Go See The Man
A man makes his way towards the stage in Festsaal Kreuzberg. Just any Wednesday, unnoticeable among the wreckage of past Wednesdays.
I have just seen three Swedish boys slag off an overly complacent Berliner audience, having clearly expected an enthusiastic and wired crowd. Well boys, the clock is still pre-vodka, your drummer is sporting a persistent cumface and whatever it is you are playing, it's just not going to fill a dance floor at half past eight on a Wednesday evening. So let's face it, bitching about the audience won't do you any good. Do your own damn dancing, get the audience seduced and aroused and then see if exalted appreciation doesn't simply unfold like the petals on a mexican dancing flower.
I am later made aware that the general level of appreciation exerted by Berliners at a concert lies somewhere between cemented foot disease and stomping statue, so granted, he may have had valid reasons for complaining. Maybe the Swedish audience are going at it like a pack of horny velociraptors tearing each other to shreds as the indie music blares out, shrieking constantly from self-induced ecstacy, I don't know. But as a fellow Scandinavian with some intimate knowledge of the Nordic temperament I find this unlikely. It's more like a stoned squirrel-king attempting to run in every direction at once, but that's about it.
Woebegone antics aside, nothing had prepared me for what was about to take place.
After the break a character in a gray leather jacket and black boots stroll past, seemingly unaffected that he is wearing sunglasses in the dark, balancing a full glass of what looks like Long Island Iced Tea in one hand, a beer in the other, and still chewing competently on a tooth pick.
He mounts the stage and circles it a couple of times before coming to a halt under a spot perfectly backlighting a neat and well-kept fro. The sermon begins. He is Willis Earl Beal and his bible is a book of poems by Charles Bukowski. After reading the poem «The harder you try», ending with the lines, «[..]those constipated minds that seek larger meaning/will be dispatched with the other/garbage./back off./if there is a light/it will find/you.[...]», he throws his jacket and unveils a white tee broadcasting the word «nobody», under a simple drawing of a face with cartoonishly dead eyes, all tightly wrapped around a rocket he can, and shall, refer to as: «his body», and commences a 35 minute gospel that owes credit to a range of influences from Robert Johnson to Screaming Jay Hawkins to Saul Williams to Flava Flav. Nobody saw this coming. A single man traversing across the stage, jigging his way into music history, drink firmly locked in leather-gloved hand, not a drop spilled, reassuring at least one paying customer - who expected to slowly perish in monomatic indielalia - that the future isn't all tainted with skinny kids half-hidden behind a mountain of cheap jewellery, singing vegan valedictions while proclaiming to be in a constant state of post-party drug confusion.
There just could be something else, something better, something valuable bound to occur at any moment. A much needed relief from any kind of paradiscourse ran by these Children of the Behemoth, a break from the bored and unbelligerent, a return, so to say, to where we have always been before, but with feeling this time.
Willis Earl Beal is the here and now, a scorching musical sorcerer who has come from some Starbucks-aligned crossroads to stick his tooth-pick in our Gordian knot of contemporary quatsch. To unfurl his gin-drenched battle rag over the then and when. A savior standing tall on a chair above his semen-encrusted and unshaven followers, orchestrating timeless moves on a balustrade of broken glass to appease yet another drunken, blind and non-existent god.
I am reborn. Into the church of Who-Gives-A-Fuck.
Sing it from your heart, baptized in gin, fire, curry, salt or fat, it doesn't matter, just step outside and feel yourself. Do you have what it takes?
In the words of Don Van Vliet: «If you want to be a different fish, you got to jump out of school.»
B.A.
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