The other night, I put up on here an old hand-bill from a club in West Berlin where we gigged in 1968. I mentioned that the dance competition advertised nearly got us arrested in the DDR and said Id tell that story later. One or two friends expressed an interest, so, heres the story. HOW A ROCK & ROLL GROUP ALMOST STARTED AN INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT Or, 5 itinerant musicians loose in Germany! In July 1968, on the strength of our performance at the Albert Hall supporting Bill Haley & His Comets and Duane Eddy, we got booked to do our first tour of West Germany. One of the gigs was a week in West Berlin at a club called Centrum 2000. The club had stuck posters all over Berlin advertising the week long gig and generally bigging us up. It also advertised the fact that they were holding a jive contest for which there were 3 cash prizes – 150, 100 & 50 DM. (The rate of exchange at the time was roughly 10DM to £1.) Now we were quite pleased with these posters and stuck a few on the outside of our van. The gig ended and was to be followed by a week in Munich. This involved driving out of West Berlin and down the East German corridor to the crossing point at Magdeburg and back into West Germany. After about an hour or so, a couple of the band needed the toilet and also wanted to get some coffee or a drink of some kind, so we pulled into a garage/service station I and John stopped in the van and Mal, Bill and Bob went off to the café. It has to be remembered that commodities like coffee, tea or soft drinks were very short in the old DDR. Most places only served a horrible sweet, pink sticky drink that they called lemonade! Suddenly, a uniformed cop brandishing a pistol opened the van door and said to John and I “Passport”. He waived the gun at us, and so I opened the glove compartment and handed over mine and John’s. He indicated he wanted all of them. This was rather worrying because only Sweden of the Western countries, recognised DDR as a sovereign state, and, as we weren’t Swedish their embassy would have been unlikely to help us . He then disappeared with our documents. At this point a rather oily fat man, dressed in a full length leather coat and looking like a stereotypical secret policeman entered the scene. It soon became apparent that he spoke little more than perfunctory English and neither John nor I spoke any German, other than a few words. Basically, after some English, some French and some German we discovered what he wanted – for us to remove the posters which not only advertised a club in West Berlin, but also, the dance competition was more than he could stand. We began to comply as the others who had been oblivious to all this returned from the café. Mal discovered that East German secret police have little sense of irony when he said to the bloke “Making us do that might start World War Three”. The cop only understood the WW3 part of that and fixed Mal with a glare that could stop a charging tiger. Fortunately, our removing the posters seemed to satisfy him and he left. About an hour later, cop no. 1 returned with our passports and it was with much relief we set off for Munich. It was whilst in Munich we had an incident with the fledgling Baader Meinhof people. After Munich we were booked at another Berlin club and whilst returning from this (on our way to Salzburg) we found ourselves in the midst of a division of the Russian army prior to the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring. Happy days! Those stories will come later.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 22:42:40 +0000
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