“Where is the Edge” (“Где тот край”) by Sokol (Сокол), OR Could the Soviet Russians Have Invented Arena Rock in the 1960’s Without the World Realizing It?

Sokol, whose name is Russian for The Falcons, were the first Russian rock group to form in the Soviet Union (however, the very first Soviet rock group was a Latvian band from 1961 called The Revengers). Sokol were named after the district of Moscow where the band members lived. In a time where the communist government of the Soviet Union placed very strong restrictions on rock music to the point of almost banning it, Sokol performed underground concerts and recorded songs privately. Some of these recordings can easily be found online, particularly through YouTube. The band’s only practical official release was a couple of songs they recorded for an animated short film from 1968 called Film, Film, Film, which was distributed by the state-run animation firm Soyuzmultfilm.

Some recordings were released on compilation albums, but their legal status is not certain. I discovered a recording by Sokol that was dated to be recorded in 1965, and it didn’t sound like beat, rock n’ roll, or pop. Instead, the song, entitled “Where is the Edge” (Russian: “Где тот край”), consists of something that is so ahead of its time that it sounded like it came from the mid-to-late 1980’s. In fact, this means that the Soviet Union invented arena rock without the world realizing it!

I discovered this song as I was looking up stuff from Sokol on YouTube, and I clicked on the video with the song in it, and after listening to it for the first time, I thought it was the greatest Russian song I had ever heard. The music was full of killer guitar solos, like a cross between Journey’s Neal Schon and famed session guitarist Steve Lukather, synthesizer, stellar drumming, and typical mid-60’s rock instruments like Hammond B3 organ and acoustic piano. I even translated the video’s description from Russian to English, and it said that the song did come from 1965, and I even YouTube searched songs with the same Russian title, and three results for the same Sokol song came up first. I even noticed the recording quality, which sounds like it came from a reel-to-reel recording, which is typical by 1960’s rock music standards.

The whole song structure all makes sense because eight years before the song was recorded, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I into outer space, beginning the legacy of new frontiers in space travel. This also meant that the Soviets were constructing and innovating more and more electronic technologies.

You can check out the song here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x3BxbtBxtw