate; where the massive and foreboding Lukiškės Prison has become a labyrinthine artists’ colony. Considering all of the evidence before me, there must be someplace here where the artists can still thrive, where the freaks and the weirdoes and the outcasts can still find community.
Maybe, despite Vilnius’s rising rents, or perhaps in spite of them, the stone gaze of Frank Zappa, the guardian angel of this city’s creative class, high atop that plinth has had an impact on the artists here, serves to remind them that the act of creativity is, whether standing against communism or the creeping crawl of free-market capitalism, a form of protest unto itself.
