Turbonegro In The USA 1995 Tour Diary

The sad and touching story of sexually challenged Norwegian ex-teens coming to terms with instant gratification!

We eat, drink and smoke cigars, discussing Celine, Schopenhauer, Wilhelm Reich, Bertolucci’s “1900” and Hanoi Rocks. Men of the world, fearless intellectuals in the twilight.

Happy-Tom: We (Turbonegro aka TRBNGR aka Stierkampf) spent the summer of 1995 wisely. We went on our ‘Nambling In The Nineties‘ USA-tour across the vast North American continent, to present to the decadent youth of America our music and our ideas. Hank von Helvete is the singer and dancer, Pål and Rune play guitar, rhythm and lead, Bingo plays the bass and I play the drums. We left Oslo in the wee morn of June the 26th. As we took farewell with our loved ones, we were not sentimental. We are beyond that. We do not play emo-core. We knew we had nothing to lose, but all to gain. Maybe, just maybe, we would never have to return to Oslo, to the “scene”, to the waiting rooms of the welfare- and doctor offices , to the waiting rooms of feces, to the corrupt and mediocre hallways of endless hell, to the “garage-rockers”. We play Rock.
As we layed on the cold marble floor of Frankfurt International Airport waiting for our flight to New York City in the next morning, we could fell the Rock rush through our veins. We are in Germany, the ethical backyard of modern man. We are bored. Hank tries to start anti-semetic riots by running around in the terminal area, rubbing his hands greedily and hunching his back, screaming “Ich bin der Ewige Jude” (“I am the eternal jew” – a common image in the Third Reich propaganda). Hanky was still excited: about three months ago prior to our departure his name was found on the deathlist of the Norwegian neo-nazis due to his radio talk-show Nihilistic One-Man Front. The bloodsucking nazis at the airport barely manage to keep their killer-insticts leashed bla bla bla.

We play in Philadelphia first, our show in New York has been cancelled. After the show we go drinking in the home of Phil and Maria Irvin (of America’s most important band Rancid Vat) and their son Elvis. It was just great. We stay for days with a genious by the name of Jeff. He is perhaps the King of Barbeque. How can there be hunger in America? Let them eat T-Bone steaks.
The next day we are supposed to play at an all-ages show, but the bouncers demand that our driver and our roadie pay intrance. We leave. We played good shows in Norfolk, Virginia and Richmond, Virginia, with a good good band called The Candysnatchers. I get a second-degree sunburn that lasts for two weeks. The South is a great place. The houses are really nice and people are pretty much down to earth and know how to appreciate ART, FOOD and DRINK. Our mustaches are all full-grown. We visit the parents of our driver/mechanic/renaissance-man Rich. They live in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We eat good good good food and drink good beer. They own a lawnmower as big as a car. Everybody gets to ride it! We throw horseshoes with Rich’s father whose name is also Richard. Pål manages to destroy their exotic flower-garden with the lawnmower. He is sober.

After Kentucky we go to Bloomington, Indiana. Bloomington was the setting for the classic and unforgettable 1970’s bicycle-movie “Breaking Away“. The subject matter of “Breaking away” is the conflict between the local predominantly working-class kids and the college-kids. The final showdown takes place at a bicycle-race between the two fractions at the end of the film with the locals as the winners. For me, personally, the climax of the film arrives when the protagonist’s dad, a fat and obnoxious cigarsmoker with a receeding hairline asks his son’s best friend (a rather short fellow) whether or not he is a midget. The short chap replies “for the umpteenth time – I AM NOT A DWARF ! I just have some problems with my metabolism.”

I myself, Happy-Tom, know a lot about being a short person. I was tiny until about 17 or 18 years of age. Now I am a fully grown adult. However I will still strongly recommend “Breaking away”. It’s just a great great piece of cinematic handycraft in the social-realistic genre. Why doesn’t Moshable Mag / Maximum Rock’n’Roll write about films like that? Is it an international law that every single fanzine on the face of the earth MUST write about Russ Meyer, Blaxploitation, Mondo this and mondo that, violence, gun-fu, kitschy and camp and oh-so-obscure B-movies ? And so I ask you: WHY? So a bunch of no-guts “alternative” tattooed serial-killer-baseballcard-collecting humanoids can live their life vicariously through the scripts, plots and oh-so-shocking imagery of even lower pieces of genetic debris? It is time to put the Old Foot down and say “We have had enough!” It is time to save what is left of the integrity in the underground. One way to do this is to keep buying our records.

Both David Gurrik (The Anal Babes) and myself started to cry when we saw Forrest Gump. David of course denies that this ever happened, but I saw him … the insides of his glasses started fogging over when Tom Hank’s lifelong boyfriend sweetheart shows up HIV-positive. I let go my feelings more or less throughout the whole ordeal. It felt cleansing in a way I have yet to experience during any dim bulb-nihilistic NYC lo-fi bullshit-flick. Think about it, please. You don’t have to be tough and post-modern every single waking hour. Do yourself that favor.

Anyway, America during the summertime is very hot, in several ways: after the show in Bloomingsdale the promoter, an incredible person named Kerry (of the legendary The Gynecologists) was so impressed by our larger-than-life live presence and the powerful suburbian ambience of our Rock, that he offered to supply us with the services of the local prostitutes. “Blond hair, big tits, and no plastic !” (plastic = silicone). Hank, Bingo and yours truly declined on his offer as we all have boyfriends at home and hence wish not to break down under the immense weight of post-ejaculation depression. Besides, what would the people at Blitz, the Gilman St. of Oslo, say when we returned to Oslo ? They had already banned us for our somewhat liberal use of the Iron Cross, but they always end up inviting us back at Christmas and we want to please them, the sentimental fools we are. I was contemplating: I am a Scandinavian Rocker … what would Nix (Nomads) or Ebbot Lundberg (Übermensch and singer of Union Carbide Productions) have done in my situation ? It is hard to say, but some of us were content with saving the near-sex-experience in our Masturbatory Databanks.

Rune and Pål (needless to say) were more than enthusiastic about the prospect of wild and uninhibited USA-porn sex, no strings attached, without the usual demands of the Oslo-female. Plus, being the axe-swingers of the group, they have certain Rock-obligations to fulfill. We drove to Kerry’s house about 20 minutes outside of town and Bingo puked in the van. The whores were summoned by telephone. I will leave the rest of the story to Rune. Pål claims that he doesn’t remember anything from his night with the prostitute. I believe him.

Rune: Hello everybody ! This is the story of my sex with the village prostitute Chelsea of Bloomington, Indiana. Both hookers were much better looking than we expected. Like I said, my hooker’s name was Chelsea. She was wearing a Black Crowes t-shirt. After a quick beer in the living room we got up from the couch and entered an adjacant bedroom. I sat down on the edge of the bed. She slid her arched feetout her shiny, black high-heeled shoes. She had dark blondish hair and was tall and slender: her legs were without a blemish, seemingly made out of porcelain. She pulled of her t-shirt and smiled like a child with a dark secret, like a child that knows too much, yet thirsts for more.

Her breasts were large yet firm with nipples about the size of a Norwegian 5-Kroner coin. They were not made of plastic, they were made of pure Indiana corn. Pounds of it. A slight overbite was evident as she ran her tongue across a puffy set of lips that glistered in the firelight. She was beautiful. It was apparent that the hard bumps in the sexual highway that every prostitute is destined to travel had not yet taken the toll off of my Chelsea. I got up and we kissed passionately. A tiny bubble of saliva dribbled out of her mouth, past her puffy bottomlip and clung to her chin. “What a dog you are baby” I thought. “Yes I will make love to you like a dog, my little Indiana-peach”.

She swallowed as my hands slid across her tits and made them jiggle to life. She pressed her pelvis against my bulging crotch. Aroused. I reached around and bury my hands into her pillows of flesh, kneading her ass-balls, spreading her cheeks and massaging her little asshole with my finger, which I had cleverly moistured with some my own saliva prior to fondling her Indiana-buttocks: I am a very strategic person and I wish to live my life in full thrusts. She stepped back and dropped to her knees. She pulled out my erect member with a desperation that said “I need this cock. You can have me for free. Oh, Mustachioed One” or maybe something like that. Please remember, I had been drinking and my perception might have been slightly blurred.

With her emerald mid-western eyes looking into mine, she tickled my medium-sized prick’s tip with her cunning cats-tongue. Cupping my loaded Norway-balls with one hand she steadied the throbbing shaft with the other. She opened her red-lip glistering mouth and started sucking that cock of mine like a wild animal. Needless to say it was great. A thick sheen of saliva soon collected around the mouth of this wild animal waiting for a mega-shot of elephant-tranquilizer. I grabbed her hair and shoved her head back and forth on my pulsating piece of flesh. That is why they call it “head”.

She dropped to the floor. Her big breasts were maximumrocknrolling against the textile of the Afghan carpet which must have felt like sandpaper against her pouting stiff nipples. Her behind strutted to all heavens, and she started rubbing her vaginal lips with her right hand. I knelt down and started rubbing the head of my cock up and down the aforementioned lips. I was a game of give and take. Slowly I entered my cock into her tight, gripping pussy. It felt so right! I started fucking her like a Norwegian mountain-goat. I fucked and fucked and fucked and fucked. She had two orgasms, and I could feel the muscles in her cunt contracting like the mouth of a rabid octopus. Octopussy.

This was too much for me to handle. It was like being Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. A Serbian rebel goose stepped out of the closet and kicked me hard in the head with his muddy boot. Thus I pulled out and swiftly crawled around to frost her mouth with my spurting semen. She scraped the cum off of her face and licked it off of her fingers, hungry girl.

We got dressed and walked back out into the living room. We drank some more beer and listened to some of Kerry’s CD’s with the rest of the entourage. They were staring at Chelsea. That was emberassing. Both Happy Tom and Hanky looked confused. That Kerry must have had every single CD made in the world. I have no idea how much he had to pay for the girls. The rest of the tour was really good, but I won’t even bother listing up where we played or what we did: for me the tour was complete after my rendezvous with Chelsea in Bloomington. America is great… There is room for everyone. I didn’t even have to use a condom or anything.

Happy-Tom: The day after we drove to Madison. There we recorded some songs for a new 7″ in a studio that Bovine Records booked for us. Sean has already put out our Bad Mongo/Hobbit Motherfucker 7″. He said it was Killdozer’s old studio. We record some new songs: The Dicks’ Young Boys Feet (I’m Greedy) and The Rude Kids classic Raggare is a Bunch of Motherfuckers and a new one, in Norwegian: I morgen skal eg daue, eg er en gammel man” (Tomorrow I will die, I am an old man). The technician wore a hearing-aid. Hm, I can vividly imagine him during the mix-down, screaming at the top of his lungs: “WELL, I DON’T KNOW, MAN – I THINK IT SOUNDS PRETTY GOOD!”. We played a great show with Ed Hall and Sixteen Deluxe. Then we drove to Chicago. I play the only drum-solo on the tour, more specifically the 1.5 second drumbreak from Born To Be Wild. Nietzsche said: “Why should the peacock hide its feathers?” Steve Albini shows up, and Hank is thrilled. He runs over to Albini and starts hugging the small man: “STEVE ALBINI! BLACK FLAG IS MY FAVOURITE BAND! BLACK FLAG, MAN! WOW, WOW!” Albini turns out to be very polite, and is not at all insulted. Good sport, crummy metabolism.

Then we drove to Oklahoma to visit family. Then we drove to Salt Lake City. What a drive. Is this the area the Nazis want for their Aryan Homeland? Let them have it. This town is in the middle of South Africa. This is what Pretoria looked like 30 years ago. Everybody looks like Chris Isaak, even the women. The low-riders are good tho’, they go bumpty-bumbty down the boulevard. We go to Rauch Records, a nice shop. Our worst show on the tour. Our van breaks down several times a day. It is over 40 degrees celcius all day every day, it is impossible to keep your feet on the floor, it will melt your skin. Then we drove to Eugene, Oregon. But first we had to pick up Pig Champion in Portland. He plays “unplugged” before our set, and joins in on a couple of our songs. The Detonators play afterwards! I saw them at Blitz many years ago. Vocalist Bruce has “TURBONEGRO ARE GODS!”magicmarked all over his stomach.

We stay at Malcolm’s house. Malcolm runs a label called Fatal Erection. He is putting out a 10″ with some of our stuff on it, including our theme song of the tour: The Midnight Nambla, which was supposed to be out several months before our arrival in the USA. He is a very bitter French-Canadian drunkard. He has started a fanzine called “Quebec Libre”, and will accept contributions from fellow seperatists PO Box 5192, Eugene, OR 97405. He was supposed to set up shows in Seattle and Portland, but he wasn’t able to do so. He gives us money, $300. He feels guilty for being such a lousy booking-agent. Both parties pretend that the money is a loan. He takes care of his bands. Pig Champion is a good man too. Takes us to a very expensive restaurant and spends $300 on us, money for a royalty check he received the same day, due to Pantera playing one of his songs on The Crow-soundtrack.

We eat, drink and smoke cigars, discussing Celine, Schopenhauer, Wilhelm Reich, Bertolucci’s “1900” and Hanoi Rocks. Men of the world, fearless intellectuals in the twilight. Late at night we try to stage a re-enactment of the latter part of “1900”, the part where the fascist Attila (Donald Sutherland) and his crazy wife/ torturess Regina are chased through the beautiful and misty North Italian morning by the vengeful peasants towards the end of the war. Hanky plays Attila, Bingo plays Regina, Pål and myself play the partisans and Rune is the director. Rich watches in awe, in tears. What drama! What pathos! Mr. Champion, nodding of in a chair, plays the entire Italian proletariat and awakens occasionally with an enthusiastic and furious cry of “ATTILA ATTILA!”, only to fall asleep again. Heavy symbolics. All of this is of course ruined when Malcolm charges frantically in from the bathroom wearing a black beret, waving a French flag and screaming “VIVE LA FRANCE YOU BESTERDS!”, eyes bulging like there is no tomorrow. This is somewhat out of context, and the entire party is ruined.

We drive to San Francisco to play with Plainfield. What a town! WOW ! Everybody looks like us, even the garage-rockers are bent, even the policemen are boy-loving men that say “whoopsie-daisy” as they lambada down Haight Street with flowers in their gun-barrels. This is probably what local boys The Authorities referred to when they sang “…they have funny little mustaches… and they skip when they walk” in “I Hate Cops”. Plainfield’s singer Smelly Mustafa is an ultra-redneck with a goose to pluck the whole world. He has a mustache and is homosexual too. It’s a small world! His philosophy when it comes to mustaches is admirable: “Don’t wear it if you don’t mean it”. Later he gives me a Pansy Division T-shirt for my birthday even though he knows that I hate them, squares trying to cash in on our success, giving enema-sex a bad name with their fake posing.

We stay at Smelly’s grand mansion on the hill. Smelly takes us to the Alternative Tentacles headquarters. I have a goose to pluck too. Jello used to write every single small-time small-town punkband in the world to get free records. In 1983 I sent him a copy of our (Bingo and myself) Akutt Inleggelse’s 7″. I told him I wanted a copy of the Condemned To Death 7″ in return. I didn’t hear from him for 7 or 8 years when he sent me another letter asking for Turbo-stuff. I am a sucker for punkrock-stardom so once again I sent him vinyl, but demanded that he sent me the C2D-record PLUS a copy of the SF Underground compilation 7″. This time he at least bothered replying, stating that he was unable to find the records. How can he whine about multinational corporations while he at the same time for years has been poking his hands into the pockets of young boys looking for “spare change” and more, that crazy bitch? Jello, I love you, but you have nambled me. To quote Emile Zola: “J’accuse!!! Te me namblaizes!!!”. At least Smelly’s old band Legion Of Doom had enough brains to break the records before they put them in the envelope to Jello.

Smelly is a music business-genious and has set up some shows with both bands in San Francisco, Fresno and Los Angeles. All shows are great! The show in San Francisco is in an old Theatre, which is incidentally the same hall that Jim Jones used as his People’s Church before they went to Guyana to die, according to a colored gentleman with a shopping card by the curb. We drive to Fresno. I realize that Smelly is a dancing star in a cosmos beyond good and evil. After the show in Fresno we drive almost to Death Valley to spend the night at the ranch that some of Smelly’s friends own, apparently ex-members of Capitol Punishment. What a FAB place! The promoter at the Hell’s Gate club in Los Angeles, a sleazy HIV-pirate crack addict by the name of Larry, escapes with all our money, and Rich threatens the steroid-freaks that run the club by breaking a bottle. “Uh, no”, says Smelly, “time to split”. A lot of people shows up for the L.A. show since Smelly, naughty man, has promoted us as “Ex-Clit Boys”. Smelly goes berserk during Plainfields set, breaking a lightbulb. He hates Los Angeles. I can understand this, but still I like the beach. It is as if talent doesn’t count in this town. Maybe a huge concentration-camp is a good idea. The Final Solution, advertized as a subdivision… Santa Treblinka, hard work (“aerobics and rollerblading”) and one last shower in the sunset of Western Living, all for a reasonable price. Rich’s sister has a really nice apartment on the beach in Santa Monica. We bath in the great Pacific Ocean. The american leg of the tour is over. At least we didn’t get the shit kicked out of us like we did the last time we were in the USA.

However, after a break we fly to France to play at the St. Amant-festival with Linton Kwesi Johnson. We stay at Claude’s place. Claude owns his own little village in the French countryside. He is a multipersonality genious. At the flick of a switch he can transform into Silver Roger, the worlds most fearless go-kart racer. Together with Rich’s charming and attractive girlfriend Nathalie we drive to the festival in the middle of nowhere.

There are thousands of people there. The stage is guarded by Hells Angels. The similarity with Altamont 1969 is striking: something bad always happens when we play this song. Hanky provokes the faggot-catholic audience, insulting the French by speaking shit-french, mostly about the homosexuality that runs rampantly thoughout the history of French culture. “I am the new Jacques Brel!” he says, rubbing his crotch. But the shit punks seem to enjoy the music.

Rich is screaming through the monitors: “KEEP PLAYING! KEEP PLAYING!”, because everytime a song ends virtually hundreds of beer-cans, bottles and even shoes and boots are hurled at the stage. Some miss, some don’t. Bingo is hit in the ribs by a full beerbottle and passes out for several minutes. There are medics on the stage. We are cool. We smoke cigarettes, then we start throwing bottles back. I see a petit hippie-woman constantly throwing bottles. I walk down from the drum-riser and throw a half-empty (or half-full, dependent of your philosophical point of view) at her face. It rams straight into the forehead of a French drug-addict, tripping. He collapses. Blood gushes from his forehead.

All hell breaks loose. The Hells Angels leave. Thousands of projectiles are fired at the stage… thousands of disgruntled Frenchmen scream their rage at the unfair actions of the sexy denim-men. It was the roar of the thousand-headed Demon. We stared into the Abyss, and the Abyss stared back to us. It was the grandest moment of my life, the moment of truth, and I felt immortal.

It was a nice summer. It reminds me of another summer in my life, I was 9 or 10 years old. The circus was in town, “town” being a rural suburb of Oslo. This was at the height of economic growth in Norway, and there was no suffering or hardship, only wealth and hope and light. The circus people had parked an elephant cage down the main road. The cage was too small for the elephant, dumb flesh bulged out through the bars like in a cartoon. Me and some of the other kids started throwing rocks at the elephant, who started rocking the cage back and forth. A crowd gathered, mothers and children on the way home from the grocery store. The elephant let go long, squealing roars of pain and panic. After a while of this some circus people came driving along. They hitched the cage to their truck, unaffected, as if people threw rocks at the elephant everyday. One of the mothers said, loud and full of pure hate, between clenched teeth: “Goddamned elephant!”. A true elephant-hater. The elephant just didn’t belong. There just wasn’t room enough for it inside her head. As was the case with our bulging crotches.

by Happy-Tom & Rune Rebellion

(read our story about Turbonegro’s masterpiece Ass Cobra here)