Atomic Express

Do you remember the 1970s phenomenon called “The rock opera”? These were a mix of spoken word songs, fairly innovative backup singing and imaginative sets telling a story over several acts. The spoken voice-music could get into your head in a weird way. I still can’t get Jesus Christ Superstar’s “Damned for all time/blood money” out of mine….

But I digress.

In the early 1980s Tim Rice led an effort to develop a Cold War rock opera based on the premise of a paranoid Soviet chess player confronting a neurotic American chess player, which was not coincidentally based on real events and real people, despite mandatory legal disclaimers to the contrary. Apparently, Rice was originally interested in a musical based on the Cuban Missile Crisis but was attracted to the chess metaphor for the Cold War as much as the emergent rivalry between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, which climaxed in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972. Up until then, the Soviet had dominated international chess for over 20 years.  The Fischer-Spassky match proved that anything, including a board game, could be bent through the Cold War lens for propaganda purposes. It must have been hilarious for the leading members of FIDE (The World Chess Federation) to see their institution receive global media attention overnight.

“Chess” involves a lot of lyrical menage-et-trois domestic melodrama, but has a caustic song about defections and embassy bureaucracy. Many of the songs went straight to the top of the charts in 1985-86, though, and “Chess” entered mainstream popular culture. 

“One Night in Bangkok” sung by Murray Head (excuse the cheesy lip-synched 80’s music video, but you get the idea) will always remind me of the the backseat of my aging 1976 Pontiac with she-who-must-remained un-named-for-a-variety-of-reasons (ie: she’s now married to someone prominent in the intelligence community)  on a humid, sweltering, Washington DC night in 1985. The dialog went something like this:

“Are we out of gas?”

“Yep.”

“Oh no! What happens if the Soviets fire nuclear missiles at Washington tonight?”

“We’re just off the exit from George Washington Parkway to the Central Intelligence Agency. We’re within the primary blast zone. It’ll be quick.”

“Well, we’d better get it on before they launch….”

(no Vodka martinis yet-it was Cherry Cokes from 7-11)

As Daniel Johnson pointed out in “Prospect” magazine “The rise and fall of chess in the 20th century was intimately linked with the cold war and the Soviet Union’s giant investment in the game. But deprived of the atmosphere of menace that characterised that era, chess has dissipated much of the capital it built up over more than a century.” Like the game, the musical “Chess” was a product of its time and would be difficult to revive it today, but for a brief moment the Cold War was fought on a new front: the stage.

Addendum: Somebody found former MI-5 director Graham Mitchell’s correspondence from the 1950′s coded using chess terminology and moves….and the KGB fieldcraft training emphasized how to use chess for covert communication.