“Anyways,” he said. “I must be off. Great night, great show.”
“Yeah,” I slurred. “See you later.”
I realized this town was exactly the way I’d left it, in a green, blurry haze, shrouded in unreliable memories and late evening conversations in the burning hearth of the fire of vodka. Beneath its grey skies, inside those broken-window factories within those cities still technologically ten years behind, there are people who are so in love with the fact that you’ve made the effort to journey to them, so happy that you’ve shared all you have with them, and so gracious and kind that it warms you from the inside, warms your blood like the soothing heat of alcohol.
I was once told, after saying thank you to an audience after a show in a small town, “You say thank you to us, but really we should say thank you to you, because you bring with you a piece of everywhere you’ve been and so through you, we learn about the world.”
History is geographic. You can feel it as your body moves great distances along the soil, along the railroad, toward or away from the sun, along an overflowing river or beside a gigantic mountain range. It is written on the ground in the movement or stasis of people, landlocked or spacious, imprisoned or emancipated by a body of water. The movement of ideas and the conquest of nations is determined by the nature and location of the rocks on which we stand.
The playing of folk music can be seen as a small addition to this canon. The peaceful sharing of stories and ideas, on a path carved by steel, through the rock, to end up in a new, manmade habitat, the city, the ultimate conclusion to the geographic effects of history. In Europe, folk music predates the arrival of industrial capitalism, stories and ideas moving freely across borders long before the printing press or spinning jenny. Touring in the modern sense—on a highway, with a guitar—doesn’t predate capitalism in North America, so it’s only ever been conceived of in that context on our soil. In Europe, people have been doing it forever, and to play folk music in the Old World is a chance to tap into that long, epic genealogy that stretches far past the beginning of borders and time.
The act of drinking with the folk you’re playing to is a violent and unpredictable partner in crime to the music, the sidekick of the songs. You learn about a place over a bottle of beer, or wine, or vodka. Somehow, all the pain and headaches, all the anxiety and shaking and withdrawal that follow for so many mornings are all made worthwhile in those moments where you first talk with people in a place you’ve never been.
Was it the liquor or the act of drinking it with those people that I was addicted to? My body felt so much better when my lips returned to the taste of alcohol, and my words as sharp as the sword of a Teutonic Knight. But my mind was most at ease when I had someone there to share my words with. As soon as the darkness fell, I’d be ready to receive all the ideas and experiences that stampeded over the history and geography of wherever I was like a giant horse, that eventually entered the bar and charged around the tavern, angry and unbridled.
The train from Wrocław to Vienna heads south through the Moravian capital of Brno, in the eastern Czech Republic. At ten a.m. I boarded at Wrocław Główny, and after three stops an announcement in Czech blared over the loudspeakers. I asked the guy across from me if he spoke any English.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s some kind of delay. We’re going to miss our train, so we’ll have to figure out another way to Brno.”
His name was Jan. “Are you a musician?” he asked me.
I told him what I was doing, trying to carve out enough cash to pay off a chunk of my MasterCard and maybe pay my rent, and do it by doing what I loved more than anything.
While checking the train schedules and connections on his computer, he remarked how strange it was that a Canadian would come so far east, beyond Prague and Berlin, into Silesia and Moravia.
We got off at this tiny border town called Ústí nad Orlicí, and the station was nothing but a wooden plank, a small ticket hall, and a café amongst thousands and thousands of miles of deep green pine. It was the furthest away from anything or anyone I’ve ever felt in Europe.
Jan laughed and joked, “We are going to disappear into the wild woods of the Czech Republic.”
A man walked across the tracks, in front of a stopped train, and entered the main hall. Such a thing would land you a two thousand euro fine in Germany, but this was the closest thing I’d seen in ages to ravaged, untouched heartland, hours away from everything, so barely anyone noticed. Waiting for our connection, we went into the bar and ordered some food. I had a beer and Jan got this famous Czech liquor that tastes like a mixture of Jägermeister and flat Coca-Cola. Everyone stared at me, shocked to discover someone who didn’t speak Czech. I knew then that I was deep within the heart of a country, the equivalent of being stranded in Brandon, Manitoba: rural Europe, the middle of the continent, a part of it I’d never seen.
That’s the kind of experience that only the train can bring you—the railroad slices through terrain that highways can’t.
On the highway, your life is defined by gas stations and rest stops, while the railroad injects you into the vein of a culture. You see into the backyards of houses when you arrive in a city. You hear the language all day and interact with other passengers. You end up at a rail town tavern, killing time between delays and sitting across from a group of Czech bikers and skinheads, the walls adorned with unfamiliar words, flags, and symbols, the air thick with an immeasurable amount of cigarette smoke and alcohol, the walls stained orange with human interaction. And there I was in the midst of it: the train had delivered me. Its beating heart of steel and coal had pulled me in.
The train is an office, bed, bar, studio, toilet, dining room, practice space, and a searing, bursting harbinger of energy. It sweeps you up and spits you out. It is unforgiving yet cradles you like a mother of metal and electricity. It speeds along at the tempo of a culture, its windows a View-Master displaying the harsh and honest nature of a place and those who live there. It often takes you where you don’t want to be. Through its lens you see things that you don’t necessarily always want to see. As though in the middle of a celestial sphere of god, you float above a city like an angel and land in the centre of a heavenly circle. You stretch your legs and write a song and drink a beer and let yourself become the train. Through its arteries you connect to the vibrant and all-consuming pulse of history. I took a sip and tasted the railroad.
Jan and I had long parted ways when I finally arrived in Vienna. He had turned left that evening, and I right, on the platform of a station in Brno. “Hope I’ll see you soon?” he said to me. I knew that would never be.
Now the Austrian conductor looked at my ticket, and then at me, and I told him how long I’d been travelling.
“Since ten a.m.,” I said, exhausted. There was a breath.
“Wilkommen im Austria,” he replied and handed me back my rail pass.
I got off the railroad at Wien Meidling and immediately boarded the Vienna U-Bahn to Thaliastrasse, my body shaking with the anticipation of finally being able to get off the train and hit the stage, to see my old friends Esteban and Stanze and reunite myself with the city that seemed like the thread from which you weave a dream.
There’s a quality to Vienna that’s not present anywhere else. It’s fiercely unique to the place, but it’s also incredibly hard to identify. There’s a mix of high class and low culture in Vienna that’s distinctly Viennese, a self-importance through rowdiness you might call it, the roughness of a German city with the palm trees and fast pace of Italy, a relaxed and laid-back charm, with buildings that are falling apart, and lepers begging in the subway. Lamborghinis circle the Gürtel in an almost Mediterranean, dim blue morning light, sex shops and neon and the gruff phonemes of the German language bouncing off the brick work and tarnishing its beauty in a self-becoming way.
In Vienna, at night, the würstelstand gives you the best glimpse into the true way of life of the V
iennese. After leaving the bars, a parade of drunks makes its way to any number of kiosk restaurants with plastic tables out front, as the homeless and alcoholic sit and yell in the street, the lumbering thunder of the train shaking the ground as it throws itself across the city above and below.
Plates dripping with the grease of Käsekrainer and crusty Viennese buns are everywhere as the lineup grows and the crowd changes from the down-and-out to the well-to-do. You’re surrounded by every kind of person, from all facets of Vienna’s classes and cultures, all here, ordering beer and sausages at four thirty in the morning.
The lineup of young kids and old men and gorgeous women and working girls hungry after a night in the dark and smoky Viennese bars becomes more and more animated as people press closer and closer together, the man behind the counter opening a beer with one hand and pulling a sausage off the grill with the other, and he’s smiling the whole time, moving back and forth between the tiny walls of his kiosk—a grand ballet. A distorted radio is blasting Austrian club music to the throng of people that grow in front of the würstelstand, and it’s as though the bars and clubs have just moved out onto the street.
This is the Viennese version of an Edward Hopper painting: common people caught at their most vulnerable, all walks of life, unaware that they’re being watched and glorified. The young and old and rich and poor and healthy and sick are joined in this awesome power. Anonymous faces enter and leave your view, and then at some point it all dies down and fades to calm, like Nighthawks at the Diner.
“Look at this,” my friend Esteban said, a few rows back from the front of the line. A long deep crimson sausage is pulled off the grill and dropped on a toasted Viennese roll. Six tablespoons of diced onions and four different curry powders bury it completely before it’s flanked by mustard and ketchup. “So dirty! So fucking filthy, greasy. I love it.”
The romance in all this mess isn’t lost on me. The ground is covered in stained paper plates, tiny empty Jägermeister bottles, and discarded Gösser cans. The smoke of the grill ascends to the heavens and nightgoers queue at the till as though about to receive a holy sacrament. The tables arranged like an outdoor café in the dirt out front are full of people celebrating the stories they’re about to tell. A gorgeous girl in a red dress drinks a plastic cup of an Italian red wine while linked to her lover’s arm, and they’re laughing amid the dust, grease, and garbage that’s strewn across the ground. Cars race by on the Gürtel, laughing drunk brutes come and go from the doorway of Thaliastrasse U-Bahn station, and as we hear the hum of Vienna rise up in a soothing roar, Esteban and I both laugh and drink and know that amid all this trash and unhindered humanity is something beautiful that could only be birthed by the mother that is the tender warm hands of the night.
I thought back to when I first went to Vienna—I think I was with Wilfred. We’d met Esteban and Stanze at the show and they took us to the First District, and as I turned those corners and the Imperial Palace emerged from behind a wall of trees I felt like I was in heaven, or at least whatever I’d imagined heaven to look like. The walls all sparkling white, the buildings seemed to touch the sky, and the district seemed never-ending. Immaculate buildings towered above us as copper figures of history turned green in the presence of time. A feeling of liberation overcomes you. Bullets would pass right through you as you vanish transparent amid the marble weight of history.
The morning after the würstelstand, I woke up in Esteban’s apartment and had to board a train to Graz. My hangovers were reaching epic proportions. It seemed like days and weeks of drinking were always compounded into one terrible, horrifying feeling upon waking. Usually by about four or five o’clock the feeling would be replaced by booze, but that day I knew something was different. This was a punishing, alienating fear of the world and everything in it. A chemical sense of self-doubt and -loathing thickened my blood. It’s nothing real, but it feels so true at that moment when the night before is leaving your body and the withdrawal sets in.
That show in Graz was a turning point for me. On those days when your nerves just can’t be calmed and there’s nothing in the world that can save you from your mind, you secretly wish that no one comes to see you play. That thought is disgraceful. A dark, unadmitted secret, one that haunts your thoughts and makes you feel a guilt so great that you’d think you’re not worthy of your own words and music.
When I got to the venue, this old Austrian tavern called Café Prost, the place was already rammed with people. I wanted to sit on the steps in front of the bar and cry. They were all about to see me at my very worst. I’d done this to myself, caught up like a pathetic victim in the hurricane of touring, of people and stories and nights out in cities, and it was steamrolling into my present now, like a crushing ton of steel.
I was introduced to probably ten people, the collective of promoters that put on the show, and did such a great job apparently, and immediately all their names entered and left my life as though through a revolving door. I thought I was going to lose my mind—I was so over my head in this maze, and everything seemed impossible.
How could I have let this happen? Why did I let the night take me by the hair and drag me through its gutters? How did I so foolishly become a servant to the rows of flashing lights, pulsing to the rhythm of celebration, neon, culture, and human life? I was a sucker for it all. It surrounded me with its waves and I always let myself get washed up on its dry, sandy morning shore.
I wanted to blame Vienna, but it kept circling back to me. I hated myself for that, all these people there to watch me, and all I could do was struggle, like they were medical students on a day trip to a hospital to study some sick patient. It took so much effort to play those songs and remember those words. I knew that I had to get this under control, or drinking was going to become me—I was powerless against it. This was beyond life on the road. I’d started to depend on the booze to cure me of my yesterday, and that wasn’t working anymore.
After the show I thanked the promoters and collapsed in the backseat of the van that was my only ticket to a bed back at the sound guy’s apartment. When we arrived I felt this pain in my side and my lungs felt heavy in my chest, rising and falling as I lay down on a mattress in a room down the hall. The sound guy was in a great mood, singing and pouring another drink in his kitchen, yet I was silent, feeling totally destroyed by the very thing that I’d tried so hard to create. I’d been chasing that fleeting and often unattainable moment in the darkness beneath the stars above that can teach you all you’d ever want to know about a place and the people in it, but other times just as easily leave you with nowhere to go and nothing to show for it.
I could hear him unwrapping the plastic on a tray of lox and I could smell the fishy odour. He cracked a beer and his phone rang, and I was sweating as the whole apartment filled with salmony carbonation and a language I didn’t understand.
Lying there amid his yelling and laughing, shouting in his thick Austrian dialect, I’d let that feeling consume the very reason why I’d come to Europe in the first place, and it was devouring me like a beast. I’d always dreamed of living for the song, of being an artist and starving for a greater good, and that night I had turned my back on those desires in favour of a faint glowing buzz beneath the eyes and a powerful headache that would pickle over the course of the day. As my eyelids dropped like teary waterfalls, something deep inside me vowed to change.
Before he left, the sound man said, “You think Vienna is crazy, but you have never had a night out in Graz.”
The door slammed shut behind him and the whole apartment went dark and silent. I had the dream again, of falling into a black and all-encompassing pit. Again, I reached up and over my top teeth with my bottom ones, and, magically and plier-like, yanked them from my mouth as the blood rained down my face and into the light of the morning.
Modern Germany is the bastard offspring of tyranny, and Berlin is its eldest, rebellious son—a teenager rising up agains
t its overbearing father. Hitler and Stalin formed a fist around these people and they have sworn forever since to break free of it.
A transgendered crust punk sells used phone chargers from a shopping cart in the Mauerpark Market. An art school student does a line of speed and goes to the club on Sunday at noon. A photographer sits and watches the beggars bloom under a eucalyptus tree on Karl-Marx-Allee while the TV Tower hangs overhead. The bars never close and people talk outside until the break of day. Someone plants a garden on their roof. Reggae blasts from a stereo on the U-Bahn while breakcore in the distance engages in peaceful musical combat. Two lovers kiss in the streetlights. You can smell the coffee in the morning as the light reflects off the beads of spray paint drying against a grey brick wall.
This is Berlin, a rebellious and optimistic kid spitting in the face of its tyrannical father. It is the sights and sounds and smells of freedom, engaging in a violent war against the past, and I think it is winning.
Berlin pays a unique form of reparations by giving everyone within its borders the right to be who and what they want. You can dance if you like, or not dance if you like, and you will be swept up by the same intoxicating and liberating rhythm. Have sex, play guitar, drink water, smoke dope, and do it all in the street if you so desire. This is how Berlin makes peace with the past and exacts its revenge on those who wronged it. It owns the future: celebration, music, and freedom, for now and forever.
Görlitzer Park swarms with newcomers to Germany trying to sell weed or speed. They’ve even assembled office chairs by the gate and hang out all day, calling to potential customers. A lady with a cart sells rice and curry from two old plastic paint buckets as hundreds of kids drink beer and smoke dope by the remains of the old Berlin subway.
Berlin-Warszawa Express Page 5