Soviet rock songwriters were deeply concerned with the difficulties involved in adapting rock music – a form they perceived to be ‘foreign’ in its very essence – to the demands of their own culture. Soviet rock fans had a certain limited access to Western cultural products and they often found fault with what they regarded as misreadings and distortions in the criticism, rewriting and appropriation of rock music by the official Soviet media and cultural institutions. The idea that rock music had to be transferred and translated correctly in order to retain its authenticity was central in the unofficial rock journalism during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Russian musicians and songwriters called upon a ‘canon’ of Western rock authors when making claims about the meaning of the genre. This article discusses the forays of Leningrad’s rock community into theorizing and thematizing the relationship between Soviet and Anglophone rock music and investigates ‘translation’ as it appears in songs by Boris Grebenshchikov (Akvarium) and Maik Naumenko (Zoopark). The article thus reveals the ways in which referring to or reworking a prior text could constitute a creative strategy, either as a satirical tool, or as a means of entry into a tradition of rock authorship.