Will you love me tomorrow?

I live half of a block from the red light district. Along the city walls for about 3 long blocks bored looking women sit on stools in windows undressed to thrill. As might be expected the district is rimmed with bars. I’m not sure what the girls cost but beer at the bar around the corner from my apartment is cheap and good. One would hope you could say the same about the sex. There is a bar with 1 Euro espresso very near. I sit outside there warm afternoons when the street is quiet. After dark the character changes and it becomes too noisy. Afternoons the girls, in wrap around sunglasses, totter out on spiked heels for a bit of sun, their hair in messy pony tails. They smoke cigarettes, laugh loudly and yell across the street in every language except German or English to other girls doing the same thing. After months here I am known enough to elicit nods of recognition when I take an outside chair with my afternoon espresso. We don’t talk much. There’s nothing to say beyond Hello and Isn’t a nice day? The bar closest to me has an incredibly loud jukebox. I know the owner. She’s a nice woman who misses Poland but is making too much money here to go home. She stocks the jukebox with old rock songs, classic rhythm and blues and Polish pop music. The only time I hear the Polish pop music is very late when she is cleaning the bar around the last few die hard drinkers so she can go home. Last night I went to bed about 3 AM. As I was drifting off to sleep the old Sherrells song “Will you love me tomorrow” was being played over and over. Somewhere in California, Phil Spector, the man who recorded and produced the song 40 years ago is in the prison cell where he will die of old age for killing a woman while playing with one of his many guns. Gerry Coffin who wrote the song with Carol King is dead 2 years now. But tonight the song is alive and fresh as the night it was recorded, at least to whoever put all those Euros in to hear it 10 or 15 times in a row. The last 2 lines are “Tonight the light of love is in your eyes, but will you love me tomorrow?” An interesting choice of song for a bar in the red light district. If I had to guess I would have to say the answer is probably, sadly, no.

Stealing

Stealing towels from hotels has never been a habit. In my life I’ve done it only once, at the Hotel Carmen. It wasn’t so great a towel that I just had to break the habit of a lifetime and put it in my suitcase. The evening prior in that same room and the hotel restaurant I’d argued my way into a separation from someone I’d loved so on some unconscious level maybe I was taking revenge on the blameless hotel. It is a pretty nice towel though. I just used it.
I am reminded of a girlfriend who toured Canada with me about 15 years ago. Most hotels provided us with a pot of tea in our room with breakfast. On the last morning of our stay she stole a teapot. Ok, a teapot is nice. We can use it when, if ever, we get home. After that she was unstoppable. She stole a teapot from every hotel we stayed at and we lived on the road for most of that year. She had to buy extra luggage to carry all her teapots. I didn’t say anything. It seemed like a harmless, if odd, little vice in an otherwise very nice law abiding woman. I did refuse to carry her clanking noisy bag in hopes she would stop when it became too heavy.
We were on a train that stopped in the middle of the Canadian nowhere where nowhere is what they do best. We were boarded by police who went from car to car making people open their bags for inspection. Probably they were looking for drugs or some sort of contraband but I joked with her that they were looking for the famous teapot thief. I mentioned that this was a serious crime in Canada and I hoped she didn’t have to be some big muscular lesbian’s girlfriend in prison. She took me seriously. When the police entered our compartment she was shaking.
Opening her luggage they saw all her teapots, looked at her curiously, said nothing and moved on the the next compartment. I’d like to say she stole no more teapots but at least she only stole nice ones from then on.
When we broke up she caught a bus from Canada back to the USA on a cold Toronto morning. She had a suitcase full of clothing and another full of teapots. She slipped out of my life with one suitcase. After she’d gone I noticed she’d left the teapot suitcase behind. I left it too. Whoever found it later found a lifetime supply of teapots.
Last night I played a pub where the point is energy. Slam them with one uptempo song after the other. I didn’t enjoy it but on another level I’m glad I can do these gigs. This is as bad as it gets in my profession. And it ain’t that bad. On the plus side I got to be ungodly loud and that’s always nice, at least for me. I played late. Drank and hung out even later, caught the 4 A.M. night liner bus home and slept the sleep of the blameless. I woke up in the middle of the afternoon, showered with a stolen towel and thought about the one who made me steal it.

Berlin

Berlin is an attitude. It’s a place packed with expatriates from all over the world, oddball Germans who didn’t fit in where they came from, students, artists, etc. If you took the Turkish population from Berlin and put them in their own city in Turkey it would be the third largest city in Turkey, or so I’m told. Rent is cheap. There is a thriving night life. You can buy the best city tour available for less than 2 Euro on the S-Bahn cross town train. Kick back and watch one of the world’s finest cities go by. From the hip coolness of Kreutzburg to the Eastern Europeanness of Wedding (I went to a party once in Wedding that could have been in Poland in 1970. It was mostly writers, painters, poets etc. from various Eastern Bloc countries. The women wore a lot of eye shadow. I thought they were exotic and beautiful. The men were bearded and used a lot of hand motions when they talked) you can find whatever you are looking for there. I played in Steglitz last night. Steglitz is a village dropped in the center of urban Berlin. Quiet suburban feeling streets, women with baby carriages, green areas, small neighborhood businesses. If I moved to Berlin I would live in Steglitz. The Celtic Cottage is a classic Irish pub in the center of it all. They serve a fine Cottage Pie with green salad. I arrived early for the gig and ate dinner sitting outside on one of the last of 2009′s warm summer nights while changing guitar strings. I played from 8 O’clock until the bartender said it was time to stop. I took a couple short breaks but It felt so good to play that night that after a few minutes I found myself wandering back to the stage,tuning up and playing again. The room filled and stayed full. They were a multi-national group who liked to comment and communicate with me and each other between songs. In the corner 2 girls talked and laughed except during the slow romantic songs when they paused, listened, then returned to conversation during the uptempo stuff. After the show I took a night bus to the Hauptbahnhof where I waited for my train. Funny thing. 24 hours of Berlin. Now I’m home. Except for some Euros in the bank it’s like I never left.

Sauntering

Sauntering. This is a little used word in the 21st century. It’s a leisurely walk that implies one isn’t going anywhere specific but is just walking to look at wherever his feet happen to take him. I see people walking leisurely sometimes. I see people walking purposefully often. Sauntering is rare. It’s got attitude. It implies that everyone else has it all wrong and the saunterer has it right. Whatever “it” is. It helps that the guy I saw today was eating an apple. He was walking on Konigstrasse clearly at peace with his existence. He put a little extra motion in his stride and slowed down to look at a beautiful woman that passed him. She smiled briefly at him. Maybe she has a weakness for men who saunter. He looked at children playing by the fountain. He took small bites of his apple and looked at whatever caught his eye. Finally he passed out of my sight. I’ll bet the Dali Lama saunters when no one’s looking and he doesn’t have to be holy. Maybe he wears a fake goatee and Blues brothers sunglasses so no one notices and thinks he’s not being holy enough. Being holy all the time, like the Dali Lama, must be tough. In my whole life I might have managed to be holy, if you add up all the moments, maybe 12 seconds total. Before I die I want to get it up to a minute. I played a gig last night that I play often. I am background noise to most of the audience. Some listen, most don’t. No worries. I gotta pay the rent. The irony is that I generally play very well here. I pull out songs that I don’t do usually. I kick back on a stool and sing. Someone has a request, I play it. The owner and staff are friendly. I play original material, party songs, everything in between. They applaud when I least expect it. At some point I won’t be playing this sort of gig anymore. I will have outgrown them. But I will miss it. The freedom to saunter musically on the supposition that almost no one’s paying attention so it’s ok to get a little loose; to go where my fingers and voice take me without any sense of trying to amaze, amuse or pump them up with energy. Perversely it makes for a good show. Too bad so few hear it.

home…

Germans are among the least understood people in Europe. When I travel outside Germany people tend to look at me sadly when I tell them where I live. In Latin countries they just shake their heads in pity at my chosen exile to this land of cold people. Before proceeding I have to say I know that to generalize about an entire nation is stupid, so here I go. Germans are the most American of Europeans concerning their personal lives. They preserve their privacy and let you in when they know you, not before. They have a complex cocktail of pride at what they’ve accomplished beginning the second half of the 20th century and guilt with their behavior in the first. You’ll find this residual collective guilt even in young Germans. Young Turks don’t spend much time pondering the genocidal behavior of their grand parents against Armenians early in the 20th century. The young worldwide read history. They know that their sweet gray haired grandparents may have been involved in genocides or random acts of terrorism against whatever minority was handy back then. In the rest of the world the young don’t feel so emotionally connected to acts committed 60 years before their birth. Wouldn’t it be an irony if future generations of Jews feel guilty over the manner Palestinians are treated now? But I digress. Perhaps this is why also the young here have their own very visual form of penance; bad hair cuts. Arguably the worst haircuts in Europe are worn by German kids. Brits run a close second. I see hair styles that seem designed to be as disfiguring as humanly possible. It’s not a matter of being extreme. I like extreme. It’s more a matter of being ugly, another matter entirely. They are not cold people as most of Europe types them. They tend to be a bit pragmatic, true, but in the end, and after a few beers, they become loose and friendly. Then they pee. Ok. Everybody pees after drinking but others tend to do it in bathrooms. It’s a bit looser here. I live 40 meters from the city wall that surrounds central Nuremberg. If stone could be dissolved by urine the city would be completely unprotected. In this place where laws are enforced strictly and to the letter it’s not uncommon to see men peeing publicly. Manners dictate that one should turn facing away from the sidewalk and anoint the city wall. It’s a time honored tradition. This can occur perhaps at the same place one’s grandfather left some ancient lager 70 years ago. You get used to seeing it. They have interesting ideas about their body. If they’ve eaten a lifetime of too much deliciously rich German food and are quite overweight this is no reason not to wear that tiny speedo thong or enjoy the nude part of the local lake shore beach. You don’t like it? Don’t look. It’s a free country.

street scene

Street scene: Central Nuremberg.When you take the sharp right and descend down this unexpected little street it feels like you’ve been teleported to Paris. Well dressed people eating their noon meals standing at tall sidewalk tables share space with workman in blue overalls smoking their last cigarette before getting back to work. At a coffee shop with bamboo chairs on the sidewalk, exactly next to discreet little shops where rich women can spend a frightening amount of money on little black dresses and shoes sits the musician feeling at peace with his world. A tiny dog with a kerchief tied around it’s neck, on it’s own but surely belonging to one of the ladies sipping coffee nearby, runs loose busily checking out smells and sights on the street. The Irish Castle is a few blocks away. It is a smallish underground room with arched stone ceiling and walls. I played there last night. It could be considered my “local”. When I feel like a drink and some conversation I go there. It’s 5 minutes from my apartment. A gig there is always fun because the audience tends to be pretty international. That means I can talk to them between songs and when I tell a joke they’re usually drunk enough to think it’s funny. I was able to balance the entertainment and music aspects last night. This means in between the usual party songs and bad jokes I played original and lesser known songs that, if you listen, are good too. They listened. They were also loud and sang along with the stuff they knew. Basically as good as a pub gig gets. And 5 minutes after leaving the pub I was unlocking my door, not 3 hours on the train. A violinist friend came in last night and jammed with me occasionally. He added a lot. A woman came in with her mother and another friend of mine. As I sat with the 3 of them I learned she was recently the vocalist with a Grateful Dead cover band. We talked about her and I doing a song together. When she came on stage later to sing with me she was funny and sort of flirty with the audience in a way that seemed natural and unconscious so was even more attractive. Plus she sang well. We had fun.

Bamberg and Bayreuth

The Blues Bar gig was good but it’s one of my favorite anyway. After about 5 days off it took the first set to get back into the groove. I played ok but had a little trouble getting the audience involved. After that it all went well. After each set the room emptied as everyone went out to smoke. When the next 2 sets after that started I played the first song to a few people before the room filled again. That’s how it is at the Blues Bar. They listen. If you don’t want to listen there are 2 other rooms you can go to to talk. Afterward, I stayed to drink with some of the staff. We listened to Christie Moore songs and talked about life until we figured out solutions to all the problems of the world including world hunger, racism and the difficulty getting good Mexican food in Europe. Tired with 3 hours of singing and solving the world’s ills I said good night to Elke and Pete and departed for a good night’s sleep in the musician’s apartment across the street.

Th next night I played in Bayreuth. I play this gig a lot. It has taken on a sort of rhythm. The people come to talk. For the most part I’m in the corner providing background to their socializing. I use it as a challenge to see if I can get their attention, then to hold it. Sometimes I succeed. Tonight it went pretty well. I enjoyed myself. It was funny. Some guy gave me 10 Euro to play “No Woman No Cry”. So I did. It buys me a good Sushi dinner when I get home tomorrow. I even let him sing along in the mic. Everybody wins except the rest of the audience who had to listen to it. What the hell. When you pay your bills playing guitar you gotta be flexible.

The Return Of Mr. White Keys

A long time ago I started with the piano. My mother had one of those bizarre semi-circular home organs with 2 keyboards and foot pedals. She wanted to learn to play but all she accomplished was a passable version of “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes” after about 10 years. I walked past it for most of my very young life. Just by messing around I learned to play some blues and rock stuff. I got a guitar at 14 and became serious about learning that. So did everyone else. When it became time to form bands we were up to our ass in guitar players so I started out as a keyboard player and stayed there a while. The music was simple. All I had to do was play chords and occasionally fake solos by banging away and looking very into it so no one would notice that what I was playing wasn’t very good. If someone commented on the quality of my solos I implied they weren’t evolved musically enough to understand what I was doing. It usually worked. Bass guitar came along when I was in my late teens. I was playing keyboards in a band and one night the bass player didn’t come to the gig. Without bass in a rock band nothing works so I picked up the bass he’d left in the rehearsal room and played bass for the first time that night with no practice. It’s the bottom four strings of the guitar so it wasn’t rocket science to come up with something. What I had been doing with my left hand on the piano helped too. I fell in love with bass that night. The bassist finally returned a few days later to reclaim his bass, the strings caked with blood from blisters on the ends of my fingers bursting while I played until callouses began to form. He was fired. I was hired. Bass guitar became my primary source of income for the next 20 years. Guitar was still what I played around the house and piano when I had one. As years past that became increasingly rare until my piano playing was reduced to messing around on one occasionally when someone elses piano was handy. I moved to Europe 6 years ago and began to concentrate on doing solo gigs. I play guitar for a living now; that and sing. It’s time complete the circle. I am buying a digital piano so I can alternate between guitar and piano on stage. With the newest technology it is possible to get amazingly good acoustic and electric sounds in an 8 kilo (18 pounds) stage piano. This means I can travel with a guitar, piano, and baggage on the train, my usual means of travel. It probably won’t be until December it makes it on stage but it will. I played a concert at an art gallery and for an encore I was loose (and a bit drunk) enough to put down my guitar and play some songs on the piano. My first public piano gig in 20 years. It felt good! Things change, situations twist around and every time I have cash in the bank to buy this piano some emergency intervenes so I must spend that “extra” cash. I expect to be driving my neighbors crazy with practicing at some point in the near future however as I reacquaint my fingers with my new piano. I get to listen to them fight, fuck and have loud conversations in 3 languages. The least I can do is share my love of the piano with them.

destruction/creation

My apartment is being renovated, renewed, destroyed. They come to my door with power tools and reams of plastic to cover my furniture and instruments from the dust. They arrive at my door early in the morning. I go to bed very late at night. I make them wait outside until I’ve showered and dressed. I attempt to hold on to my life but this is impossible. Usually no one enters my apartment without an invitation and there aren’t many of those. It’s my private place. Now anybody who shows up with a power tool or measuring tape comes in. My answer when they show up is a snarling “What the fuck is it now?” I know they are simply doing their jobs. I am attempting to do the same thing and they are making it very difficult. Today I wrote a song, “Strange Love”. I let it bounce around my brain for a couple days until it was ready to poke it’s soft head into the world and be written down. When this time comes it has to be done, exactly then. Too early and it wanders around the page looking for a reason to exist. To delay after it’s ready can mean it’s DOA, it lost the will to exist. When I find a convenient later time to write it, it’s inspiration is gone. In the middle of dueling drills, saws and hammering above around and below I wrote it. At times I couldn’t hear the guitar in my lap. I had to remember what a B minor might be like following a G or should I use a D? In brief moments of relative quiet I played what I wrote to check it’s effectiveness before the next attack of noise rained down. At some point this will be funny and I will laugh about the way this song was written but that’s a long time from now.

Nuremberg Sunday Afternoon

It’s Sunday in Nuremberg. The only things open are restaurants; bakeries until mid afternoon. No one works today except me. I will do the final vocal tracks for “After All” because I can’t get the mandolin and accordion players here until the middle of the week and I want to keep the inertia going on this song. I will also start on “The One”. I plan on keeping this one very simple with just guitar, harmonica and maybe a bit of dobro around the edges. We’ll see on that too because the temptation is always to keep throwing more and more on a song. This song is strong enough to stand on it’s own without a lot of tarting up. But first coffee. I don’t make coffee. I go out for it. I go to the same few coffee shops. They know me. I like that because there is so much transition and instability in my life that these stupid little rituals make me feel comfortable. When I walk in and the counter people ask me where I’ve been and do I want my usual I feel as if I am part of some community that exists in the half kilometer around my apartment. I sat outside. At the table next to me was a man who obviously had no woman. He had that ill cared for air about him. His hair was combed in front but not the back and a couple other things said this. Usually when you are leaving the apartment with a woman she will emerge, after 20 minutes, from the bathroom looking very pretty and then she will look at you. If there is toothpaste that has somehow made it to your cheek and dried there or you are wearing the shirt you found behind the couch backstage when you opened for that punk band in Serbia she will look at you with the LOOK. Yes, the LOOK. The LOOK speaks volumes. It says “You don’t really think I’m going out with you looking like that do you?” At this point I take the hint and change shirts, get the dried toothpaste off my cheek and we go out. Possibly I am being sexist. I’m sure I am but I tend to be with sexist women who, frankly, are a lot more fun than politically correct, unisex women. If the downside is I dress a bit better the upsides makes it all quite worth it.