East German Music Festival Poster
Much of my life has been lived along borders. Just a stone’s throw from a border that
divided one country from the other and one culture from another. Though an
American born in India the real national divide I experienced was not that
between the States and India but between India and our mysterious, hated enemy
Pakistan. In the 1960s TIME magazine
carried full page ads for Pakistan International Airlines which boasted of its
flights to Peking and Shanghai. This was
incredible to me. India’s other big
enemy was China and relations were in the deep freeze throughout the 60s. But
here was Pakistan flying into the most isolated country of all! As I did my
business on the toilet my fancy would sail wildly across the Himalayas and try
to imagine what life was like in Peking.
Did they see movies? What sort of music did they listen to?
As an adult I’ve
lived in a tent along the Iraqi border with Iran, worked on the borders of
Afghanistan and Ethiopia. I’ve been
lucky enough to spend time in DPRK (North Korea) and Albania, two of the most
isolated nations in the world, and those tantalizing thoughts I had about 1960s
China have not disappeared. Once upon a
time Iran had a lively rock scene but in the 1980s you could be arrested for
listening to Pink Floyd. I had a friend
in Albania who was arrested for a couple of days because he had a Beatles
tape. We all know what the Taliban think
of music, and shudder at the thought of their re-capture of Afghanistan.
Of course, no country is completely isolated. Kim Jung Un was educated in Switzerland and
his dad loved Hollywood movies. Enver
Xhoxa, the Albanian Communist supremo, sent his kids to Sweden and holidayed in
the south of France, while he locked the doors of the country to his fellow
citizens. My friends still managed to
listen and even dance all night to Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel at the height
of Khomeini’s rule. As Leonard Cohen
says, “There is a crack in everything, where the light gets in”.
And so I suppose I should not have been surprised to discover
that there was an audience for American country and western music in East
Germany in the 1980s! But surprised I was.
The
Amiga imprint was the record label of the state and its (as yet
unwritten) history is surely as significant as Anna Funder’s work on the Stasi
or any on the hundreds of books which have explored the counterculture of the
DDR, be it political or social. Amiga vinyl itself is a wonder to
handle, seeming dust-resistant and impervious to scratching. Lps and singles
picked up secondhand over the years still play ‘as new’, where the sleeves
demonstrate the ravages of time and the owner’s insistence in playing them
post-pub to captive audiences, where cds would’ve perhaps been the more
sensible option.
Amiga, was
established in 1947 by Ernst Busch, a life long party member who fought in
Spain with the International Brigades. Prior to fleeing Germany in 1933, Busch
was a well-known actor and singer and he was later a frequent contributor to
Radio Madrid, recording two very hard to get albums of Civil War songs. His
performance of Peat Bog Soldiers is particularly haunting. The song, covered by
the Dubliners on ‘Revolution’ (1970), was written by Nazi political prisoners
in the Bögermoor concentration camp and first performed there in 1933. Busch
obtained the permission of the Soviet occupation authorities to establish a
label to provide music for the masses, however, it took a decade or so before
the label realised that the masses were getting tired of an anaemic diet of
Brecht, Hans Eisler, bad jazz and Kindermusik. They were now tuning their dials
to the American Forces Network stations not subject to the jamming and
interference inflicted on Radio Free Europe, the broadcasts of which were
unequivocally political. Thus began the golden age of East German pop. (http://wastedonarchaeology.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/the-great-ina-martell/)
Country Roads is a collection of American country classics released
by Amiga Records in 1985. With covers of
John Denver, Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings (often with night-club
perfect impersonation of said artists voices) this record is a happy clappy
paean to Top 40 Country ca. the mid-70s.
The playing is competent and the singing robust in that communist
propaganda film sort of way.
The cracks in the German
Democratic Republic system had obviously widened somewhat to allow such a
record to be issued. In a creepy sort of
way this is Stasi-approved country music!
Weird thought. But exactly the sort of thing I used to think about
staring at those PIA ads way back decades ago.
For an interesting
article on the East German pop scene circa 1968, click here.
Enjoy this slice of
commie country, comrades!
Track Listing:
01 Thank God I'm A
Country Boy [Achim Wilk]
02 Ring Of Fire [Peter
Tschernig]
03 Rocky Mountain Music
[Harald Wilk]
04 Foggy Mountain
Breakdown
05 Back Home Again [Achim
Wilk]
06 Apple Jack [Linda
Feller]
07 If You're Gonna Play
In Texas [M. Jones Band]
08 Take Me Home, Country
Roads [Achim Wilk, Viola Kirsten]
09 Detroit City [Harald
Wilk]
10 Broken Down Cowboy [M.
Jones Band]
11 Good Hearted Woman
[Peter Tschernig]
12 Orange Blossom Special
[Various]
13 Waiting For A Train [Harald
Wilk]
14 Medley: Wabash Cannon
Ball, etc. [Achim Wilk, Harald Wilk]
