Email this article | Printer friendly page From The Mountains To The LowlandsBy Marc Stone |
It’s good to be back at the Bodensee, or Lake of Constance. It’s a beautiful place, and I’ve had friends here for more than 10 years. It is a great place to escape the Louisiana summer heat, and it’s the place where I experienced Katrina. It is also where I experienced the reaction of the world beyond the U.S. to what was happening in New Orleans. I saw the frustration of Europeans with the American government, which has been building steadily for several years. I had to answer a lot of questions about American politics and my opinion of the president. Even though many had no direct connection to New Orleans, everyone’s feelings were laid bare by the shock of what they saw on their TV screens. While the outpouring of sympathy for the victims of Katrina was intense, I was often left wondering at what point some people were drawing a distinction between the American people and our government. Coming back to the Bodensee, I was curious to see where New Orleans sits in the general consciousness now that the better part of a year has passed.
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Since one of my first gigs was at the New Orleans Festival in Bregenz, Austria, I was at least able to get a glimpse of how New Orleans music is faring in Austria at the moment. The organizer of the Bregenz festival and the New Orleans festival in Innsbruck is Austrian musician and actor Markus Linder, who has been presenting New Orleans artists in Austria since 1999. In his words, “This kind of music fascinates Euros because it has something in it that is medicine.” When I asked him how he was representing the situation in New Orleans to his audience this year, he said, “I am always trying to make the picture of New Orleans realistic. I’m aware of all the social discrepancy, how much the musicians get paid. I’m trying to get that to the people, that it is not just Mardi Gras.”
Linder never forgets that New Orleans, even post-K, is a symbol for joy and celebration. This year he proclaimed from the stage that he wanted to bring a little bit of Bourbon Street to Bregenz. To honor Linder’s ambition, I snuck up behind bassist Michael Harris, who I hadn’t seen in about two years, and said, “Say bruh, I betcha ten dollahs I know where you got them shoes.”
Michael was in Bregenz playing with R&B saxman Charles “Chucky C” Elam. Chucky has headlined both the Bregenz and Innsbruck festivals in the past. His warm, disarming stage presence, his dead-on vocals, and his sax and harmonica playing have won him a lot of friends in Austria over the years, during this year’s festival in Bregenz, they came out in force. Over 2000 people jammed the Kornmarktstrasse for his Saturday night closing set. Chucky and his band Clearly Blue, comprised of Harris on bass, Matthew Fricke on guitar, Markus Linder sitting in on keys and Brennan Williams on drums, laid down a smokin’ show. The crowd was right there with them all the way—energized, vibrant and showing a lot of love.
Earlier in the day, I played two sets on the side stage with my main musical partner in crime on the Bodensee, pianist Christof Waibel. Waibel, known professionally as Stompin’ Howie, has a nice feel for New Orleans piano styles and has worked with Chucky and other friends from the Crescent City. My host, harmonica player and professional fly-fisher Ewald Grabher, joined us for the second set and blew some serious harp. In an exuberant moment, I accidently broke my glass slide against the metal body of my guitar. It was in the middle of an uptempo solo number, so I had to figure out how to turn the slide with the adjacent finger without cutting myself or letting the song fall apart. It was a close call, but it worked. Afterward, I tossed the slide in the air and let it smash on the pavement next to the stage.
Bregenz is a beautiful ancient city originally settled during Roman times. It sits directly on the eastern tip of the Bodensee and is the capital of Vorarlberg, the westernmost state in Austria. In 1999, massive snow melts after a hard winter caused the lake to swell, pouring three feet of water into the downtown area. Late last August, days before Katrina hit land, floods in western Austria killed several people and caused nearly 4 billion dollars in property damage. The experience of living in an active flood zone further sensitized many of the locals to the events in New Orleans.
Ewald Grabher lives in Lustenau, a town about 10 miles from Bregenz that is bordered by both the Bodensee and the mighty Rhine River. After flooding wiped out Lustenau twice in the late 19th century, the Rhine was diverted in a major engineering project. As a professional outdoorsman, Grabher is intimately familiar with the mountains and waterways of Vorarlberg. Being from a town that, like New Orleans, is sandwiched between two large and powerful bodies of water, he can relate to the fear that New Orleanians have long held of the infamous “bowl scenario” actually occurring. Pointing out his window in Lustenau, Ewald says matter-of-factly, “We’ll be underwater one day, I can tell you that. The Rhine will take back what we took from it 100 years ago.”
According to Markus Linder, many Austrians wanted to help New Orleanians after Katrina because they shared the experience of a profound flood. “The people got the feeling of how it feels to have this kind of catastrophe,” he says. “It was a personal relationship too, because the people love Chucky over here.”
I have seen ongoing efforts by some Europeans to keep their countrymen aware of the continuing struggles in the Crescent City. Media attention has diminished greatly, but some efforts like Linder’s continue. At the single-stage Rock the Wolves festival in the village of Wolfhalden, in the Appenzell region of Switzerland, roughly $1700 was raised for New Orleans charities. More would surely have been raised if not for heavy rains. Fewer than 100 people attended the second day of the normally small festival. I performed with 60 or so people (and a few wet dogs) seated in front of me on the stage. Despite the rain, it was a lot of fun and much more intimate than your average festival gig. People at Wolfhalden, as at many of my gigs in Europe this year, expressed sincere concern for the fate of New Orleans and asked how they can continue to help.
While the plight of Katrina victims has elicited great sympathy from people around the world, the botched government response inflamed the already simmering anger that many Europeans feel towards the Bush administration. Kansas native Sheila Doerfler and her German-born husband Jürgen own The Landings, a Gulf Coast and Caribbean restaurant just behind the Kornmarktstrasse, and they’ve had to deal with those tensions. The Doerflers lived in the Ft. Myers, Florida area for five years and endured multiple near-misses until Hurricane Charley seriously damaged their house in August 2004. When Hurricane Ivan terrorized the Gulf only a few weeks later, they pulled up stakes and moved to Austria. With live blues, killer surf and turf, and some very stateside-style decor, The Landings has become an outpost for American culture in Bregenz since opening earlier this year.
Being an American business owner in Austria has given Sheila Doerfler direct exposure to the emotions stirred in Europe by the disaster, reflected in mounting frustration with the U.S. government over many issues, particularly the war in Iraq. “They were already watching,” she says of her Austrian neighbors and clients, “so when New Orleans got hit, they could see what was happening there. That’s why they are completely against Bush.” This anger would factor into Doerfler’s relationships with some of her regulars. “They came in my restaurant and asked me who I voted for, they asked me political questions. I told them, ‘Not him the first time, not the second time’, so they stayed as my customers.”
Dr. Irene Ziegler, the Austrian-born director of the University of New Orleans summer program in Prague, had a similar experience. “When Bush was re-elected, I got a lot of grief from my friends in Austria,” she says.
According to Markus Linder, “I think the thousands of people who come to our festivals are trying to separate the good Americans from the bad Americans,” he says simply. “They are not condemning the whole nation. They are saying those in power may be bad, but the people are good and they need our sympathy and solidarity.”
The sympathy and solidarity of the people of this region is what got me through after Katrina. I had just arrived about 50 miles up the lake from Bregenz in Uhldingen, Germany, when the levees broke. I had a flight home scheduled for September 10, which was cancelled along with all other commercial flights into Armstrong International. I was staying with a good friend I had not seen in nearly ten years. His girlfriend had known me less than two days, but when the extent of the crisis became clear, she let me know I was welcome indefinitely, then took me to the second hand store in the neighboring town and bought me a nice leather jacket.
Within a week, a network of old and new friends began to convene around me. The editor of the local newspaper interviewed me and arranged some gigs for me. Two new friends, Dagmar and Sven Frost, appointed themselves my business managers and searched far and wide for gigs for me. The work that Dagmar would bring in over the next few months, despite having no experience in the entertainment industry, would greatly expand my circle of friends, musical associates and performance opportunities. From her work developed the chance for me to build a network of venues and musicians here in the Bodensee region and the opportunity to do the tour that I am currently on.
One date was at a stadtfest, or town fair, complete with pony rides for kids, nail driving contests with a weird, multi-headed mallet and 6-inch spikes, lots to eat and more to drink. The local volunteer orchestra and the school dance troupes performed and when called for encores, they re-did the routines they just did—the only ones they knew. A swarm of little kids climbed up onto the stage for our set and sprawled out around us, giving the whole day some real small town charm. They all were curious about my shiny metal guitar, and it was something else to a bunch of small German children bopping to the Delta blues and New Orleans stuff that we were playing.
During this amazing time, I’ve often been asked what’s going on in New Orleans. Sometimes it’s hard to answer. Even when I’m in town, that can be a tough question. I’ve been on the road for six weeks and have kept in touch with friends and associates. I’ve been encouraged by some things I’m hearing, deeply saddened by the passing of friends (Scott Thomas and Kufaru Mouton), and worried and wondering what I will see when I return home in August. When people ask if I think the city can come back, I do my best to explain the unnamable driving force of New Orleans, that thing beyond culture or community that draws me, and so many more of us, back, maybe in spite of the odds.
Irene Ziegler lived in Gentilly close to the UNO campus before the flood. Many friends have ask her why she doesn’t abandon New Orleans and move back to Austria. “I try to explain to people there is such a sense of place and family in New Orleans,” she says. “We stayed because my husband’s family is here and also because we wanted to be part of the rebuilding.”
While her peers in Austria may not fully grasp why she hasn’t moved, the reaction of people of her parents generation, who lived through World War II in Europe, puts things in a different light.
“When I was in Austria at Christmas,” she says, “we talked about [Katrina] a lot since it was still quite recent. What my parents’ friends told us was that they admired the people there for going back. They compared our experience with the post-war period in Austria because of the physical devastation, of losing everything and having to start again from nothing.”
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