hamburg

hamburg: we were supposed to play last friday night at an outdoor venue but thundershowers descended on the city and washed away our chances of playing. incidentally, that gig is now happening tonight at the kulturforum. so with show post-poned and an open weekend ahead, i took ben's offer to join his band on a weekend excursion to hamburg. it's been a while since i've travelled with a whole vanloadofbandboys but it's just the same in deustchland as it is in canada. i hardly needed german fluency to keep up with the bad jokes, word games, and endless hours of playful insults between band members. we hit the autobahn in a Highway Tiger and made the several hour trek to hamburg. on the way, however, we made a quick and amazing detour to visit ohrbooten's guitar player, matze's grandmother in the tiny town of Wittenburg. you've got to love a successful pop reggae band of boys that still finds time, en route to festival gigs, to pay a spontaneous visit to a tiny, gentle soul of an 83 year old woman. matze's grandmother and 87 year old grandpa (who was off on his daily morning bicycle ride!) have lived in the same house for 47 years. the tour van pulled in next to their miniature dwelling, overgrown with tons of flowers, a vegetable garden, huge cherry trees overhanging the house heavy with green fruit, and a back garden with chickens. the rooster even started his cockadoodling upon our arrival. matze's g-ma was so surprised to see us and so thankful to have a bunch of young gents pay her a visit. she was especially impressed by ben...i mean, he is the *singer* afterall, and insisted that we stay for coffee and that we just had to return again in a few weeks so that the cherries could be ripe for our next visit. so sweet!


got to hamburg, a port town filled with loading docks, shipyards, cranes, seafood and no buildings higher than four floors. i walked around the port with tilman (ohrbooten sound man & hip-hop beat producer, but more on that later), while the band had a meeting with their booking manager: a quintessential über-german rocker with the requisite 5 piercings in each ear, hands heavy with rings, full arm tattoos, white blonde hair, piercing azure eyes, and beautifully tailored pinstripe trousers, shirt and slick italian leather boots. running around in an abandoned warehouse, he could almost have been a nexus 6. the ohrbooten rocked a street festival mainstage (kinda like this) in a massively entertaining & headlining performance that had every age group there dancing and singing along to every tune. johnny v. was kindly invited up to join in the proceedings midway through and i rapped a few freestyle bars to an appreciative and raucous, if uncomprehending (!), crowd of hamburgers. sunday morning we re-assembled the troops and spent a few sunny afternoon hours busking and playing to outdoor cafe audiences willing to be distracted from the world cup for a few minutes (but only a few!) by our/ohr spontaneous reggae and hip-hop serenades. many new ohrbooten fans were made. soundtrack (special tourbus edition): digable planets 'reachin', the cat empire, and some german instrumental rock (unknown mixes, artists, and years).

ohrbooten - the film: returned to berlin just in time to haul gear back into the old psychiatric hospital / military institution that houses the ohrbooten's rehearsal space (the building is filled with bands jam spots, most of whom are riotous death metal groups who stay up all night jamming on one riff for 12 hours) and then we zoomed straight on to ole's house where friends and fans were gathering to watch ole's recently completed doc film on...who else...die ohrbooten. ole's girlfriend julia cooked up amazing malaysian food for the party and we revellers settled in for 80 mins of ohrbooten backstage magic. now having spent 2 days straight surrounded on all sides by german langauge speakers, i was feeling like i was getting the hang of all this deutsch stuff, well and also feeling like i had no idea what the hell was going on. needless to say, the film was fun and funny but most of its linguistic subtleties were lost on the CanCon kids in attendance. the post-screening acoustic jams lasted well into the night (again) and the weekend was complete. soundtrack: hmm...guess what- ohrbooten.