Get Your Muckin' Groove on with German Hair Syndrome

by O. Hannah for Nostalgieeee

It's a midsummer's day when I pull up a gravel driveway into a thick patch of pines about twenty miles outside Durham, North Carolina. Despite 90 degree heat, or maybe because of it, there's a thick cloud cover and a distant rumble of thunder. As I pull up in front of the sprawling ranch house where the East German ladyfinger quartet German Hair Syndrome has made their home, Heike – most well-known to fans for her spritely electric viola riffs and hardcore Dinglish punk lyrics in songs like "Monatskarte" – motions me over to a side clearing twenty feet in front of the goat pens that border the driveway.

“Herzlich wilkommen,” she says, and shakes my hand with a firm grip, asking “You have found us alright?”

She smiles from underneath the clean cuts of an 80s glam mullet, and despite the overwhelming incongruity of goats, socialist rock, mullets and a thick German accent, I feel completely at ease. Whether it's her smile or some magic fairy tale spell cast over me on my journey into the forest, I'll never know.

“It looks like it's gonna rain,” she says, “we should go in. I'll introduce you to the ladies.”

“Maybe you should like some tea?” she says on the way up the path, “We've just cut some fresh herbs from the garden.” I giggle until I realize, mid-chuckle, that, my god, she's not kidding.

“There's fresh peppermint. It's good for the digestion.”

German Hair Syndrome was hardly a blip on the rock and roll radar of the early 80s, when their first album, Spargelzeit, was released on LP by Krautrock Records in Dresden. They were part of a small east German punk/rockabilly scene in Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, the German state bordering the Baltic Sea, and GHS plodded along in relative obscurity until 1985. That was the year they got their “big break”, opening for the Russian glam band Gyka on a tour of the Soviet states. Apparently they were just what the Kazakhs had been looking for: Casio beats, sparkling folky charm easily confused with an acid trip, and just a little bit of smoldering resentment aimed at the State. In one of the more contrived moments of modern rock history, GHS eventually boarded a US-bound flight while trying to find a gig in the United Arab Emirates, and has remained – oblivious at first to the fall of the Wall – in the States ever since.

“So it was,” Dagmar will remark laconically when I ask GHS about their haphazard emigration, “So it was.”

She takes a drag off a freshly rolled cigarette, and then peers at me threateningly from behind an ever expanding cloud of exhaled tobacco. They have now lived in the US for almost 25 years, having purchased their farm outside Durham as a collective in the early nineties after a successful tour opening for punk darlings Spin the Toad Locket. Heike Kleene-Jungfrau, Samantha St. Pauli, Dagmar van Lindenhuus and Jörg Öztürk live together, make music, raise goats, rabbits, cattle and sheep, garden, drink schnapps and smoke under the shade of stately pines, persisting in a nostalgic Ostbloc haze in the middle of the deep American South.

“It's not really that strange,” Jörg remarks, “not really. Look at Cat Stevens, he was kind of strange, that man. Or who was that woman, sang jazz, she went back to an ashram for thirty years, only came out after her husband dead and gone. We always just want to make music. And music, that you can make anywhere.”

And make music they did. The nineties saw a burst of creative production emanating from GHS: Flucht Versuch came out in limited release in 1987, followed by Pupsegal (1993), Du warst mein letzter Versuch (1995), Das Leben ist öde (1997) and Tja (1998). Their newest release, Ja, ja, kommt schon (2004) has just been released online with a pay-as-you-can download from their website, www.germanhairsyndrome.com. In just a few weeks, their revenge pop melodies had spawned animated YouTube cult videos, late night open air jams in the Piedmont, and touring offers from The Bandits, Ärbele, and Armitron. GHS rejected the offers politely, citing irreconcilable political differences.

Later that evening, Samantha, the bands clarinet/spoken word artist, told me “We'd rather not cooperate with the fucking capitalist pigs,” a statement as jarring from its rhetorical anachronicity as from it's timing. Samantha had said absolutely nothing for the several hours since I'd arrived, only to break her hour-long silence by protecting what seemed to be wounded socialist pride.

Jörg, Heike and Dagmar inhaled slowly on their cigarettes in the ensuing pause, and nodded their heads seriously to repeated “ja's”. But after the awkward assertion of political sympathies had been dealt with, I suddenly found myself in the presence of the whimsical cult personalities from the GHS albums I'd been listening to for years.

“Do you want to see our wig room?” Jörg asked.

“How about bowling, do you bowl?” said Dagmar. She exhaled in my face. “Probably not,” she surmised, looking me up and down, glaring at my khaki pants.

“I don't,” I had to give in, and she gave a self-satisfied puff. Off to the wig room it was.

“When we first got here, we realized that we would have to create our own spaces,” Heike said as she opened the door to a huge room on the first floor, “and one of our top priorities was creating space for our personalities. Which we hide in our music, but mostly our wigs.”

The room I was led into looked like a hyper-techno riff on Today's Special: hundreds of mannequins and heads, all sporting variations of the layered mullet, bobby cut, and Rocketman styles GHS has sported over the years, an immense wave of browns, blacks, blonds and redheads, all in immaculate condition – some of them even on mannequins sporting the touring costumes of the late 80s.

“First thing we did here was hire a wig nanny,” Dagmar exhaled, “Anne shows up once a week, comes in and dusts and combs.”

“Want to play dress up?” Jörg asks, halfway into a mullet sporting a foot long rat tail. Who could ever refuse an invitation like that?

“Can I wear this?” I asked, pointing at a bright pink Jem-style number.

“Whatever floats your fancy,” Jörg said, “As long as it makes you feel invincible.”

Much has been written about the transformative potential of masks. I won't bore you by referencing that here. What I will admit is that under the influence of a certain bright pink wig, German Hair Syndrome convinced me to try bowling (my score? 13 points, but Dagmar tried to convince me it was a merely a matter of rigid shoulder rotation), half and hour spent on the trampoline with GHS and their favorite goat, Ralf; and finally a soothing plunk in a mineral mud bath pit GHS built themselves, sipping fuzzy mineral water all the while. Thank goodness. Given the mad romp and constant hilarity, I was beginning to think I'd never actually get to ask GHS any questions. In limus veritas, so they say.

O: You know, there's a lot of folks out there that would like to see you live. Do you ever think you'll go on tour again, capitalists aside? (Samantha glares in my direction and sips water through a straw).

Heike: Perhaps we will tour again one day. If we were to receive an invitation from a Party, or perhaps if there were a Worker's Tour. I had a friend, she sang for years with the USO, but I'm sure you see the difficulty of engaging with the Empire.

Jörg: But I am hopeful. I would like to go on a Green tour, but it's very difficult to find Green venues to perform in. Maybe we could do a campsite tour? But they often don't appreciate our gravitas.

O: Gravitas? What do you mean by 'gravitas'?

Dagmar: Schatz, you must understand that all of our music is seething with the joke the world has played on us!

Samantha: (snorts) You must remember capital.

O: I'm an American. Spargelzeit is about global capital?

Jörg: Do you speak German? Or do you just like our groove?

O: Well, I speak a little German, but -

Jörg: It's immaterial, actually, I remember, these lines are in English: “Poles and the Russians come to harvest it/ Migrant Labor fuels the free market” - these are some of our earliest lyrics, and I say them now to you because in our new album, Ja, ja, kommt schon, you can see that we have not lost ourselfs in the now pervasive global corporation. Have you heard the album?

O: Yeah.

Jörg: You know the song, “Hartz IV”? “Und alles was sie wollen/ kommt mit dem Hartz IV-Holen // die Neo-nazi-Kohlen/ findet man (verdammt) ganz oben/ oben in Mecklenburg-Vorpommen” This is about reunified Germany, you know?

Dagmar: Economic stagnation and, how do you say, brian-drain! The State fucked us over! (Samantha rolls her eyes while she rolls a new cigarette).

Samantha: Capitalism fails again. Surprise.

This is the moment where two things happen. As if on cue, GHS decides that we have spent far too much time in the mud bath, and exiting requires being hosed off and then led to one of the many bathrooms for showering and changing. It's also the moment where, for at least a brief while, gravitas makes sense as the descriptive adjective for German Hair Syndrome. Maybe the mineral water and the mud stuck in each and every fold of my joints contributed heavily to this moment of clarity. Even so, when I pulled out into the gravel drive, waving to GHS and Ralf, the pink wig in my passenger seat as a present, I realized the unbearable lightness of gravity. It is both the quality that holds us here, keeps us on the ground, and the frustrating condition that keeps us from flight. In their wacky self-sufficiency and political agitation, German Hair Syndrome keeps hammering away at the most obvious of global circumstances that so often hides behind its own invisibility. Ja, ja, they seem to say in my rearview mirror, waving and knowing the realization will eventually sink in, ja, ja, kommt schon.