CULTURE
The Gin Palace Jesters Do Europe
Part II: Finding Fun in Finland
Our return to Berlin was the start of the strangest part of our tour: beginning with a five hour midnight drive from Hannover to Berlin and ending, that same night, in the apartment of Lemmie, our Berlin promoter, whose flat was totally decked out in American Retro furniture.
Lemmie sports a Pompadour hairdo and a leather vest. He told us he was the president of a motorcycle gang called The PreuBen Rebs, whose logo is the Confederate Stars and Bars flag. The gang operates out of a burned out factory just east of the old Berlin wall.
On
one side of the factory, the gang repairs old Indian motorcycles; on the other,
the Preuben Rebs have set up a nightclub to host an assortment of
rockabilly bands.
When we took the stage, Ken introduced me as being from Richmond, Virginia, “The Capital of the Confederacy” and the Rebs gave me the loudest applause of the night.
Those big German bikers just loved that redneck Dixie shit. So we gave it to them, playing two encores and, still, they wouldn’t let us go. Even after the music ended, there was this big guy in the audience who kept yelling “Bass Zolo! Bass Zolo!" [More bass solo! More bass solo!]
We didn’t get out of the club until around 3 AM. That left us only two hours to tour Berlin if we were to get to our next gig in Geldrop, Holland, ten hours away. We piled into the van (the goddamned van) and went sightseeing in the dark. I saw the sun rise up over the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate in all its glory. Beyond those two landmarks, I can’t tell you a thing about where we went or what we saw.
Fun, Fun, Fun! What day is it anyway?
Geldrop, Holland
We're currently riding along in my favorite van
to Geldrop, Holland.
Dave tells me that if we drive fast, we can cut the 14-hour drive time to
12 and make it to our next gig, a club called De Kroeg, before they even know
we are late.
Holland is a land of history, flowers, charm and over-smoked, over-drunk, and over-sunned people. Being late in Holland is like being on time in Greenwich. Everyone carries around their own degree of lateness, and you can set your watch by it.
De
Kroeg is one of those tiny bars with a big heart. The music is everything.
Even the bands don’t matter as long as the patrons are amused; and the
crowd, a mixture of truckers and rockabilly groupies, is amused by anything
country.
European truck drivers are the same as American truck drivers. Salt of the earth. One of them sat down next to me between sets and whispered "Mobile, Alabama is the REAL Capitol of the Confederacy." I decided to leave that comment alone.
Another fan in the audience said he skipped out of work that day to drive into town to see us because we were "REAL" country music.
When our set was over, we all relaxed in the 90-degree heat listening to another band, The Truly Lover Trio, and waiting, quite comfortably, for someone to come by with our hotel accommodations.
“About that hotel room,” Ken started to say . . . our promoter Ralph had somehow forgotten to make the reservations. So back in the van we went, prepared to drive another five hours back to Hannover and finally, we hoped, some sleep.
Dave wanted us to stay in Holland to plug The Gin Palace Jesters CD on the radio the next day. But we decided we could phone it in from the road. As much as we hated that van, we had our dignity. Climbing back in that van was our way of getting it back.
So with only a single stop for a 2 AM breakfast at a Dutch Chinese restaurant, we were back on the autobahn, doing 120 km per hour (90 mph) and listening to a CD of Buck Owens singing Act Naturally. Is this living or what!
Hannover Again
All I remember is we had two days of rest and we
spent it eating the German version of Indian food and visiting a zoo. We played
a club called Gearbox 
in
a town called Branschweig, then another huge rock emporium the next night
in Regensburg.
The Regensburg gig looked to be a sellout. The club had two levels: one featured techno-music and flashing lights, the other had country music (us) and flashing lights. The audience flowed from one floor to the other, happy just to be in on the action.
Helsinki
We landed in Finland on June 27th, I think.
Finland is green in the summer. Very green. So green it reminds me of Goochland County in Virginia, my ancestral home. That impression is only reinforced when we are picked up at the airport by a driver wearing a red flannel jacket, bib overalls, Sears Diehard work shoes, and a baseball cap. His vehicle of choice is a Chevy mini-van.
Yes, dear readers, Finland reminds me of home. Think of it as the West Virginia of Europe. Go to the outer edge of civilization, then go another mile.
And it would only get stranger. We were booked to play at the Midsummer Festival in Vammalla, Finland – a summer solstice party that seems to celebrate a time and place that knows no night.
About an hour out of Helsinki, we arrive at the fabulous Hotel Elluviori. The hotel parking lot is filled with vintage American cars and motorcycles. As we pull in, there is a steady stream of fans along the roadside walking in from distant parking to hear us play.
It’s fair to say in Chicago The Gin Palace Jesters can draw a crowd as big as a Jesse Jackson rally in Cicero, but in Finland we are treated like The Beatles at Shea Stadium.
On our arrival, we are ushered past about 10 security guards into the lobby of the hotel and escorted to a suite of three rooms, with two beds in each, all featuring French doors that open onto the hotel’s back lawn.
Finally, I’m thinking, the European rock tour I always dreamed about. Then I looked out on the lawn to see something a cross between a Ku Klux Klan rally and a Hell’s Angel’s Camp.
The
lawn is swarming with dozens of junker American cars (Dodge Darts, Chevy Novas,
Ford Pintos and Mustangs.) Tarps strung between trees mark makeshift encampments
and concertgoers sit on milk crates under the tarps drinking beer and discarding
empty bottles into garbage piles already two feet high.
I can still remember seeing one fat woman out my
hotel window peeing in her tent and covering herself with a Confederate flag
for modesty. I also will never forget the mopadour-ed men who, having misplaced
their pants, were having an arm-wrestling competition on the back of a 60's
Chevy Impala with pink flames painted on it’s hood. And only in Finland,
I tell myself, will I ever again see a man with his pants around his ankles
hit on a 
woman
swathed in a Confederate flag.
Just so you know, what I am calling a “mopadour” is our band’s name for haircuts featuring heads shaved into a Mohawk, then greased and combed into a (sometimes colored) Pompadour. Every other boy seems to sport one these days. I suppose it’s a psycho-billy thing. But I, personally, don't get it.
We were scheduled to go on at 11 PM. For effect, we had decided to do this concert in our cowboy duds (we are, after all, a country western band) and that just made the crowd all the more crazy.
The stage wasn’t much larger than a Chicago bar club, but the place was packed to the gills. People were crushed up against our feet. We started playing and they started screaming and singing along with all of our songs.
All of these Finnish kids knew all the words to all of our songs, and they didn't want to hear any cover tunes at all.
Between songs, they were reaching out to touch our hands and, like, partake of the golden flow. After the gig, we spent a couple hours in the hotel lobby signing autographs. T-shirts and CD’s were flying off the shelves.
I met a boy named Miika from Lapland who had our
CD and another boy named Henry whose guitar teacher was transcribing our songs
into Finnish to teach him to him how to play American country music. He and
his friends drove five hours to see us and were staying in a van in the parking
lot.
Ken met a Russian guy who said he had driven from St. Petersburg to see us.
Even some Nazi skinheads showed up, but they were convinced to take their
swastikas off, so there wasn't any trouble.
Our
concert had been over for several hours when, around 3 AM, it started to look
dusky on the horizon. People were still lined up for autographs, but I went
out into the parking lot to look at some of the old Indian motorcycles. From
an old Chevy pick-up, I heard the echo of Dave, our lead singer, doing a tune
from our CD on a MP3-jacked radio. The Chevy owner was playing a gut-bucket
washtub bass along with it.
I went to my room thinking it doesn’t get better than this. But Dave knocked at my door 15 minutes later telling me to come back down and sign more autographs.
I can’t tell you when I went to bed because I never actually saw nightfall. But I can tell you that I awoke the next morning to have breakfast with John Doyle, the sax player in a Chicago jump jive band called The Four Charms. Like me, Doyle was feeling the same surreal vibe.
The solstice festival in Vammalla was our last tour appearance. We caught a plane back to Frankfurt, said goodbye to Randy the drummer over Middle Eastern fare at a German restaurant and caught the next flight back to Chicago via Montreal.
Except, of course, on the road, whatever doesn’t cost you money costs you sleep. Our flight got to Montreal late so we missed our Chicago connection spent the night in an Econolodge. We ate pizza for dinner (again) and 14 hours later arrived back safe in Chicago.
But isn’t it fitting? Tripped up on the last leg and forced to stay in an Econolodge? And the only question left is: will Ralph pay for it?