4-28-2007 Saturday Berlin at the Knaak    

The crazy sounds of distant yelling, laughing and general mayhem made sleeping a bit difficult, but the day before was complete sensory overload so sleep eventually came. Soon I was awake again and at 6:00AM I decided that I should continue my tour workout with a good run through the streets of early morning Hamburg. The place near the hotel and the Reeperbahn are a bit like our east side or water street in Milwaukee. It is a young and wildly liberal area but unlike America it is also peppered with big groups of still raging partiers drinking from bottles and staggering in the morning sun. It was great running among the Germans because this is not a speaking exercise and I feel like an incognito spy that goes undetected as I run. Afterwards I want to see more so I go for a bit of a walk to see the Reeperbahn. I think I may have gotten up too early and head back to bed for a couple of hours.

A surprise awaits us in the lobby later this morning and we have our instruments, but still no luggage for Paul. We stop at the beautiful Hamburg airport on the way to Berlin in one last vain attempt to find "the last of the Mohicans", but it is a fruitless exercise. The good thing is that his bag was last seen in London at this time. At least it is on the same continent now, Paul remains optimistic.

The gig at the Knaak in Berlin is very cool. Here before the show I get to meet fans from the Beatallica message board. These crazy cool dudes made us special t-shirts and dog tags. Then they gave us beer too, very big beers in fact. It was delicious but I swear it was a one liter bottle as I slammed it to get inside for the start of the show. Dennis, Hemi and Bass are the coolest Beatallibangers I have ever met.

The crowd was excellent and the show opened up with the very first presentation of Doktor Rock. Then we hit the stage and even with our rented gear it sounded pretty good. The sound man was very good and the show ended with fans blocking our exit from the stage claiming that we had to play more or we couldn’t leave. It was cool of them but we had a curfew and HAD to stop.

After the show I talked with this really cool girl named Daniela from Berlin. She was telling me about how it was when she used to live in communist Berlin. Totally fascinating girl. Then she laughed as some guy came up to me and said something I couldn’t understand. He seemed to want something from me, but I didn’t know what and she found this even funnier. The man left in disgust and then she was really laughing. She left for the disco, we packed up our gear, split up into two groups and stayed at different places in Berlin. We had to park the Sprinter against a fence to keep our gear safe in this old and crime ridden city. Still the place is beautiful and the people that I met left me with a very good feeling.

The only thing you can do after an Ausfart is get right back on that Autobahn.