Marco Thiede - Human Punk For Real: An Autobiography [English Edition]

Marco Thiede

HUMAN PUNK

FOR REAL

Translated for real by

Bill Collins and Marco Thiede

FUEGO

About the book

If you used to be a punk, you never where!

I wasnt even twelve years old in 1976 when I heard about this New Thing from England called: PUNK ROCK! Something completely new, snotty and revolutionary. A musical and verbal revolution against the Establishment! A punch right in the face of the whining love song era! I was immediately affectedor better said: infected!

It started with TheSex Pistols and The Damned - but when I heard Jean Jacques Burnels bass guitar in Goodbye Toulouse by The Stranglers I was totally stoked!

Then as now, the music has never lost its power and energy, and I love all these songs like the first day I heard them!

In this book Im attempting to describe the beginning of the Punk movement in Bremen - a very unpopular and rough German city - especially in the 80s. About the ongoing battles with right-wing Skinheads, and how we had to scrape together every penny just so we could go to as many cool shows as possible. First in Bremen, then other German cities, then in England (the Promised Land of Punk Rock!), and later in California. To me, its an ongoing, never-ending adventure. Finally, In 2012, I landed in the Bay Area.

In December 2014 I became 50 years old and Punk Rock is still, to this day, the only kind of music that always gives me goose bumps! And this will never change - as with many of the other infected - to my last breath!

What a night! For nearly 3 hours helicopters have been circling our house in Vallejo, a small town in California near Oakland and San Francisco. I've been living here now since October 2012, far away from my much colder homeland in Germany.

Totally wiped out, I drag my tired body out of bed and look forward to my first cup of coffee.

I look out the window and watch an old an old lady strolling past our house on Ryder Street. She has a gypsy look to her; she reminds me of my long dead grandma from Bremen Nord

Grandma Thiede lived right next door, in the other half of our duplex in Bremen-Aumund. This was an old lady you did not mess around with. Actually, she was anything but a lady

My grandpa was better off than most in our neighborhood of Aumund-Vegesack. He was the first one in that neighborhood to own his own work truck. After he married my grandma his life changed, and not for the better. She showed him right away that shed have nothing whatsoever to do with keeping house. It didn't take long before they both started drinking heavily. Though they were both already lifelong drinkers, after their wedding, things went only in one direction: downhill!

After a couple of years, the situation deteriorated even more, and as little kids my older siblings and I learned to fear the Terrors Next Door on a daily basis.

Constantly, we could hear bottles smashing against the wall on the other side of our walls as grandma and grandpa beat each other up day in, day out.

I felt sorry, for my father was the complete opposite of his parents. It didn't take long before my grandparents house began to attract the most fucked up neighborhood drunks. Windowpanes were soon replaced by wooden boards, and more often than not, one or two police vans were parked in front of the house.

When cars came racing down our street at 50 km/h they would all slow down as they passed our grandparents' place just to see what was flying through the window, or what was being demolished in the front yard today.

Grandma and grandpa Thiede were the talk of the town in Bremen Nord.

Two houses away lived my other grandparents on my mothers side - who, lucky for us were much nicer. At that time we still had an orchard, complete with manure pile and rabbit hutches.

In our neighborhood, we kids had plenty of opportunities to blow off steam outdoors. Not so far away was a little forest with a pond where we often liked to go to catch frogs and newts.

Next door at my grandmas lived three cousins: two older boys, and a girl my age. I felt sorry for them because of all the chaos they had to put up with. My aunt Gisela, their mother, was a part-time prostitute and hard-core alcoholic. Her husband, uncle Willie, was a seaman somewhere near Bremerhaven, who more or less followed the path of excess blazed so well by the rest of his family. After a while, my cousins ended up in a state run Home in Bremen-Aumund.

I took another sip of my coffee, when once again these stupid helicopters interrupted my thoughts. It seemed the cops were chasing somebody through the backyards.

Vallejo does not have the best reputation when it comes to criminal activities.

When I recently attended, more or less by chance, a meeting of German transplants, in a pub in Napa Valley, I startled all present when I told them that I live in Vallejo. All the German granny ladies there assured me that when they go to Vallejo or Oakland, they always carry guns in their purses. I could not help but grin and thought to myself: what do I need to fear more - German Grannies armed to the teeth, or Oaklands resident crack heads?

But back to my childhood

Back in the days when there were only three channels on the television apart from what was going on next door - life was rather unspectacular.

As a little boy I unfortunately had always eaten what was on the table, whether I liked it or not. From time to time rabbits were on the menu, but for some reason that was never my thing. Until I had my own rabbit named Max on my plate one day. From then on rabbit became my favorite meal! Normally, especially in childhood, an event like this has the opposite result...

As a little kid, my mother constantly forced me to wear scratchy tights, in which I could function only partially, in a robot like way.

A scratch - phobia still haunts me to this day when shopping or trying on new pants. It took years before blue jeans were finally able to triumph over my woolens.

At some point my father started to build a new house in our garden, a task that took him some years. We were finally able to enjoy the Terror of our grandparents from a safe distance.

Nevertheless, the drunken escapades continued to run their course, with more and more sketchy hoodlum types and assorted thugs. It wasnt uncommon to see one of their new drinking buddies, with a fresh black eye, or a self-sutured Rambo style scar.

Sometimes, when our local drunks burglarized one of our local kiosks or mom and pop shops nearby, theyd present us kids with stolen goods they had no use for.

As a young spud I found a preference for football, and kicked the ball around with my buddies in wind and weather on every imaginable green space. This in turn led to some conflicts with less enthusiastic neighbors who lived directly next to those green areas.

That's why many of our neighborhood kids joined our local football club, Eintracht Aumund. I stayed there as a defender in the (youngest) E group, until a knee injury ended my football career as a hopeful scorer, later in the C group.

1974, Germany became world champions. That was the first time I saw my entire family dancing on the couch at home to the victorious final game! The precursor to Pogo?

Gerd Mueller from Bayern became my football idol. Im a Bayern Muenchen supporter to this day!

Note: It occurs to me here, that all, like me, who were born in 64,are true-blue loyal types. We stand up for our cause and are not constantly changing ours minds about what we stand behind.