rock'n'rill

The Reverend & me & two more Stooges

Had a pretty cool, diverse weekend last week. Here’s the rundown.

photo by Lucas Schobert

On Friday I played at Brückenkopf in Hanau near Frankfurt. I shared this gig with Reverend Schulzz. Knowing that the good Reverend has near-legendary status in his hometown, all along I had assumed it would be a double-header. A few days before the gig I realized that it was more of an opener/main act kinda deal (with him being the opener).
He’s a good guy, we’ve met a few times. I sat in with him on “Paraguay”, a song by his mentor Rich Hopkins, and found some cool guitar lines to go with it. Later on in my set, Dirk played another one of his original songs and played harp on a few of mine.

One of the previews had called our gig “the Hanau version of Bob Dylan meets Townes van Zandt” – they have a nice sense of humor there. At any rate, the place was packed!

Luke, the promoter, put me up at his place for the night. It turned out that he’s one of Germany’s biggest Tom Waits fans so we listened to Waits’s new album which I hadn’t heard before. Great stuff. Had a great time hanging out with Luke.
I enjoyed the Reverend’s set the night before. His wife Julia played the singing saw – pretty cool and unusual!

Saturday

After visiting a curious local institution – Vladimir Leidl’s Fried Chicken – I made my way to Marburg to hook up with my friend Robert Oberbeck aka Bob Hormel. Our plan was to spend the afternoon working on a song we’ve been collaborating on via email for a while and then run through some tunes we could do together at night. What we actually accomplished was to catch up with each other’s private lives and then play almost every John Mellencamp song known to man. Robert has worked up a nice version of John Prine’s Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness that I was able to latch onto.

At 7 p.m. we ventured to Molly Malone’s, the pub we were playing at that night, and hooked up with Markus Leidig, the third Stooge, if you will. I’ve shared a few gigs with Markus, he’s gigged with Robert but this was our first threesome. After checking sound we sat together backstage and worked up a few songs we could do together. It’s interesting how the common ground you share with people differs. With some folks it’s Dylan or Townes, with others it’s Johnny Cash or Elvis, with some I can do Stones or CCR, but between the three of us it was mostly Springsteen and Mellencamp.

We all played separate 40-minute sets with a couple of duo things thrown in and ended on about 30 minutes or so of jamming. In his set, Robert played a stellar version of Blood Brothers and dueted beautifully with Markus on another Springsteen song (but right now I can’t remember which one it was, sorry).

I tried out a couple new songs in my set debuting “Never Come To Know”, a cool new song.

But, really, the highlight of the evening was the three of us banging our guitars on “Small Town” and “Pink Houses” and “The Joker” and ending with a mellow take on “Hungry Heart”. A real good night with a good-sized audience..