The Trottel Stereodream”s hippy Experience

Oh, Dear Reader! Sometimes you really do your best but luck does not follow you. Our tour van just got smashed in a terrible accident. / Ask Xenomusic's Head who was the driver ... / It happened 10 days ago on the beautiful croatian seaside between Zadar and Split. A czech car pushed the van into a bosnian car who was unluckily doing an illegal left turn at that very moment. The result 's miserable but the consequences are even more painful.

This week end we had to play two concerts, one in Senta in Serbia and the other one, the biggest german psychedelic festival at Burg Herzberg, above Fulda, east side of Germany, a legendary event existing since 1989 where all the hippies meet year after year, celebrating the good old Woodstock feeling.

So we leave Budapest with full of excitment and also a bit of fear inside since it is normally forbidden to get into a country with a heavily injured car.... But what can we do? There wasn”t time enough to fix the van and the rental's out of question as it costs really a lot of cash. The anxiety can't destroy our mood and full of the certain american positivism injected in us by our favourite singer Todd, we approach the hungarian serb border. The view is amazing. The hungarian side of the border is brand new. The constructions were probably paid partly by the European Union since Hungary's soon gonna be part of it and we'll be the last fortress before the Balkans. I feel your hear standing up on your back when you read the world Balkan, the horror itself – So they think at the EU too, so they make it sure that the new border will be safe enough and strong enough to stop the invasion of all those poors invading Europe and taking those great and well payed jobs from the european citizens. Like if it wasn't usually the local business guys who 'd employ poor foreigners for lower wages...... But anyway, back to the story: Proud of our hungarianness and being part of the priviledged Europe we slip through the hungarian bit and nobody asks anything about the car. Great. The road zigzags to the serbian side, you'd realize it anyway as suddenly the environment changes and you feel you're back 50 years. The building 's in a very bad state and so are the guards... but they're friendly. I think they like it when they see a band crossing the border, for them – amongst all the baddies willing to cross with illegal stuff or money or else – we , the band – are at the moment the little distraction what sweetens their schift.

Lucky us. They even smiled so we can go on. We release the rest of the tension and the mood in the broken van is getting higher. The festival we are invited to is some sort of hungarian days in Vojvodina, formerly part of Hungary. In Senta / Zenta in our language the 80% of the population is native hungarian so it isn't too difficult this time to get directions. At the end of the small city we find our target. It smells burned sausage everywhere and we can see that many small buffet things are selling barbecue stuff / bad news to me as vegetarian and good news to Todd who's becoming more and more excited to get one. /

We're the guests of the local hungarian youth magazin Képes Ifjuság. The magazin exists since the 80 's and strangely enough they were the first one publishing article about Trottel in 1986 before anything would have appeared about us in a paper in Hungary. That time, before the system changed and before the war in the Balkans, former Yugoslavia was the most progressive and opened country in the Eastern Block. Our grandmas and other relatives living near the yugo borders used to go shopping there and came back with chewing gum, chocolate liqueur, cigarettes and records for grandsons. / that's how i got my first Kiss and later my first Uk . Subs and Sex Pistols LP's....

I keep forgetting that we'll need diesel the way back for the night. I doubt that we could find a non stop one so i ask the locals to take me to get fuel. But you can only pay in local currency. Weird, in the last decade you could rarely hear the word dinar there, everybody counted in german marks or us. dollars because of the crazy inflation of the yugo money. Now, so they say, the yugo government tries to strenghten the dinar and make people use their own money. The bank doesn't change hungarian currency. This is weird too since it's close to the border and almost everybody has relatives coming here from Hungary and the people regurarly go to Hungary too. My companion explains me that they moved to Szeged years ago / big hungarian city near the serbian border / but there, they felt always refused, hungarians told them they were serbs and not real hungarians so they came back. Bad story.

What can we do? My friend takes me to a local pub to change. The club we go to is a legendary place. Almost 20 years old, it was open even during the war and despite of the fact that it's a blues club, they receive different kind of bands too. Otherwise totally western looking venue with a nice atmosphere. And their coffie taste great. At the petrol station i meet the only person who does not speak hungarian and it's really confusing as i got so used to talk in my language in this city that suddently i don't know how to speak to this man. Finally, i think i didn't manage to say a word, even not an ! english thank you!. The festivals programm has already started. Couple of thousands of people, all sorts, locals, families, yougsters, artists and visibly many rockers. We are going to go on to the main stage later in the night. So we seat down under the tent of Képes Ifjuság and face a huge bottle of local spirit, clean like a spring. Our friend explains that people in Vojvodina are worried because of Yugoslavia joining Europe. In the EU they have a regulation forbidding to produce home distilled alcohol above, if i remember right, 5 liters per year. But in Vojvodina someone who hasn't made at least 25 – 50 liters a year can't be considered a human being.... so what will they do? ... well, they think everybody will keep happily producing it as always.

The drink is good. Strong like hell but pure. When the girls from the Vojvodina hungarian TV are coming to interview us, we really look like a happy bunch of tourist tasting local lifestyle. I think somehow we managed to introduce our band and to be polite but the constant jokes and laughs made the interview not too serious. Also, the constant loud music from that huge tent next to us. Some group of evangelists who got into the festival programm, they came down from Budapest with a big new truck and brought all, they needed : tent for 1000 people, PA system etc... God's poor servants! The value they brought down worth more than all the local stuff together.

We wanted to go to see the fight in the mud and other spectacles but time went on quickly and our showtime arrived. After some small technical problems we had a very nice concert, Todd ‘s birthday one. I could see he was touched when we celebrated him on stage.

The programm of the whole evening was rather eclectic, from local folk to metal you could find everything. The public enjoyed all the acts so our performance happened to be a great experience too. Somehow the hungarians outside of Hungary seem to be more open-minded than the ones inside, we always have big parties at gigs in the territories of former Hungary. After the show, sweaty, we go back to the tent where we spend the rest of the evening with our friends. One of them talks about cannabis and later we hear it from someone else that the guy wansn't a local organiser but an MP of the Hungarian Socialist Party / on government now /who ‘s seriously lobbying for the legalisation of grass. How he ended up here i don't know but i think we'd definitely need some more of these guys in the Parliament. Food. ... when i beg their pardon and say i am vegetarian the air freezes around me. They look at me with astonishment. You only get meat here / Kaktusz runs aways to get Todd a grilled – burned sausage for his birthday / and someone comes with me and offers me a tastless pastry looking thing sooked in oil. Life's hard. I got some food in the van but when i approach the broken van my stomach goes in cramps. We can not enjoy much longer our friend's company because we have to leave to the next concert by night. Tomorrow night we got to be in Germany at the Herzberg festival. It's 1200 kms with two borders and the broken van. So we thank to everybody for their hospitality and leave. It's 4 am, the night ‘s over, my band's snoring in the back of the van exept my favourite navigator who just had his birthday.... he's snoring next to me while i'm driving through the bad looking serbian and few minutes later the very good looking hungarian customs. No one asks about the van. Lucky monkey's.