One of the few English language exports that I am not ashamed of is our music, especially the music of the sixties and seventies. I remember my first trip to Berlin in the early nineties, soon after the wall came down, my sister, in one of her often brilliant inspirations, took us all to a dance hall in what had recently been the eastern sector of Berlin. A huge room, heated by a towering heavily decorated coal fired stove in one corner, full of people dancing. This was not so long after the wall had come down and these were obviously people, who had been coming every Friday night for years. There were also a surprising large number of men who looked like my stereotyped idea of tartars, men from the steppes of Russia, slightly slanted eyes, tall, a little wild looking, without partners. We danced and danced and danced. The music? The Beatles, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Procol Harem, even Bob Dylan.
Last week end we went to Berlin overnight. On the way there we detoured through the Spreewald - a kind of marshy area, that used to be home to fisherman and people who navigated the world in boats, and is now mainly for summer tourists. Although not completely, we crossed a little bridge and coming through the swamp were two flat bottomed boats full of logs, powered not by poles (as they had been tradtionally) but rather by small outboard motors. End of season fire wood perhaps. To my eye the wood looked very green. Maybe for next year, my sister said. That seemed unlikely to me; in my world if you are getting wood in March, it is because you didn't quite get enough to last the winter and so you call a few friends and bribe them to come out and help you get a load before you really get in trouble with your wife for letting the house get cold. But maybe I am just making up a story here.
After a short walk we went into a restaurant for a lunch of fresh fish. We were the only customers. The usual wall of skulls and antlers and animal corpses. Above us a huge head and shoulders of a deer with a 10 point rack, and next to it, a large catfish with it's mouth open. We ate fish, cucumber salad, and a big communal bowl of potatoes. The music? "Benny and the Jets" and "Stand By Your Man", the latter, in Polish or some Eastern European language. (I remember listening to hours of country music, while sitting on the grass drinking tea in Kenya; there the radio played a mixture of country and Congolese music.)
So I started a list of familiar music heard in unlikely public places. So far I have down: "Hotel California", "Both Sides Now" ,"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (I think it was Sam Cook singing), "Benny and the Jets", "Stand By Your Man," "Whiter Shade of Pale."
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