Dear Dr. Larkey, Forgive the delay. I know you’re on a deadline.  Here are my recollections about the gig we did in East Germany for their TV show, RUND, in 1983.

Would it be possible to skype/phone this evening? If I leave anything out, or if you have questions, I can be available at 8pm.  My skype name is joyryder.   I have spoken to Jimi Voxx, my former boyfriend and guitarist, who organized the show with RUND.  He organized several gigs for us in the East, and had connections through a diplomat there.  He would be willing to speak to you by telephone.  Perhaps we could conference call.

I remember being out in the countryside in East Germany, at a hotel, and it being very primitive.  The toilet paper was pretty impressive, with a texture somewhere between brown paper towels and sandpaper. There was one lightbulb overhead, and that was the lighting. The room hadn’t been painted since Sputnik was launched. I don’t remember any central heating in the hotel, and have a recollection of a very sparse room.

The fellows in the band were looking around for things to do, after rehearsal, so they  went to investigate why people were on line at some little shop, near the hotel.  Sid came back with Darryl to report that the whole town was on line for strawberries!  The store was the only shop in town, it seemed, that was open, and this for the express purpose of selling strawberries on this Saturday morning.  In the middle of nowhere, there was a long line, like the whole town was waiting for Springsteen tickets!

When we got to the studio, there were soldiers digging a trench outside. My mind went to James Bond films, and I figured they might be building underground missile silos. I idly thought how silly the US government was not to use rock musicians as spies, since we seemed to have access to places that others didn’t.

In those days it cost 25 Deutsche Marks per day to visit the East. You had to go thru Checkpoint Charlie, or one of the lesser known checkpoints, and pay yer admission. Most of us artists weren’t so wealthy to be able to afford that cover charge, and the guards could be sort of hostile too.  Once, Jim and I went to East Berlin with Inga Rumpf, a singer who had done 17 albums, in German, with a group called Frumpy.  The kids in the East had heard the band on West radio, but had never seen the group live. We went to a “Youth center” in East Berlin, a boarded up ground floor apartment in a back courtyard, where they had a record player, a bunch of scratchy vinyl LPs, a few red lights in the ceiling for atmosphere, and some long tables.  They served the DDR version of “screwdriver” which was 100 proof vodka with orange koolaid.  When the kids realize that Inga was from Frumpy, they practically asphyxiated her, trying to get next to her.  She and Jim and I signed autographs, and then got out of there before she got smothered.

This was still the cold war, but I could play in the East, as I understood, because I held an “Ally” passport.  German bands had a tougher time getting in.  My drummer was German from Indonesia, the bassist was American and the Guitarist was West German. We were paid in East German marks, and then somehow we gave the pay to the booking agent/diplomat who exchanged the money for us for West currency, which he gave to us on our next show in the East. This worked well, until the last show, when the diplomat was nowhere to be found.  We couldn’t take DDR currency out of their country, and couldn’t exchange it in the West, anyway.  We wound up trying to buy each other dinners and drinks in Karl Marx Stadt after getting paid for a show, and finding out that our diplomat had disappeared, leaving us all with too much East cash. “Let me buy you that saurbraten and champagne”.  “No, let me buy yer dinner for you, I insist”.  A town threw a party for us at their cultural club. The town itself looked like it hadn’t changed since the middle ages. One could imagine carts with bodies on them being hauled through the narrow streets with masked people calling “bring out the dead” during a medieval plague. At the culture center, a young couple told me that they were getting married, and as a wedding present, the State was going to give them a hot water heater.  I figured this was a pretty practical arrangement, marriage in exchange for a hot tub to soak in.  I was ready to marry someone too, if it meant that I could get a hot shower, and that was only after one chilly East German day.

I remember taping two shows of Rund, or perhaps we did two takes, Jim would maybe remember better. We performed to playback, which was common in early American TV in the 1950s and 60s, where artists had to lipsync the lyrics and mime playing their instruments. ( By comparison, in West Germany in 1984, when we did Beatclub Special, . it was recorded live to multitrack.)   At the end of the session, a young person with flowers from the Young Communists came out to thank me, with a bouquet of flowers.  I was horrified.  I knew how much the US detested communism, having read about the McCarthy era and blacklisting. This was just a music show, and now some Commie kids, in uniforms yet, like the boy scouts, were giving me daffodils!  One even kissed me on the cheek, I think..I smiled and thanked them, but worried that perhaps my government would yank my passport for being kissed by a “Commie Boyscout”.

The people in the East were really sweet.  They were curious to meet Americans, and were very kind to us.  I only remember one live show we did at the Metropol in East Berlin, where we performed rock n’ roll in the middle of the afternoon, with the “War Heros” in the front row.  In E. Germany and Poland (where we also performed), the soldiers with medals got the best front row seats for all events.  Unfortunately, we were playing a sort of avante guarde rock music, where the old guys would have preferred Bach.  At live shows in the East, we always had a wall of front row grouchy old guys, and behind, a pack of wildly enthusiastic kids, who didn’t mind going to a rock concert at 1pm.

After the show, where we shared the bill with several East German bands (Jim would know better who they were), we had a party. I remember drinking the really strong vodka with some sort of orange koolaid, the drink of choice in East Germany.  A drummer from one of the bands broke down in tears because he could never play in the UK or the USA.  I tried to console him. “You can play in Moscow.  Its hard for me to play there!  You can play in Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and maybe even China. I only can play in NY and California and Berlin”. It made him cry harder. I reminded him that he got 5 or 7 marks per hour, working, while we had to fly by the seat of our pants.  He was miserable.

Girls showed up at the Metropol, lining up on the walls as the band came through, cruising the boys in the band.  Some of the girls were flirting with babies in their arms.  They were looking for West boyfriends.

There are lots more impressions, and Jim has a lot of them, having worked with East bands.  I am looking forward to your project.  I can read some German, so please tell me when you’re published.  Thanks, Joy

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