At one level, Sergei Zhuk tells the story suggested by the title—that of the arrival of rock music in the Ukrainian city of Dniepropetrovsk, which was closed to foreigners from 1959 onward. Zhuk repeatedly asserts that, because the city was offlimits to Westerners (many of whom, in Zhuk’s telling, came to the Soviet Union bearing rock music), the city’s rock fans had only limited access to rock records. Especially in the early years, they or their black market providers travelled to other cities, above all L’viv (a cultural emporium because of the number of visiting Poles), to obtain stock. Nevertheless, the history of rock music in Dniepropetrovsk followed the same trajectory as in “open” Soviet cities: jazz arrived in the mid-1950s, the Beatles by the mid-1960s, then heavy metal; in short, musical tastes followed Western trends, with an admixture of offi cial and unoffi cial Soviet bands.