Don't you think the most exciting times in life are often the ones that are completely unexpected, those days or nights that God just blows in from some strange existence that make your own existence more thrilling, and even more alive. Now with a start like that, you'd think I was going to tell you a story that changed my life or something. But this was simply just a interesting night that should definitely be recorded....
It was a Sunday night in our fair city, and Magnus and I were watching a documentary on the life of Stephen Hawking. And just as the cosmos were changing and time was going in reverse with broken coffee cups flying back together and people growing younger, I got a text from our Australian friend Kate. She said the concert they'd been to was absolutely fantastic and sorry we missed it. But the band would be meeting her and her Aussie pals in a bar near the Muscle Temple studio in ten minutes. We decide that the reversing cosmos and Hawking could wait a few hours maybe while we had a beer with friends.
Now I forgot to mention that Kate and the Aussies went to see R. Stevie Moore play. I didn't remember the name whenever they mentioned him earlier in the week whenever they said they were planning to go, but later I figured out who Mr. Moore is and where he comes from. TENNESSEE! I remember reading one time that he once sang a duet with Mr. Jim Reeves and his voice of velvet, as Momma says ♥. And Mr. Moore has self-released over 400 cassette and CD-R albums since 1968. Whoa.
So we arrive to Rote Rose on Adalbertstrasse to a bar full of very drunken older Germans dancing to the Macarena on the jukebox. Uh oh. And they announce that they've been there partying for three days. Congratulations guys. Other than the very depressing site of this, these guys were pretty entertaining. One guy stands out and seems to be the leader of their party. So my friend goes over to ask the camouflage-clad man some questions. "He claims to be famous," my friend whispers. "He won't say who he is, he just keeps whistling 'Winds of Change'.'' We laughingly guess that he's the founder of the 1980s German hair-band Scorpions [whose name I won't write here just in case he finds this blog whenever he Googles himself after waking up from his party!]. For those of you who don't remember, Scorpions wrote one of the most famous, or infamous some would say, songs after the falling of the Berlin Wall. Well the night goes on and this joke starts becoming reality. He won't let anyone take his photo, says he lives on Kensington High Street in London, and he demands to be in control of the jukebox. Whenever I would try to choose a song, he would jump in real quick and press a stupid song [!]. And I couldn't get angry since this could truly be this fallen rock star. I felt so sad for him! But we never really took the idea too seriously, as R. Stevie Moore arrived, and I remembered our original mission, which was to hear Mr. Moore's sweet Tennessee accent :).
So Mr. Moore arrived with his band at one point, and I immediately loved him. He was just as I imagined, like my long lost rock and roll Grandpa, here in Berlin. He's a lot younger than my sweet Grandfathers, but he has very snowy-white hair and a long white beard to match making him look older than he really is. And he has a very kind sentiment that makes anyone immediately wanna be his friend. I don't know his music very well, but I knew right when he spoke that it must be very charming.
As we were speaking, I noticed that my Southern drawl was kickin' back in, and his became stronger and stronger as mine did! He's been on his first tour ever this summer all over the place and been living lately in NYC. But despite all this and the Aussie/Norwegian/German/Turkish accents around us, we spoke Southernese and it made me wanna cry.
Why can't there be more Southerners in Berlin??? And why can't the few Southerners we have here keep our accents? I really try and make an effort to keep mine, but it's so difficult whenever you want everyone that's living here from around the world to understand you. It's tough.
But it was absolutely amazing to hear this voice that once sang with Jim Reeves in the 1950s in Tennessee exist here in this strange bar. But soon we began to get tired and Mr. Moore was of course exhausted having played a sold-out show, and most of us were ready to head home. We said goodbye to the Scorpions man and his drunken pals and walked outside. I'd only spoken to R. Stevie Moore for a short time, but I felt like I'd known him for a while. I guess that's what home can be like. It exists where your family is, and it exists in small parts of the world whenever you can run into it. I gave him a hug and told him to be careful gettin' home.
As Magnus and I walked home, we were still laughing about the 'Winds of Change' dude. So whenever we got home we Googled the Scorpions guy, and he was wearing the same camo hat in an image we found online. So bizarre...
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