Prologue: The Record High

Der Schwarzwald

I was born 1967 in a tiny farmer's village, deep in the heart of the Black Forest, a wide, rolling mountain range located in the far southwestern corner of Germany. A region rich in natural beauty but littered with punishingly conservative settlements, like the small village I grew up in. Not much had changed here since the fall of the Third Reich: firecrackers were still commonly referred to as “Jew farts”, my uncle wouldn’t shut up about how much he wanted to kill some of the long-haired terrorists he saw on TV, and his son proudly scratched swastikas into the red glitter of his bicycle frame.

Its remoteness, however, also made the Black Forest a wonderful place to grow up in. Sweeping hills offered panoramic vistas across dark woodlands and blooming pastures stained bright yellow with dandelions—an ancient landscape that resembled the sepia-tinted postcards displayed behind the counter of the small general store up the hill from our neighbor’s farm. 

By the time I reached my teens, the store had shut down. Everybody was driving to the city now, flocking into discount stores to buy cheap versions of what they had seen on TV. New streets with ugly new houses emerged at the edge of the village, and new, uppity people moved into them, none of whom seemed any nicer than the villagers. 

Carefully avoiding the presence of others, I immersed myself in the wonders of nature. The forests close to the nearest city had been turned into soulless timber plantations, but the woods surrounding my village naturally included the Black Forest’s famous fir trees, but also birches, pines, and oaks, and wide, cloud-shaped beech trees that scattered their tiny, bitter nuts across the forest floor—already rich with berries and hazelnuts. 

Once embraced by the forest, I found a sense of freedom in abandoning all orientation and relished the uncertainty of where I would end up. But no matter how hard I tried, no forest was deep enough to truly get lost in. Before the sun had set, the woods always spat me out again, and I found myself on the edge of yet another village—or on a path to follow back home. 

2.000 years earlier, invading Romans had built a road of sandstone boulders that still led down to the valley where, from my grandfather's trout pond—fed by a deep well of clear, cold water—sprang a narrow, crooked stream. A few miles farther down, the water ran past the charred foundations of an old wooden mill, surrounded by swampy moor. Remnants of ruined walls still stood about a meter tall, crowned by horizontal beams. A blaze had turned their dense wood into shiny, black carbon that nourished patches of spongy moss. 

Sometimes I found crystals of molten window glass glistening in the soot; dirty jewels with flecks of ash trapped inside. Beneath the mill, the stream widened into a small pool, where brown trout warmed themselves in the sun; wild mint, sorrel, and watercress grew on its bank, which made for a small but spicy snack. I outwaited the long, depressing winters reading books from the surprisingly well-stocked village library and wondered how many more years it would take until I could pack up and leave.

The soundtrack to my childhood was my father’s small stack of records by The Who, Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After, Neil Young, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. “Manic Depression” was his favorite song, and come Sunday morning, he would turn up the stereo to such an ear-shattering volume that I was warned not to enter the living room or my young eardrums would rupture.

On Christmas Eve 1979, a radio cassette recorder waited for me under the candlelit tree—a world-changing improvement from the tiny transistor radio with a broken antenna I had listened to before. Germany’s airwaves were dominated by sports and a nauseating mix of schlager and Top 40 pop, but now I could tune into weaker signals and discovered a small station operating out of Stuttgart that sometimes played songs by The Police, Blondie, or The Stranglers—and hosted creepy audio plays late at night. Fascinated by what else might be lurking out there, I spent many long winter nights glued to the dial, trawling the ether for whatever sounded out of the ordinary.  

One evening, seemingly out of nowhere, the primal drum beat of Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run” came banging through the static. "Record" and "Play" were already engaged; all I had to do was lift my finger from the pause button for the trustworthy Grundig to spring into action. Shockingly, right when the spastic guitar solo reached its screeching peak, a series of high-pitched beeps brought me back to reality, and the song was cut off by a newscaster who spoke with a Swiss dialect. I instinctively knew that this piece of music carried great significance, but I had missed the announcement, and there was no clue at all as to what I had just managed to capture on tape.

As if hypnotized, I couldn't stop playing this fragment of an unknown song, which resonated with me in a completely different way than anything I had ever heard before. It was like discovering a cryptic message of truth that came with a disdainful sneer toward the fake emotion and commercial dross that oozed out of other people’s radios.

The following day, I tried to tune in an hour earlier but failed to locate the station, but several attempts later, I finally got lucky and discovered that I had been listening to François Mürner's radio show, Sounds!, on DRS3 Switzerland. As the crow flies, the Zurich-based broadcaster was located less than 100 kilometers away from my village, but the terrain was mountainous, and in order to tune in successfully, the wind had to blow from the south and the sky needed to be clear.

It was worth it: Mürner’s selections were just incredible, featuring records by The Cramps, The Laughing Clowns, James Chance and the Contortions, The Clash, Gang of Four, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Suicide, Killing Joke, and Tuxedomoon. With each completed tape, my life became richer, and it gradually dawned on me that there had to be an enormous amount of truly exciting music out there.

On Saturday mornings, my parents would often drive our silver Fiat to Villingen, a medieval town that back then seemed like a big city to me, with a shopping mall large enough to get lost in. The record shelves were a complete waste of time, but there was a newspaper kiosk packed with all sorts of enticing magazines full of half-naked girls, leather-clad rebels, disco dancers, bare-chested rock stars, and spiky-haired punks. 

Not long after I discovered Mürner's Sounds, a music magazine with the same name popped up on the newsstand, surrounded by the usual rags that still had Smokie, The Sweet, Led Zeppelin, or The Who on the front page. Sounds magazine turned out to have nothing to do with the radio show, but it covered some of the same bands. 

One autumn, my parents took me on a trip to Freiburg, where I found the record section of a large electronics retailer that sold records by Suicide, Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed—all names that I had written down from Sounds articles as essential. It was here that the mystery of my previous summer’s secret hit finally resolved itself. Even though I was still stuck in the country’s bleakest cultural desert, I suddenly felt connected to something. 

Unable to physically extract myself, I found other ways to achieve the largest possible distance from my surroundings and turned into a teenage punk. A good amount of time was spent running away from heavy-boned village people, but their insults and threats of violence were exactly what I had wanted. It meant I had successfully established myself as an outsider and would never be one of them. 

Their scorn felt liberating, and their hatred mirrored my own sentiments toward them. A deep line had been drawn into the ground and I stood firmly and alone on the other side. I didn’t yet know what kind of a life I would find for myself but I already knew that it would be far away and have a well-selected soundtrack. In the summer of 1983, to my immense dismay, Sounds magazine was discontinued. Its final iconic issue had a photo of Jeffrey Lee Pierce on the cover—clearly the coolest man who ever lived—which I tore off and pinned to the wall above my messy desk. 

With a thin, saved-up billfold in my jeans, a map of the city, and the record store section torn from the Yellow Pages in hand, I soon came across Mono Records, where I bought The Birth, The Death, The Ghost by The Gun Club, Penis Envy by Crass, and Kollaps, the debut album by Einstürzende Neubauten. Blixa Bargeld’s deranged vocals struck a chord with my inner feeling of alienation, and the album rarely left my turntable for more than half a day. 

Back in the Black Forest, I noticed a poster for a music festival to be held in Villingen and—unbelievably—one of the acts announced was die Tödliche Doris. Sounds had once mentioned the band in the same sentence as Einstürzende Neubauten, describing them as part of Berlin’s Geniale Dilettanten movement. From a radio shop in Sankt Georgen, where I went to school, I excitedly ordered their self-titled debut album, which unfortunately turned out to be quite hard to listen to. Not that this dimmed my excitement for the festival, which most of all seemed like a God-sent opportunity to meet other outsiders, if any existed at all around here.

A few days before the show, I re-dyed my hair from dark purple to blinding white, black, and magenta, and decided to hitchhike to Stuttgart to see if I could find any local punks—and to visit Die Lerche, which was reckoned to be one of the wider region’s best record stores. On the way out the door, my mother gave me a hate-filled look and launched one of her tennis rackets at me. Stunned by the sudden assault, I managed an instinctive duck. I felt the strings scrape through my spiky hair and heard a loud bang as the racket embedded itself in the drywall behind me, vibrating like a poisoned arrow. 

The drivers that sped past me on the highway seemed to share my mother’s lack of enthusiasm for my new look, but eventually, a long-haired student in a rusty 2CV showed mercy. I arrived at my destination about half an hour before closing time and was disappointed not to see a single punk in the entire, impressively large store. Frantically flipping through the shelves, I scored the second Suicide album, Alan Vega’s Saturn Strip, Der Westen ist Einsam by Abwärts, and two more Velvet Underground records; enough to blow all my cash, apart from a few measly coins. 

The plan had been to take the train back home and avoid the risks of hitching a nighttime ride, but a train ticket was now out of reach. I used my last couple of Deutsche Marks to buy an XL can of ravioli, and headed into the park by the railroad tracks. Hungry and freezing, I collected some old newspapers and fallen branches and built a fire that spread across the surrounding dry foliage, quickly burning out of control. 

When a fire truck arrived, its sirens screaming dramatically, I hid behind the bushes and contemplated my first ever night in jail. Luckily, the blaze was put out even faster than it had started, and the firemen were friendly enough to leave the ravioli behind—even though the water cannon had blasted sand into the lid. Feeling cold and stupid but free, I spent the night on a park bench, shivering inside my parka, grit between my teeth, and my valuable bag of records carefully hidden underneath me. 

Just after dawn, I was standing at the edge of the motorway again, a consistent drizzle causing lines of magenta hair dye to run down my face. Eventually, a friendly trucker gave me a lift and even bought me a coffee at the Neckarsburg rest stop. Back home, I collected some fresh clothes and found temporary shelter with my girlfriend, hoping to get her excited about die Tödliche Doris—but when the big day came, she preferred to stay home and watch TV. My only musically appreciative friend, Ole Ostblock—a.k.a. Czechoslovakia’s lost Ramone—shared her lack of enthusiasm and once more I was on my own. 

Two cans of hairspray later, I slipped into my mail-ordered Crass T-shirt, wrapped myself in several meters of red-and-white plastic tape I had stolen from a construction site near Stuttgart, and caught the bus to Villingen. The other passengers stared at me with dead, resentful eyes and I stared right back, a can of CS mace clutched in my fist, ready to go. I was never stingy with the stuff—it was too much fun to watch these assholes drop like flies and curl up into the fetal position. Over the next few years I would enthusiastically empty several cans before eventually upgrading to a six-shot 9mm gas revolver, with a couple of flares mixed in for visual effect.

On this day, though, I arrived in Villingen without incident and walked toward the circus tent on the edge of town, finding it a slight shame that nobody had decided to fuck around and find out. It was unseasonably cold, and when I finally got there all I could see were normal, middle-aged citizens in anoraks. A few boring hours later, die Tödliche Doris finally hit the stage for an uninspired, if slightly noisy, set—nobody even attempted to pogo. Cold, insecure and disappointed, I walked across the half-empty parking lot when, just like that, the most important part of my mission completed itself.

Thomas was easy to spot from afar: an imposingly tall guy with wide shoulders, wild, unkempt hair and—despite the cold—wearing only a skin-tight Cramps T-shirt. Next to him stood Axel Frischmilch, publisher of the now-legendary Plaste fanzine, in a long, black coat with two homemade buttons on the collar: one of them displayed the Einstürzende Neubauten logo, while the other read “The Gun Cub - Elvis was Gay.” 

Off to the side stood Martin and Wolfgang—aka The Florida Boys—both of them rail-thin, sporting tight blue jeans and sunglasses. Martin had The Barracudas and Wolfgang The Gun Club stenciled onto the backs of their black leather jackets. I approached slowly, careful to pick the right moment to make eye contact, and my voice almost broke when I said, “Hi!”

After a hastily stitched-together response to Thomas’s question about where in the hell I had just come from, I was invited to come along to see Alan Vega play in Zurich the following weekend. A wave of excitement washed over me, but Zurich was way too expensive after blowing all my money on records. I explained how much I'd love to and that hadI had just bought his new album, but now I was too broke to generate enough cash for a trip into Switzerland with just a few days of time. No problem, he's also going to play Stuttgart in a few weeks, said Thomas and walked me to his car, a white VW Beetle with the Crass logo displayed on the driver’s door. 

He bent into the vehicle and handed me a photocopied picture-postcard of himself standing next to his Volkswagen with a gun in his hand. “That’s my dad right there, look at him—I told him to play dead–HAHAHAHAHA!” he explained, laughing hysterically and pointed to an old, frail man lying on the ground next to him. Then he grabbed a felt marker from the glove compartment, scribbled “With Tom into the 80s!” and his phone number on the back of the card, handed it to me and offered to drive me back home. It turned out Thomas lived just two villages over from mine, a tiny place called Niedereschach. 

Everything changed. My new friends were four or five years older than me and had the most exceptional musical knowledge and taste and didn’t shy away from driving for half a day if an interesting band was scheduled to play in Zurich, Munich or Frankfurt. Often we saw a band three or four times in a row, and whatever city we arrived in, they always knew where to find the best book and record stores. 

Life was no longer passing me by. Over the next few years, I got to see The Gun Club, Einstürzende Neubauten, X, Suicide, The Cramps, Ted Milton’s Blurt, The Wipers, Nico, Swans, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on their very first tour, Bad Brains—and many, many more.

      

Of all my new friends, Thomas was the most driven. He had an incredible collection of records, knowledge, passion—and more than anything else, he loved being in his car with people, playing his newest mixtapes. Riding along in his Volkswagen was like a warm-up party to whatever concert we were heading toward. 

Thomas would crank the stereo up to full volume and loudly sing along to his favorite songs by X, The Blasters, The Flesh Eaters, Minutemen and, of course, Black Flag. He once got so worked up that he had to pull the car onto the shoulder of the highway—just to take his hands off the wheel, drum his fists against the padded roof, and yell: “We can fuck forever, but you will never get my soul…” 

Thomas took a short break, breathing like a racehorse, sweat running down his face, and loudly declared, “THIS IS THE BEST! The absolute best—this is the best fucking record of all times!” 

He ran his manic eyes over each of us to make sure we all agreed before frantically fast-forwarding the tape to select the next highlight. 

“You have to hear this… OH MY GOD! You guys have no idea, you really have to hear this! RIGHT NOW! LISTEN! Listen, God damn it, please listen closely! All of you!” he screamed, raining spittle all over his audience. “You look just like an Elvis from hell, my heart is broken, so I’m going to hell!” 

Thomas sang along and turned to his co-pilot, Wolfgang. 

“Do you understand who he's singing about, right?” Wolfgang didn’t dare make a wrong guess. “IVIEEE!!!” Thomas yelled at him with frightening intensity. “God damn it! Listen, just listen, can’t you hear? Don’t you understand? He’s in love with Poison Ivy!” Thomas loosened the handbrake and accelerated suddenly.

Chunks of dirt and grass hit the wheel arch and sprayed through the red glow of the rear lights as the car swerved wildly back onto the road, causing drivers to honk their horns in anger. 

“Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Jesus Christ, he’s the best, the best ever. He looks like the love child of a young Marlon Brando and Debbie Harry, Wolfgang, don’t you think? There’s never been anybody like him, Wolfgang, no? Wolfgang! Tell me that I’m right, Woooolfgang!” 

“Thomas, stop hitting me, this really hurts! I’m going to have blue marks all over my thigh and arm again!” 

“Ok, ok…” Thomas pretended to get a grip and slowed his breathing before yelling loudly, “OH MY GOD! WOLFGANG! THE CRAMPS! They are finally coming on tour! Before the year is over! THE CRAMPS! Can you believe it?"  

“I didn't know… really? This year? For real? You’re not making this up again?” 

“This time I know it, Wolfgang, please believe me. I can smell it on my urine. They're coming. This will be. The. Best. The best concert EVER! I can finally kill myself when this is over. Let me play this song again, I need to hear this one more time, right now, right now! I have to hear the whole thing once again! NOW!”

We listened to the song playing in pitched-up reverse, and when a strange chirping sound indicated the guitar intro, Thomas disengaged fast-rewind, cautioned us to truly pay attention this time, and with a stern—“Now! Listen! Just LISTEN!”—he pressed his strangely curved, bony thumb against the play button with full force and turned the volume up to max. 

With every line of the song, his voice grew louder until Thomas cranked down the window, stretched his arm out, and took aim at passing cars with his index finger: “Gonna buy me a gun just as long as my arm…” 

The driver of a new Mercedes responded with inaudible curses, stabbing his finger against his temple. “Cocksucker! Cocksucker! What do you want? Suck my cock? What do you want? Here, have a go—I’m unpacking!” Thomas proceeded to furiously unzip his pants. 

“Thomas Huber, please, calm down”, Annette cautioned. The zipper went back up. 

For a while, Thomas quietly basked in the afterglow of the female attention, then launched into a monologue about the Gun Club’s new album, which already had ads in the latest issue of Maximum Rock’n’Roll: “This is going to be the best record of all time. I need to goddam have it, I want to have it right now! NOW!” 

Thomas lit another cigarette and continued. 

“I need it, I need it, Wolfgang, oh please, my God, I really need it right now! I would kill somebody for this record if I have to!” 

Nobody said anything. Thomas took a short break. 

“What should I do? Oh my God, please tell me what I should do? Who do I have to kill?” Wolfgang slowly shook his head while the rest of us stared fearfully through the windshield, hoping that Thomas would take the foot off the gas in order to increase our distance to the truck in front of us—and that the trucker wouldn't suddenly hit the brakes.

Thomas didn’t like the shift of attention, and kept quiet for half a minute, before scaring the shit out of us with a loud and sudden scream: 

“AAAAAHHHHH!!!—I MEAN IT—I REALLY MEAN IT—I WOULD KILL SOMEBODY FOR THIS RECORD!”

“Thomas Huber, I really have to tell you that you must consider other people's safety. You can’t just lose your mind like this in the middle of traffic, not at night—and not with all of us in the car with you. Seriously, Thomas. I’m not joking now.” 

Thomas took a few deep breaths and then calmly responded. “Okay, Annette, you are right. Ok Annette? There I said it, you’re right. I’m sorry, Annette, I’m sorry, okay? Okay, Annette? I'm really sorry, okay? I promise, from now on I will keep my pants on while driving... Okay, Annette?”

Annette shook her head and let out a mistrustful grunt. “Never mind… it’s all good, but please control yourself now.” Thomas kept quiet for a moment and then, completely out of the blue, began to softly laugh under his breath. 

Wolfgang asked what was up. 

“Next week we’re going to Zurich to see the Lords of the New Church”, Thomas responded, “Stiv Bators, this fucking junkie. Aaaaahhhh… I want to shoot up heroin in front of the stage. That would be so fucking cool. Wolfgang? No? That would be the coolest thing of all times, no?” 

I was sitting in the back, beaming with joy, when my friend Klaus elbowed me in the ribs, crying salty tears down his face, deep red with suppressed laughter. None of us did any hard drugs back then—or so I thought.

Me at 17, photo by Thomas @tom_ahawk666

For a while we even had a band together but none of our two self published cassettes seem to have survived.

Two weeks after our first encounter at the Tödliche Doris concert, I met Thomas at what he had described as Villingen-Schwenningen’s only alternative bar. The dank and dark place was populated by a small handful of older, sad looking older hippies. Thomas was friends with Bernhard the bartender, who even played the Gun Club tape Thomas had forced onto him right when we got there, but soon the grey faced, greasy haired hippies complained and some boring rock crap was put on. For the most part, I just sat there, nursed my Bären Bier and thought about something that had happened a few days earlier. I was sitting at the kitchen counter, eating a sandwich, when my mother came in. She mustered my exceedingly colorful appearance with an expression of disgust and contempt, commenting: “Just peep on going keeping on like this and one beautiful day you’ll just go missing.”

She probably worried abut me hitching rides every day on the edge of the highway below our new home in the industrial complex of a village just outside of Villingen, but this didn’t jive with the hateful tone. “What do you mean with that?” I asked. “Oh, when the time comes, you’ll understand, but by then it will be too late.” Due to her concern and the almost non-existing traffic at night time, I had asked to borrow her old bicycle for tonight, which she didn’t use herself anymore ever since she had bought one of those mountain bikes that had come into fashion back then. She had wanted to know, where I would take it and to lock it properly, but surprisingly, she had nothing against me using it to visit a shady bar where according to her, only drug users and lowlifes would ever hang out at.

Bernhard closed down at 1:00 am, the city wide curfew he had to either respect or be closed down. Thomas offered to take me home, but the damn bike was too bulky to fit in the beetle’s trunk. He took off and I made my way along the darkened, completely deserted railroad station. Not a single car was in sight, until I took the bridge crossing the tracks, when I noticed a car behind me, which then seemed to stop. Strange, I thought, you can’t park on the bridge and even a U-Turn would be impossible due to the center divider. I reached the outskirts of the city and when I passed under the highway to take the on-ramp on the other side, the car was back again, keeping a stable distance. When I reached the acceleration lane, the driver pulled up besides me, forcing me closer and closer to the guardrail, until I was fully boxed in and had to come to a stop. The guy riding shotgun had the window down, throwing insults and then spitting at me. I already had the mace in my hand and blasted him straight in the face, from less than 10 inches away. The driver reacted incredibly fast, simultaneously pulled down his window and sped away.

The next exit was several hundred meters away but from there I would be much closer to houses and possible help, so I bravely continued along the highway. Soon, I noticed the car again, which had pulled over just before the exit sign. With all the speed I could muster, I crossed the highway and went down the on ramp on the other side, Pedaling with full force against non-existing traffic and swerved onto the road back into town. The car came closer and when I could already see my shadow in its headlights, I curved into a residential road, wondering, how this was even possible at this speed, without wiping out. Without any other choice, I turned down a steep driveway and screeched to a stop in front of a garage. I couldn’t find any way out, the garage was connected to the main house on my right and to the left there was a fence. Too high to climb up fast enough, I realized, when I turned around and noticed the driver standing in the middle of the driveway, the car was parked behind him, but I couldn’t see the passenger. I began banging against the side door of the house, yelling for help at the top of my lungs. “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything to you, just tell me what you hit my brother with, the guy is completely fucked up and won’t even talk anymore…”

A second floor window opened, somebody stuck out his head and in a sleepy, but angry voice told me to go and piss off. He had a legal obligation to call the police, I explained, in not doing so, he would commit the offense of failure to provide assistance to a person in clear and present danger. The citizen pulled his head back into the building and the driver just kept standing there, about 30 meters uphill, smoking a cigarette. When the citizen reported the cops would be here in a few minutes, the guy lazily walked back to his car and drove away. Slowly enough for me to run up the street and write down his license plate. Back in those days, I always had pen and paper at the ready I order to note phone numbers of possible new friends.

Two young policemen arrived and I was shocked at how nice they were. They asked if I was ok or needed medical assistance and then even packed my mother’s bike into their trunk, before driving me home. I immediately gave them the license plate number, they called it in and while we were waiting explained that it would be for the better, to not file a report. After all, I was only 15 and not legally allowed to carry mace with me. Also, there had been two guys in the car, while I had no witness at all and no visible harm to show. The two could just claim to have asked for directions, before being assaulted with a dangerous weapon. However, they shared the name of the car owner with me, which I hastily scribbled onto my piece of paper.

The following weekend we went to see Alan Vega and of course it was incredible. “Great show!”, Thomas commented, “But Zurich was even better, remember Axel, how he borrowed a piece of gum from a girl and chewed on it for a song or two, before sticking it back into her mouth!” Friday came and there was no show to go to, so Thomas and I met at the boring place behind the station again. This time I took the bus and I had a crazy story to tell the bartender. “Damn, you got really lucky son.” Bernhard looked at me in disbelief. Since his workplace had such a bad reputation, maybe he knew the name of the guy, I thought by myself and retrieved the piece of paper from my pocket. “Kratzel! Here, Kratzel is the name of the driver! Do you know someone by that name?” Bernhard’s expression became very serious. “This is no joke. The Kratzel brothers are real thugs. Not just hoodlums but real, hardened criminals. One of them just got back from serving in the French Foreign Legion.”

Somehow this made me think of 3 summers earlier and our last family vacation at the Côte Sauvage. On the way back, we had visited my grandfather’s old forced laborer. A very strange visit with little talk, but strong in suppressed emotions. Only a few weeks later, my mother, with a bright smile on her face, had told me how the man had suddenly died. This surprised me, not only because he had seemed so strong and healthy when we visited, but it had also been clear, tat he didn’t know we were coming and him and my parents never exchanged phone numbers. I asked my mother how she knew and could still hear her say: “Oh, you just have to know the right people.”

Not too much later, one Kratzel brother committed suicide. I worried a little, CS mace had the reputation of messing you up psychologically, but what else could I have done? Then, just a couple of few years later, the other Kratzel brother made huge headlines all across the local newspapers, when he spectacularly blew himself up inside his apartment, supposedly while working on a bomb.

By this time I lived in a cheap basement apartment in the town of Schwenningen, where I found work at a bar and later at a machine shop—the beginning of a decade-long string of transient jobs. Too broke to move to a bigger city, I turned my back on one meaningless workplace after another, rarely staying for more than a year—but I was never unemployed, not even for a day. Leaving became a ritual, a celebration of independence and the illusion of change. 

My job experience widened from being a machinist to working construction. I tried my hand at welding, cooking, and had a stab at screen-printing, often with another part-time job on the side. Not just for the money, but also to get a foot in the door early for my next gig. Working five long 8- to 12-hour days just to cover basic living expenses and two days of weekend fun, seemed like a shitty deal—but there was no alternative. I continued to sell my workdays to the highest bidder and avoided giving the concept any deeper thought.

As the 1990s moved along and grunge turned mainstream, I slowly lost interest in current music. Before long, I stopped looking for new releases altogether and instead invested my expendable income into a blossoming passion for VHS tapes of obscure exploitation movies. 

Back in the early 1980s, small publishing companies had bought up the rights to entire catalogs of outdated and cheap horror and erotic movies to stock the shelves of the myriad video stores that had opened up all over the country. The clamshell covers usually featured alluringly sexy or outrageously violent images—lifted from the original movie posters and lobby cards—promising shock, intrigue, and arousal. 

Independent video stores with limited budgets just loved these cheap little titles, making previously unobtainable cult movies or forgotten oddities available in the most unassuming establishments—often just around the corner or a few towns over. Meanwhile, cable TV had hit the broader market, and privately run stations began to air a poorly curated selection of similarly trashy films during the early morning hours—just to keep the screen flickering—though they heavily censored the more excessive violence and nudity. The novelty of these midnight movies soon wore thin, and public interest and rentals dropped toward zero. 

Banned to the adult section by exceedingly stringent laws, the colorful clamshells collected dust, and it became easy to convince store owners to part with some of these outdated goods—usually for very little money. With fewer interesting shows to attend, my friend Christoph and I began embarking on weekend road trips through the provinces to scout money-starved video stores for anything obscure and unusual. We secured carloads of increasingly hard-to-find zombie and cannibal flicks, ultra-violent Italian police films, home invasion dramas, and sexploitation movies—in short, anything that breathed an air of violence, sex, and sleaze, or felt somehow disturbing and amoral. 

Our biggest favorites included misanthropic cult classics such as Cannibal Holocaust, Last House on the Left, Der Berserker, and Exzesse im Folterkeller (aka Beauty Hunting), but we also archived loads of strange and obscure arthouse movies like Jodorowsky’s El Topo, Arrabal’s Viva La Muerte, The Night Porter by Liliana Cavani, and anything featuring badasses like Klaus Kinski, Udo Kier, or Tomas Milian. 

As our collections grew, we began renting tables at movie fairs, quickly establishing a nationwide reputation as a prime source for highly collectible, banned, or indexed movies. Sometimes the fairs would be raided by the police—who were after exactly the kind of material we were selling. But we were well connected and had eyes watching out for us. From the moment the first cop car pulled up, it would take only seconds for us to stack our crates onto a hand truck and race out the back door.

Over the years, I gradually lost interest in violence and gore and instead developed a deep, personal penchant for the more sophisticated European sexploitation cinema of the early 1970s, with its go-go club and striptease scenes, usually accompanied by a funky, organ-heavy dance soundtrack. It didn't take long before I became specifically obsessed with the strange work of Spanish director Jess Franco, who also seemed to have the coolest soundtracks of the entire genre. If I had been granted just one wish at that time, I would have chosen to live inside a Jess Franco movie.

Berlin

Early in 1994, Christoph and I got ready to attend our first movie fair in Berlin, home of the infamous Videodrom store. Not only did the place have a worldwide reputation for stocking whatever couldn't be found anywhere else, but its owner, Graf Haufen was also one of the founders behind Splatting Image—easily the best movie magazine on the planet. 

In order to make a strong first impression as the southern kingpins of sleaze, I compiled two 90-minute music cassettes with the grooviest tunes my VHS collection had to offer. To add some flair, we hired Sonja—a friend of a friend’s Berlin-based girlfriend—as a tabletop go-go dancer. With the trunk and back seat packed with our VHS crates, a boombox, and an ice chest filled with beer and booze, we hit the Autobahn and rolled into the city right after sunrise. 

We had just finished prepping our table when Sonja showed up, wearing a pair of sequinned cherry-red hot pants with a matching bikini, platform boots, and devil horns poking through her long blonde hair. A pitchfork in hand, she explained her costume was a cherry-flavored tribute to Poison Ivy from the cover of A Date With Elvis. I opened the cooler for the first round. Sonja scanned our booth, complimented the movie selection, and knocked back her first vodka. 

The doors opened at 10 a.m. Sonja took another shot, climbed up onto the table, and with a challenging smile, asked why there wasn’t any music yet. To our surprise, the fair was a family-friendly affair, mostly focused on fan merchandise for film classics and newer, more commercial releases. Nobody connected to the Videodrom or Splatting Image showed up, and to make matters worse, uniformed security guards kept harassing us and complaining about our loud music and lewd behaviour.

Nevertheless, I continued making weekend visits to Berlin. Sonja and I became a couple and before long, I left Schwenningen behind to move into her all-female commune in Schöneberg. It wasn’t a vote won easily, but first I wowed her roommates with home-cooked meals—and when I offered everybody free access to my record collection, the deal was sealed. Within a week, I had landed a job at a small silkscreening shop just two doors down from Kreuzberg’s legendary SO36, and found myself actually looking forward to going to work every morning—or whenever I got there. 

Sonja and her friends introduced me to Berlin’s complex landscape of hidden, illegal clubs, bars and concert venues that were sprouting up in abandoned warehouses, crumbling hair salons, and condemned apartment buildings across the grey eastern part of the city. Most of the venues didn’t even advertise, in order to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities, but could still attract crowds in the hundreds through word of mouth alone. 

Sonja and I became devoted followers of Le Hammond Inferno, a DJ duo that specialized in an eclectic blend of funky organ combos, French ‘60s pop, and all sorts of groovy soundtracks—which immediately made me think of some of my favorite movies, filled with tunes far raunchier and funkier than anything on a Peter Thomas sci-fi score.

I began fantasizing about becoming a DJ myself. If I could somehow manage to recreate Jess Franco’s club scenes, success would be mine—there was no doubt about it. From the director’s massive output, I had most helplessly fallen in love with Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy and The Devil Came from Akasava. All three films were shot in 1971, and featured Portuguese actress Soledad Miranda—a stunning, raven-haired beauty with dark, haunting eyes who tragically died in a horrific car crash right after completing the trilogy. 

The movies’ strangely surreal atmosphere seemed the perfect setting for Soledad’s otherworldly beauty, and her dazed, druggy performance captivated me like a lost world. Imagining the footage projected all over a venue’s walls and ceilings, I compiled her many dance, strip, and shower scenes, watching the tapes for days on end. Set against exquisite, mid-century modern set designs, the footage exuded a musky air of hedonism and unabashed decadence, accompanied by hypnotising, fuzzed-out grooves featuring relentless organ grinding and psychedelic sound effects. 

I set out on a time-consuming and difficult quest to track down similar sounds, digging through the record crates of Berlin’s enormous flea markets and its many second-hand shops. Describing the sleazy, organ-driven sound to perplexed record store clerks and the cranky old slobs manning the flea market stalls was no easy task. While some responded with dismissive remarks or uneasy laughter, others proved more helpful. To try and spot some of Le Hammond Inferno's heavier tunes, I began hanging out close to the DJ booth and soon managed to track down my first records by André Brasseur, The Mohawks, and The Nilsmen. 

One night, the duo put on a ridiculously funky organ grinder featuring an excessive amount of loud sexual breathing. I sheepishly asked to see the sleeve, and it turned out to be a 45 titled Erotica by an artist credited as Rita Sexologie. The two DJs introduced themselves as Holger and Marcus, and while they selflessly pointed out some of Alan Hawkshaw’s work on KPM, Peter Jacques on the Quadriga label, Gus Brendel on Europhon, and Ambros Seelos on SABA Records, they both drew blanks when I asked if they were familiar with Jess Franco’s movie soundtracks.

It was already late one Saturday night when, completely out of the blue, my friend Stefan—an occasional bar DJ—called the commune’s telephone. He was bedridden with the flu and unable to make it to his gig at a hot new venue called Die Hohe Tatra. Stefan asked if I could fill in for him, and I was just as thrilled as I was terrified. With less than an hour to get ready, I flipped through my records and grabbed whatever I thought would make people dance: Ambros Seelos, The Mohawks, ESG, James Chance and the Blacks, Serge Gainsbourg, The Stooges, Nino Ferrer, The Stranglers—everything was allowed. 

I stuffed the records into a pair of oversized shopping bags, showered quickly, and ran downstairs to hail a taxi. Die Hohe Tatra was located in Mitte, near Rosenthaler Platz, where I stopped at a Turkish grill and quickly inhaled a couple of sucuk sandwiches. After all, I was booked to play until sunrise and—in order to calm my nerves—an excessive amount of drinking would be in order. My heart pounded unusually fast, my throat felt constricted, my face tingled, and I was sweating profusely. I felt like a fraud that was about to be exposed—what in the hell had I gotten myself into?

A few very large, stiff vodka and limes later, I felt much more at ease. For the first time in my life, I experienced the incomparable rush of being behind the turntables, overlooking a packed dancefloor. What could be easier? What could be more fun? I played Max Greger’s “Big Train”,Hugo Strasser’s version of “Black Night”,Jacques Dutronc’s “Les Cactus”,and “Bonny & Clyde”, by Gainsbourg and Bardot. The crowd went nuts and when I ran out of my small stash of funky Hammond and French pop tunes, I was too drunk to care. 

“He Moves in Mysterious Ways” by Lubricated Goat was followed by Bloodloss’s deadly cover version of “Nutbush City Limits”. The outro of The Cramps’ “Human Fly” faded into Alan Vega’s “Saturn Drive”, after which I dropped the Bush Tetras’s “Can't Be Funky”, ESG's “Dance” Killdozer’s “Nasty”, then “Peaches” by The Stranglers—followed by Gang of Four's “Damaged Goods.” The party kept going no matter what I threw at the crowd, and before I knew it, I had fully lost myself in the intense rush of sharing my favorite songs in the most gratifying way imaginable. When the night ended, I even got paid—and the owners asked me to come back the following week.

Life couldn’t possibly have been better, but a weekly club residency came with the responsibility to steadily improve my set. Early mornings were always best for finding records at Berlin’s flea-markets, but they were already opening around the time I stumbled out of the club. When the taxi pulled up in front of our house, I’d tell the driver to wait, drop off my records in the hallway, then jump right back in to head to the markets.

There, I’d dig through endless rows of records, stuffing myself silly with grilled sausages, washed down with ice cold beer. By day’s end, I returned home like a Viking from a victorious raid, drunk on Schultheiss, clutching bags bursting with records, my hands coated in thick, disgusting layers of sausage fat and dust.

One of my sources at Schöneberg’s fleamarket perfectly understood what I was looking for and welcomed me every week with fresh stashes of hot records. His best finds included the suggestive bounce of Georges de Giafferi's “Sado Maso”, the steaming, psychedelic groove of Sullivan’s “Hashish Faction”, and Antoine Et Les Problèmes—particularly their garage punk anthem “Dodecaphonie”, and the equally banging psych killer “Un éléphant me regarde.”

Some of these records had once been well-known hits in neighboring France, but they were as new to me as to Die Hohe Tatra’s regulars. Jacques Dutronc’s garage banger “Le responsable” regularly caused near riots, Nino Ferrer’s “Mirza” and “Les cornichons” prompted girls to take their tops off, and the beat-heavy sides of Serge Gainsbourg like “Requiem pour un con” or “Initials BB” made the floorboards sway so much that the needle skipped out of its groove. 

The nights at Die Hohe Tatra stretched more and more into the next day, and soon I began thinking about employing go-go girls. One foggy night at Club Boudoir, I met a mysterious striptease dancer named Jasmin, who had just achieved considerable fame as part of Link Protrudi And The Jaymen’s European tour. I had been to one of their shows a few months earlier and was mesmerized by her performance. It took me some courage and a few quick shots, but I somehow managed to talk Jasmin into performing at my next DJ gig. Sonja and her roommates agreed to strut their stuff on stage, and we spent hours studying my Jess Franco tapes as if they were instructional videos. 

The girls stitched together an array of costumes, and I selected a lobby card from Ingrid Steeger’s cult classic Higher and Higher for the flyer. Another big personal favorite, the movie also helped us compile additional hours of projection tapes, alongside hard-to-find visual treasures like Una Sull'Altra by Lucio Fulci, Rolf Thiele’s forgotten masterpiece Undine ’74, and whatever else received the unanimous vote after a well-lubricated viewing session. 

The big night came, and to our disbelief, Die Hohe Tatra was packed beyond capacity. The party turned almost frightening in its uninhibited frenzy. and only way after sunrise—once the entire stash of beer and liquor had been depleted—did the crowd begin to filter out into the street. Amazed by what had just happened, we winced at the glaring summer sky and, in a homage to Higher and Higher, the club owners drove us out of the city for some hippie-esque skinny-dipping at a secret, water-lily-covered lake hidden deep in the Brandenburg woods.

In the summer of 1995, an ad in Splatting Image magazine announced the publication of the soundtrack to Jess Franco's Soledad Miranda series. The CD-only release was limited to just 500 copies—not nearly enough for what I instinctively knew would be a future club classic. A quick phone call with Graf Haufen revealed that the material could easily be sub-licensed, and I immediately thought of my old friend Töni back in the Black Forest. Töni owned a tiny record label called Crippled Dick, on which he had released a small handful of his own hobbyist alternative rock attempts—but it was a record label nonetheless. 

The year prior, I had gifted him copies of my movie fair tapes, so he was already familiar with the music. When he heard that the material was available for licensing, he jumped at the opportunity. Six months later, the record had hit the stores, and to whip up some hype, Töni offered to take my raunchy sexploitation party on an extensive promo tour. He even hired a publicist and a booking agency. 

All of a sudden, I felt like a real DJ. Real DJs should get real pay, I figured, but all in all I had no idea what I was trying to do and only asked for 200 Deutsche Marks for myself and 100 for each dancer per night. In order to figure out what to charge overall, I added up the van rental, estimated fuel costs, and the meals I had to buy while we were on the road. “No problem!” Töni said.

The parties turned into a big success. National TV crews showed up, we received an enormous amount of press coverage, and at the end of each night, I was paid in cash. Some clubs paid under the promised minimum, but the booker said, “Don't worry, it will all balance out in the end.” Nobody wanted to spoil the good times with serious thinking, and the gigs quickly grew more numerous. Leaving my day job behind, I cruised through Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in a rental van packed with go-go girls, records, and a custom-built, chrome-plated go-go cage. 

The over-the-top media attention soon went to Jasmin's head, and she began demanding double pay while pestering me to build her a circular, fur-covered, slowly-rotating platform to sprawl and gyrate on. Horizontal dancing was the future, she was convinced, but the manufacturing process, folding mechanisms, and additional transportation requirements resulted in a terrible headache. “Just buy a trailer and hitch it behind the van”, Jasmin suggested, before asking for a dog sitter so her French Bulldogs would be taken care of during her stage time. 

Jasmin was on the verge of becoming the Pink Floyd of go-go girls, and as sad as I was, we had to part ways. Staff problems became even more severe when Sonja and her roommates had to return to university and couldn’t join for some of the longer tour stretches. Auditioning new dancers, feverishly looking for more records, and the near-constant travel all blurred into a strangely surreal experience. 

Watching my life play out like a Jess Franco movie, I was stunned by how well it all seemed to work, and avoided asking myself any questions. There was always money in my pocket and another party to drive to—why not enjoy the puzzling phenomenon to the fullest now, and start worrying once it all blew up in my face?

One night in Stuttgart, I crossed paths with my previous girlfriend, Manuela, who had made a trip to New York half a year earlier, where a friend had hooked her up with a nanny job. Old flames rekindled, Manuela flew back to NYC, and a forbidden fruit began to ripen inside of my mind. The parties were still going strong, but the music press had lumped us in with the so-called “easy listening” trend. 

With the inevitable decline of the fad, my success would fade away. Worse yet, I found out way too late that it wasn’t Crippled Dick who was supposed to pay for the booking company. Instead, the agency now demanded a previously unmentioned 30% of all proceeds to be paid from my own pocket. This would have left me firmly in the red, with no choice but to print T-shirts again for a living. 

Töni didn’t have any such worries. Tarantino sub-licensed a Vampyros Lesbos track for his new movie Jackie Brown, and my old friend bought himself a house in Berlin. My only way forward was to leave Germany and this damned easy listening trend behind, and maybe move to a city with a larger crowd to draw from—a city like New York. It did not go unnoticed by me that I was sitting on the entire tour money while still being paid more after each event. The forbidden fruit kept growing bigger and bigger.

New York City

The tour ended, and easy listening became yesterday’s news. Outside Germany, however, the album became a modern classic and remained stocked in record stores all over the globe. As the facilitator of the release, I received two boxes of promo copies—and that was that: my first experience with the parasitic cesspool that is the music industry.

Breaking up with Sonja was a mean thing to do, but I convinced myself of its necessity. I sold my VHS collection to Videodrom, shipped the go-go cage by sea freight, and bought a plane ticket to New York. After an excessive going-away party at Kreuzberg’s Ankerklause, I took a taxi to Tegel Airport and checked in two heavy aluminum flight cases—locked and loaded with my strongest records—and boarded the plane. I had a little over 10,000 Deutsche Marks stuffed into the pockets of my jeans, a case of 45s and a duffel bag with a thick roll of movie posters as carry-on—plus an extra set of clothes and a second pair of shoes slung over my shoulder.

The stolen money was immediately set aside for flyers, slide and video projectors, and getting my Jess Franco posters framed. I took one of the $5-per-hour jobs readily available for illegal aliens and spent my days printing “I ♥︎ NY” T-shirts at a Korean-owned tourist shop on Christopher Street. Manuela quit her underpaid nanny gig to score a $6-per-hour job selling toys at an adult shop two doors down from my workplace, but we still didn’t make anywhere near enough to afford Manhattan rent—or even a nicer part of Brooklyn. 

Humbled by our limitations, we moved into the cheapest place we could find: an unfurnished garage behind a gloomy house on Staten Island, just a short minibus ride from the ferry terminal. We spent a long, hot cicada summer and an even longer, ice-cold winter sleeping on a bare mattress and living out of cardboard boxes and laundry bags. 

Everything around us closed at 5 p.m., except for the White Castle next door, and the neighborhood generally felt like a rough place to live. After our first month, the tenant of the main building was found stabbed to death, and we worried about being interviewed by the police. Fearing potentially deportation, we stayed out late and barely slept for a nervous couple of weeks—but strangely enough, nobody ever bothered us. 

I soon landed a semi-regular DJ night at the Beauty Bar, followed by a weekly guest slot at Penelope Tuesdae’s wildly hip 999999s night at the Flamingo East. We only had Sundays off from our day jobs, but all the best parties seemed to be on weeknights. That meant we had to rush home from work as quickly as possible. Barely through the door, we’d fuel up with a ham and cheese hero and a few beers, then take turns in the tiny shower. After that, I’d load my records onto a hand truck while Manuela packed two suitcases with her boots and costumes.

Depending on which ferry we managed to catch, we’d arrive back home with very little time before we had to race out again. Most days we lived on White Castle burgers and deli sandwiches, with a Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast on the ferry back into Manhattan. Every day brought a new challenge, but just sustaining ourselves felt like a triumph.

To get to know the scene and scout possible venues, we went out often. Eventually, we secured ourselves a Sunday night residency at the Suzie Wong Lounge—a tiny, hidden-away basement club just north of Soho. The place was designed to resemble an opium den. Purple curtains framed cherry-red furniture, and there were more mattresses than seats, all arranged behind long, narrow tables less than a foot off the floor, each holding a flickering candle in a punctured tin container. 

The wooden dance floor could fit up to maybe 80 dancers, which seemed pretty ambitious at that time. The walls were covered in deep red paper-maché. I invested in a cotton sheet to project slides from my favorite posters and lobby cards—sexy, rare films no one around here had ever seen or even heard—and we pulled the upholstery from one of the seat segments to create a go-go stage. We put on a rehearsal party for the owner and a few of his friends, who all seemed deeply fascinated.

With less than a week to go before opening night, the desperately-awaited go-go cage arrived at a customs office not far from JFK. All I had to do, supposedly, was rent a van and sign some forms—or so I was told over the phone. But when I got there, the official in charge spoke in a noticeably more concerned tone. Everything had already been unpacked and laid out on the floor. Scratching his head and looking genuinely worried, the customs agent and his cohorts speculated whether I was trying to import some kind of distillery or laboratory equipment. 

“No nooo…” I answered, with an uneasy laugh, and explained that it was just a harmless go-go cage. Their faces darkened even more as they began to ask questions about the exact size of the cage, the distance between the bars and—most importantly—what type of animals we intended to lock inside this contraption, since the U.S. of A. had very strict regulations for the caging of livestock. 

“No, no, it’s not that type of cage”, I stammered. “This is a go-go cage I had built to have girls dance in it.”

At this point, the discussion among the agents became too complicated for my command of English at the time—but surprisingly, this handicap seemed to work in my favor. I stared at them helplessly, my eyes full with genuine confusion, and voilà; one of the agents suddenly seemed eager to wrap things up, probably so he could take his lunch break. Maybe I knew a U.S. citizen who could declare the cage as a “stage prop”, he suggested—emphasizing the key word needed to solve this problem. 

I scrolled feverishly through my beeper to find Rai Sadow’s work number. Rai had sub-licensed the Vampyros Lesbos album to the New York label, Motel Records, and had quickly become friends with us. Not only was Rai the only person I knew with an office number, she was also familiar with the concept of a go-go cage and—perhaps more importantly—she had the smooth, diplomatic communication skills required to calm down some of the other agents who were still pensively scratching their heads. Despite their attempt to trip Rai up by asking, “What type of animal is this cage planned for?” she managed to put their skepticism to rest, and I was free to load up and leave.

Manuela and I began scouting New York’s last remaining strip bars to hire additional dancers and soon found ourselves at the Baby Doll Lounge, where we met Japanese superhero Jaiko Suzuki and her best friend, Viva “Knievel” Ruiz. The four of us immediately bonded. We went out to all the most happening parties and concerts to promote our event, which was the easiest thing in the world given how excited we were about the project. Before the internet, European sexploitation cinema was mostly unknown in the U.S., while French ’60s pop, European soft-porn soundtracks, and library funk were among the most exotic-sounding subgenres to never appear on a party invite.

Opening night already had a supercharged, uninhibited vibe all of its own, and it soon became clear that Jess Franco’s magic wouldn’t fail us. The crowd grew from week to week, and after Michael Musto gave us a rave review in his Village Voice column, a line formed down the block so long we were forced to turn people away. As much as we loved Suzie Wong, it looked like we had already outgrown it. To give myself more time to work on new slides and video projections, and to look for another club, I quit my day job—the timing couldn’t have been better. 

Only a few weeks later, a slender young man in a business suit walked into the store. My old boss seemed to know him, and the two went into the windowless, crammed back room—where he was then shot in the head, right in front of the dust-caked silk-screening press, where I had printed T-shirts six days a week. This happened during work hours, too: the killer used a silencer, so the young clerk working that day had no idea what had just happened, and simply watched as the killer walked out the front door and disappeared into the crowd. 

The murder made all the newspapers I never read. On my next visit to the 55—a jazz club and former speakeasy a few blocks up the street from the crime scene—the bartender, Brian, filled me in about the headlines. “The Korean mob was involved”, he remarked, raising his eyebrow as he stocked the fridge with bottles of Brooklyn Lager. 

I left my beer on the counter and walked down Christopher Street. It was late on a quiet weekday night, with barely anyone else around. In front of the store I stood at a small shrine of candles, flowers, and news clippings.

“You should try the XVI as a new venue”, Brian suggested, as I sat back down behind my half-finished beer. The club was still intimate enough, but at least four times larger than the Suzie Wong, and he’d heard that they were looking for a new Thursday night party. Before I knew it, Brian had called Ernie, one of the club’s owners, who invited me to come and see him the following day. 

We sat down in the cozy, mirror mosaic-covered basement bar of the two-level club. According to Ernie, this had once been a private belly-dancing lair, where a concierge would point wealthier patrons up a discreet staircase that led out to the backyard and a series of hidden love nests—all easily accessible via the fire escape. 

The secret exit now housed a coat-check, and the apartments had been rented out to corn-fed students from the flyover states. We staffed the second DJ booth with Rai—the heroic liberator of our go-go cage—and, naturally, the owner of an incredible record collection. For special occasions, we booked Romain, aka “Lord Funk” from Paris. The mastermind behind the Orchestral Party compilation series soon began selling me personalized DAT tapes with some of his biggest dancefloor bombs, which greatly improved my own weekly sets.

In the meantime I had switched from vinyl to MiniDisc. After all, the night celebrated vice and sleaze more than rare records. With my hands freed up from having to select, pull out, and cue up records, I built a stack of VHS recorders into the DJ booth and installed a fisheye camera on the second dance floor downstairs- All of it fed into a video mixing board, and from there to a total of three projectors. With enough cocaine and booze in my system, the mixer’s oversized fader felt like the thrust lever of a plane. 

Fueled by a never-ending stream of raunchy movie scenes, kaleidoscopic color bursts, and liquid slides, all melting and fading into each other, I steered us safely through the night—high as a kite, naturally. Because we valued privacy above all, a strict “no camera” rule was enforced—with the sole exception of Gerard Malanga—and just as intended, people took shameless advantage of it. 

The walls, columns, and ceilings of the cavernous downstairs were covered in tiny mirror-mosaic tiles that acted like an inverted mirror ball, fanning out the colorful beams that streamed from a set of old-school disco lights. The lights cut through the smoky air, all the way down a long tunnel that led to two discreet restrooms, typically visited by couples or small groups. As our crowd grew, more money rolled in, and we were finally able to leave Staten Island behind and move to Brooklyn.

Jaiko and Viva played together in Fresh Fish, a wild band that sounded like a mix of Flipper and Bush Tetras. The two were friends with pretty much every musician in town and our party became instantly popular among NYC’s alternative rock scene. Kid Congo Powers, J. G. Thirlwell, Sally Norvell, and Jim Sclavunos were among our first regulars. 

I had first heard Jim’s drums rumble out of my radio in 1980—when I was just 12 years old—and François Mürner had decided to play “Diddy Wah Diddy” by 8 Eyed Spy. At the time, I had no idea who the drummer was—nor any clue that over the next decade, I would see him perform live dozens of times with bands like The Gun Glub, The Cramps, The Shotgun Wedding or The Bad Seeds. 

Now I was seeing Jim at the party week after week. We quickly became friends, and when Manu and I finally managed to find a roomy apartment in Brooklyn—through a landlord who didn’t need any paper work—Jim picked us up from Staten Island in his mother’s car. He helped us load up our suitcases and cardboard boxes, and soon we crossed the Verrazano Bridge. 

It was a beautiful spring day, and as we drove onto the Belt Parkway, Jim pointed out a stretch of Lover’s Lane where the Son of Sam had killed one of his victims. Having grown up in New York and been active in the city’s music scene since the mid-1970s, Jim was like an encyclopedia of all sorts of trivia—with a special penchant for the dark and macabre.

Around the same time, my old friend Töni of Crippled Dick fame contacted me for the first time since I’d run off with the tour money. He asked whether I might want to do a remix for a Vampyros Lesbos tribute album he was working on. The statute of limitations still hadn’t run out, and I was relieved when not a single word was mentioned about the incident with the booking agency. Maybe this was Töni’s way of giving me some credit after all. 

With no idea what a remix was—or how to make one—I asked Jim for help, and got really excited when he agreed. Jim knew how to do everything, so I was sure this would turn out great. With no access to the master tapes, we digitally re-edited “The Lions and the Cucumber” using the studio’s computer system. Jim then recorded a louder, much heavier drum beat on top and added an extra organ line. 

More drums and more organ was all my limited creativity had managed to come up with—until our friend Stan Harrison, who had played saxophone in Serge Gainsbourg’s band back in the 1980s, brought Serge’s widow, Bambou, to the city. I remembered her from “Love on the Beat”, and asked if she’d be willing to do something similar for our remix. Bambou immediately agreed. 

Brian Emrich, who at the time played with Foetus and Congo Norvel, had just laid some extra-heavy bass on top of the tune, and Jim's organ sounded as shrill and primitive as I’d asked for. Now it was up to Bambou to apply her magic touch. I had invested in a carton of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, some hors d'oeuvres from Dean & DeLuca, and an eightball of cocaine from Brownie’s, so there was considerable euphoria in the air.

Jim and I lounged in the control room, watching through the glass panel as Bambou stood behind the microphone with her eyes closed. The first two takes felt a bit timid, and when I asked if she was okay, she explained shyly that it was her first time doing this in a recording studio. But what about “Love on the Beat?” Bambou blushed. Serge, she explained after a short break, had hidden a tape recorder under the bed—without even telling her. 

In an effort to make things easier and give her some intimacy, we turned the microphone so that Bambou faced the wall and managed not to look in her direction before the fade-out. “That was it!” said Jim in a firm and convincing tone, and everybody agreed. We left the studio in high spirits—and when Thursday came around, the tune became an instant hit at the party. 

Crippled Dick, however, didn’t like our work at all and demanded an electronic beat be added by a legitimate dance music producer. We refused to make any changes and, as a result, weren’t included on The Spirit of Vampyros Lesbos.

The owner of the Suzie Wong had been so sad to see us leave that, after some time, he called and offered us a weekly side gig at his fancy restaurant on the Upper East Side. Upon our arrival, we were wined and dined luxuriously before I began playing records for an after-dinner crowd of rich, cigar-puffing men and their not-very-amused wives. Manu and Jaiko obligingly climbed onto a couple of cleared-off tabletops to shake their stuff. 

When the place shut down at around 2 a.m., we took a taxi downtown. I got out at the 55, which still ran after hours at the time, and Manu headed back home across the Brooklyn Bridge—or wherever she chose to spend the rest of her night. I would usually stumble out of the bar around dawn, often together with Joe Frivaldi or Cecil Taylor, who used the 55 as his extended living room. 

From there, we took a taxi over to Brownie’s social club—an infamous coke den located where the East Village turns into Alphabet City—owned by a retired pimp who had named the place after himself. It was his legal name too, a fact that he loved to prove by flashing his driver’s license. One night, a borderline psychotic Irishman with military tattoos started a fight, clawing himself onto Dominique the bouncer like a wildcat—and wouldn’t let go. 

The two wrestled on the floor for what seemed like forever, a heavily breathing knot of limbs that occasionally relaxed, grunted, and then re-contracted. Brownie and his gun weren’t present that night, so the bartender made a phone call while everybody else just kept drinking. Eventually, two men with baseball bats showed up, circled the two, and aimed a long series of heavy swings at the Irishman, whose muscles finally relaxed so Dominique could roll out from under the unconscious heap of meat.

The veteran came to, stood up, spat blood and insults, and finally turned to the door, followed by a succession of further blows. When I arrived back home around noon, I had to fill a bucket with warm water and soap, grab a rag, and wash the dried blood off my DJ cases, which had been lined up next to Brownie’s doorway. I almost threw up. 

Another night, I took a friend out for a lobster birthday dinner before we went drinking at KGB, a Prohibition-era speakeasy that also ran after hours and had once served as the headquarters for the NY chapter of the U.S. Communist Party. I spotted Brownie lounging at the other end of the bar, and as I walked over to say “Hi”, I noticed how the young square sitting next to him was about to put his sneaker on the footrest of Brownie’s bar stool. 

Brownie valued etiquette more than most things, and everybody knew that he would kick people out just for swearing. Even Quentin Tarantino was famously evicted while loudly complaining, “I only said freaking, really! Just freaking…” “Too close”, judged Brownie, as Dominique walked the director toward the door.

The square’s rubber sole made a soft squeak on the brass and, noticing Brownie’s facial expression, I knew it was time to move. One Sunday, after locking up around noon, this man had once shot a kid in the arm—just for sitting on the hood of his car. You have to be a fool for putting your sneaker on his stool, I thought, as I walked back to our table. I glanced back towards the bar just as Brownie poked the student in the neck with a small pocket blade—the gesture was so casual, as if he were wiping a piece of flint off his shoulder, that nobody else seemed to notice. 

The fratboy stared in shock, grabbed a handful of napkins, and pressed them against his throat, while Brownie slowly stood up, put on his coat, and walked out the door. Not knowing whether the kid would be lucky enough to live, or stupid enough to call the cops, we left—and, by pure chance, ran into Brownie again at some dive bar a couple doors down the street. We all had a few more drinks until the bartender yelled, "Last Call!"

“Time for me to go!” announced Brownie, and he left to open up his social club.

I couldn’t get enough of this city, and embarked on an everlasting hunt to savor its last remaining pockets of gritty authenticity. One of Brownie’s daughters told me how her dad had once owned a strip club on Avenue A, with each booth under a different sign of the Zodiac. One early morning in the late 1980s, somebody smashed in the front door, dragged a gasoline-soaked mattress into the club, and set it on fire. Brownie moved to his current location, and the landlord rented the renovated space to the new young owners—who kept the name and set up a live club.

One night, we caught an amazing show by Congo Norvell there; another time, The Valentine Six (video in the link was shot at the Suzie Wong); and eventually, Rai and I would put on a Desco Soul Review there, featuring Sharon Jones & the Soul Providers, Mighty Imperials, and Sugarman Three. While Manuela loved coming along to see bands and attend club nights like “Shout!”—where Georgie Goodtimes and some of our other friends and regulars would hang out—she usually took a taxi back home come closing time, while I went on to cruise the after-hours bars. Cloaked in a constant daze, I floated through a parallel world of vice, looking on as my adolescence began to stretch itself well into my thirties. 

It was Cecil who introduced me to Body Heat, a makeshift bar housed on the second floor of an apartment building in Alphabet City. I kept coming back to talk with the bartender, a beautiful Puerto Rican girl named Fernanda. She was pregnant, which seemed to make the other customers uncomfortable. Fernanda drank orange juice, didn’t smoke, and had a slow fan blowing clean air in from the back room. Every few minutes, cash, drinks, and bags of cocaine moved across the counter, and another happy customer would scurry back to their armchair. 

One night, just as the bouncer opened the door to let me in, Fernanda quickly disappeared into the back. When she returned, she had changed out of her sweatpants into a red miniskirt and flashed a big smile, her glossy lips painted the same deep red. Fernanda loved to share stories—fascinating tales from a world that was as real as it was close, one that I only skated along the edge of. Her belly kept swelling, and people stopped making eye contact when they approached the bar. She told me she would work until the very last day.

Soon after, early one Sunday morning, I found the door locked. For a few months, nobody answered the bell—until one night, a sleepy-eyed civilian opened up, peeking over the door chain with a big question mark on his face. Even Alphabet City began to gentrify, and while Times Square was still home to a few depressing peep shows, it was almost impossible to believe that this was the same place depicted in Taxi Driver. 

I searched out what was left, and enjoyed each moment deeply enough not to want to repeat any of it. Now and again, I would picking up a pack of smokes, pause, light a cigarette—and just take the reflections of the lights on the wet blacktop, smell the flowers lined up in front of the deli, and listen to the delirious bum standing at the corner, rattling coins in his paper cup. I committed every detail to memory and soaked it all up like a sponge; the sense of opportunity, the great uncertainty of what might happen next, the limitless gift of it all, the solitary adventure of being alive—a warm wave of thankfulness washed over me.

Some thirty years earlier, photographer, poet, and artist Gerard Malanga had become famous for wielding a whip and dancing on stage at the Velvet Underground’s legendary live shows. His wife, Asiko, was a close friend of Jaiko, so the pair would often swing by and lounge on one of the club’s hidden sofas, from where Gerard occasionally raised his camera lens. Jim brought The Bad Seeds down for an aftershow party, and my friends from Berlin, Stereo Total, performed a set with Jaiko on vocals. 

Terry Richardson once snuck in right before opening time, clutching a small point-and-shoot camera, then hovered around the cage for an hour, sneaking shots of Aissa, the latest addition to our gogo girl roster, and rubbing up against the gleaming chrome bars—a private performance he paid for in signed, glossy prints. Another night, Matt Dillon fed stacks of dollar bills into Manuela’s G-string before asking me for the name of a Jacques Dutronc tune he later used for the City of Ghosts soundtrack. 

Kate Moss caused a stir by writhing away on the downstairs dance floor, while Billy Zane—her date for the evening—climbed back upstairs to get drinks and promptly got himself evicted by the overzealous bar manager, just for wearing a baseball cap. Titanic had just hit the theaters, and the actor was at the peak of his fame, but the manager didn’t care. Billy sullenly squeezed past Cecil Taylor on his way out, who was sitting on a barstool, grumbling about how—even in 1997—people were still locking other people into cages.

The party continued at full steam, week after week, for four years straight, and we never had a single slow night. But things grew more and more difficult for the XVI. By the late 1990s, NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani—a former police chief and a sworn enemy of all things fun—reintroduced an age-old law against dancing in unlicensed nightclubs. The goal was to drive noisy clubs out of the city and replace them with overpriced coffee shops, apartment buildings, and designer boutiques. 

Most of New York’s small- to mid-sized venues didn’t have the required license, and in most cases the owners weren’t able to ever obtain one due to zoning regulations. The strong arm of the law came down on them with all its might—particularly on weekends, when the riffraff from Jersey and Long Island flooded the city, and the clubs hired mainstream DJs to play the kind of commercial dance music these lemmings enjoyed. Every place was packed beyond legal capacity, with enough frat boys and underage girls in the mix to guarantee rich pickings. Giuliani’s goons busted one venue after another. 

The XVI didn’t have a cabaret license, so the owners were forced to post “No Dancing!” signs on the walls along the narrow dance floor and hired extra security to discourage any type of rhythmic movement. The first cops through the door were always undercover and would call for backup as soon as they caught someone dancing or showing a fake ID. The XVI was brutally fined—just like every other club in the area. Even a single cigarette butt behind the bar counted as a disorderly premise and resulted in a steep fine. 

The cops had to be well-rested for their weekend bonanza, so none of them ever made it out to our lawless Thursday party—although rumor had it that some of the more unassuming regulars were off-duty police officers with a taste for our kind of entertainment. Whatever the reason, the “No Dancing!” signs were removed for our night, and the crowd was allowed to indulge in all sorts of immoral and legally dubious behavior. By early 2000, however, the fines had become so numerous and enormously expensive that it was clear the XVI wouldn’t be around much longer.

In a somewhat haphazard move, we relocated to The Cooler—a former meat locker on the West Side that boasted a framed cabaret license behind the counter and could therefore legally host dance parties. Since dead pigs don’t call in noise complaints, the venue’s high-quality PA could be cranked up as loud as we wanted. The Meatpacking District was still a desolate area back then, without a single apartment building on the entire block. Transvestite hookers worked the streets, and it would be years before the area became gentrified. 

We hired Desco bands Sugarman Three and Mighty Imperials as alternating house bands each week. Sugarman Three were already a tight band of professional musicians, but Mighty Imperials hadn’t even reached legal age yet—and their bare-bones, organ-driven instrumental funk proved to be a perfect match for our raunchy sleaze-fest. Members of both bands also played with the Soul Providers, the backing band for vocalists Sharon Jones, Joseph Henry, Naomi Davis, and Lee Fields. 

In those years, the Desco Records stable still performed at small venues in front of a few dozen enthusiasts. Nobody could have guessed that just five years later, some of these very same musicians would record the backing tracks for Amy Winehouse’s breakthrough album Back to Black, reaching the ears and hearts of millions of people.

Desco Records was owned and operated by Gabriel Roth and Philippe Lehman, both regulars at our party—and it was Philippe in particular who would inspire my musical passion for the following decade. I first met him at A1 Records in the East Village, where he immediately hipped me to The Piranha’ Sounds’ “La Turbie Piranhienne”—a breathtakingly sleazy slice of instrumental funk, created solely to soundtrack a girl slowly peeling off her clothes. 

Philippe constantly had the most amazing records coming in from his friends in Paris and kept digging up previously unknown deep funk 45s on road trips all around the U.S. There was so much new and exciting music swirling around in those years, it was dizzying.

Another major source of inspiration was Matt Weingarden, aka Mr. Finewine, and his Downtown Soulville night at Botanica, a legendary basement bar on Houston Street. It was there that I met Ian Wright, and other internationally recognized funk DJs and got to enjoy the communal record banter and shared passion for obscure music over endless strings of beers.

Electricity was in the air and everybody would rush to the turntables when Matt or one of his guests would drop a big discovery nobody had heard before. I loved the communal gasp and wide-eyed disbelief in response to the earth-shattering drum breaks, followed by the knowing smile of the DJ as he turned up the volume and cut the bass to force some extra punch through the bar’s ultra compressed house system.

Back then, it was still possible to walk into stores like A1 and find Tony Alvon & the Belairs’ “Sexy Coffee Pot” or “Soul and Sunshine” by Harvey and the Phenomenals for a mere $30, so I usually bought them in pairs. The prices for such classics multiplied tenfold and then twentyfold within just a few years, so these spare copies enabled me to make good trades and quick sales in order to add records to my repertoire—records I could never have afforded otherwise. 

Some of my friends made a career out of hustling these 45s, and with the rise of the internet, they didn’t even need a store to do so. Notoriously shady deep funk dealer Glenn Bivins struck gold one day when he managed to get his hands on 50 copies of Mickey & the Soul Generation’s monumental double-sider “Get Down Brother”/”How Good Is Good”–maybe the heaviest 45 of all time–sourced directly from the label owner. 

Glenn was a special regular at our party, with unlimited spots on the guest list, so he would give me a good deal on his merchandise—but other than that he proceeded to sell them at $500 a pop. It took him just a few months to move all 50 copies, and when I resold mine ten years later, it went for almost a grand. 

This wasn’t even a lot of money for this type of record. In some cases, fewer than 20 copies of a specific single would be on the market, which resulted in much higher prices, if one even became available. Extreme rarities, with only a handful of specimens known to exist, would often fetch thousands of dollars. 

At Matt Finewine’s nights, you could listen to some of the most elusive funk and soul 45s on the planet—and sometimes watch them change hands for dizzying amounts of money. When one of the big DJs came through, the usual suspects, pockets bulging with cash, would be leaning over the turntables, squinting to try and decipher the label. It often came down to who was quickest to say: “Damn, this tune kicks like a donkey; do you have a spare?”

I wondered how people with regular jobs could pay these kinds of prices. Then I found out that almost everybody split their domestic life and their record habit into two separate economies. Many would keep their paycheck untouched and instead sell a few records whenever they needed cash for a big acquisition. “Real money” and “record money” were accounted for separately and treated as if they were different currencies. 

The whole thing felt a bit like playing the stock market. A previously overlooked tune, if played out by a big DJ, could suddenly rise in demand, and depending on the number of copies available, prices could go up sharply. These trends could be spotted early, and buying the right record at the right time could yield extraordinary returns. 

The deep funk 45 collector’s market was a significant shadow economy where rare commodities changed hands for serious amounts of cash. The high prices made it difficult for newcomers, but those who had been in the game for a while had already amassed a good enough reserve to prevent the habit from impacting their economic stability.

To my mind, all money was record money. It had been clear from the beginning that we would eventually have to return to Berlin one day, and turning the stacks of cash sitting in our kitchen drawers into records would make it a whole lot easier to move our savings back to the fatherland. At the same time, these 45s signified my future as a DJ. Nobody else back home would be able to keep up with the heaviness and power of these tunes. 

This wasn’t Motown: these were small, young bands, hungry and wild at heart, taking a shot—and often only one—at putting out a record and hoping to turn heads with it. To get noticed, the producers aimed to create the loudest and most infectious song in any jukebox, capturing their audience right from the run-in groove—to deliver a heavy punch that, in a juke joint setting, could stand up against James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Rufus Thomas, or Sly & The Family Stone, whose hits might be selected right before or afterwards. 

Since they couldn’t keep up with the often superior songwriting, the big horn sections, and expensive production of their mainstream competitors, these smaller bands made sure the drum breaks banged as loudly as possible. They also usually cranked the Hammond up to the max to get everybody’s attention and carry them on a runaway soul train to the promised land. Nothing could compare to these records—piped through a solid club system, they would create a vastly different experience from anything else Berlin’s other funk nights had to offer.

However, building a sufficiently large collection was a big goal to realize. In Berlin, no serious club would shut down before sunrise, so I needed to be prepared to deliver an eight-hour-long set—which translated to around 200 45s. And to keep things interesting from gig to gig, I would need to own at least twice as many.

After a few months at The Cooler, it turned out that the club’s cabaret licence had, in fact, been Xeroxed together at a Kinko’s. I took this as a sign. The past four years had been an amazing experience, but nothing like this could—or should—last forever. Now seemed like a good time to leave. The statute of limitations for robbing the booking agency had finally run out, and I was getting more and more tired of sexploitation movies and French Yé-Yé pop. 

It was time to walk out of my personal Jess Franco movie. The credits were about to roll, and I didn’t want to wait for the lights to come up.

Berlin Revisited

Some ten years earlier, when we had first met, Manuela had mentioned her dream of becoming a diplomat—and only a few months after our arrival in Berlin, she took her first steps towards realizing this unlikely goal. Unsurprisingly, applying for a small handful of openings alongside hundreds of well-qualified students fresh from Germany’s best universities—all much younger and without a recent, four-year U.S. stint as an illegal  alien—didn’t work out. 

Manuela only had a two-year course as a trilingual secretary under her belt, but at her interview at the Foreign Ministry, she met a friendly mentor who managed to get her a low-paid intern job, and explained how this could be her best route into the diplomatic corps. In the meantime, I kickstarted a night called Soul Explosion at a cute pavilion building—aptly called the Pavillon—located at the edge of a small park in the Mitte district, just a couple of convenient blocks away from our new home. 

For whatever reason, the 1970s venue had never experienced any sustained popularity, which made it easy to talk the owners into giving me full control over the door. The parties were an instant success—10-plus hours of pure, exhausting joy. The crowd was much younger than back in New York, made up mostly of students and visitors from all over Europe—by then, Berlin had already become a prime destination for a cheap weekend of partying.

This was a good thing, as it kept me independent from the relatively small local funk and soul scene. Some old friends from Die Hohe Tatra came by for a visit, but other than that, a generational gap had opened up between me and the crowd. We shared a passion for the same music and enjoyed the uplifting, communal high of partying together—but they were young, and I had become the middle-aged guy with the records. I didn’t mind and there was no time to socialize anyway. Playing 45s with an average running time of two to three minutes all night, while constantly thinking up new sequences of where to take things next, was completely different from what I had done before. 

Back in New York, Manuela had fallen in love with the Latin boogaloo records I kept picking up. The music came from the same era, and I figured—why not have her brighten up my eight-hour-long deep funk sets, and give me a much-needed break or two? Manuela visibly enjoyed herself behind the turntables; the crowd went wild for her short sets, and it felt good to have her more involved in the party.

Something else had changed—though at first I didn’t notice: I wasn’t consuming cocaine anymore. Nobody else around me was using it, and I was surprised to find that I didn’t even miss the stuff. Sadly, the Pavillon soon closed down due to noise complaints from new neighbors who had moved into a big new apartment building at the edge of the park, which almost loomed over the modest, single-floor venue. 

At least some of the blame for the loud music could be laid at the dancing feet of our Soul Explosion nights, but it turned into a happy accident anyway when the Pavillon owners quickly found a new home. Incredibly, the new place was also a Pavillon—this time located on the other side of Prenzlauer Berg, in the much larger Volkspark Friedrichshain. The club was about twice the size, boasted a much more powerful sound system and—most importantly—the nearest apartment block was far enough away that we could take full advantage of all available wattage. 

Our only concern was no longer being positioned in the central district of Mitte. The venue was quite far off the beaten nightlife path and a good walk away from the nearest U-Bahn station. The promotional work necessary to continuously fill a place of this size was enormous, and my workload increased a great deal with the move. For each bi-weekly Soul Explosion, I designed a new poster and had thousands of oversized cardboard handbills printed, which I plastered daily onto lampposts and traffic lights along the city’s busiest streets. 

This kept me on my feet from morning until well into the evenings, and gave me some much-needed physical exercise—but most importantly the legwork was worth the effort. We were soon pulling in a crowd of around 500-700 dancers. Then again, the aggressive promotion yielded some negative side effects. A few “concerned” citizens took it upon themselves to follow me around and tear my posters and flyers down again as soon as I turned the corner. 

On other occasions, I had to outrun the police and was once even spat at by some Eastern fascists in far-right Thor Steinar shirts for promoting what they called “negro music.” Germans can be an ugly bunch. Despite these occasional pains while working the streets, the new Pavillon turned into the best venue we ever had. Matt Finewine was blown away when we flew him over as a special guest. It was like playing a rave, he exclaimed in bewilderment—and he was right. 

To keep things fresh, I traveled up and down the U.S. each year to hunt for new tunes. New Orleans funk by Eddie Bo, The Explosions, Mary Jane Hooper, or Chuck Carbo always received a deeply passionate response, as did Texas-based bands like The Soul Seven, Fabulous Mark III, The Latin Breed, or Sunny and the Sunliners—so I spent a lot of time down South.

Some of Soul Explosion’s biggest hits were found in the back rooms of juke joints around Lafayette and New Iberia, and on another trip, I caught a particularly lucky break at Miss Flip’s Rock Shop in Baton Rouge. Eventually, my travels led me up the East Coast to New York, where I spent my remaining cash at The Sound Library—and then made most of it back with a one-off Vampyros Lesbos party, revisited by old friends in a blur of bygone habits. 

Over the previous few years, deep funk 45s had become increasingly expensive. But not only did I need new tunes, they still seemed like a good investment, so I just kept buying. Why deny myself the pleasure of adding monstrous tracks such as “Funky Thing” by Larry Ellis And The Black Hammer to my collection, if I could share them with an enthusiastic crowd willing to pay the bill? 

As a fitting entry for this particular record, I let the previous 45 play out fully and switched off the lights, so the club was bathed in silence and pitch-black darkness. Without even using the headphones, I let the needle find its way into the run-in groove, cranked the gain up all the way until a suspenseful static filled the air, and waited for the spine-tingling organ intro to hover across the room. The superheavy drums kicked in, and a monumental bassline came blasting out of the subwoofers. The floor began to shake violently. 

As the beat hit, I flicked the disco lights back on one by one and activated the dozen or so ceiling fans circling the dance floor. Just as the song exploded into its full glory, the airstream blew through everyone’s hair, and the groove came down on them like a steam hammer. It was electrifying. My hands were tingling, and goosebumps covered my body like a blanket soaked in ice water.

I never understood the point of blending the end of one song into the beginning of the next to create a seamless mix. Why aim for a uniform experience where everything blurs together? Where it made sense and felt easy enough to do, I might have dropped the new tune on the same beat—but generally, I preferred to focus the crowd’s full attention on each individual song and respectfully allow a record to play out, instead of putting on a big show of painstakingly rehearsed, excessive knob-twisting and vinyl juggling—as if acrobatic sorcery were required to play other people’s music from an old record.

By 2004, Manuela received a list of diplomatic positions that would open up the following year and was told to pick her favorites. Unfortunately, popular destinations such as Paris, New York, and Tokyo—great cities to put on DJ events—were off the table for a first assignment. 

At the same time, I felt the urge to begin exploring a new musical genre and remembered how shocked Philippe Lehman had been back in 1999 when he invited me to an Antibalas show. I had admitted to never before having heard the term “afrobeat”. A quick Google search led me to a few compilations on the Strut label, and The Kings Of Benin Urban Groove—the groundbreaking debut European reissue of music by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. which had just come out on Soundway Records. 

It wasn’t possible that a band this powerful had emerged from a cultural vacuum. The internet didn’t turn up any other funk acts originating from Benin, but I knew there had to be more out there. I began to fantasize about prolonged digging trips through West African countries whose names I’d barely heard before—and the undreamt-of music that might be found there. 

Since her job was guaranteed wherever we went, Manuela gave me free rein to draw up a list. I included all the available postings along the West African coast. We were warned it would take at least six months before our exact destination could be confirmed, and so the anxious waiting game began. 

Early in 2005, I went on a short trip to NYC to play one final farewell Vampyros Lesbos party. When I met with Jaiko and Viva and told them about Manu entering a career as a diplomat, Jaiko raised her fist and yelled loudly, “Yes! I knew it! From go-go girl to spy! You go, Manu!”

While in Philly, I took a taxi to Smith’s Records, a legendary soul and gospel store I had first stumbled across in 2000—where I’d scored some of my heaviest funk 45s. The owner, an interesting character named Stanley Smith, had inherited the business from his father, who had spent most of his life as a traveling record producer, committing countless gospel, funk, and soul recordings onto tape—not only in Philly but for numerous small, privately owned labels from Pittsburgh all the way down to Louisiana. 

The store was located in a rough neighborhood, its streets lined with boarded-up businesses, overgrown lots and abandoned buildings. On my first—unforgettable—visit, the door had triggered a loud alarm bell. I entered with my hands over my ears and found the counter unmanned, protected by thick plexiglass and a double layer of chicken wire. Peering through the dull plastic and rusted mesh, I finally made out Stanley, standing at the back of the store with a revolver tucked into the waistband of his jeans. 

When he realized that some random ‘lost tourist’ had wandered in with his arms raised—as if surrendering—he casually stashed the gun between some gospel CDs and asked if I needed help. For a good decade or so, Smith’s Records had gained notoriety among Philly's soul DJs for the owner’s outright hostility and strongly-worded refusal to sell any of his records to white people. Somehow, my thick Kraut accent won Stanley over, and I was invited to browse a storage room on the second floor that even my fellow record hounds hadn’t known about. 

I still remember how my knees trembled as I made my way up the stairs and found walls lined with long, wooden shelves packed with boxes and boxes of 45s—all thickly coated in dust and clearly untouched for decades. There were hundreds of copies of Gunga Din's “Snake Pit” “Grease Wheels” by the Smokin' Shades of Black, “Fat Bag” by Bobby King & his Silver Foxx Band, and a seemingly endless number of other stone-cold killers.

Stanley had long gotten over his prejudice, but in the meantime the store had been raided by a string of dealers who cleared out anything rare or interesting. Looking at the near-empty shelves, I felt a tug of melancholy. For old times’ sake, I picked up a few copies of Big Maybelle’s “96 Tears” and a few classics by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band—classics I still played at home or during warm-up sets. 

By now, I was buying most of my records from overpriced lists sent out by international dealers to hundreds of customers at a time. The excitement of discovering unknown tunes in places like Smith’s had given way to a race against time—and other people’s money—to be the first to place an online order, or to win another white-knuckled bidding war on a closing eBay auction. Stanley seemed to be doing much better than when we first met, and when I told him I might be moving to West Africa and trying to find records there, his face lit up. 

“I might have something that could interest you…” he said. It turned out that back in the early 1980s, Mr. Smith Sr. had embarked on a soul-searching trip to West Africa and returned with around a hundred albums in his luggage, all on the Nigerian Tabansi label. He put them on the shelf behind his office desk and passed away just a few months later, without breaking the shrink-wrap on any one of them. 

I hadn’t brought a portable turntable, nor much cash, so I just grabbed a good handful by instinct—and for the cool-looking covers alone. Back home in Berlin, I dropped them on my turntable. While most of the records contained the kind of fast-paced highlife I never really got into, the one with the most eye-popping cover—Na Teef Know de Road of Teef by Pax Nicholas and the Nettey Family—instantly blew me away. 

The four slow-burning tunes were miles apart from anything I had heard before. This mystic, otherworldly music didn’t have the theatrics of Fela's big band arrangements, nor Tony Allen’s monumental drums, but was instead dominated by whimsical percussion, with the soft heartbeat of the drums placed far back in the mix. The horns and guitar were as much jazz as juju, with a ghostlike organ producing psychedelic layers that floated through the air like electrically charged sheets of multicolored silk.

We were barely back in Berlin when Manuela received the big news: we were going to move to Conakry, the capital of Guinea—a mythical country on the coast of West Africa, just down the shore from Senegal. Neither of us believed in marriage, but for me to receive full diplomatic credentials, we were forced to make an appointment at City Hall for an unceremonious wedding. After all, under a repressive military dictatorship like Guinea’s, a diplomatic passport was the only guarantee of a comfortable and bribe-free life. 

Most importantly, the prestigious document would exempt me from import taxes and customs fees, making it much easier to move quantities of records across West African borders. After the wedding, we began a lengthy vaccination process, and I started to wonder what life as a diplomatic spouse would feel like. 

After a phenomenal five-year run, the Soul Explosion was still going as strong as ever. It felt like a big waste to just let it all go, so after much deliberation, I turned the event—and most of my deep funk collection—over to my friend Mark Fuck, who agreed to wire me a share of the proceeds to make sure I wouldn’t run out of record money.