[1] In 1972, he founded the band Aquarium with his childhood friend Anatoly "George" Gunitsky as a postmodern theatrical endeavor that included poetry and music.

Inspiration from The Beatles and Bob Dylan transformed Aquarium into a low-fi electric blues band that moonlighted in acoustic reggae.

[1] The Communist Party of the Soviet Union regime routinely suppressed experiments in non-standardized self-expression as a matter of policy, so decent recording facilities were out of reach.

[citation needed] The several two-track recordings hacked out over those years, such as Temptation of St. Aquarium (Iskushenie Svyatogo Akvariuma), Count Diffusor's Fables (Pritchi grafa Diffuzora), Menuet for a Farmer (Menuet zemledel'tzu), and a motley bag of "singles" were of unprofessional quality but showcased his interest in Oriental thought and mysticism that eventually became his trademarks.

The festival was a state-sanctioned attempt to control the Russian rock music movement, but the group's performance caused a near riot and was wildly out of line with the Soviet officials’ expectations.

The first Aquarium music available in the West was in 1986 when a double album entitled RED WAVE, 4 UNDERGROUND BANDS FROM THE USSR appeared in record stores in the U.S.

The single "Radio Silence" was his biggest hit outside of Russia, reaching number 7 on the Billboard Hot Modern Rock Chart in the United States in August 1989.

The Aquarium album Favorite songs of Ramses the 4th (Lyubimye pesni Ramzesa IV) was mostly filler, and Archive vol 4 was all outtakes.

His 1997 album Lilith is still mostly Russian in lyrical theme but is recorded by way of a chance meeting with his idol Dylan's former backing group, The Band.

In 2014 he released Salt, "one of the best albums of Grebenshchikov’s long career, an astonishing, visceral piece of work that more than lives up to its moniker: earthy, vital, biting, life-enhancing".