After landing in Germany, it took me months to discover a source for concert listings in the Frankfurt area. As one might imagine, the U.S. military did nothing to help soldiers discover the local culture beyond the popular drinking holes.
The ticket above was the very first concert I attended in Germany and it couldn’t have been any more appropriate. I may not have been collapsing buildings, but I was definitely collapsing structures by this time. For those of you who don’t know, Einstürzende Neubauten translates to Collapsing New Buildings. A month after I landed in Europe, Neubauten released their album Halber Mensch, and this concert was a performance of this very album. I was on top of the world. As lucky as I was to have caught this band so early in their career, the show I’d see two days later was the experience I never considered might happen.
Psychic TV. About 7 or 8 years before I bought this ticket, I learned about a band from England called Throbbing Gristle. I was enchanted. NOTHING prior to TG sounded like them, absolutely nothing. Four people created a new genre of sound called Industrial Music. Their time together abruptly ended in 1981, with the members fracturing into Psychic TV and Chris & Cosey, a.k.a. CTI. Genesis P. Orridge, Peter Christopherson, Chris Carter, and Cosey Fanni Tutti were my superheroes. By 1986, Peter had left PTV to form Coil, another all-time favorite. But tonight, I was paying homage to GPO, who took to the stage wearing some incredibly shiny purple shoes. Yep, his shoes made that big an impression.
After the show, there was no way I wasn’t going to wait around for an autograph. Of all the musicians I’d ever learned about, it was Genesis P. Orridge who had one of the biggest intellectual impacts on me. There were pop stars I’d loved, such as David Bowie, Sting, DEVO, Blondie, and some others who impacted me culturally, but TG and PTV were different.
The next ticket I saved was from this On-U Sound featuring Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart, though not billed for this night was Keith LaBlanc. While I had a nice chat with Keith, I was still too intimidated to approach the famous (in my mind) producer Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart from the Pop Group, who was also in the same league as David Bowie (again, in my mind).
There were certainly more shows I saw between February and June, but those are lost in time. One that stood out was on my birthday back on April 4th here in 1986, when some friends and I went to the Frankfurt Festhalle, where I’d scored some great seats somewhere near the 17th-row center for Elton John, whom I adored back in 5th and 6th grade (between Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Pinball Wizard).
Yet again, here I am at the Wartburg in Wiesbaden. Maybe I saved these tickets in particular due to their colorful nature compared to the machine-printed tickets or simple stubs you’d get at the door. In addition to the Wartburg, I’d discovered the Dschungel (The Jungle) just up the street, not too far from Buy or Die Records, where I’d met this guy Laiki Kostis, who would end up having a HUGE impact on my life. Laiki was the person who, years later, asked Caroline and me to make him a record cover for the Hypnotist and their breakthrough tracks, Rainbows In The Sky and Death By Dub.
While I didn’t much care for Wolfgang Press, I had to show up for the film titled Decoder. Featuring F.M. Einheit from Einstürzende Neubauten, Genesis P. Orridge, William S. Burroughs, and Christian F. there was no way I would ever miss this film.
The first ticket I saved from The Batschkapp in Frankfurt. I should have saved the ticket from a band I saw at the same club just two weeks before this, Skinny Puppy. Besides the Batschkapp, which I visited frequently due to its recurring Friday night staple Idiot Ballroom, where I could easily meet other like-minded people, I was going to Galluswarte, the Music Hall, and a host of small venues in Wiesbaden and Mainz. Along with Laiki, I was now friends with Uwe-Hamm Furholter, Michael Maier, and some other Germans active in the art and music scene who were happy to expose me to their world.
I should point out that by the end of 1986, I’d visited Paris, France, with Uwe and his friend Robbie, whose father was in a diplomatic position in Versailles, which gave us a base in the attic of their house so we could wander Paris without worrying about a place to stay. Our first trip out that way was to visit with some French noisemakers we’d learned about from P16.D4, whom I’d met because of another of Uwe’s friends, Peter Weiss who was behind Hypnobeat. In many ways, my time in the Frankfurt region was imitating my life in Los Angeles from about 1978 to 1981. It was ecstatic.
Welcome to the New Year 1987; it would be a pivotal time in my life. A Certain Ratio was the first “big” gig of January, and while their sound had changed by this time, there was a lot of history that drew me in to see this iconic group. Obviously, my perception of who was playing important roles in the evolution of music might have been skewed simply by what I liked. I had a sense that certain groups were having an outsized influence on other artists, and so, up on the pedestal they went.
The funny thing about this show featuring The Young Gods is that I was here to see Collectionism, some local German artists a friend told me about. The Young Gods stole the show for me, and for the next couple of years, I knew Franz by first name as we spoke on occasion about art and philosophy. So much so that after Caroline and I met, she grabbed one of the posters for a show and, like I did for her with the Stone Roses poster, had him sign it for me.
Again, a major gap in the record where four months of concerts disappear without a trace, but this next gig is a definitive course-changing punch in the senses. Around this time, I was living in Neu Isenberg outside Rhein-Main Airbase with the pregnant mother of my daughter, and on one of the local channels, I caught a video of this band from Belgium called Front 242. Hello, world of Electronic Body Music, a.k.a. EBM.
I entered the Wartburg with an 8mm video camera and the idea I was going to tape the show. Not more than 5 minutes into the show, security stopped me, but they didn’t kick me out. So, I went over to the mixing desk and asked Jean-Luc de Meyer if I could film the guys. He consented, so right there at the mixing desk, I taped my first live show.
Oh My God. I’m going to see not just Chris & Cosey but Graeme Revell with SPK too. My mind was melting in anticipation as while I was going to be present for the dancy industrial sounds of these former Throbbing Gristle founders and SPK were noise pioneers who, prior to Whitehouse, created the most viciously aggressive sound I’d yet heard. After my good fortune of being allowed to film Front 242 just ten days before, I decided to give it a try, asking all those involved if I could tape the performance; everyone was on board.
A note from that night. After getting permission, I spent some time during soundcheck talking with Brian Lustmord, who was performing with Graeme that evening; Lustmord was a force unto himself with his self-titled project. That was that, until seven years later, at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in January 1994. Caroline and I, along with some friends, had just arrived in the United States for our wedding trip. As we were making our way through the parking lot, I’d swear I recognized the guy walking nearby, so I called out, “Brian!” He turned, we approached each other and he said, “Frankfurt, SPK!” I was shocked that his memory was that fine-tuned. I introduced him to everyone but especially to Uwe Schmidt, who was recording as Atom Heart (pre-Atom™), Lassigue Bendthaus, Lisa Carbon, and others. To this day, I don’t know if they ever collaborated.
And then, in a flash somewhere in the middle of summer of 1987, I was gone from Germany, but that’s part of a different story. When I returned from the U.S., now out of the Army, I hit the concert scene with vigor. There was a difference this time: I took aim at the shows I wanted to go to and counted on being able to talk my way onto the guest list, and I was effective. Now, 34 years later as I’m writing this, I suppose my nostalgia wishes I had those ticket stubs as they make nice visual reminders of things I’ve done in my past.
When I got back to Europe in November 1987, it was just a couple of weeks before I returned to the Wartburg in Wiesbaden, where I taped another group I held in the iconic position of being larger than life: Test Department. That show was on December 3, the last time I ever saw them.
Between that show and Foetus Interruptus on 24 September 1988 (which Caroline was also at; she had been at several of these concerts, though we didn’t know each other yet), I caught over a dozen more nights out. The majority were recorded, though not always the opening act. These included the following: The Shamen, Neon Judgement, Zev, The Anti Group, Controlled Bleeding, Bourbonese Qualk, Mark Stewart, Tackhead, Edward Kaspel, Skinny Puppy, Der Riss, Hypnobeat, Die Form, and Swans. Finally, seeing Foetus was a treat as I’d last seen Jim Thirwell at The Anti-Club on Melrose in Los Angeles on March 8, 1985, just two weeks before I left for Basic Training in the U.S. Army. He was one of the opening acts for Lydia Lunch, and this was the first time I was introduced to his work. Although it was Glen Meadmore who stuck in my head as he took the stage dressed in a chiffon wrap, high heels, and pantyhose before he started shoving chickenheads up his ass. I thought we might go to jail that night.
Before catching MDMA on the 28th of October, I have recordings of Well Well Well and Dinosaur Jr that are part of my permanent record; who else I might have seen is unknown. You should know that between all these concerts, I was also hopping from club to club, including a new place in Frankfurt that opened in 1988 called Omen, the creation of Sven Väth. One of the earliest shows I saw there (besides Sven spinning records) was Westbam during his crazily popular Monkey Say, Monkey Do phase. Then there were the films such as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, works by Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, and a bunch of others out of the NYC indie film scene.
I, too, asked, why am I including this? A friend of mine called one afternoon after his date dropped out of going to this show by Bon Jovi, and he asked if I’d be interested. My first impulse was, fuck no. On second thought, I’d never seen something like this, so why not? I brought the hash, and before the doors opened, Jim and I smoked nearly 2.5 grams of the stuff. I was so high when we got in that when Bon Jovi took that stage; I was confused as I couldn’t recognize any of their songs. By the fourth song, I realized that I really wasn’t familiar with this band at all. Slowly, it dawned on me that maybe I was not even looking at Jon Bon Jovi, so I asked Jim if there was an opening act. Apparently, he was as high as me because he said, “Oh yeah, Lita Ford was supposed to open.” From that, I could only figure that he, too, thought he was watching the headliner. Aside from that, I have no further recollection of the events of that evening.
Just before this show, I went to see and record Thin White Rope, and then two days later, I was fortunate enough to watch Steve Albini as Rapeman attempting to tame a wild guitar. The sound on my tape is horrible as I was in front of the bass player and his speaker stack which is about all the on-camera microphone picked up. But at least I have this poor recording of the short-lived project controversially named Rapeman. About “taming his guitar,” Steve’s guitar strap was wrapped around his waist a couple of times and just dangled from his midsection, and then, almost as an afterthought, he realizes he’s got a guitar except it’s now a weasel that needs to be subjugated to his will. He proceeds by strangling it before he starts hammering the beast.
I’d already seen Nitzer Ebb a couple of times by now, and whatever happened to the performance I recorded early one morning / late one night at Cooky’s in Frankfurt is beyond my ability to find that tape. I should point out that it was around the time I first watched Nitzer Ebb that I also saw Der Plan (Germans in the art music scene will know these legends).
Did you notice that I didn’t have any tickets to share what I might have seen between early November 1988 and mid-February 1989? Well, there were a lot and they included the following (in order): Savage Republic, Pussy Galore, Laibach, Goons, Mindblast Four, Schaum der Tage, Phase Pervers & Konrad Kraft, Threat, Politics of Experience, Sylvia Juncosa, Bazooka Joe, Cassandra Complex, Aircrash Bureau, Force Dimension, Philadelphia Five, Nuts, Collectionism, Trapdoor, Die Haut, Happy Mondays, Ugly But Proud, Slawheads, Prong, Legendary Pink Dots, Set Fatale, Situation B, Slawheads (again), and the Screaming Trees.
Since seeing Nitzer Ebb on February 19, 1989, and this day on March 9, 1989, I went and caught 999, Alien Sex Fiend, Die Form, Hubert Selby, Henry Rollins, and now Front 242. Following this EBM gig, I continued through a couple more weeks of February, going to watch and record Nova Express, Mute Drivers, Glamour Ghouls, Drowning Roses, Barbarella, Strangemen, and My Bloody Valentine. Next up was one of the most adventurous journeys into music I’d ever made.
On a whim, I called a phone number for Genesis P. Orridge that I had scrounged up from someone and got hold of his personal assistant. If my recollection serves me, her name was Jackie. I was requesting well in advance if I could tape the show in Frankfurt that fell on April 3rd, 1989, but actually played on the 4th because shows at Cooky’s never got started before 1:00 a.m., even when the show was on a Monday night such as the upcoming Psychic TV show. She conveyed the message to Gen, who then came on the phone and asked why don’t I just join the tour and film all the shows? I didn’t have to think about it, though there was going to be a certain amount of financial hardship figuring things out, so I said yes without hesitating. What were the hardships? I didn’t have money for a room, I barely had enough money for the tapes I’d need and I’d be short on food after I put enough to the side for gasoline. I figured I could clean up in the clubs and that maybe I could snag something to eat at the catering before the show after the band and crew picked over everything, but really, I didn’t care because I was going on tour with PTV on a mini-tour of Europe.
Cafe Europa in Bielefeld on the 27th of March was the first gig. The show was just around 3 hours long, and I was able to film before and after the show so quickly I found out that I likely didn’t have enough 8mm cassettes to record everything. In retrospect, this is probably where I lost some earlier shows I’d recorded of bands such as Der Plan, an early Nitzer Ebb show, The Young Gods, and some others that were forgotten about as weighing the importance of relative unknowns versus capturing this historical moment dictated I simply make it happen.
On that first night and even on subsequent evenings, to say that I was intimidated would have been a gross understatement, and yet my ego felt super inflated, too. The next night saw us driving a short 70 miles (112km) to Dortmund for a performance at Live Station. The day after that was spent driving across Germany, so on the night of the 30th, we’d be in Vienna, Austria, for a session at the Arena. One of my fondest memories is a strange one: the band wanted Indian food, and I’d never had it, so I was invited to the restaurant as a crew member, and I had my first chicken korma. I fell in love. The next strange memory (to me at the time) was a stop at a sex shop in Vienna to collect materials for Paula to add to the mix on her cassette mixing station. As the tour progressed, we stopped many times for new sounds, even if they were from Swedish people practicing sadism, it was from tapes picked up in the local area.
After a successful show in Vienna, we were off to Linz, Austria, for a show at the Posthof.
Now starts the problem of relating much from this tour. I was sleeping in my car, which I often didn’t get to until between 2:00 and 3:30 a.m.; we were on the road fairly early as in the next city, the van needed to be unpacked, and the band needed to meet the press and food before the show. While some crew slept on the bus, I was driving right behind the van, following closely so as not to get lost. Remember that this was before cell phones and GPS. When we arrived at the next venue, I was excited to see the backstage area, the stage itself before the band took it over, and watch the mechanics of how a show was assembled. Soundcheck was always like a mini personal show just for me, and then I’d drop in on the interviews when it was convenient, or else I was filming other people traveling with us as they entertained themselves while the “important people” did their thing.
BTW, I tried my best to snag tickets from the stack that was for sale at the venue that had the number 23 in them but wasn’t always successful; most times, I couldn’t even get a ticket unless I wanted to buy one. I would have bought food or tape instead.
April 2nd, 1989, we drove away from Gammelsdorf north of Munich and headed for Stuttgart. I called my wife and told her that I was going to try to drive home after tonight’s show as I was only 2.5 hours away down in Stuttgart. I didn’t make it as it was again late before I was able to pass out. First thing in the morning, though, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, started the engine, and was on my way to a hot shower for the first time in 6 days. I bought more tape and was able to casually head the 20-some miles over to Frankfurt to catch up with the tour.
That the concert didn’t start until after 1:00 in the morning already set the mood afoul as no one was made aware of the late start at this particular club, I knew, but this was my normal. Then, about 90 minutes into the show, an equipment failure had the band throw in the towel, calling it quits for the night.
I was milling around looking for shots as the band was trying to cool off from the perceived failures when I bumped into this woman I’d met back in February at the Slawheads gig and then again at a performance from the French sado/maso group Die Form, her name was Caroline. Wow, she’s a Psychic TV fan. Caroline was there with a friend of her’s named Angela. Then it hit me: I should introduce them to the band (ego at work). Well, it turned out that Angela and Fred Gianelli, who was playing guitar for Psychic TV and was a large part of the current sound of the group, took a liking to each other and exchanged contact info. At the end of the tour, ten days later, Fred returned to Frankfurt and spent the next couple of weeks with Angela, recovering from the incredible burnout that happens when touring. Now, a bit after 3:00 in the morning, I offered the women rides home, and while I took Angela to her apartment, Caroline had me deliver her to her workplace as she only had a few hours left before she’d have to leave for work anyway so she was going to catch a few hours of sleep on the floor. As for me, I went home to Wiesbaden for some proper sleep before I drove to Cologne for the next show.
The band played at the Rose Club on the night of April 4th, my birthday, and for the occasion, Gen asked if I had a special request. I chose Just Drifting from their first Psychic TV album titled Force The Hand Of Chance. In hindsight, it was a weird request. A love song to a fanatical follower, exhausted and simultaneously drunk on being in the presence of someone I had an unhealthy obsession with, but who, when they are young, can understand the relationship between a perceived icon and someone with low self-esteem? Anyway, that’s a topic for a therapist and their client, not content for a blog post about concerts I attended.
The next night’s gig was in nearby Hannover at the Pavillion. A blur. Maybe I should rewatch my footage and see what’s there to put together a compilation of PTV on the road in the spring of ’89?
That brings us to Berlin at the Loft. At this point, with a large audience and having been on tour for more than a week, the band was well-tuned and ripped into a long, amazing set. Gen was in great form, recycling bits and pieces of events out of the week on the road to include in the evening’s storytelling. Listening to Gen tease apart the various situations, spontaneously bringing fragments into the lyrical content, made me realize that when he was in the vibe, he was a genius, though I know Fred G. would vehemently offer a differing opinion. After the show that went on well past midnight, we had a day off, and how that was spent is forever erased from my memory.
Once the day off was over, we were on our way to Coesfeld back in West Germany.
Then on to Bremen, playing the Schlachthof before pulling into Hamburg. While the night’s show was at Fabrik, it was our time out on the streets of the city near the Reeperbahn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, also known as the red light district, that stands out in my memory. It was maybe 11:00 when nearly every one of those traveling with PTV dropped acid, including myself. Hamburg in this area is already weird; on LSD, it transformed into something altogether wild. We roamed the streets until the wee hours and then returned to the hotel to play flashlight puppetry with dildos and sound effects from people singing or imitating moments dragged out of events of the tour.
The next day, we woke late as we had another day off, a day that wasn’t going to be wasted either. The first stop after a breakfast buffet at the hotel was at Club de Sade. My memories are vivid; the ground floor featured rubber fetish gear for shit and piss play, while downstairs was a wide array of electrical shock devices to hook up to your pierced nipples or Prince Albert. Gen offered up some serious advice should I ever consider getting my urethral opening pierced between it and where the glans meets the shaft of my tool, “Don’t connect even a small current to your cock; it HURTS!” I’ve listened to that advice for all of these years, though without a PA of my own, there really wasn’t any metalware in my junk to apply electricity to.
Here’s another interesting side note: Before being out on tour with Psychic TV, I had never considered that there is a fetish where people played with poo, but damn, did I learn a lot about that subject over these two weeks. Then again, there was that time that a band opening for Skinny Puppy at the Batschkapp had a man greasing up a fist and forearm for a purpose that was totally beyond the intrusion reality was about to extend itself: that lubed fist and arm was to be inserted into another man’s ass. Sure, I’d seen the tame version portrayed in the movie Caligula, but that was for torture and killing, not for pleasure. Add this to the list of things my high school sex-ed class forgot to teach me about.
April 11th, the tour is winding down. Only three nights to go. The mood at Tivoli is heavy. Is it fatigue, the LSD, the intense energy of Berlin, or the financial shenanigans with Lars, the tour promoter, who is paying the band far less than was expected? Well, I’m just supposed to be the fly on the wall though there was that time in Hamburg when my hand happened to find Gen’s fly as I tried to whip out his cock while Fred was joking around about a knife-pierced banana looking like Gen’s willy so I needed that on camera for laughs. When Gen opened one sleepy eye, smiling, saying I’d turned from being the fly on the wall to being the hand in the fly, well, I got a good fit of laughter in. The audience at Tivoli did, in fact, suck; I just attributed it to the Netherlands’ lax marijuana laws and figured everyone was stoned.
Den Haag at Paard was another show that was at the edge of my consciousness. I was fried and dumbfounded about how bands could handle such a rigorous routine that often lasted for months, not just a couple of weeks. Oh, I almost forgot; it was somewhere between Hamburg and Den Haag that we picked up Andrew M. McKenzie of Hafler Trio, who was and wasn’t on stage with the band. Again, I should check my tapes after these intervening 32 years and see if there are any moments worth sharing with the wider world. Bands like PTV are nearly lost to the march of time as the internet eats everything and tosses it aside after 42 milliseconds, or the time it takes to ping a relay a thousand miles away on a bad day.
We are in Amsterdam for the band to play the last evening of the tour, we are at the Paradiso. The funny thing was when we walked into the club in the afternoon, two guys were sitting, or should I say half-slumped over a table with a pile of drugs in front of them. It was Peter Kember and Jason Pierce, a.k.a. Sonic Boom and J Spaceman of Spacemen 3. They had to finish what remained of the goods before returning to England, and they weren’t going to toss them, nor would they risk flying them into the U.K. I sat awhile talking with them, asking if I could film their show in Mainz in mid-May when they were doing the German leg of their tour; I was put on the guest list and invited to film whatever I wanted.
The show in Amsterdam was a strange, loose affair. The band seemed to drift in and out of putting any effort into songs that seemed mostly improvised to me. I hung out on a balcony, the worst camera location of all the shows I’d recorded. Dejected, I headed to my car, loathing myself. I don’t know how Gen heard of my predicament, but he came out and talked with me for what felt like nearly two hours, discussing the problems of trying to measure up to people who’d practiced their craft for decades. For him meeting his heroes such as William S. Burroughs laid him out as he ran into a literary genius he could never hope to emulate and yet who he was in awe of. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was learning more and more about imposter syndrome. With that, the tour was over, and I was completely and utterly exhausted.
After a couple of weeks of recovering, I ventured out again to one of my favorite tiny clubs, Negativ, in the Sachsenhausen area of Frankfurt. On May 5th, I caught Pink Turns Blue, and then two days later, on the 7th, it was Big Dipper. Over at the Batschkapp on the 11th, I enjoyed more than I thought I would, a night with the Wedding Present. At the last minute, as in maybe days before the events, I learned that the Sugarcubes had two “quiet” shows they were performing as warm-ups before a couple of festivals.
The first show I taped this year was in Coesfeld on May 12th. It’s funny that 32 years later, this concert and the one on the 14th are not listed in any list of concerts the Sugarcubes played at. After this warmup gig, they were playing the Bizarre Festival along with the Pixies, the Mission, and The Cure.
Some days after the show in Bielefeld on the 14th (that I also taped), they were playing at Rock Am See opening for the Mission, Die Toten Hosen, and the Cure.
Somewhere along the way, I saw the band and was introduced to Bjork’s son, who was on a brief couple of shows. While I might be wrong about the specifics, it might have been in Ghent, Belgium, on December 11th, but I don’t have a ticket or video, and believe it or not, there were many concerts I went to and was either denied the opportunity to film the band or I just went to watch them such as was the case with Living Colour and the Beatnigs.
Spacemen 3 lived up to being a rollercoaster of aural drugs. Their motto at the time was, “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.” Writing this, I had to bring up the show and watch Jason Pierce lay into Rollercoaster, and with the drone flowing, he starts singing:
Well, I met someone some time ago
His eyes were clear to see
He showed me things in my own mind
That I wish all the world could see
He stopped me from living so insane
I can be just what I wanna be
Things appear as they really are
I can see just what I want to see
[Chorus]
Well, come on and let it happen to you
Well, come on and let it happen to you
You gotta open up your mind and let everything come through
I’ve listened to the audio of this show many times, often stoned to incredible heights when the sonic landscape painted the most incredible trajectories of frenzied psychedelia. When they broke up, it was one of the first times I sincerely deplored the idea that a band would ever grace a stage again. Their studio recordings never held up to what was felt at a live show. My recording was made on 17 May 1989.
Next up was Frontline Assembly on May 22, 1989, at the Batschkapp.
Then, on the 4th of June, I stepped into the Batschkapp before any of the audience members, as all the bouncers and Ralf, who owned the Batschkapp, knew me by then, and went up to Michael Gira, who probably was Swans in his own mind and asked permission to capture the moment: permission granted.
Following the Swans, I was off to Cologne to meet with and film Bullet Lavolta and the Lemonheads on June 15, 1989. The highlight of that night was during soundcheck when Evan Dando performed a short bit of a Charles Manson song. Maybe someday, these shows will end up on YouTube, and others will see what I saw, but for now, they live in my memories and in secure storage.
So why am I stopping here? It’s because the next show started a sea change in my life and marked one of those occasions where nothing is the same afterward. I was at the Pixies on June 17, and after the show, I talked with Caroline Engelhardt, whom I kept running into starting back in February and continuing through this summer evening. We never stopped after that.
