[If you don’t see a video here, you will in just a moment!]
In spite of rumors of her escape that had endured for decades, it has been well documented that Bolshevik revolutionaries executed Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, the youngest, most beautiful daughter of Russia’s last tsar, along with the rest of her family in mid-1918, a few weeks after her 17th birthday.
What isn’t so widely known is that the year before, she had had a daughter, Olga, out of wedlock in Warsaw, to which her furious father had sent her on learning of her pregnancy. After the collapse of communism in 1991, Olga’s great-granddaughter Svetlana Motorina relocated from Poland to Tula, a industrial city 120 miles south of Moscow, where she had two sons and then, 14 years after the birth of the younger, a daughter of her own.
As Russia struggled to find its feet under the erratic Boris Yeltsin, many came to yearn more and more openly for a restoration of the country’s royal family. This alarmed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who directed that anyone related to the Romanovs be made to disappear. Getting wind through a sympathetic informant in the local police department that they were in jeopardy, Svetlana Motorina and her daughter, 10 by this time, fled the country, living first in Warsaw, and then in Paris. But Vladimir Putin’s reach doesn’t extend only to his own country’s borders, and Svetlana Motorina was kidnapped in front of the 16th arrondisement building in which she and her daughter shared a tiny flat. Sympathetic neighbors determined that an uncle of Svetlana’s had been living in Los Angeles as John Mendelssohnsince the 1970s, working as a journalist and occasional musician, and successfully appealed to him to provide refuge for his great-great niece.
Years later, Lisa appealed to her great-uncle to let her sit in with one of the covers bands in which he made vodka money playing the drums. He was so impressed with both her vocal abilities and her obvious adoration of the spotlight that he contacted two musicians with whom he’d played in glam and hair metal bands his own first decade in America, bass guitarist Kirk Henry and the legendary Pete Castle, like whom every young guitarist between LAX and San Diego County’s northern border had yearned in the 1970s and 1980s to be able to play. The three older musicians and the vivacious young singer — who renamed herself Anastasia, after her ill-fated antecedent — discovered that they complemented each other wonderfully, and became a band.
In the past, the three instrumentalists, all songwriters, had squabbled bitterly about whose songs to perform. They decided that this time they would avoid such acrimony by performing songs from that wonderful era between rock and roll’s birth and the onset of psychedelia. They performed an ancient Dion favorite as Bob Marley might have, an early Who number in the style of Johnny Cash, a once-dark Velvet Underground song as Rosemary Clooney might have sung it in 1952.
And Los Angeles audiences loved them for it.
