I arrived in Munich at dawn under a cloud of sleep-deprivation and with lingering poisons in my blood-stream. The day seemed unkind, as did the sullen Germans opening their shops all around me. I located a cheap pension in the University district but still had to wait for the room to be vacated. I found a quiet cafe to listen to some tunes I had picked up in Berlin but it seemed too loud and confusing so I just let my eyes wander around the place, which had concert announcements flypapered to the walls. One of them caught my eye, it read:

TONIGHT
ONLY
BANANAFISHBONES
garage-alternative-country-pop

I recognized the band's name from  the J.D. Salinger short story and the Cure song   it inspired, and you couldn't beat the description, at least in terms of variety -- so I decided to check them out that night. I spent most of the day in the largest city park, meeting strange Germans and fellow travelers. When it started to get dark, someone lit some candles, someone else passed around some hash. When it started to get late I remembered the concert, said my goodbyes, and made my way to the well-ordered Munich streets.

The band was playing in a barn-like club near the river, which I located by following a couple exuberant groups of German teens and twenty-somethings making their way to the show. When I arrived things were in full swing. The band was singing in English and consisted of a guy who played his acoustic like a percussion instrument, a drummer whose head and flying arms barely emerged from beyond his set, and a skinny, bony, completely bald singer/bassist with dual goatees at either end of his chin.

The crowd was going crazy over every song, whipping itself into an ecstatic and at times beatific frenzy. The music was like its description, mostly focusing on scratchy, grungy guitars and poppy drums, with the occasional hot metal or twangy country injection. Most of the crowd's energy was directed at the singer, whose voice meandered through the Bayern valley of Corgan and into the black forest of Violent Femmes, with occasional bear bellows at the end of a line. And he knew how to work the crowd, bringing them higher and higher with both his singing and his bass-work. At one point he walked to the drum riser and had the drummer play an alt-rock funk beat on his bass-strings. The kids ate it up.

They screamed and surged and danced in such harmonious rapture that I was forced to shrug off my exhaustion from the interminable train ride from Paris, forget where I was, and smile for the first time in a long time.   In Berlin's outdoor abstract hip-hop clubs I was blissed out, gone to a different heaven, here I was just enjoying the kid's reactions. It reminded me of when I was younger and didn't need so much to make me happy...the bar was close to the stage and, after rummaging my coat for some change,  ordered a triple vodka without ice. I gulped it down and then another and another. I felt perfect.

After the show I caught up with Sebastian, the lead singer of Bananafishbones. I started off by asking him about the music he was into and influenced by. He named the Violent femmes, Ween, Nick Cave, and the Cure as his primary inspirations.
 

He told me he liked pop-music as a medium because it is the best way these days to really communicate your feelings, hopes and desires to a mass audience.  Also, most of the liquor is free.

I drank a (free) beer with him, then said my goodbyes and walked off into the warm night. German kids were streaming around me like fish, chatting with self-assuredness, making plans, yelling. I lit a cig and crossed the street.

The next thing I knew it was dawn and I was walking into the city from the deep outskirts, my pockets too empty for a cab. The dawn's light was very bright, and the air smelled exceedingly clean and crisp. I felt like I was turning over a new leaf, that the spirit of youth was inhabiting my 29 year old body.

Two days later I was back in Berlin, raving like a lunatic, half-dead, and having the time of my life...

USOUNDS || 1999