Leaving Görlitzer Park, when you walk up Falckensteinstrasse toward the Oberbaumbrücke, you’re along the main artery that connects all the boroughs of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Friedrichshain, and in twenty minutes you can pass through the heart of culture and music that has an energy that permeates the air like an expensive perfume. When you cross the bridge and come to Warschauer Strasse U-Bahn station there are cranes towering above the people, creating apartments and sky-rocketing the value of post-commie Berlin. Drummers and saxophonists play ecstatic symphonies. Punks panhandle outside a nightclub called Suicide and every direction is crawling with people absorbing the uncertainty of life in waves of sexual pleasure and mystery.
For all these reasons, it’s never easy leaving Berlin. Exene used to put me up at her place for days and days on end. It was like her flat was a charity for the revolving door of artists who would crash on the floor. Once while I was staying there, Exene introduced me to a friend of hers on the U-Bahn who was on his way to meet a dealer to buy some speed. After my show, Exene and I had gone to a club and I got so wasted that she needed to take me home in a cab. I woke up in the morning, still drunk, and there was Exene’s friend, coming down from the uppers, speechless, smoking alone in her kitchen, and staring at the wall.
Exene lived right on Warschauer Strasse, five minutes from the U-Bahn station, where all the drunks would pour out of the train like some mass exodus at every hour of the day on the weekend. Right on the border of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, it was a ten-minute walk to Ostbahnhof, which could connect you to the rest of the country, and when I took that walk to head out for a long run of shows, I was always left to reflect on the boozy haze that would define every trip I’d had to the city.
I’d climb the stairs to the train platform in this grave, familiar way, always thinking of my next, quickest way back. This feeling of loss and desire would always descend over me when I’d load my bag and guitar on the train and see Berlin disappear in the distance, as I was enveloped by the woods and country of Brandenburg. The city seemed always to vanish—not necessarily get smaller, but just dart behind a cloud of trees—and I was unsure if that made it easier or worse for me.
“Berlin is beautiful,” Exene would say. “But it can break you, like it is riding on your back, and you are the horse.”
I played with the idea of moving there so many times, but the idea just never became a reality. I thought of the endless partying and how it’s impossible to escape it unless you have the will of a great bear and a liver of solid steel.
“All these people,” Exene said once, “they move here with passion in their hearts. They all want to be artists, to be in love with life, to flourish, and then Berlin possesses them. And then it’s Monday morning and they’re pale as ghosts and they feel terrible and they put on their Ray-Bans and a tight black dress and they lie to themselves about feeling better. They move here because they want to be connected to their identity, and then they lose themselves completely.”
I never wanted that to happen to me. The thought of getting swallowed whole and shat out like that by a city, like you’d never even existed at all, was terrifying. To be food for it, faceless, used for its survival, its sustenance, such an insignificant part of its grand and infinite story that you just become forgotten in it, like a single cell in a massive body—that scared me. But is that fear or sound judgement?
And so I was always in this process of leaving and returning. A train seemed to be always slowing down or speeding up at Ostbahnhof. I saw the same views leave and enter my life so many times that I got accustomed to a feeling that was so tragic and unforgettable when I’d first experienced it. It wasn’t the act of leaving and coming back that I’d gotten used to, just the feelings of sadness and excitement that came with it. Those emotions seemed familiar, but Berlin itself was always foreign.
Once, on that train ride out I was headed to Kassel to play my friend Fonzie McKnightingale’s bar. Fonzie owned the place with this guy named Lutz who used to hold illegal underground shows in the art school there. They were legendary, incredible parties that, in true German fashion, ended far and deep into the light of morning. When Lutz graduated, I guess he took his parties with him. He bought an old tavern with Fonzie, and they called it the Weinberg Krug.
Fonzie was a songwriter who recorded under the name Mockingbird. He was kind of the pioneer of rough-and-tumble folk-punk touring in Europe, at least for Canadians. Like Old Bull Lee to my Sal Paradise, he was a veteran of the acoustic guitar path who’d managed to carve out a name and a living in Europe, like he’d been tattooed with a rusty guitar string and an ink made from German rainwater, ages and ages before the modern wave of North Americans trying to stake a claim in the “nouveau New World” of East Berlin and post-Bloc Europe.
Fonzie also passed on the first slew of contacts that got me to Europe and because of that I’d always work with the same group of people to get shows, those same people, like sand in the sunblock, who would sharply rub up against you in that big viscous, gelatinous matter that’s life on the road.
So, direct from Ostbahnhof to the Weinberg Krug in Kassel, I unloaded the guitar, checked the system, and tested the room. And then I was at the bar, where they served genuine Czech absinthe. They weren’t sure if they could serve it legally at the Krug, but they didn’t necessarily give a fuck. We used to roll and spark whole joints in there, smoke them down to the filter, then bust up a ball of hash and roll another, well into the morning.
Once, I even got behind the bar and started serving. I threw my CDs across the place and even hit some young girl in the eye, and moments later bought her a shot of vodka as compensation, drank one with her right at the table, and then ended up in a cab back to Fonzie’s living room floor, throwing up out the back window the whole way.
And so here I was, another night at the Weinberg Krug ahead of me, drinking with Fonzie McKnightingale, my Old Bull Lee, until the early morning. Fonzie and I always end up slinging words across the room in a drunken five a.m. stew. He told me that he’d just bought a castle well outside the city, in the middle of nowhere, beside a smaller town close by. He was brilliant in his ability to buy property and businesses with money that he’d made from touring. The concept floored me. Buying a bar, then a castle, and from nothing—from thin air, from music. He had some insight, I thought, so when he talked, I listened.
“What you have to do is go to the end of the S-Bahn line,” Fonzie explained. “Drive half an hour or forty minutes from that, and there, that’s where you find cheap shit.”
I pondered the trip that Wilfred and I had taken to Poland and all the magnificent potential that goes with a place being so empty and barren.
“What about eastern Europe, why not move there?” I said. “Think about what you can buy in Slovakia or Romania or Croatia for twenty grand?”
“Yeah,” Fonzie laughed, “but then you have to live in Romania or Serbia or wherever. You’re so far away from everything. It’s not about east or west anymore. It’s so far from the end of the Cold War that you should just forget about that east–west dichotomy. It’s not just the fact that it exists east of Berlin that makes it cheap nowadays. Any city of over a million people is going to be expensive, because if there’s a million people who want to buy into living there, then it’s gotta be worth something to somebody. What we’re going to see is a battle between the city and the country.”
I thought about the new economic world, the cheapness of Poland, the former DDR, and really anywhere significantly east of Berlin, and how even though you might live in rural Germany you’re still only a heartbeat away from the monstrous artery of the Deutsche Bahn. Germany was still worth it, and that’s why people kept going there. I also wasn’t alien to the irony of a DIY punk rocker being so dependent on a system he despised. In eastern Europe, for example, the farther away you are from western capitalism, the more disconnected you are from the railroad, the airports, the h
ighways, and everything else you depend on to carve out a living.
“I can buy into a castle in rural Germany,” Fonzie said. “And if I do that, I’m still connected. I can still take a car to the S-Bahn and get to the nearest Hauptbahnhof and that connects me to all of Europe. Romania? Serbia? Poland? There’s still so much infrastructure waiting to be built there. The middle of nowhere is still the middle of nowhere, no matter how little it costs.”
Germany was quickly becoming one big city, with the amount of green space between towns shrinking by the second, the urban sprawl of Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich encompassing every piece of grass that someone was able or willing to buy. It would take too long, according to Fonzie, for that to happen east of here. Too slow for the impatient musician types who book their own tours and live on trains.
“I want this now,” Fonzie said. “I want to be connected now, and I can still be as connected as I need to be in the German countryside. That’s what everyone’s going to want to gobble up next.”
Real, new-style European capitalism, coming from the mouth of a DIY indie rocker: “Don’t bother going east. You’d have to wait just as long for opportunity there as you would waiting for a booking agent. Or a publicist. Or anybody else that doesn’t share your hands-to-the-wall, DIY approach to living and playing.”
I thought of Eastern Europe, and the former Iron Curtain, how the light of the West was slowly creeping eastward. The euro and the dollar coming for it, ready to gnash their teeth against the people who lived there. The fall of communism was a new dawn for consumer capitalism and a million more mouths with credit cards and bank loans, eager as anyone to line their pockets with the fruits of the labour of someone else: the Baltic Tiger, the price of rent in Warsaw, Gucci outlets in Kiev, the colourful high-rise apartments of downtown Ljubljana, these images came to me all at once. It was coming for all of it, like a crazed bird of prey on the hunt, in the form of urban sprawl. East or west, it didn’t matter.
“Nowhere is safe,” I said, “is what you’re saying.”
“In a way, yeah,” Fonzie said. He packed a bowl of dope and took a rip. “If you really want to outrun it, you have to head for the country. Leave the city. But the difference is that, in Germany, you’re still kind of in the city because of how connected you are.”
On tour, everywhere you go, everyone is always talking about rent. It’s this commonality, this unfortunate standard of connectedness, whether you’re in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, or Toronto. Through this underlying expression of resentment toward metropolitan human society, the murmurings of many languages become universally understandable:
“What do you pay? It used to be less?”
“Increased by how much?”
“That’s criminal, you’re going to have to move away from London/Paris/Madrid/Berlin/Toronto/___________.”
The defining condition of our time will be one where urban rent everywhere gets too high and all the culture flees the city in a mass economic exodus. And any kind of unwelcome displacement from the place you love to live is exile. No one steps in to help you, everyone is on their own.
The cities in eastern Europe are safe, at least for now. But the talons of capitalism are attached to a pair of beating wings on a gigantic bird of prey that is flying through the grey Polish sky faster and faster, at the speed of information—the speed by which cellular technology throws money through the air.
We’re enslaved by it. All of us. Fonzie’s solution is to head for the country and try to outrun it, but it will catch up to you. It’s a semipermanent solution to an eternal problem. Evade imminent cultural destruction, at least for now. Carve out a little piece of land where you are the voice of its definitive artistic creation, pay less to live, and compete with fewer artists clawing and scraping toward the same vision. Leave the city. Prolong the day until your piece of the world is demolished and reconstructed in steel and fibreglass that scrape the sky.
“How much money do you have?” Fonzie asked. I snapped back to attention after a doped out and boozy freight train of thought barrelled down my track.
I laughed. “Nothing, absolutely nothing.”
If it wasn’t for touring, I’d probably have loads of money. I could’ve had a house somewhere by now, maybe not in Toronto, but somewhere close by, but I’m determined to do just this, to tour.
“Of course, man,” he said and laughed too. “I understand. Keep in mind I’m twice your age. I toured for twenty years until I figured out how to live off it, and then I had to move here. If I still lived in Canada, I’d be in the same boat as you.”
I always wonder how long this will last, how long I’ll travel the world playing shows and hoping for a time when I can depend on it to make a living.
Who will hear me?
How much longer will this go on?
I pulled my beer.
“I had an agent who was super committed to my Mockingbird project,” he says after another big hoot from his bowl. “And I guess that everything was hinging on whether or not I got this grant from the German government. Because when in the end I didn’t get it, he stopped returning my emails and phone calls.”
The thing that people don’t understand about DIY and punk rock is that it’s not like you pick the lifestyle—this lifestyle picks you. Nobody will book your tours for you, so you do it yourself. No one will give you the money to record your album, so you record it in your bedroom. No one will pay for your publicist, so you do your own mail-out and cold-call the papers. True punk rockers, the ones who see only the finish line, the ones who at any cost will find their music an audience, are all victims of circumstance and necessity. The situation always commands the art.
Fonzie and I went to the nachtmarkt across the street to get more beer. I’d finished mine, and the fridge was empty. We bought four. I drank three. No topic was off limits. Words flowed the way of the booze and smoke. We talked about Swedish death metal and Norwegian black metal, we talked about girls, we talked about castles across the German countryside, we talked about beating off on the road. Whether or not, when you fly loose in the train washroom, the person after you has the faintest idea of what you did in there. We both snickered like schoolboys in a changeroom.
“Berlin is beautiful,” Fonzie said, when I talked about my morning, leaving Ostbahnhof only hours before. “Obviously. But it’s the furthest thing from a good city for live music. No one cares about guitars there. It’s all post-this and post-that. They want to feel the punishing bass of German techno, the rhythm of the dawn of the new urban world. Gabber parties, hardcore techno, that shit—that city has the rhythm of all that deep within its blood. They want to escape the country, so they’re the ones making it so expensive.”
Thinking of that electronic pulse, in all that talk of eastern Europe, all that booze, all that hash and weed, all that music, those yelling, smoking, drinking Germans, all of them filling the Krug with exuberance and charging the atmosphere in the bar with the copper rush of a battery, I became exhausted. And then I was in the dark, on the floor, dreaming drunken dreams of Poland.
I woke up late and, sweating electric bullets, ran through the escalating archways of Berlin Hauptbahnhof and barely caught my train. I found a seat and put down my guitar, caught my breath, and began my first real descent into the former Eastern Bloc.
Poznań is the first stop on the Berlin-Warszawa Express, and opposite the platform is an abandoned factory. Every window is smashed. I had an amazing idea of where I was, but I still had no idea of where I was going.
Under that grey and ominous autumn sky I kept staring at this factory and thinking of how it had gotten so neglected. Every stone that broke those windows lay innocently on the ground before being picked up and hurled, at the speed of destiny, through those factory windows. Who would know how long they would lay motionless waiting for someone else to walk along and pick them up?
I arrived
in Warsaw at eight p.m., and got in a taxi at Warsaw Centralna. When I went to pay the driver, I reached into my pockets to pull out ten euros and realize that I’d forgotten to convert my currency. In broken English he told me not to worry about it and shrugged it off.
“Wait,” I said, “I’ll find someone to change it, I’ll be right back.”
I hoped that body language would explain it all and I went into about seven shops looking for someone to help this guy. Everyone turned me away. I returned to find him still standing by his cab, in the middle of the street, smoking a cigarette, not a thread of anger sewn on his face, no ironstone waiting for me there.
“It’s okay,” he kept saying.
I handed him the euros, insisting he accept them. I thanked him and apologized and thought about how back home someone would’ve fought you over that. He just smoked, shrugged it off, and drove away. Later on, I’d find out how much better it worked out for him anyway—the złoty is probably twenty to one to the euro—and maybe he’d played me the whole time, but I still felt terrible.
I found the venue, which was this old underground cavern that looked like it could have been a bunker in the war. Warsaw was bombed so badly that maps of before and after look nothing alike. I ordered food from the kitchen and moments later the cook returned with a different dish than I’d requested.
“This is not what you ordered,” he said. “But I think you’ll like it better.”
I ate it anyway.
In a few minutes, Michal, the owner of the bar, showed up and we did soundcheck. Not long after the people started pouring in. A young guy approached me at the merch booth and told me how he knew and loved my music. I tried to imagine how that music got there, through the internet, how so far from Canada it would be so hard to find the channels to hear it, but it had still arrived, and I realized how rare it might have been for Canadians to come there and play.
Berlin-Warszawa Express Page 6
