CULTURE
Europe, My Way
I don’t know why I was surprised that the first day of The Gin Palace Jesters European Tour lasted 40 hours. We’re a band. A small country music band, I admit, consisting of a lead singer named Dave, Ken on guitar, Buddy on steel guitar, and myself on bass. And because we are a band, I’m wise to the fact that whatever doesn’t cost you money on the road costs you sleep.
But it still came as a bit of a shock on Day One of our three-week tour to learn -- while sitting in a plane stalled on the O’Hare runway -- that we were not only making our way to our first gig in Spain via Montreal, London and Frankfurt, but the last leg of our journey would be a 22-hour ride our record producer Ralph had arranged in a Mazda van from Frankfurt across Germany, Switzerland, France and Spain to Barcelona, where our many European fans were gathering.
I said we are a small band of four. That was before we were joined in Frankfurt by Randy, our stand-in drummer, and his bass playing friend Wassily, who just wanted to come along because it all sounded like a lot of fun.
So together, we are now six (plus a drum set) snuggled up in Wassily’s van making our way across Europe. I have been awake for 42 hours, and if my calculations are correct, our luggage, lost in Montreal, should be arriving in Frankfurt any minute now.
It’s freezing in the van. I’m still wearing the same T-shirt I left Chicago in. I’ve yet to brush my teeth, change my money or close my eyes for anything but a cursory nap sitting up.
I crawl onto a mattress in the back of the van with Ken, our guitar player, thinking I might catch a few winks. But just as I’m starting to dream about punching Ralph’s lights out for putting us through all this, we stop at a French filling station -- and I pick up the most delightful prosciutto sandwich.
A few miles down the road, just past Marseilles, I see a most spectacular sun come up over the countryside. And somewhere down the road (who knows where) someone (who knows who) tells a joke, which isn’t even funny, and we all laugh in giddy exhaustion.
And even though we are all bleary-eyed and haven’t even played our first gig, I can’t stop thinking: this is pretty cool.
Barcelona
Our
first gig is a rockabilly festival in Calella, a small town just up the coast
from Barcelona. The Gin Palace Jesters are one of a number of American
country music bands invited to play. This turned out to be a good thing since,
without our luggage, I had to borrow Wassily’s bass and Buddy cadged
a Stratocaster off another Chicago band called The Honeybees. But
we still went on in the same clothes we’d been wearing for 48 hours
and looking about as sleep deprived as we felt.
The venue was an old Spanish factory made over into a concert venue with a Greek motif across the front. But it was still packed with 1,000 fans when we went on. Just as we were getting cranked up, the power blew in the middle of “Singing The Blues.”
We
looked at each other wondering what to do. But there was really only one choice.
Keep playing. The crowd in front of the stage who could still hear us started
singing along. Pretty soon, the whole audience was singing the blues. When
we finished, they went wild in appreciation of them and us. Just as we ended
the song, the power came back on. So we concluded the set – and they
screamed their appreciation. It was one of those rock and roll moments you
always dread, and never want to forget after it’s over.
After packing up our gear, Ken, Buddy and I decided to walk back to our hotel around 2 AM through the Calella nightclub district. The weather was perfect. Music poured out of the various taverns and, on the beach, with a bunch of drunk Germans singing in the background, we sat down and talked about life.
There was no rush now. Our first gig had gone well. We didn’t have to be back in Berlin for two days, so we would have time to explore Barcelona in the morning. I went back to the hotel, washed my socks and skivvies in the sink and hung them over the balcony. Then I fell asleep.
Saturday
The rockabilly festival turned out to be a gas. Dave and I went down the second night to see The Barnstompers, but not before stopping in at a Calella bar for ex-patriot Brits. Dave has a nose for Guinness and sniffed it out instantly. While he was downing the brews, I had a chance to leaf through the bartender’s impressive collection of old 60’s R&B tunes (all on 45 RPM records.)
We made it to the venue just in time to see Joe Clay close out the festival. The organizers celebrated at an after hours party in a club called the Western Saloon. As soon as I got into the Western Saloon, I felt like I was biting into a steak and having it taste like styrofoam. Nothing was right about this club. It was some kind of Euro-trash disco with Western knick-knacks sprinkled around and felt about as authentic as vinyl cowboy boots.
I
won’t bore you with the many versions of food poisoning that beset me
in these first days of my first gig in Europe, but I can assure you that you
should be glad you weren’t in the van with us the next day for our 22-hour
return trip to Germany – and our next gig.
Hannover
We dropped Wassilly off at his apartment, then slept for 5 hours on Randy's floor. Randy lives in a nice one-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend Ina in a city about three hours west of Berlin called Hannover. Everything in Randy’s apartment is vintage. It's just like Dave’s or Ken's place back in The States except, of course, when the TV is on, everyone is speaking German.
The next day, with our luggage and all our instruments back in our possession, we held a little practice. Then we went out with Ina as our guide to see Hannover proper. The highlight of our tour was a cathedral built in 1333 (and not destroyed in WWII.) But I felt like I was looking at the whole town with fresh eyes. Clean clothes, a hot shower and a good meal definitely brighten your outlook on tourism.
My bandmates have decided that, because I have let my hair go shaggy, I am not “rockabilly” enough for Europe so Dave went after me with Buddy’s beard trimmer. I now look like a cross between a Polish military cadet and a mental patient. Everyone – except me – thinks cutting my hair was a lot of fun.
Our first gig back in Germany was to be in our promoter Ralph’s hometown of Uelzen, where he had us booked into a small bar called Schiller’s Musikcafe.
Before the Uelzen appearance, I spent an hour in the bathroom trying to bring my hair and my head back into alignment. With only a rusty pair of scissors, I managed to undo most of the damage. But nothing can be done about the splotches on the side of my head. Hopefully they will grow out quickly. Maybe the sun will tan my scalp and I won't look so much like Forrest Gump.
The Musikcafe in Uelzen went well. Our gig the
next night in a club called 
Biker's
in Oldenburg went better.
Oldenberg is a three-hour drive from Hannover. Because Randy had another gig, Dave took the wheel on the van. Let me condense two pages of journal entries on Dave’s driving into a single sentence: don’t tell Dave he doesn’t know where he’s going.
Eventually, we made it to Biker’s. Bikers is a small club with a wild and avid Gin Palace Jesters following. We sold more T-shirts and CD’s than ever. After our set was over we found hotel rooms at The Harmony Hostel and ate take-out pizza for dinner because, frankly, we needed a break from German food.
The Harmony is your standard European hostel with dorm bedding and group bathrooms, ours being the only one flooded with standing water. Fortunately, we have Buddy with us. Buddy is a regular American Mr. Fix-it who never leaves home with his Gerber Multi-tool. To the list of broken guitars and wayward amps Buddy and his Gerber have set right you can now add one hostel sink in Germany, danke sein herr buddy.
Hamburg
We’re playing tonight at a club called Knust. We have no idea where it is. Ralph, the president of Rhythmbomb Records and our tour promoter, is planning to meet us there.
As we drive along to Hamburg, I’m amazed at the many wind turbine farms I see along the road. Vast acreages of high-tech wind turbines occupy the landscape along the expressway. In Chicago, I hunted and pecked along the internet for images of turbine farms to accompany a graphic presentation I was making for our local utility company. Here, they are everywhere.
Once we are good and lost, Dave finds a guy in a black T-shirt with a thousand tattoos and holds up a map in his face.
“Kunst?” he exclaims. “It’s right here.” He points to a street corner on the map, but since we don’t know where we are to begin with, his directions are of little help.
“No Beatles,” he says and smiles. Every year, American and British tourists flock to Hamburg looking for the club where The Beatles had their first success. The locals resent the intrusion and Ralph makes no mention of it as he walks us past it in what is now known as the Rapperbahn – The Red Light District.
As we walk, the prostitutes approach speaking flawless English. "You're not interested in sex?" one of them asked me. "I'm interested," I said, "just not with you." Aren't I the smooth talker?
Finally we get back to the club. While standing in as our European drummer, Randy also plays guitar in his own band Randy Rich and The Poor Boys, which opens for us tonight. I’m glad we finally got to see them perform – because they were really good and it set the stage for a fun evening.
While we were playing, a woman named Barbara whom we all remembered seeing dance at our last gig in Green Bay, Wisconsin, came up to dance in front of us. She knew the lyrics to all our songs and sang along to a Jim & Jesse song we often cover. A German girl who knows the lyrics to our songs and splits her time between Green Bay and Hamburg? This is getting weird.
After the show we went back to Ralph's House. I had to take a cold shower because the guy hadn't turned the hot water heater on. I also had to share a double bed with Randy. But that was okay because he was in a mood to talk and, having seen him play, we now had lots to talk about.
The next morning, Ralph had us booked to play a benefit gig in a nearby music story to help him out with some distribution deals for his label (Rhythmbomb.) After two sets before a small but polite crowd, our reward was a lunch of bratwurst and potato salad – and another 5-hour ride in the van.
Our next stop is Berlin, the gateway to a whole new world of German biker bars, Confederate flags and hillbilly Huns. So come back next week as The Gin Palace Jesters tour of Europe continues through Berlin, Holland and Helsinki.