YUPPIE FARM ANIMALS, THE CATWOMAN, AND THE HAUNTING OF HOTEL HELL
(Switzerland and Germany)
Crashing hard from a sugar/caffeine near-coma, we roll into Stuttgart, Germany, birthplace of the Master, Jeff Dahl. We’ve got a lot of dates coming up in Deutschland, but tonight is just a stop on the way to Switzerland, land of the Ratboy. Perhaps because we’re shooting through such ancestral territories, or perhaps because we’re as exhausted as we’ve yet been on this tour, or maybe just because we’ve not touched bathwater for several days and can no longer bear each others’ bodily odors, the drive seems unusually solemn, even for the Jeff Dahl Factsheet Plus Two.
In Germany, things seem more like the States, with well-equipped motor lodges and hotels everywhere. We check into a pretty stylin’ place, and get a wide variety of rooms. Dahl and Tim get separate ones—more and more they seem to be detached from the pack and from each other—and I room with Simon in a fairly average hotel double. I’d loaned Z my shaving lotion back in Prague, and went knocking on his door at the end of the hall one floor up to see if he still had it.
“Go away!” It was Z’s voice from behind the door.
“It’s me. It’s not Tim. Open up!”
“Who’s with you, anyone?” This time it was Rat that I heard.
“No. No one’s with me. I’m all alone. Let me in, for Crissakes!”
“Simon’s not with you, is he?”
“You’re beginning to piss me off, and I was in a pretty good mood. Open up!”
The door cracked open, with two beady little Rat eyes peeping out. Slowly the hotel room door opens to reveal the largest, most plush, most bodacious bachelor pad of an urban apartment I’ve ever seen outside of uptown Manhattan. Z and Rat begin giggling.
“This can’t be real,” I gasp, with my mouth open.
“Can you believe it?” laughs Rat, waving his arms around to show off what is, at least temporarily, his.
“How can this even be part of the same hotel?” I wonder. “It must be some kind of mistake, like the bridal suite, or the manager’s hideaway, or a porthole to a parallel dimension or something.”
“We just unlocked the door and here it was, big as life,” says Rat, stumbling around in his pajamas, hitting off a bottle of vanilla liquor he’d lifted from the booze-atorium we’d discovered below the Basque Country Club. “We can’t have Tim finding out, wanting to take a bath or something. We can’t have him around, ruining everything. And Simon will want to stay and watch television. You’re okay. I mean, you didn’t want to stay that long anyway, did you?” Rat is giddy and beside himself
“McGruff,” intones Z, getting ready to switch gears on the conversation. “I called work. We may not have jobs when we get back.”
Nothing like dropping a nuclear bomb. Of course, history was rife with musicians going off to tour and returning to have the carpet pulled out from under them, but not us, not big shots at the little label, kings of Indieland. Surely we would return to day jobs.
“Why, what’s the problem?”
“I think they’re having major difficulties getting orders filled and dealing with the export business while I’m gone. I just think the whole operation’s floundering too much, and by the time we get back, well, it may be too late.”
“You mean to tell me that the whole thing’s going belly up because of your absence? You’re a fucking drummer, you can’t have that much authority at the day job. I thought you just talked on the phone and exported a few CDs here and there.”
“That’s typical of you, to think I’m nothing. Look, shit is going down, and if they can’t pull it together, I’m just sayin’, well, we might be looking for work. We may have to go to the T-shirt printers or something.”
“Right, T-shirt printing. Dude, I gave up printing a long time ago.”
“Bullshit!” Z said, looking me square in the eye. “You’re still printing.”
Somewhat depressed and unnerved, I go back to my room, not really telling Simon about my conversation with Z. I try to reach the office to see how accurate Z’s reports of encroaching doom are, but I can’t get through. I decide to take a shower and wash out my long johns. After they’re washed, I wrap them around the rod that served as a support bar of sorts for getting in and out of the shower. This had proven a good method for quickly wringing out the garments, at which point they could be placed on the radiator on which they’d completely dry by morning. As much as I’d chided Dahl for his Woolite, I too had developed my own methodology for completing the task of cleaning clothes on the go. As I twist the thermal underwear, squeezing out every drop, the bar breaks free from the wall, and as it snaps, the long johns act as a spring and my feet go out from under me on the wet floor. My right knee crashes hard into the corner of the shower stall, and shit seems to be flying everywhere. Simon, who was sorting through all manners of foreign money, comes running in.
“Are you alright?”
Embarrassed and sprawled rather unglamorously on the floor, I try to figure the answer. “Yeah, I guess. Damn, I fucked up!”
I stand up, and my knee sends a series of sharp pain signals up my spinal cord. “OOOWWW!”
“You didn’t break anything, did you?” he says, genuinely concerned.
“Not since I cracked that rib. No, it just hurts.” I limp like a loser over to my bed. While avoiding colds and pink eye and laryngitis and the like, I’ve managed to sustain the most bruises and bumps and contusions, which, truth be known, is somewhat typical of me. I’ve always been a klutz. I lie down on the bed in a modicum of discomfort, drink a room temperature beer, write in my journal, and watch a boring soccer game.
The following morning I feel even more depressed. I’m in a reasonable amount of pain, and now I’m worried about my job. Simon heads out the door with his bags and tells me to hurry up. Instead, I get out my calling card and attempt to reach out and touch someone, my darling Gina back home in Hollywood. It should be about closing time the night before back at home. Again, I can’t seem to get through. I pack my shit and walk out the door, but I look back at the phone and decide to give it one more try. I glance out the window and see that the van is almost packed and ready. To hell with them, they can wait for me for once. Again I begin the complex procedure of dialing across the waters.
Four rings. Five rings. “Hello?”
“Gina, it’s me. What’s happening?”
“Oh, not much. Well, a lot really.” She starts to laugh, and as seems to be the norm, she sounds drunk, buzzed, or both. “I just got back from the Grammys. I got to go to the Grammys after party! Billy from Faith No More got me in. It was pretty cool. It was really cool. HYUP. Shit, I can’t stop hiccupping. You know how I get. I met Stuttering John there. He was real nice.”
Her words began to blur together to me. I look out the window again and see everyone impatiently waiting. Meanwhile, Gina’s words fade as I focus more on the image of her all dressed up, partying with real rock stars, and living it up in the show biz capital of the world, while I’m limping around Stuttgart considering my employment opportunities.
“Oh, good news,” she cut in, practically interrupting herself. “My boss has been talking to Ray, and he really likes Tim’s tape.”
My ears perk up. Ray is a partner of mine who I’ve worked with on dozens of musical endeavors, and is probably the best recording engineer I know. He came by the house for the Euro-Blur bon voyage dinner and had dropped off tape of his friend Tim, an almost rock star from a nearly famous band that was trying to make another stab at success with some cool, classic rock type material. I almost forgot about it, since I left for Europe immediately and hadn’t heard his music since.
“Yeah, they’re gonna launch this custom label with Tim. Ray’s gonna produce it and you’re the bass player. As soon as you get back it should be getting started. Looks like it’ll be a good budget, so no more money worries. Isn’t that great!?”
“Yeah, yeah, damn, that is great. Is it pretty for sure?”
“It seems like it. HYUP. Sorry. Wow, you wouldn’t have believed the food spread at this party...”
And so it went. I missed her. I realized she was having the time of her life, but she still seemed to keep me in mind, and brought me good news as was fit to deliver. But now I had to go, onto Switzerland. Euro-Blur waits for no one man. The momentary good news had revived my spirits, and with a determined stride I marched out to the van. I told everyone about my upcoming LP project, and they all nodded at me. They were somewhat annoyed they had to wait for me, but I was the bearer of good fortune that applied only to myself. Things like this no longer mattered on the bloodied roads of Euro-Blur.
Soundchecks, for me anyway, could be eliminated by this point in our journey. Either the guy at the board knows how to get a good sound or he doesn’t, and no amount of knob twiddling, endless pounding on the floor tom, or “testing one two one two” is going to make a difference. Yet here we are, enduring a particular lengthy one with an unusually unsympathetic sound geezer. With his polo-style shirt and thinning, slicked-back black hair, he suddenly approaches me.
“Do you mind?” he asks, pointing at my amp. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but it is a rented amp, so I just shrug. He steps onstage and begins adjusting the tone equalizer on the amp. In my near twenty years playing live as a goddamn pro, no one has ever crossed the proscenium to alter my sound before. But then again, this is the first time I’ve ever played in Switzerland. He makes the bass sound incredibly mid-range-y and trebly, there’s almost no bass left in it.
He re-adjusts the overall sound to boost the kick drum, de-emphasize the guitars, and puts the vocals way out front. Dahl begins to wig out.
“Look,” he says, slightly raising his voice and obviously having a difficult time remaining composed, “we are not a disco band. We are a rock ‘n’ roll band. You are fucking up our sound!”
“No, it sounds good now. I know!”
“Turn up the guitars, man,” says Ratboy.
“Guitars are just right,” our tinned-ear saboteur responds.
We try another song. The bass is EQ-ed to virtually make it the lead instrument. Finding this amusing, I take off on a solo in the middle of the song. Dahl doesn’t see the humor, tosses down his Les Paul, and sulks off to the dressing room.
“Tell you what,” says Simon, trying to rescue the situation. “I’ll go to the van and get one of Jeff’s CDs and he can hear what it’s supposed to sound like.”
Good idea. Simon comes back with the disc and tosses it in the club CD player. As if to confirm our worst fears, the soundman violently clasps his hands to his ears and shouts, “But this sounds as bad as the band does onstage!”
“Yes, right, it does!” I shout. “That’s the sound! Buzzsaw guitars, screaming vocals, and a subdued rhythm section. That’s also what the punters will be paying to hear tonight. That’s what you’ve got to get coming out of this P.A. system!”
“Oh, I can’t do it.” He throws up his hands, grabs his coat, and leaves the building. We all stand onstage, mouths open. We’ve just collectively never seen anything like it. A much younger guy who’d let us into the club is standing around watching all of this with his hands in his pockets.
“Well,” he says, slowly at first, as if to carefully monitor his own speech. “I guess I’ll do sound.” Right, you bloody do it, mate. You don’t need a degree in engineering. You don’t need four semesters at the Juilliard School of Music. Just turn it up and let it rock! Even with our novice friend at the flight panel, the show goes fine.
Afterward, Rat visits with his sister and some friends who’d come to the show. We eat deli platter food and drink lukewarm beer, and while it’s nice to see Rat so happy and in the bosom of his family, I’m personally feeling bored, which is an almost constant state of affairs, it would seem. If not bored, then frustrated, or homesick, or antsy, or lonely, or restless, or...or...GO ON, SAY IT!!
Horny. Yes indeed, baby. Horny as a marching band playing John Phillip Sousa at full tilt. Yet, girls weren’t really coming to our shows. They most certainly weren’t coming to our dressing room, and they couldn’t even get past the desk clerk at the hotels we stayed at. Still, the fact remained. I’m horny as a cactus garden at high noon.
After the show, we return to our Swiss Family Robinson quaint Little Old Lady Who Lives In a Jackboot hotel in beautiful downtown Bern. It’s a small but gorgeous city, with giant Dalì-esque clock towers and snow-banked rivers and postcard perfect pastoral scenes just across the road. But tonight, the town has taken a rather ugly turn, as some sort of beer-drinking, costume-wearing, citywide celebration is in effect. None of us, or anyone we talk to, knows what the purpose of this festival is, or what they are ceremoniously applauding en masse. A change of season is hinted at, a blessing for the new crop, a tip of the mug to improved hops, fertility in the land and the women, who the fuck knows? But it seems to have roots in centuries that pre-date our silly and trivial American customs, so who are we to dare judge these crazy bastards. One thing that we have learned is that this grotesque masquerade (which features a lot of the attendees wearing ersatz animal heads for whatever reason) is mainly peopled by neighboring German yuppies, not the more low-key local Swiss contingency. Germans, even more than musicians, like to consume mass quantities of beer. Sitting in the hotel bar and watching this abstract parade of mythological creatures drinking their grogs and brandishing their credit cards is beyond surreal.
Simon is with some scraggly looking teenage Riot Grrrl from the club, a bass player no less. Given the ever increasing I surrender vibration of our throw-in-the-towel companions, everyone else from our party has gone directly to bed. I decide to carry on, since I can’t even remember the last time I saw middle-aged women in Lederhosen wearing paper-mache pig heads. We retire to the hotel bar amidst all manner of inebriated middle-class farm animals.
We’re reasonably unnoticed among the melee, and the three of us—Simon, Riot Grrrl, and your humble narrator—carry on small talk about music, basses, travel, and other unimportant bullshit. The still-nameless-to-me girl excuses herself for a pee.
“She wants my dick inside her,” announces Simon without blinking.
“You’ve got to be joking. She’s just a kid!”
“Oh, I don’t know. She said she was sixteen, that’s old enough.”
I suppose the gap between my unparalleled antiquity and a sixteen-year-old was in fact many times greater than that between a twenty-two-year-old and a sixteen-year-old. Still, it didn’t feel right, and I said so.
“Simon, she’s just a nice kid. Why do you have to abuse her?”
“Because she wants it, you twat. Now fuck off!”
I hobble up to my room with my aches and pains and my brain going full speed, not in the slightest bit tired. Z is snoring like a lawnmower. Tomorrow, I’d hear about how this teen bassist ripped Simon’s pants down the second I left them alone. Tonight, I would only hear the sound of Z’s sinuses.
A big Friday night and we’re entering Ravensburg, Germany, a town no one knows anything about and no one has an opinion on—no one except for Jeff Dahl, who’s played here before.
“I played the U-Boat, man. That place was fucked. There were Nazi skinheads starting fights, people spitting at the stage, people sitting on the edge of the stage shooting up. It was just totally fucked!”
This trip we would play the Jugendhaus or Youth Center. It’s three stories of teenage hideaway, a sanctuary from adult supervision. Inside, there are dorms with bunk beds, kitchens, recreation rooms with foosball and pool, rehearsal rooms for the local death metal bands, and a small concert room. The place is punk—that is, run down as all hell yet somehow functional.
After a joke of a soundcheck, we kill time by watching a television that really doesn’t work and observing Simon and Tim play foosball with the local teenage girls.
“Look at that little smile he pastes on for these girls,” I cynically remark.
“And look at Tim,” smirks Ratboy. “He’s trying to be Shaun Cassidy or something, a fallen teen idol.”
Our two flirtatious dashing heroes shoot us looks that can only be interpreted as fuck off and die. I tire of this and seek out dinner.
We gather in the kitchen, a rather filthy place inhabited by some unkempt young women who are, for better or worse, cooking for us. They begin to dish up plates of rice and some kind of white meat. It’s spongy, and, except for the curry sauce that seems to be included to the point of overkill, almost tasteless.
“Um, what are we eating?” I ask.
Without batting an eye, the master chef—a thin, disheveled young lass with stringy dark hair dangling in the food—responds: “It’s like chicken.”
Like chicken. Well, that certainly narrows it down. What, pheasant, pigeon, bug-eyed vulture, mutated squirrel, sacrificial Satanic rabbit? You tell me.
Forget eating, I venture into the concert room where a two-man industrial band is playing pure noise for noise purists, with strobe lights blinking and a smoke machine clogging the already stifling air. The music is remarkably hideous, yet, following my hallucination-inducing meal and considering the snowy cold outside, I’m compelled to endure it. The mostly male crowd stares at these two weirdoes with hypnotic fascination. Oh, it’s too much to bear, I decide to go outside, have a cigarette, and freeze to death, when, much to my surprise, I see an unfamiliar sight on my way out.
It’s a woman, a mature woman grown beyond the teenage years, wearing an actual tight, short, black dress. In fact, I’d dare say it’s the kind of dress that women who enjoy the company of men are prone to wear. From my distance I could see that her brown hair was pulled back into a serious bun, and that she was almost my height and in possession of a firm, taut body, outlined fabulously by the black minidress. I throw caution to the wind and approach.
Standing right beside her, I extract a ciggy from my pack and fire it up. She looks over, and I hold out the pack offering her to join me in a lung cancer ritual. She accepts and smiles. It’s far too loud to talk at the moment.
The band subsides for an instant, she turns to me, and remarks: “This music is horrible. What causes people to do this to other people?” Given her accent, she is obviously a local, yet her English shows that she pegged me right.
“I can’t explain it,” I reply.
We exchange names. Hers is Sabine. She seems to like me, and even attempts to hijack me. “I don’t think I can take any more of this. I suppose I’m going to go. Would you come for a drink with me? I know an alright place nearby where you can get a real drink.”
“There’s nothing I’d like more. Unfortunately, I’m next up to torture people’s eardrums.”
“Do you play with Jeff Dahl?” I explain that I in fact do, and she tells me she saw him previously at the U-Boat and thought he was great. Okay, she decides to stick around.
Meeting girls has become an escape valve as much as anything. Can they facilitate freedom, afford easy passage through the corridors of the unknown? In other words...
“Do you have a car?” The answer is affirmative. I tell her we can get that drink after the show.
Ah, the show. Whatever is in the water, the air, or just the good old Ravensburg chromosomes seems to ensure that every event in this isolated township must border on dada, on surrealism, and verge on anarchy. Very drunk, extremely weird, wild-eyed guys, who spend the duration of the show making lurid, verbal sexual advances toward the band, surround the claustrophobic stage. This is funny for about a minute. For the following hour and twenty-nine minutes, it’s a drag.
“I waaannnt yeeewww!” slurred the apparent ringleader loudly. Then he reaches toward my crotch, drooling. Ratboy laughs uncontrollably until he becomes the next target. “Yeeewww are God! I love yer tight leeetle ahss in those paantts!”
Now Dahl laughs at us, the subjects of such unbridled homosexual desire, until he becomes heralded. “No, Noooooo! YEE-EE-WW-WW ARE GOO-OOO-AAAA-WW-WW-DDD!!! You with the big pubic head! Love me! LOVE ME!”
This went on nonstop until the end of the set, at which point we launched into the most dadaist, exploratory, abstract, free-jazz, Ornette Coleman, epileptic fit extrapolation of the Stooges “Dirt” imaginable. This simplistic soul dirge had indeed become an emotional stress ventilator of sorts, and a dependable one. As if to take us away and guard us against the evils of the physical world, we are four repressed jazzbos, unleashed from the confines of pop song structure to float freely in chordless limbos, unshackled from the chains of rigid four-on-the-floor rock beats. Somehow, the crowd loved it, and the screaming boys followed us off to the stairs that led to our third-floor refuge. Sabine was there, too.
“Give me a minute to get rid of my bass, and I’ll be back down.” She barely curls her lips into smile.
We go for a drink at the infamous U-Boat, which is a small, rather typical bar filled with what passes for scenesters here in Ravensburg. I quite like it. Sabine, easing rather gracefully into her mid-thirties, is a cross between Vera Miles and Emma Peel with a somewhat work-weary countenance and strained, beady green eyes. I buy her a gin and tonic, a whiskey and coke for myself, and we perch at a booth opposite the bar of this cramped booze huddle. Sabine hunkers down and scowls.
“Eh, these people. They have nothing better to do, they all stare at us.”
“Really? I didn’t notice. I don’t feel like I’m being stared at.”
“I know a lot of them, and some were at the show. The town will be gossiping tomorrow, whispering as they are now about me, about me being out with you.”
“You’re kidding. You’re probably overreacting—they don’t even know who I am.”
“Oh no. They think I’m out with some American musician, and that I think I’m a big shot or something like that. They make me craaazy!”
I ignore the rest of the U-Boat denizens, and listen semi-attentively as Sabine entrusts me with her life story, at least her recent life. She teaches German to Russian-Islamic Germans, that is, Germans and their descendants who fled to Russia following World War II. Folks who now, with the reunification of Germany, want to come on back home. She hates them.
“They are cretins—crude, uncivilized barbarians with no respect for anything or anyone, least of all women. To them, I’m an object to be ridiculed and abused. They are scum who deserve only a horrible, violent death.”
The woman has a way with words. She also designs leather clothes and published a book of poetry, which piques my personal interest. She says she’ll translate it for me, so I’ll understand her better. Meanwhile, another round, more stories, and soon we disembark for my pathetic little hobble of a room.
The drive across Ravensburg from the bar to the hotel is like crossing a parking lot—the one time I snag a car and driver there’s really nowhere to go. Nonetheless, Sabine manages to go the wrong way down a one-way street and we get stopped by a policeman in what has got to be the smallest fucking police car I have ever seen. It wouldn’t even function as a golf cart in the States. The police cars are, seemingly, shrinking. First, the small cop car that accosted us in Florence, then the microscopic, ramshackle joke of a four-wheeled vehicle that pulled us over going into Prague, and now this.
She says, “I’ll handle thees,” so I let her, not being particularly anxious to exchange pleasantries with the local gendarme in the icy cold at 2:30 a.m.
Back at Hotel Hell, we relax in my bed/sitting room and I put on some music my porta-stereo, a compilation tape featuring mellifluous sounds ranging from Siouxsie to Ciccone Youth to Moby Grape to (how appropriate) German chanteuse Dagmar Krause. The lights go dim and her long, full, wavy dark reddish-brown hair comes tumbling from its restrictive binding. Wordlessly, she begins to rub my shoulders and chest with the top of her head like a cat. Then, she paws me all over with her palms, again like a cat, with that same, soft but insistent left-right routine that cats drive you crazy with. This leads to a temple rub and back massage. Though I’m still awake (sort of), this all sends me off into a sort of quasi-dream state.
“You are not like most guys. No, you are not like most people. You have a good, positive energy,” she purrs. There’s a long pause as I silently enjoy the physical pampering. Then, she makes an unusual declaration. “I can touch your temple in such a way as to make your brain run backwards through scattered memories and dream fragments, like a video tape recorder.”
“Do it.”
My lover from college sits at the piano playing Chopin (which always gave her an orgasm) while the axle of the tour van separates outside Salt Lake, and my mom and I check out the alligator farm for my ninth birthday. The tape keeps rolling and I keep reeling. Who needs psychedelics when the electric spiritualized Catwoman is on the prowl? Practically in a full hypnotic trance at this point, I nonetheless muster the willpower and wherewithal to reach up and grab her eruption of hair and pull her face down so that our lips touch and tongues meet. Time passes in unusual ways, relative, I suppose. The clocks speeds up and slow down as they see fit, answering ancient rhythms that are primal, tribal, and mystic. Reality interrupts around 4:30 a.m. or thereabouts.
“I’ve got to teach those ignorant mongrels how to speak properly in a few hours. I must go, but I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She’ll see me tomorrow? Hmmm, should I try to get hold of some catnip?
“No, no, no understand. You wait. Wait!”
The matronly woman of indeterminate age waddles off to locate her prepubescent daughter, who has a much better grasp on the English language. Here in the practically nonexistent mountain town of Ulm, English-speaking folks pass through infrequently. The daughter emerges from the small hotel’s kitchen.
“Can I help you?”
“I hope so. I’d like to get a couple of glasses, for drinking liquids, you know. And I’d like to get some soap, and a towel, for bathing.”
She disappears and re-emerges with a washrag-sized towel.
“No soap?”
“This is cheap hotel, sir.”
Yes, well, no need to overstate the obvious. Earlier I’d actually had this poor girl come up to my room to get me some sheets for the bed.
The local market had these cheap little candles. I bought a bunch of them and took them back to my room. I close the blinds and survey this closet of a room. Dammit, I’m going to make it cool if it kills me. The bed isn’t even a twin. It’s barely a two by four with a lumpy pillow at one end. At the foot of the bed is a small hutch, which I decorate with my porta-stereo, candles, and drape my flashy, bejeweled, pastel tie-dyed neck scarf over the torn lamp shade. This is how Jimmy Page would do it, or Keith Richards. Yeah, turn even this pitiful hobble into a gypsy camp, a place of fun and romance. Who was I kidding? The room was so small there was barely enough room to squeeze between my bass case, resting against the wall, and the bed to get to the shower-sized bathroom. Pagey and Keef might be proud of the effort, but they’d be sad and shake their heads in dismay at the reality. “Po’ fucka,” they’d say. “Rock ‘n’ roll was never this fookin’ dreary fer us!”
Following the gig—at another Jugendhaus, complete with some stoned kid coming onstage to do a Johnny Thunders impersonation and another guy wearing a “Satanists Against Racial Prejudice” T-shirt—Sabine returns with me to my closet of romance. She comes bearing gifts—photos and copies of her writings—like a schoolgirl with a crush. I’m a little touched. The back of the photo says:
A moment
In my life.
You are
My soul
My security
My danger
Sabine
Baby, I’m just a shmuck on the road with a band, like a million shmucks before me and a million comin’ round the pike. I ain’t your soul, and I sure as hell ain’t your security. Your danger? You’re the one who was tweakin’ my brain like a Panasonic ghetto blaster. Ease up.
I find it hard to settle in and get comfortable with a strange girl in such confining space. Ah, well, nothing a little John Lee Hooker cassette won’t unravel.
“Ahhmm in the moood, the mood fo’ luv!” intones the blues master.
Turns out the Catwoman don’t groove on the blues. “Turn that off!” she veritably snaps. I calmly shoot her a glance, but kill the sounds anyway. The resulting silence is deafening.
“Excuse me,” I announce, adjourning to pee in the bathroom, a mere five inches away. I return to find a very serious looking Catwoman awaiting her prey pensively on the child-sized bed. Stripped down to her black bra and panties, and with a steel-eyed, piercing, X-ray vision burning from her lashes through my very soul, I feel naked already. She begins the cat routine again, and I feel suddenly extremely uncomfortable in her presence. Her bra comes off, and she is rubbing her butt against my crotch. I bend over her back and kiss her neck, feeling a sudden, bizarre, uncalled for desire to bite hard into her skin and draw blood. I resist, being ever the gentleman. The lights are out, the ludicrous candles are flickering away, now we’re face to face, smoldering like the flame. It is an unusually tense moment, and to be sure, something just doesn’t feel right.
“Are you ready?” she asks, demanding “Do it now!”
So much for foreplay. “Eh, you know what, I don’t have a rubber.” It was a lie. Simon put two in my leather jacket after coming to my room and seeing the budget love nest first hand. Be it guilt, paranoia, advanced shyness, sudden Catherine Deneuve-esque repulsion, I dunno, but I just didn’t feel like delivering the final act, the home run, the rocket launch. I also had a weird feeling that we weren’t alone. I suppose this violates the most sacred of all male laws: if ever a girl wants it, no matter how sickening an act it may look to be, the man must give it. No man may ever turn his back on ready ‘n’ willin’ sex. It is the way. It is our duty to fuck whenever the opportunity presents itself. Anything too slow to get out of the way invariably has it coming.
“I have one!” She grabs her purse and flings useless artifacts from it, looking for the hermetically sealed second skin of safe and disinfected passion.
“Here, come here, just a minute first, let’s relax for a second, alright?” I beseech, cradling the hyper-drive kitty in my arms.
“You know, something is different tonight from last time. You seem to have a negative energy, a black aura. You were so positive before. What went wrong?”
I don’t answer, and this naked, desperate angel begins to cry next to me—or rather practically on top of me given my peasant-sized bed. Shit, I don’t need this. So, her mystic meter reader says I’m coming up negative. Great.
I start kissing her, maybe it’ll stop her crying and, what the hell, maybe I’ll get in the mood. Yeah, that’s the idea. What’s wrong with me? Okay, she’s a little worse for wear and tear, but she does look pretty good with her clothes off, and she’s certainly anxious. A bit of preliminary grinding occurs when suddenly, surprisingly, the ashtray that was on the second shelf of the hutch flies off the shelf directly on top of us in bed, a distance of three feet. We both sit up.
“What was that?” asks Sabine loudly and nervously.
“It’s an ashtray,” I answer, picking it up and looking at it.
“It just flew into the bed!?”
“Yes, seems to be.”
She glares at me, as if to demand an explanation.
“Maybe it’s a manifestation of negative energy,” I offer half-sarcastically. It’s possible that in precoital grindage we jarred the ashtray from it’s secure position, yet how do you explain it traveling the two and a half feet into the bed rather than just falling straight down? At this point, I don’t wanna see what’s going on anymore, so I somewhat nervously blow out the candles, put the ashtray back, and lay back down. Should I try to pick up where I left off? I wonder.
Then there’s a thumping noise, right to the side of the bed. I turn on a little lamp and watch, incredulously, as my bass case bumps up and down all by itself and moves away from me along the wall toward the window. We both see this happening.
“What the fuck?” is the most intelligent thing I can muster.
“What’s going on!?” she asks, obviously scared.
“I don’t know. I’m not too versed on the paranormal. It seems we have visitors of some kind.” The bass stops its dance and again there is calm. The light’s still on, and we’re still sitting up. We don’t talk at all, and I’m unsure how much time passed. Finally, I click off the light and lie back down, sweating.
“Do you think this place is haunted?” she asks.
“Seems like a good bet.” I considered my grade-Z accommodations for a moment. “Naw, you know what, it’s probably just rats—big, hideous rats that can lift a fifteen-pound case and hurl ashtrays like Joe Namath. Yeah, that’s all it is.”
I feel extremely uneasy, feverish, dizzy, and the bed seems to swim as if at sea. I can feel her body, clammy and sweaty next to me. The bed itself holds two as easily as the back seat of the van holds four. We sleep off and on and don’t speak to each other again until the morning.
Sabine joins the entourage for our typical budget breakfast of cheese, bread, butter, coffee, tea, milk, and juice. Small talk is exchanged, but mainly I can’t get last night’s poltergeist performance from my mind, and I can’t help but see Sabine at the center of it. Her sad life, her desperate poetry, her sexual over-anxiousness, and her unwillingness to go away are on my now shattered nerves. She says she wants to follow us to the next stop, Stuttgart, where there is a famous modern art museum she could take us to. Rat and Z say how much they’d like that, despite me shooting them lethal glances. She’ll follow the van in her car.
“Will you ride with me,” she asks demurely. Damn, you’d think she’d be the last person who’d want my company.
“Eh, well, I can’t really, see, there’s some details regarding merchandising and the show that we have to discuss. It’s really the only time we have alone to deal with our business.”
Dahl overhears me and picks up on what I’m doing. “Oh, McGruff. Don’t worry about it. We can handle it. Go on with her.”
“Gee, thanks, Jeff, but I really think I should be in on it. In fact, we should get going now, shouldn’t we, Simon?”
“Like to finish me tea, if you don’t mind, lover. What’s the rush?” It was obvious none of my bros had my back or intended on helping me out.
I ride in the van anyway. As we depart, I instruct Simon to attempt to lose her.
“Are you sure that’s what you want? Who knows when you’ll ever even see a girl again at one of the gigs on this tour.”
“I’ll chance it. Step on it, dammit!”
Everyone laughs at me as Simon gives his best James Bond chase scene effort to out-drive Sabine, but given we’re in a van and she has a sports car, he fails. By 1:30 p.m., both vehicles pull into the hotel parking lot, back in Dahl’s birthplace, Stuttgart.
Having been to the Louvre, the modern art museum was a bit of a letdown. Much of it seemed like tomfoolery, pulling one over on the public, although sometimes that’s the point. We all appreciated the Warhol exhibit, and that was perhaps the biggest shock of them all. Ratboy stood in front of a Jackson Pollack work, which consisted of three solid planes of color.
“Look at this,” said the guitar-slinging art critic. “The paint isn’t even spread smoothly. This guy couldn’t paint a wall!”
As we wonder through the museum’s rooms, Sabine clings to me like a bad habit (much to Z and Rat’s delight) holding my hand and arm and so forth. Still, I enjoy the Otto Dix, Dali, and Ernst, and the coffee afterwards.
Back at the hotel, Simon has given me a single room again, though I specifically instructed him not to. Inside, I start to change my clothes while Sabine sits pensively on the bed.
“Look, you’ve got to understand, I’ve got a job to do here. I can’t hang out with you all the time, I’ve got to go and play music. You’ve got to get back to your life.”
“It’s Sunday. I don’t work today. I can just wait in the room until you come back, if I’m in the way.”
Geez, there’s just no easy way. Clearly I’m in a “be careful what you wish for” situation. “No, look, you just have to go. I have to get back to the groove I was in. I can’t hang out. I want to be alone tonight. Don’t take it personally, you’re great, but I just have to get back to what I’m trying to concentrate on.” Finally and firmly, I tell her, “You have to leave.”
We kiss and once and for all she leaves. Is she upset? I don’t know, she seems positively emotionless now. What a strange girl, so full of electric energy and cosmic debris. I wonder if it was feline power and psychic voodoo that was causing the Stephen King scene last night. Whatever, I surely didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but I’m so glad she’s gone. I flop down hard on my bed and issue a loud sigh of relief. Yeah, careful what you wish for. I pulled all those sly moves to entangle her in my web, only to find the real trick was getting her untangled. She always looked so sad. Well, who knows, maybe better luck tonight. It was just a game, now, a diversion tactic, something to ease the boredom. As the wise sage Lemmy once said, “The chase is better than the catch, you know it is!”
Our German record distributor hooked up a support act called Mind Overboard for the rest of the German dates. We meet up with them and find that they are older geezers, and not so easily impressed by us. They are standoffish and quiet, only the drummer and the guitarist’s girlfriend, who sells the T-shirts, speak decent English. They drive home every night and meet up with us the next day, never getting a hotel, no matter where we are playing. They are on a true no-budget outing—foodless, diesel-less, hotel-less, lifeless. They use our amps and eat our backstage food. The drummer has his neck in a brace, and looks like Pee-wee Herman. We never quite learn their names, but always refer to the drummer as Pee-wee. He doesn’t seem to mind. They play hard, and get the crowd going very well—the fact that they speak German helps. As time wears on, the two groups become friendly and even supportive of each other, but this is a won trust, not a given, and as such, carries more weight and value.
Our German dates bottom-out by the time we get to Koln. As is common by this point in our journey, we can’t find the club, and Simon, an honorary American dad driving the family cross-country on vacation, refuses to ask any locals for directions. After a good wasted hour, we arrive at the Underground, a truly bizarre combination of coffee shop, microbrewery, auto repair shop, and live music club. Some overtly unfriendly guy covered in grease shimmies his way out from under a Volkswagen bus and begrudgingly unlocks a room where we can stash our equipment. As in Prague, we have the first night off, and we are in accommodations provided by the club. Also, like Prague, there is one key for the six of us. We ask if, like Prague, there will be some wild shenanigans taking place on-site at the Underground, but Adolph Asshole merely informs us: “No. There’s nothing for you here.”
He’s right. In fact, the accommodations, unlike the upstairs crash pad in Prague, are several kilometers away, beyond reasonable walking distance. Also, in Prague, we were sympathetic to the obviously kind and well-meaning people doing the best they could do given the budget they had. Köln was a large city in a wealthy country and the Underground was a big club. The “accommodations” in this case reflect the promoter’s cheapness, which furthers the intended bastardization of musicians in general, an exploitative attitude implying that we’ll be happy with just a bed and a toilet. Fuck ‘em.
It’s above a musical instrument shop, and the shop’s proprietor shakes his head in pity as he lets us in. There’s a room with a sink and a shower, neither of which work, a bunk bed, and another cramped room with two bunks and a broken window. The radiator half works (if you kick it), but it only stays on for an hour at a time, so if you fall asleep while it’s on it turns off and lets the room temperature nosedive. The sheets lay in a pile in the corner—washed? Who could say? The walls are peeled and cracked, and above one bunk a previous tenant has drawn on the wall, marking off the days spent in groups of five, just like they do in prison movies. There is garbage everywhere—food wrappers, beer cans, empty packs of guitar strings, and cigarettes. It is beyond depressing.
I cynically laugh about it all, my anger just barely held in check. Z, Rat, and Tim, mope around grumbling under their breath. Simon’s all smiles, because his lovely lass from home, Melanie, is in town and they’re going to be spending the night in a four-star motel across town. How nice.
Dahl rebukes his band of babies. “It’s not that bad. You guys have never been on a punk tour.” Them’s fighting words, bub, and both me and Rat respond.
“We’ve been on plenty of them, and you know it!” I say, my voice tensing.
“The thing is,” says Rat, quietly but firmly, “is that you said we’d have hotels every night. We’re supposed to get a bare minimum of comfort since we’re not getting paid, per diems, or anything else. It’s only what you said. But whatever, I can deal with it.”
Indeed, what choice would there be? The Factsheet Three decide to get out on the town. It’s unbearable here, so off we go. We actually have some errands: we need to find an optician to clean Rat’s screwed-up contact lens and to sell me more disposable ones. We cruise Koln for optics, beer, food, and guitar shops, anything to kill time yet save money. We’re all essentially broke by this point. After dark, and after a decent Italian meal in a nondescript little restaurant not too far from Stalag Koln, we return.
“Didja bring me anything to eat? I haven’t eaten all day,” Dahl asks
“No, we weren’t sure what you’d want,” I reply. “Do you want to go get something while we stay here?”
“No. Fuck it.”
“I’ll go get you something if you like. I don’t mind going back out.”
“No, just forget it.”
“You should eat if you’re hungry.”
“No.”
“I know you’re hungry. Is there a reason you don’t want to go out and you don’t want food brought to you?”
“No!”
Jeff of Arc, rock martyr. I didn’t think it possible at this point, but he still is capable of becoming even more of a mystery to me. Silence again ensues as we all stare at the grotesque walls. Simon, chipper with the thought of being with his true love, stands up and prepares to exit this unfavorable scene for the honeymoon suite of some nearby hovel. I remember that he has a bottle of Southern Comfort, acquired for band consumption, safely tucked away in his bag.
“Gimme the Southern Comfort, since you’re going off to have fun and we’re stuck here.”
“Oh, c’mon, I was going to drink it up with Melanie, have a few spots to increase the mood, you know.”
“Forget it. It’s a band bottle, and I intend on crawling inside of it and getting warm, cozy, and lost in its reassuring haze.”
“Well, I don’t see why you have any more right to it than I do.”
“You can get a bottle of anything, anywhere. You have the van, money, freedom, a girl, a real hotel room. You got it all. I’m stuck here. Look, it’s not really open to discussion. Give me the fucking bottle of Southern Comfort. NOW!!!”
“You fookin’ cry baby.” He throws the bottle at me.
“Goddamn, it’s over half gone. You haven’t even been sharing.”
“Would you shut the fuck up about the booze?” shouts Dahl from the next room. Simon leaves and I commence to drink. Z and Rat have a little to keep warm, but mostly it’s me, hitting straight off the bottle and enjoying that sweet, cough syrup rush that only the chosen elixir of Janis Joplin can administer. By 10:00 p.m., I’m drunk enough to fall asleep.
While I snore like a race car, Dahl paces the floor like a worried dad. Seems Tim has gone out on solo flight and has not returned. I wake up at 2:00 a.m., and Dahl is stumbling around.
“What are you doing, man?”
“Tim never came back, the idiot. I’m responsible for him!”
“Oh.” Not being capable of mustering any concern for Tim, I go right back to sleep.
The next morning we learn that Tim was locked outside, and apparently we couldn’t hear him pounding on the door from upstairs. As the worried father and prodigal son slumber, the remaining three go for breakfast. Ratboy just can’t get over what he’s going through.
“I’ll never do this shit again. This is bullshit,” he says offhandedly. “When my band goes on tour, it’s going to be done right, with a proper budget and decent gigs, or forget it. None of this staying in Alcatraz Prison so I can play in a fucking auto garage the next night.”
Koln is one gigantic mall, an endless indoor-outdoor shopping area. Given we have practically no money, we somehow manage to waste the whole day endlessly walking in and out of places we have no intention of buying anything in. Following a beer and pinball break, which is surprisingly refreshing without Simon along to slaughter us game after game, we return to the penitentiary by 4:00 p.m. I polish off more Southern Comfort, and once again I’m drunk, which I openly admit, and then it’s off to yet another pointless waste of a soundcheck.
Usually when I drink, I get in a mellow, happy mood, but not tonight. Tonight, I’m in the mood to argue, fight, and/or carouse. I can feel myself ready to go off. At the club, the promoter tells us to move our van off the lot. Simon, who’s in a terrific mood, sets off to comply, but I intervene. I set into the guy, raising my voice and saying it won’t be moved because all of our luggage is in it, and it was clearly unsafe to leave it in the “club apartment.” Later, the representative of our German distributor shows up, and tells Dahl we can’t sell our CDs because they came from France and the U.S.—we must purchase them from him in Germany. Jeff agrees to this. It technically is none of my business, but I make it all mine anyway. I start an argument with the guy, saying we’re supporting ourselves on the road with these friggin’ CDs and what help has he been and how does he expect us to carry on and it’s none of his affair and so on. Dahl vanishes, and I adjourn to the bar with this joker to resume discourse, joined by Z to aid in the debate. We’re from the record company, after all, so to hell with what anyone else says, we’re gonna call this shot. We argue for over an hour, and eventually Mr. Distributor gives in. I think just for the peace of not having to hear us anymore.
Blasting through the show faster and more furiously than normal, I look up and see Rich and Laura, friends of ours from a local Los Angeles band, The Tommyknockers. They are on a Euro Tour of their own, crisscrossing ours, and they’re here to party, heckle, and kibitz with some homeboys. Laura, who I’ve never gotten along with, sneaks up behind a pole that is to the side of me onstage, and, once behind it, grabs me while I’m playing and gives me the hero’s French kiss. She’s perhaps not my type, but it feels pretty damn good. So good, in fact, that I manage to play the next song and a half without missing a note while making out with her. That’s entertainment. I figure by this point, might as well give the punters a little something extra.
Meanwhile, a Swedish-style blonde beauty is soul mating with me as we head toward the encore. Perhaps Germany, not Italy, is the Promised Land. Then, a loud, erratic noise interrupts the proceeding as Rat’s amp blows out. He plugs into Dahl’s set up. Dahl takes center mic like a real lead singer while I go back to smooching with Laura, and Z throws drumsticks at me. We launch into yet another surfin’-on-the-astroplane rendition of “Dirt,” made all the more warped by Dahl rolling on the floor and groaning during the more musically hypothetical moments.
Following the show, I give the blonde a personalized S.L. Duff pick—a look that says she will be mine—but she leaves with her boyfriend. How naïve of me.
“Laura, let’s go outside and neck.”
“Okay.”
It’s fun for about a minute, but it’s cold outside, and we’re only kissing out of abstract boredom. We don’t even like each other and we both know it. We go into the bar where another touring band has shown up to blow off steam. Known—honestly—as the Scottish Sex Pistols, these wankers play the Pistols songbook lock, stock, and barrel, and are even a more punk rock Sha Na Na than we are. In keeping with their adopted image, they start a fight, talk in awful, phony Cockney accents and generally annoy everyone.
As I continue to drink past the limit of any degree of sensibility, I notice Rat pouting in a chair by himself. I turn to my right and see a gorgeous brunette and point Rat out to her. She seems to think he’s cute, a match made in heaven, perchance, but Rat doesn’t want to be cheered. As much as I try to enjoy myself, there is always someone around who is unhappy. Ahhh, road life.
Back to spend our final night in the Koln Pen, I put on a tape of hard-rocking old school punk—Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Adolescents, Damned, the good stuff. From the other room, Dahl snaps a request for no more music. He’s going straight to sleep, goddammit! Another party of one, I take my headphones and the dregs of the Comfort bottle to the upper bunk with me. I quickly pass out, and, as in France, wake up in a pool of my own piss, a suitable souvenir to leave for the next poor bastard. Maybe I’ll skip drinking for a few nights.
The next morning we have another band argument—as if you couldn’t see that coming. I wake up understandably hungover and crabby, and complain about how shitty the food the Underground fed us was, how fucked up this dump is, and how, in general, the club treated us like tenth-rate losers. Dahl seems only concerned with making these cretins happy and not stepping on any toes so he’ll be afforded the luxury of returning to play these holes for the fourth time. Then I launch into a new topic.
“You know, it woulda been nice to have been thanked for being the only bastard with enough balls to stand up to the promoter and the distributor when they both tried to railroad us.”
“McGruff, you and Rat have been complaining nonstop,” reckons Dahl. “You’re making yourselves miserable. Fuck the situation with the distributor. We could easily just sell T-shirts the rest of the time here in Germany, no big deal.”
“No big deal?! You just pocketed a couple hundred extra bucks because of me. And what about the van? You don’t think that was important. I guarantee you, had we parked it on the street, we’d a been ripped off.”
“There was nothing to worry about regarding the van,” chirps Simon, the happy little bird. “He agreed to let me keep it where it was as soon as I asked him nicely.”
“That’s bullshit. You were running out with the keys and your tail between your legs as soon as you were told to.”
“Nope.” I see now that it’s every dog for himself. Two weeks—slightly less than one fourth—of Euro-Blur left, and it’s come to this.
“I’m sick of you guys and your bellyaching,” Dahl says, starting to sound less rational and more emotional, as the military side wanes and the sensitive artist side rises. “I’m going to have to think long and hard about you guys going to Japan. I think I’m just going to get a band there.”
Dahl leaves for the van. The Rat speaks. “I don’t care if I go to Japan, I don’t think I can deal with being in the presence of the Master much longer.”
“Yeah, I don’t care. Fuck this,” added Z.
“Well, I fucking care. I haven’t gone through all of this not to get a payday. We’ll get paid in Japan, and besides, it’s Japan. None of us have been there. Goddammit, it would be just like Dahl to have us do the dirty work and then reward someone else with the Japan trip.”
“Forget it, McGruff,” said Z, doing his best Jack Nicholson. “It’s Chinatown.”
Onto Münster, where we’re treated much better, fed well, and generally kowtowed to in terms of sound and lights. The promoter here, Alfred, is a big, jovial, bearded redhead who aims to please. Largely obnoxious, drunken idiot guys, and a slew of young, cute girls attend the show. It reminds me of clubs in Orange County, California, where the ratio of knucklehead buffoon jarhead rejects and delectable sultry samples of femininity is roughly similar. The girls here gather at the front of the stage and dance, while the guys jump up onstage, yell into the mics, and then knock them over. This silly ritual continues throughout the whole show. As together as Alfred and the crew are, they didn’t count on needing any security, which would have been pretty helpful.
After the show, a six-foot-tall dishwater blonde with big eyes and thin lips talks to Rat about their favorite guitarists. Out of all these girls, she seems to be the only one left who followed the show. Later, I’m carrying some equipment out to the van when she walks up and starts talking to me.
“I understand you like dancing.”
“Besides playing the show, it’s the only form of exercise we’ve been able to organize on this little outing.” I pause for a second. “That’s a stupid answer. I apologize. Yes, I love dancing, where can we go tonight to trip the light fantastic?”
“I was trying to think of someplace, but haven’t come up with anything gooot. Wednesday in Münster is really not very gooot. Besides, you must have plenty of GROUPIES to keep you busy.”
Of course I laugh. “Groupies? We have no groupies. There are no groupies on this tour. Just look around. Desolation. This is how it is after every show.”
Hadn’t I explained this before, in France, in Belgium, in fact wherever we tread? Like many before, she begins giggling at our plight. “Really, no groupies?”
“Are you volunteering for the job?” asked Dahl as he walked by.
She laughs with Jeff and then turns back to talk quietly with me. “I’m going to go now, but I’ll come see you Friday. Alfred’s going to go to your show and I’ll catch a ride with Heeem. I will see you then.” She pulled me close and kissed me. Hmm, sometimes cool things are where you least expect them. Do I hear wedding bells? I hoped she wouldn’t turn out to be Catwoman II.