Marco Thiede

HUMAN PUNK

FOR REAL

Translated “for real” by

Bill Collins and Marco Thiede

– FUEGO –

– About the book –

If you used to be a punk, you never where!

I wasn’t even twelve years old in 1976 when I heard about this “New Thing” from England called: PUNK ROCK! Something completely new, snotty and revolutionary. A musical and verbal revolution against the Establishment! A punch right in the face of the whining love song era! I was immediately affected…or better said: infected!

It started with The Sex Pistols and The Damned - but when I heard Jean Jacques Burnel’s bass guitar in “Goodbye Toulouse” by The Stranglers I was totally stoked!

Then as now, the music has never lost its power and energy, and I love all these songs like the first day I heard them!

In this book I’m attempting to describe the beginning of the Punk movement in Bremen - a very unpopular and rough German city - especially in the 80s. About the ongoing battles with right-wing Skinheads, and how we had to scrape together every penny just so we could go to as many cool shows as possible. First in Bremen, then other German cities, then in England (the Promised Land of Punk Rock!), and later in California. To me, it’s an ongoing, never-ending adventure. Finally, In 2012, I “landed” in the Bay Area.

In December 2014 I became 50 years old and Punk Rock is still, to this day, the only kind of music that always gives me goose bumps! And this will never change - as with many of the other “infected” - to my last breath!

Foreword

What a night! For nearly 3 hours helicopters have been circling our house in Vallejo, a small town in California near Oakland and San Francisco. I've been living here now since October 2012, far away from my much colder homeland in Germany.

Totally wiped out, I drag my tired body out of bed and look forward to my first cup of coffee.

I look out the window and watch an old an old lady strolling past our house on Ryder Street. She has a gypsy look to her; she reminds me of my long dead grandma from Bremen Nord …

Grandma Thiede lived right next door, in the other half of our duplex in Bremen-Aumund. This was an old lady you did not mess around with. Actually, she was anything but a “lady”…

My grandpa was better off than most in our neighborhood of Aumund-Vegesack. He was the first one in that neighborhood to own his own work truck. After he married my grandma his life changed, and not for the better. She showed him right away that she’d have nothing whatsoever to do with keeping house. It didn't take long before they both started drinking heavily. Though they were both already lifelong drinkers, after their wedding, things went only in one direction: downhill!

After a couple of years, the situation deteriorated even more, and as little kids my older siblings and I learned to fear the Terrors Next Door on a daily basis.

Constantly, we could hear bottles smashing against the wall on the other side of our walls as grandma and grandpa beat each other up day in, day out.

I felt sorry, for my father was the complete opposite of his parents. It didn't take long before my grandparents’ house began to attract the most fucked up neighborhood drunks. Windowpanes were soon replaced by wooden boards, and more often than not, one or two police vans were parked in front of the house.

When cars came racing down our street at 50 km/h they would all slow down as they passed our grandparents' place just to see what was flying through the window, or what was being demolished in the front yard today.

Grandma and grandpa Thiede were the talk of the town in Bremen Nord.

Two houses away lived my other grandparents on my mother’s side - who, lucky for us were much nicer. At that time we still had an orchard, complete with manure pile and rabbit hutches.

In our neighborhood, we kids had plenty of opportunities to blow off steam outdoors. Not so far away was a little forest with a pond where we often liked to go to catch frogs and newts.

Next door at my grandma’s lived three cousins: two older boys, and a girl my age. I felt sorry for them because of all the chaos they had to put up with. My aunt Gisela, their mother, was a part-time prostitute and hard-core alcoholic. Her husband, uncle Willie, was a seaman somewhere near Bremerhaven, who more or less followed the path of excess blazed so well by the rest of his family. After a while, my cousins ended up in a state run Home in Bremen-Aumund.

I took another sip of my coffee, when once again these stupid helicopters interrupted my thoughts. It seemed the cops were chasing somebody through the backyards.

Vallejo does not have the best reputation when it comes to criminal activities.

When I recently attended, more or less by chance, a meeting of German transplants, in a pub in Napa Valley, I startled all present when I told them that I live in Vallejo. All the German granny ladies there assured me that when they go to Vallejo or Oakland, they always carry guns in their purses. I could not help but grin and thought to myself: what do I need to fear more - German Grannies armed to the teeth, or Oakland’s resident crack heads?

But back to my childhood …

Back in the days when there were only three channels on the television – apart from what was going on next door - life was rather unspectacular.

As a little boy I unfortunately had always eaten what was on the table, whether I liked it or not. From time to time rabbits were on the menu, but for some reason that was never my thing. Until I had my own rabbit named “Max” on my plate one day. From then on rabbit became my favorite meal! Normally, especially in childhood, an event like this has the opposite result...

As a little kid, my mother constantly forced me to wear scratchy tights, in which I could function only partially, in a robot like way.

A scratch - phobia still haunts me to this day when shopping or trying on new pants. It took years before blue jeans were finally able to triumph over my woolens.

At some point my father started to build a new house in our garden, a task that took him some years. We were finally able to enjoy the Terror of our grandparents from a safe distance.

Nevertheless, the drunken escapades continued to run their course, with more and more sketchy hoodlum types and assorted thugs. It wasn’t uncommon to see one of their new drinking buddies, with a fresh black eye, or a self-sutured Rambo style scar.

Sometimes, when our local drunks burglarized one of our local kiosks or mom and pop shops nearby, they’d present us kids with stolen goods they had no use for.

As a young spud I found a preference for football, and kicked the ball around with my buddies in wind and weather on every imaginable green space. This in turn led to some conflicts with less enthusiastic neighbors who lived directly next to those green areas.

That's why many of our neighborhood kids joined our local football club, Eintracht Aumund. I stayed there as a defender in the (youngest) E group, until a knee injury ended my football career as a hopeful scorer, later in the C group.

1974, Germany became world champions. That was the first time I saw my entire family dancing on the couch at home to the victorious final game! The precursor to Pogo?

Gerd Mueller from Bayern became my football idol. I’m a Bayern Muenchen supporter to this day!

Note: It occurs to me here, that all, like me, who were born in 64,are true-blue loyal types. We stand up for our cause and are not constantly changing ours minds about what we stand behind.

All others in my school were, of course, for Werder Bremen, but they were too boring for me, because Werder constantly at that time was a lower level team back in those days.

Back in those days, the Sportschau program on TV only broadcast games by the three or four best clubs at the top of the league. For years, this was how it went. Bayern Munich was always one of those top teams – the only one that could defeat the other top teams in the European Cup games. They went on to win a lot of championship titles.

I spent a lot of time with my other, good, grandparents, who I will always remember fondly.

My uncle, who lived with my grandparents, often spun singles by T. Rex and The Sweet on his turntable, which eventually sparked my interest.

Even as a ten year old I wanted to have nothing to do with all the schmaltzy Pop bands my parents listened to. The hit parade with Dieter Thomas Heck was ridiculous to me, and on the most embarrassing music show of all time: Ilja Richter’s Disco, 95 % of all the bands just plain made you sick. Bands like Pussycat, Baccara, or Peter Maffay – it was a chamber of horrors with no end. If you were lucky, you could at least admire ABBA’s pretty (at that time) singer Annafried at least, which doesn’t say much for their music - which sucked - unless one was so stinking drunk that nothing made any difference.

My three - year - older brother loved progressive Rock bands like Rainbow or Nazareth. But bands with songs like “Love Hurts”, were not my cup of tea. I realized early on that I had a lot more in common with the Bad Boys of the music scene.

At that time there were still bands like The Who, who demolished stages and their guitars. I found them much more to my taste, but still felt there was something missing. True, at that time, there were bands like MC5, and Iggy and the Stooges, but in Germany they were relatively unknown.

The Sweet did it for me a for few years; despite having top hits they still played aggressive music and had a penchant for destruction, that was cool.

But I would never have guessed what was coming my way two years later, towards the end of 1976. Something that never existed until that time. New, rebellious! Punk Rock, a music that told the truth. An attitude, combined with lifestyle and pure madness!

That has to this day, forever shaped my life, and turned everything that came before upside down.

1976

That was the year of redemption! A bunch of crazy fuckers from London would change the lives of an entire generation and youth culture forever. That was the year of Punk Rock! A rebellion against the music establishment; a revolution of misfits. Finally there was something that was a reaction against all that useless Disco garbage and those endless whining love songs. Something that spoke the truth. Finally we had music to touch, to go crazy to and get our aggressions out on. The Punk invasion came at the perfect time, in the era of nuclear power, RAF (Red Army Faction), environmental pollution and other crises.

Punk Rock has changed my life forever, and in an extremely positive way. Unfortunately, it has drawn many…too many other people down into the gutter. From the beginning, I’ve always done my own thing. I had no ambition to just get wasted, and kept my hands off of drugs. And this in a time when those who indulged like crazy people died off like flies!

I've always been working class, and have nothing in common with those colored-haired Crusties that hang around the train stations.

With this book, I want to document, as well as I can, my Punk Rock life story. From the zero hour, with a focus on the 80s, up to and including today. With all the ups and downs. Including the growth of the Bremen Punk scene, and all the violent clashes against the right-wing Skinheads, cops and rednecks.

Bremen was, especially in the 80s, a very unpleasant place for Nazi Skinheads and sometimes, unfortunately, for Punks from other cities. Because of this, in part, it was not possible for Bremen bands to gig out of town, or to find places to crash in other cities.

Through the founding of ASL (Anti Skinhead League ) Bremen Punks became very well known throughout the whole German Republic. For this, they were sometimes shunned in other cities, because at the beginning of the Punk era, many Punks and Skins hung out together. Beginning of the 80s however, the whole Punks and Skins United thing fell apart.

I would first have to make it clear that I 'm not a thug, and don’t necessarily need violence in my life. But it was always clear to me that I would stand up for my beliefs, whether it was fun or not! If you were a Punk in Bremen, you were automatically in the ASL! There was no founder or boss. Our priority was to attack Skins whenever we saw them, and leave no inch for them to gain a foothold. Bremen was virtually the English Huddersfield,or Millwall (two cities infamous for their Hooliganism); we had a tendency towards cruelty. That’s how it was. This was war!

We all come from the Street, not from the hair salon. And that's a good thing. From today's perspective, I am totally happy that some of my former enemies are nowadays very good friends of mine, healed from the wounds I helped inflict on them, and able to enjoy life.

I realize that I can’t please everyone with this book. But honestly, I don’t really give a fuck. People will always criticize, no matter what you do. Even if you buy the whole world a free beer…

Another reason to write this book, was that although there are many books about bands, musicians, etc., very few have been written from the perspective of other participants: spectators, companions or eyewitnesses. So-called No-Names have maybe written Punk novels – but that’s all...

And also my two friends T. Winter and Chaos, which at that time were on the other side, have written about that time from their perspective, and in my opinion, did a damn good job. So that gave me another reason: to show the situation from the point of view of Punk Rockers, to describe the “brutal, despised” Bremen.

I was unfortunately always too dumb to play an instrument, or even to growl into the microphone, although unbelievably many thought I played in bands. Let's hope that at least my scribbling sounds a bit more interesting.

Dedicated to myself, my daughter Cheyenne, my wife Sarah, my sister Pedy Peng Peng and all my countless great friends. For those that share my life, and those who are sadly no longer with us.

The list is endless!

1976-1989

Bremen-Nord was a town in itself. In the 70s, most in my class were Sweet or Kiss fans.

The Sweet was really my band. From time to time they played on Ilja Richter Disco, Saturday nights on German television’s Channel Two. It happened that the singer Brian Connolly (RIP), broke the microphone and threw it into the corner. Or that Mick Tucker, drummer, smashed up his drums after a song. In the playground the next day that was the number one topic of discussion. Hits like Blockbuster or Hellraiser today are still some of my favorite tunes. At that time, the world’s ugliest band, the Bay City Rollers, attacked the charts. As a result, my favorite band felt they had to compete with them. Suddenly The Sweet played only fuckin ' love songs.

The climax of that cruelty was “Fever of Love”. WTF!

It made you want to scream. Out of the blue, we suddenly became aware of a new sensation out of England. All of a sudden there were articles in the Bravo (Teenie music magazine) on the New Threatening Thing from England: Punk Rock!

It hit like a bomb. Millions of people were disgusted by what had exploded onto the British music scene. Fortunately, this was just what countless crazy and bored people had been waiting for, for years.

Right away, my classmate Voller and I were infected. Many people thought we were crazy, but it wasn’t long till we saw one or two others who were also infected by Punk Rock.

Slowly our situation developed and we set off down the long road to the Viertel - Bremen City’s Punk neighborhood. That took time, thanks to the poor bus service, up to two hours. At flea markets here, you could already discover one or another Punk record. Before long, there was a record store called Govi, which was very focused on Punk Rock. Incredible, that it was possible, even at that time, to buy Punk records from cute, pretty Punk girls working behind the counter.

What birds of paradise!

I'll never forget the first time I heard “Goodbye Toulouse” by the Stranglers, at home with my brother. What a bass! I’d never experienced the true sound of a bass guitar in this way before. Killer! My brother liked that too, although he hated Punk then for some reason.

Eventually I met a guy, who I called Sweet Fan, because he had The Sweet logo on his jacket. When I called out to him: Hey, Sweet Fan, he replied to me: I am not a fan of Sweet anymore! I’m a Stranglers Fan and listen to Punk Rock now! That was Wanne of HB-Nord (Bremen Nord). A lifelong Punk Rocker. Just like me.

In the Viertel then there were already Punk or New Wave stores like the Camarillo. We were always happy when we ran into another new Punk. What an adventure!

It was not really easy for us Bremen - Norder. I was born in 1964 and was not even twelve when everything took off. We hardly had any money, and the way to Bremen was very long. Sometimes even longer if we’d been drinking beer and had to take a piss. On the other hand, we still had long hair, and had the feeling that the City Punks despised us because they had short hair or spikes. Then there was the problem that we young sprouts had to be back home on time, which worked less and less.

Near the infamous Sielwall corner was the first official Punk pub called Chateau. Weekends over there were always crazy, and that’s where we first made contact with the Punks from Oslebshausen - which was between Bremen Nord and the City. But the Oslebs Punks didn’t trust us at first, because of our long hair and our oversized, homemade, plate-sized Punk badges.

Only one was very cool to us from the beginning. Hank from Ritterhude. I remember that I met him once at a Buttocks concert where he had his hair spiked with green fluorescent car paint! Unfortunately, that didn’t work out to well for him, so he had to cut it all off down to the scalp. Through Hank I heard about an upcoming Punk concert in Ohlenhof in Groepelingen.

On September 22^nd I finally got to attend my very first Punk concert: Two bands from Braunschweig: Bombed Bodies, (later Daily Terror) and Riot Squad (who were later renamed Sluts). What a show! And so many Punks from everywhere! I was in seventh heaven.

During the show my Dad came to pick me up. I was so excited that I poured my beer in my hair beforehand, and dragged him into the concert hall!

“You have to see this,” I stuttered. But unfortunately, he was extremely shocked and could not share my enthusiasm. The foundation for more trouble in the future was laid ...

Nothing could stop me now. Not even the Punk movement.

More and more shops sold Punk records. Ear Records, JPC.... Fanzines were made, and there were more and more Punk shows going on.

The Schunt was the first fanzine. It was followed by the Endloesung, the Kotwurm etc. It didn’t take long before I made my own fanzine: Trash – Printing: ten copies. Then the Norddeutsche, with a similar amount of copies.

One time my parents went on vacation. When they came back, my hair was gone. My mother was shocked. My dad kind of liked it. I remember like it was yesterday that my classmates looked at me like I was an alien. Actually, I used to be just the opposite, and there was always a big drama when my mother wanted to cut my hair.

Punk Rock now found a place in the media more and more. The Bravo dedicated a monthly page to the “New Wave”. Thomas Gottschalk, the German grannies’ favorite son, hosted the television music show: Szene 77, Szene 78 … where you could watch the Damned, Stranglers, Devo, XTC and other bands. Unfortunately, never the Sex Pistols, but they did show Iggy Pop.

The cool thing about Iggy's appearance was that he stretched himself and flailed his body around, but kept his mouth shut. He was probably thinking “why not?”

Since most bands lip-synced to their recordings. I think this was a very embarrassing situation for German TV!

In Bremen, some bands were formed: A5, Niveau Null, Substral (even till now, Bremen’s only female band!)

Blutsturz, Shaddocks, Volksabstimmung, Nylon Euter, AOK, Speichelkrieg, Snobs, Headbangers, Organbank, Modern Primitiv, and, and, and...

In the Buchtstrasse and in the Kulturfabrik Hemelingen and of course at the Schlachthof you could watch the first out-of-town Bands: The Buttocks from Hamburg, ZK (later the famous Toten Hosen) – who were always fun to watch - with Out of Order, the English band that lived in Bielefeld, Wutstock (later Blut und Eisen ), The Aristocats (later Boskops), Blitzkrieg and Kondensators (both from Hannover), Daily Terror, etc…

There was also a mysterious guy I had seen at only two Punk shows at the Marin Werderstrasse (Groepelingen). He was dressed completely like Spiderman and always kept in the background. Now and then he’d pogo like a maniac - for never more than two minutes - till all the furniture near him was reduced to splinters. Real impressive. No one knows who he was, or where he came from.

Maybe he was the real Spiderman ...

The media paid more and more attention. The cops hated us, and there was constantly friction and arrests. In Hamburg, there was a big war between Teds and Punks, and it was always in the newspapers.

We also had a few Teds in Bremen. Some of them we even knew personally. We thought it was stupid to attack Teds just because the press wanted us to. There was only one Ted in Vegesack who, like the Hamburg Teds, wanted war with the Punks. Then, when I wanted to confront him about this one day, he ran and hid in a shoe store. That was our gang war in Bremen. The so-called Popper (Yuppie Disco fans) war would follow, but was actually just as moronic, as well as not particularly noteworthy. Especially in contrast to what was waiting for us with the right-wing Skinheads later!

In October 1979, Sid Vicious made ​​ the alleged murder of Nancy Spungen a worldwide sensation. My father confronted me with the Bild-Zeitung with Sid Vicious on the front page. What could I say?

Meanwhile, in England and elsewhere there were countless brilliant bands: The Ruts, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, Rezillos ...

From the States, the brilliant Dead Boys, Ramones, Blondie ... The list was and is endless.

We could hardly wait to listen to and tape the newest stuff from England on John Peel's Music program on BFBS.

Of course, the big record companies got wind of a possible quick buck and tried to cash in on what they could get.

The Clash, one-time political rebel flagship band, were the first to give in and sign with a major label. The Big Sell Out began. When the Clash played in Hamburg it didn’t take long before the disappointed audience kicked them off the stage. After all, there was a vision in addition to the music.

Then a kind of stagnation came into Punk Rock, and more and more bands went mainstream and softened their style to New Wave instead of Punk Rock. That was around 1980.

Luckily, there were many who thought differently. And suddenly, new, harder, often more political bands like Discharge, Crass, Varukers, Chaos UK, Conflict and countless others took off. Harder, uncompromising, more energetic. Political Punk Rock at its best.

The new cult of studs and spikes was born. A few Bremen Punks went to Hamburg Bergedorf to a hardware store called Brothers Glunsch very often. There we bought tons of studs for our jackets and were an annoying highlight for the employees every time we showed up...

Many Punks found the scene and music too hard now, and left. We Northerners then hung out more and more with the Oslebs Punks, especially a Punk of Greek descent - let's call him GG - who loved to fight. GG and I were both born in Hartmannstift, Bremen Vegesack’s hospital. GG was born 12 days ahead of me. I am sure that, as babies we made a pact in vomit on the hospital corridor to become Punk Rockers in 12 years! At that time, pregnant women still had to stay in the hospital up to three weeks after birth...

GG was also our excellent secret weapon when it came to fights with Skinheads. More on this later.

Many people started using the funniest nicknames: Fickfrosch (Frogfucker), Kroete (Toad), Katja ohne Zahn (Toothless Katja), Krankenhaus Anke (Hospital Anke - RIP), Bloed (Dopey), Eierpfeile (Balls-grater), Tommy Rinnstein (Tommy Curbstone), Doris Killcat, Staffi, Bloody, Burp, Banana, Droehnung (Shitfaced - RIP), Gockel (Rooster), Shashlik, Koma, … the list is endless! A bit later came Ines Bohrteufel (Ines Drilling Devil), Sonja Säufertochter (Sonja Drunkard’s Daughter), Smeagol, Nikki Bum Bum, Hueftschaden Ute (Damaged Hips Ute), etc.

Now there were more and more shows, and the Schlachthof in Bremen became more and more our home. Also, in other cities there were already many clubs. So sometimes we drove to Hanover to the Korn, Glocksee, or more often to Hamburg to the Markthalle or other venues.

The Krawall 2000 club didn’t last long in Hamburg, and soon the friction with the Teds developed into brawls with Skinheads.

There weren’t many true left wing Skinheads in existence back then. We were actually baffled to hear that the main Nazi leader in Hamburg was a Black man named Heiner G.

How crazy is that?

We heard more and more about fights with Baldies in other cities. In Bremen we said from the beginning: No Skinheads at our concerts!

1981, the Downfall Tour came to the Marinwerderstrasse Youth Center in Bremen Groepelingen. Slime, Betoncombo, Middle Class Fantasies, and Aheads from Herford played.

To our great surprise, a lot of Skinheads from Hamburg showed up. With them came an imbecile named Michael David, the subject of a documentary, “From Nazi to Punk”.

Michael David was actually more of a jean-jacket Redneck with a stupid, distinctive speech impediment. From Nazi to Punk? And now he dared to show up with a horde of Fascist Skinheads? It didn’t take long before there was a brawl in every corner.

The climax came when all the members of Betoncombo put down their instruments and jumped off the stage to join the fight! The whole thing then shifted outside where it escalated even more.

That was it. From now on there was war in Bremen. Anyone in a bomber jacket with no hair was attacked! Now things really took off, especially since the Skinhead scene in Bremen had gotten noticeably larger. The Bremen Skins responded, and began ambushing solitary Punks on the way to the Schlachthof, at the train station or the Findorff tunnel. Especially in the 80s, the Schlachthof was regularly attacked during Punk concerts. Many a time, bands like GBH played to an empty hall because all the people were outside hunting the Skinheads, who never made it into the Schlachthof, because they knew that this would have been a quick end for everyone of them.

It was not long before the first US Punk bands were on tour.

In Hanover, I finally got to see Dead Kennedys and MDC from San Francisco. What an amazing concert! But Skinheads everywhere. While I was pogoing I saw I was completely surrounded by a Skinhead mob, and to this day still don’t know how I got out of there in one piece. There were others who weren’t as lucky as I was.

The concert took place in a venue called the Rotation, and afterwards, Jello Biafra swore he’d never play there again. He called it one of the absolute worst places he’d ever played. In front of the stage there was a broad ditch, which was several meters deep. Nevertheless, Biafra had could not be kept from jumping over the fence, into the raging mob. I thought it was weird that were bodybuilder security goons everywhere on stage!? A short time later, Black Flag came to Europe. First I saw them in Hanover, and then the next day in Hamburg.

48 hours with no sleep and no drugs – then, off to work.

Fortunately, I never had anything to do with drugs. What a blessing.

Also, at these two concerts there was a lot of ongoing Skinhead trouble. It made me want to puke that that a small mob of Skinheads kept reappearing and ruining the shows. It took a long time till the Hamburg Punks were finally able to stand up to the Skins and kick them out for good at a Toy Dolls show in the Markthalle.

Now in Bremen was the ASL (Anti Skin League), which had become known all over the country. There was no chance, even for a single Skinhead to show up at our shows.