Rocking Around the Bloc : Pop music: When top acts like Guns N’ Roses tour Eastern Europe, they turn to Laszlo Hegedus, the Bill Graham of the former communist world.

PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia —  Laszlo Hegedus has been in the right place at the right time for a long time.

After growing up in Budapest, Hungary, in the heart of the communist era, he has become one of the most important figures in big-name rock concerts in today’s Eastern Europe, doing for this part of the world what his late friend Bill Graham did for so long in the United States.

Hegedus and the people at Budapest-based Multimedia, the concert promotion firm he co-owns, have become a rock ‘n’ roll conduit, bringing the big shows from the West for the final generation of communist kids who had only heard and seen pictures of their musical heroes.

In fact, his name has come to be practically synonymous with promoting arena rock ‘n’ rollers in the region.

“Promoters from Western Europe and the world know Laszlo Hegedus, and it is impossible to bring bands to Eastern Europe without him,” said Milan Mlejnek, manager of Spirit Production, a privately owned concert promotion firm in Prague.

Multimedia has brought in such artists as the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon and Guns N’ Roses and package tours like Amnesty International and “Monsters of Rock” in the past few years.

Until a handful of years ago, however, it was a bureaucratic maze to clear the way for such Western bourgeois artists. Not that none had been allowed in--in 1984, the last of the iron-fist totalitarian years before the coming of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Multimedia worked with the state-run Pragokoncert to bring Elton John to Prague. The show went off, but not without hitches.

“They wanted to stop Elton John from performing with an earring in his ear because (they felt) it was homosexual propaganda for the Czechoslovak youth,” remembers Hegedus, sitting recently in a backstage office trailer two nights before a Guns N’ Roses show here. “The good band was not the one who played good music, the good band was well-dressed.”

In the end, John wore the earring.

“(The government) wanted to make these gestures toward the young people and at the same time wanted to make positive gestures toward conservatives and for the old people and Communist Party,” he continued. “But you’re killing whatever you’re doing because people hate it in the end.”

Nowadays, little if anything is disallowed for political reasons. The difficult economy is the main culprit keeping more than a trickle of stadium bands from coming. Almost without exception, big acts that come to the region must take a hefty pay cut if they are to play.

Simply put, many of these bands cannot cover production costs with the money that can be paid under the region’s struggling economies, much less make a profit, said George Mezo, Multimedia’s international coordinator.

Tickets sold to fans paying Hungarian forints or Czechoslovak korunas just don’t add up like dollars; tickets for the Guns N’ Roses show in Prague, which also featured Faith No More and Soundgarden, cost the equivalent of about $11, compared to the going rate in the West of $25-$35 for such an event. Artists such as U2 and Genesis touring the Continent this year were out of the price and profit range for Eastern Europe.

“It’s getting more and more difficult to get bands to come for less money,” Mezo said. “In the early 1980s, a lot of people used to come for a lot less money, but not anymore.”

Hegedus, a big, round and handsome man in his mid-40s, said that with the difficulties in drawing big acts, he figures Guns N’ Roses was the “last of the Mohicans” willing to perform in the region for less money.

Then again, his firm is working to bring the region a spring show or two from Metallica, whose members seem to be the type that would be willing to go through the trouble of finding a way to circumvent the money headaches to bring their music to the kids.

Hegedus explains all this as his associates crouch in and out of the cramped trailer, somewhat reverently seeking his advice and approval on everything from production specs to the price of soft drinks at the stadium’s concessionaires.

But Hegedus is not such the heavy to wield the intimidation within his grasp. At one point during the interview he can’t remember the name of a band that played here last year; clicking on his walkie-talkie, he affably queries his busy workers on the other end about who the band was, causing a flurry of garbled dispatches in the Magyar tongue that eventually come back with the name: the Black Crowes.

Those at Multimedia Hungary, founded in 1982, say they expect conditions for successful concert staging to turn around in a few years--hopefully along with the region’s economies--so that the shows will be within reach. The company was originally set up in Berlin when some agents from Multimedia Europe in Great Britain had heard of Hegedus and his ability to bring bands behind the Iron Curtain.

“We saw a market (for promotion in Eastern Europe) and an opportunity to expand,” said Tim Dowdall, now the finance director for Multimedia Europe and one of the agents who offered to back Hegedus to start his own Multimedia branch 10 years ago. “The amazing thing was here in the middle of the stifled East at that time (1982) he was talking about things that are now being realized.”

If it weren’t for that stifled state of affairs in his country, Hegedus might still be writing for such newspapers as Magyar Nemzet, where he started at age 20, not long before the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of neighboring Czechoslovakia.

Disturbed by the events--the tanks rolling through Prague streets as they had done in his hometown 12 years earlier--he says, he wrote “some ironic words about the Russian army and the great friendship of all these nations. I was fired the next day. I didn’t say anything strong but it was absolutely forbidden to say anything at all.”

In communist Hungary in those days, you weren’t so much out of a job when you were fired, you were just given another less prestigious one; in his case the new job was writing for publications like a national canning industry journal and a newspaper that chronicled the world of ladies’ underwear. “It was like a gulag,” he says.

Hegedus also started working for a youth newspaper within the next few years, and because he was still barred from writing about politics, he wrote about Hungary’s pop music scene.

By 1973, he had become fed up with the writing business and started managing a pop group called the General, then moved on to full-time management of one of the country’s most popular and internationally known groups, Locomotive G.T. It was during the next busy handful of years, touring and meeting people along the rock ‘n’ roll circuit in countries throughout the region, that Hegedus made the wealth of contacts and gained the knowledge that would come to be so valuable in helping East meet West.

Locomotive G.T. split up in 1980, about the time he had been reading a book about one of the leaders of the Bauhaus movement. This inspired a venture in putting together multimedia laser, light, video and music shows at a Budapest planetarium. It was revolutionary and highly successful, so much so that the government took an interest, and ended up nationalizing the profitable outfit.

Hegedus was, however, given the opportunity to keep running the show--the difference being that the state would keep the receipts. He would have none of it, and managed to move to Berlin with the intention of starting a version of the theater there.

Hegedus soon met some members of the avant-garde low-burn synth and soundtrack music group Tangerine Dream, who introduced him to Dowdall of Multimedia Europe. It was impossible to set up shop in Budapest so he arranged to stay in Germany.

After starting in 1982 by bringing acts to relatively hospitable Poland, the firm gradually meandered and chipped through the bureaucratic, political and cultural icebergs in other countries from Czechoslovakia down through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In those early years, there were other acts like Dave Brubeck, Tangerine Dream, Santana and Bob Dylan.

Gorbachev’s ascendancy in 1985 was also good for business. Within six months of his appointment, definite changes for the better were under way in Hungary. A member of the country’s Communist central committee passed through a policy allowing citizens a greater selection of movies, television programs and concerts. Bands such as Queen and Genesis were soon to come to the region, thanks to Multimedia.

In 1986, Bill Graham rang up Hegedus and said they were going to Moscow to put on a free show, whereupon Santana, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt and the Doobie Brothers were rounded up to perform. A stadium built for the 1980 Olympics but never used was to be the site, and the promoters’ agreement with the government stipulated the gates would be opened to anyone who wanted in.

Came the day for the show and the gates swung wide, yet scarcely a soul entered. Baffled, Hegedus and Graham climbed into a car and sped out looking for answers. What they found amounted to “the biggest trick I have ever seen in my life,” Hegedus said.

Soviet troops had established an extensive militarized zone clear around the perimeter of the stadium, about a kilometer out, to prevent regular citizens from attending. Busloads of families of the KGB and other officials were bused in, though, and many of the soldiers came inside and danced.

The two would go on to organize a number of other concerts, including another free show in Moscow intended for the youth whom they saw as instrumental in fending off the hard-liners in 1991’s fumbled coup attempt. This time the kids would get inside and see bands including AC/DC, Metallica and the Black Crowes. It was held in October of last year, and it would be their last collaboration before Graham died the next month in a Bay Area helicopter crash.