Punching Germans in the Nuts
A long memory and a penchant for retribution? Yes, but why do you ask?
First off all apologies due to Slovakia. When last we spoke the issue was, or became, my desire to stab Slovakians, made in the mistaken belief that I had actually been to Slovakia. Far be it from me to unfairly malign the brave and wonderful people of the magical land of Slovakia which, it seems, I had confused with Slovenia.
Now you may have a hard time believing this but I have had people ask me where in London, exactly, Paris was. I have had people express a belief that Poland was in Holland. And I’ve had people question the entire existence of the country of Togo. And when I say “people” I mean “Americans”. So my crime here is fairly minor though I’m quite aware that this amounts to blood libel in this part of the world for which “I” am the one who should now fall under the blade.
So, for accounting purposes only, Slovenia, despite the wonderful presence of Laibach and a few other friends, is where I felt the urge to commit murder most foul.
Slovakia?
OK. Listen. I grew up with Czechoslovakia, and as a child I prided myself on being able to spell it, so it was with much chagrin that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Czechs and the Slovaks couldn’t continue to find common cause and broke up. While repeated trips to the Czech Republic had cemented its existence in my mind, Slovakia, had been the forgotten one.
Outside of the Dan Ackroyd and Steve Martin comedy routine about two “wild and crazy” brothers from Bratislava and their perpetual hunt for “large American breasts,” I had no sense map of Slovakia. At all.
But driving in with BUNUEL, I now knew one thing about Slovakia: it was, at present, also hotter than Hades. Which was fine. Following the dictum of The Robinson Way, on arriving, I found a black chair, in the sun, right next to the black stage and proceeded to read, while dressed in all black, Jim Ruland’s wonderful book Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records, which features OXBOW prominently in the chapter titled, curiously enough “SST vs. Techno”.
…I anticipate some saying “if fellatio is on the menu, who are you to deny fellatio on the menu?” But you have to know how to read the crowd…
Annapaola Martin, director of the wonderful BUNUEL video “Roll Call” AND tour manager sees me sweating, profusely, and offers me a “better” spot to sit in the shade.
“Well…to get to the shade I’d have to move,” I say, looking at the 10 yards yawning between us and the front of house sound board under a tarp. “So, um, I’ll just stay here.”
The wonderful thing about Italians is that they always seem totally OK with you being as stupid as you want to be, so in the sun I sat cursing the sun while I sat, sweating, sweaty and defiant. Of? The sun, fate, and G-d, I guess.
But it was a curious venue. Outdoors on a circle of cement by an old tram car. You know where a screen or a banner would have hung in another type of venue? This is where the tram sat, behind the drum riser. The very small stage was right in front of it and all around us what felt like the kind of corporate park that’s become commonplace in New York.
By which I mean it feels pleasantly funky, but I’m not missing the corporate signage down by the adjacent waterfront — we move eventually, a move I have measured out before I am willing to stand, sweating, and walk to it (30 yards this time) — and the now-globally ubiquitous scooters and rental bikes.
This is not good or bad but just an early indicator that this show could go either way. As is usual when you open up the world to you, you’re also open to whatever the world wants to deliver your way. In literary terms, we call this foreshadowing.
But our seats on the Donau are jolly and I watch a two-member crew team row against a current that’s strong enough so that for a good measure, though they are furiously rowing, they are not going anywhere. A scene I watch until the larger life parallels make me uncomfortable and we wander back to the venue.
Our backstage is in the ass-end of a trucking container, the kind that over 50 migrants in the US just died in, and feeling the heat there I am both happy it’s as hot and miserable as it is — see above regarding The Robinson Way — and horrified that over 50 humans couldn’t walk out of this steely tomb as easily as I could.
“They’re starting!”
Our stalwart sound guy Michele is gesticulating in that universal sound guy way that I’ve finally come to understand means “get your ass on stage”. But, and maybe it’s the heat, I don’t take him seriously. Or I don’t until I hear the first song start and I’m still putting on my pants. Which is, if you think about it, a really hopeless mummery as I will be pants-less before the set is over, but I am a bear for process and ritual and so I rush to get dressed and stagger out of the shipping container.
As I get to the stage I see someone has nicely put a vase there, full of flowers, the fact of which makes me unaccountably angry. As in: how dare they darken my desire for darkness by introducing cheer into the proceedings? So, the flowers get stomped on and as I stomp on them I am remembering David Yow’s once-spoken words to me: “what is WRONG with you Black people?” and I smile.
A smile that lasts just as long as it takes me to figure out that something is wrong.
I don’t guess this. The crowd has guessed it for me as they all give wide berth to a woman front and center who, and here it’s not so much that some of her front teeth are missing because, of course: our most ardent fan would have missing teeth. But it’s her level of enthusiasm. Now I am in BUNUEL and am pretty enthusiastic about the entire affair and still I am not this enthusiastic.
I’m not sure though whether they fear her or fear for her but it’s clear to me that I have a problem on my hands since while I have mastered the art of handling male “enthusiasts”, handling female “enthusiasts”, is a whole other ball of wax. There are scant opportunities for teachable moments when every cellphone video uploaded the next day ends up showing you, context-free, choking someone who you outweigh by 100 pounds. No matter what she’s done to deserve it.
And she’s doing plenty to deserve it.
Starting with the “simulation” of fellatio. I say “simulation” but it’s fairly clear to all gathered that this is no empty offer nor is it even a challenge. There are two people in this world now and for one of these people, the most sensible thing in this world at this time is: fellatio.
Which I ignore. But given that the height of the stage puts my crotch at exactly crazy lady mouth level this gets harder to do and a few songs in she’s first licking my hand and then licking down my forearm.
Context: There was one time at an OXBOW show that I got explosive diarrhea on stage after being food poisoned by vegans and I had to leave the stage to use the toilet. One wag afterward suggested I should have just shit the stage. “That’d been punk rock, man!” But he wouldn’t be the one that had to spend the rest of the night with shit in his shoes.
Similarly I anticipate some saying “if fellatio is on the menu, who are you to deny fellatio on the menu?” But you have to know how to read the crowd and in this instance she was presenting a problem that the crowd was curious to have me resolve (and solve), however no one seemed to want it resolved, or solved, with a penis in anyone’s mouth. Which is a good party rule for lots of places.
She, of course, is driving a hard bargain (see what I did there?), and since I don’t stop the forearm licking she amps it up and grabs my chest and starts moving her hand down it right as a song ends.
“But what about CONSENT?” I ask and look her in the eyes finally and for the first time, and blasting through the accumulated crust of whatever chemical cocktail had been consumed I wanted to have a real question asked and understood in whatever language it was that she might have understood.
Her response: “ARRRGGHHH AAAHHHSKKK ZZZ…!” Or some variation thereof.
So I asked again, “shouldn’t there be consent BEFORE fellatio? Or you even touching me?” At which point she buries her face in the palm of my left hand, part cuddle, part contrition, part an attempt to give me hepatitis I would guess.
The next song starts and I push her and her face away. Gently but authoritatively and the crowd goes wild and for the first time in a long time I find myself looking at a mosh pit. I never see her again but the promoter comes up to me after what, by all measures, was a successful show and says, “so…still feel like stabbing Slovakians to death?”
I laugh and say “well not ALL of them” while admitting that I had gotten the countries wrong.
One country I’m never apt to get wrong though: Germany. And from Bratislava to Berlin the next day was a haul. Probably faster if you got yourself a Messerschmitt, but we’re driving Ford’s version of the Mercedes Benz Sprinter.
OXBOW played Berlin’s Cassiopeia before. So you’d have thought that I would have noticed it. But I didn’t even if I now do: it’s all corporate too. Yes, there’s the graffiti, and the spot sports a skateboard ramp but walking around to the back door there’s a rockclimbing feature, and the stink of artisanal cheeses, beers and people who can afford both.
Moreover Berlin has a little less shitty graffiti than usual. Now my relationship with graffiti is complicated but there is a big difference between good graffiti and shitty graffiti and the last great graffiti died maybe 20 years ago but that’s not the point.
The point is that true to Eddie Lagapa’s original proposition “Morrison comes in packages now.” It all feels shrinkwrapped and carefully served up as “fun and funky” with all of the edges rubbed off but maybe that’s OK. The last time the Germans got “edgy” well, that didn’t work out so well.
But my favorite part of the night, outside of the one-show surprise duet with the estimable KASIA MEOW, was seeing Oliver R. Now for those of you following older versions of OXBOW tour diaries, you might have remembered him as the fella who came to OXBOW’s last show at, yes, Cassiopeia, and while standing next to me by the merch table decided to knee me in the testicles. Just to see if…I was paying attention I guess.
Given that I had my hands in my pockets, I could block the nut shot, but I knew then and there that at some point, I would pay him out of the bank account that he had just paid into. And sitting in a theater chair by the door in the backstage room it came by way of a knock.
“Hi hi Oigen!” Which is my name in German. And it was Oliver and he had brought me a gift. A record, hard to get in Germany, of a Rastafarian dub artist who has turned all of Hitler’s major speeches into vocal elements in his dub remixes. Yes, that’s right: Adolf Hitler, Rastafarian dub artist.
I love Oliver. Sports photographer, dog lover and known associate for almost 15 years now. But his nuts were calling me and as he handed the record over I took it with my left hand and hammer fisted him in the crotch with my right. He groaned and bent at the waist and choked out “oh. So you remembered that…”
“Remembered it? I’ve been LIVING for nothing else my friend!”
He leaves the room, the show proceeds apace and early the next morning it’s off to Rotterdam. Or as I’ve come to think of it, Götterdämmerung. And then France. If we don’t die first.
Fantastic!
Eddie Lagapa reference! RIP