Worst. Show. Ever.
Rock and Roll is full of interesting anecdotes. It’s typical when bands plan something, that something gets fucked up. Thats why successful bands have managers that take care of things. However if we had one, the following would have probably still happened. Hmm, scratch that. If we had a manager, we probably wouldn’t be playing in the celler of a youth center in Winsen, Germany.
On Saturday AMJ had a show at the 30th birthday celebration of the Winsener Jugendzentrum. We were supposed to go on at 10pm but there were all kinds of 15-16 yr old punk bands playing Misfits and Ramones covers getting out their teenage thorn crown pain. And we finally hit the stage at about 11:30pm. At the foot of the stage were a group of punks, not in the condescending sense of the word punks but the diaper pin through the nose, totally wasted, fuck it all, punks. They were saying nonintelligable things, some of which sounded like, “Hey alter, play some shit, we wanna rock, we wanna fuck, where are the drugs, pass the spoon, blah, blah, blah.” So in other words the usual. So we get up there and set up rather quickly and get ready to bust it out and we aren’t even a whole bar into the song when the power goes out. Na ja, it happens. Usually a fuse is blown or someone spills beer on a cable or a they trip over a cable. It took the sound crew about 20 minutes to figure out what the problem was. I don’t think they ever figured it out. The power was back on and then out again, on again, out again. Meanwhile the punks were living up to their namesake and two of them, a guy and a girl, totally wasted, had jumped up on the stage and were trying to sing Desperado into the dead mic. Interestingly enough, they didn’t notice that the mic was dead and kept singing, screaming rather, to overcompensate for the lack of volume and amplification. You still with me? Oh it gets better. Finally the power is back on in a stable state but we have no power to the stage monitors, which means the audience can hear us, but we can’t hear shit except for the drums which are right behind us, but since the drummer can’t hear himself, imagine that, he’s playing at twice the normal volume simultaneously blowing out our eardrums. So we bust out into the first song again but there is still the annoying problem of the two punks on the stage that seemed to have moved onto their own brand of stand-up. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but they were killing ’em. When they noticed we were playing again, they tried to take Marco’s guitar and bumped into me effectivly bringing the song to an end. My polite request for them to leave the stage was promptly ignored and one of them tried to grab my guitar.
Allright. That does it. Pulling my guitar’s where I draw the line.
The “security” was nowhere to be found so I pushed them both towards edge of the stage. This was met with “Hey fucker, what the fuck, stop the violence, what the shit?, blah, blah,blah.” The Hausmeister came and tried to pull them off the stage and I kicked them both right in their asses, which sent them off the stage. (Yeah, thats right. I kicked a girl. Don’t worry. It wasn’t hard) Punks gone, Rock on!! By then we had little time left and it would have been totally arrogant to just say fuck it and leave so we said fuck it and rocked out. The whole thing was shot to hell anyway so what the fuck? We turned all the amps up to 11 and let loose. Me and Florian were playing on the foot of the stage total rock guitar god style with wailing distortion. I had my foot up on the dead floor monitor and wailed out some solos, did a little Jimi behind the head, laying the guitar on the amp getting crazzy feedback. To paraphrase Tom Sanders of Sidekick Kato, “My Guitar is my rock and roll machine and I use it to shoot people with rock and roll.” The whole time we couldn’t hear a thing. I have no idea how we sound but I sure had fun.