At long last.... The Open'er Festival update!

Warning: This is a rather long entry.

I met these great English musicians from Leeds while in Krakow. They have a jazzy, soulful hip-hop sound, and despite they’re very convincing arguments about how painfully bad they are, I found them not to be half bad. Check out their Myspace page here.

They were barreling through Krakow in a day and a half on their way to the Open'er Festival in Gdynia, Poland. I took one look at the lineup, and I had to go. Gdynia is an 11 hour train ride due north of Krakow on the Baltic Sea. In order to make this trip happen, I’d first have to convince Colette and Matt to go. Going to a festival solo, in most cases, is not advised lest you wish to find yourself naked in your own one-man drum circle.

Convincing them proved easy after another three hour lunch; our third in as many days. For those of you keeping score, that’s 9 hours of lunching in 72 hours, or 12.5% of my time spent swilling beer, borscht, cigarettes, and various polish food products under the baking sun of Krakow. Good-ass times.

Once the decision was made to go, three important variables had to be worked out: lodging, tickets (festival and train), and warm clothing, in that order. Lodging proved difficult, as campsites were sold-out, and literally every hotel, hostel, and short-term apartment was booked within a 2 city radius.

We decide to rent a car. Not to drive up there, but to sleep in once we get there. The attractiveness of that idea is right up there with drowning myself in lake of ipecac. But a guy working at The Flamingo, Rafal, was already going to Open’er. He heard of our idea to sleep in a car, and openly laughed at us.

Let me just be clear; Rafal is gay and weird. Not that he’s weird for being gay, but he’s pretty weird, and if you add gay, he’s pretty much the weirdest guy I’ve ever spent any significant time with. He has tattoos on his actual head, a pretty progressive (or regressive, depending on your point of view) haircut of dyed long, red hair with the lower skull shaved (to show off the tattoos), and a generally understated yet unambiguous flamboyance. --I’m not doing him justice. I wish I had a picture.

On top of all that, I was sensing that Rafal was digging me. I know this because I have among the most sensitive Gaydar’s in Eastern Europe (I’m quite sure no one in Poland has spent 6 months performing a weekly show at The Duplex). Knowing this, I sat with him for nearly an hour while he played me clips of his favorite (shitty) bands on YouTube. Mind you, I took this to be more of an act of spreading the gospel of whatever horribly offensive emo-grunge music he listened to. Think 30 Seconds to Mars, only subtract an accomplished actor who’s banged half of Hollywood as your lead singer, and add a troubled Marilyn Manson impersonator. I was hoping my patience in willfully viewing this detritus of even the emo-grunge genre, would earn us a place to stay that A) that didn’t have a tattoo parlor with a hair salon for a waiting room, and B) was about two securely locked doors away from Rafal.

As it turns out, he came through and found us spots in the middle school down the street, where we’d be sleeping on the floor.

Colette and I took one train up there, and Matt took another about 4 hours behind us. On the way, Colette tells me that the night before, she made a play to hook up with Matt, and he rejected her. Rough. Then she asks if I would have cared, since that may change our friendly/family dynamic, to which I say “Absolutely not, though knowing what you know now, it was probably a bad call to leave your vibrator in North Carolina.” She emphatically agreed.

We get to Gdynia at 5:30am, and rather than hang out in the dingy train station waiting for Matt for four hours, we head across the street to an even dingier mom-and-pop coffee shop, where they are BLASTING house music. At 5:30 in then morning. On a Friday. With no one inside except a weathered looking seaman from an old Hemingway novel. Random.

It turns out, everywhere in Poland is like this; house music in coffee shops, hip-hop in family restaurants, house music in supermarkets, etc etc. This really brings the “Follow the baseline” mantra into question. Playing by those rules in Poland, you could wind up stuck behind a rigged video poker machine at a Herna Non-Stop, next to Captain Ahab, dropping zloty hand over fist and reminiscing about the time the girl fell for you, and YOU ran away. Man, those were some good times we had, back then.

Once in Gdynia, I view our sleeping quarters, which consist of approximately 24 square feet of linoleum floor. That’s it. For all three of us. I promptly hit the convenience store and bought two car mats to sleep on those instead. After 3 straight days of car-mat-stubble on my back, I had effectively reasoned out suicide as a more painless personal tragedy.

On to the festival. Sorry, the lead-in really is half the story. The first thing I notice is: Heineken green is absolutely ev-ry-where. They’re really not afraid to be omni-present. The running joke of the festival, among literally everyone I spoke to, was “hey, do you know who’s sponsoring this event?” By the second day, I felt like Sysiphus. I was in a never-ending beer ad, with no hot girls in bikinis, and beer that tastes like Hitler’s urine after a plateful of asparagus spears.

In a shocking twist, Heineken is all they’re selling. Needless to say, after three days of binging (and once purging) on Heineken, I never want to see or smell or taste those horrible demon’s ejaculate ever again.

The next thing I notice: no drugs. ANYWHERE. Not the familiar wafting of weed waltzing past my eager nose, not the overt sale of home-blown hippie glass, not the ubiquitous salesman with the less ubiquitous backpack, not the dread-locked team of brownie vendors, nothing. It was almost spooky.

Whether you partake or not, after about 10 of these festivals now under my belt, I’d come to expect (and appreciate) the libertarian self-governance of music festivals. Police presences, when present, were usually only concerned with crowd control and acting as EMT consultants. In Poland however, news hadn’t arrived that not only is music great, but that music festivals aren’t only about music. They are about a throwback to a time when we could govern ourselves, and if you weren’t harming anyone but yourself, you were free(er) to do so.

Speaking of which, Matt was fiending for ecstasy, which was more than a few synthetic strides past where I was willing to go. But he obviously wasn’t about to find what he was looking for in this emerald lockdown.

Once we got over our disappointment, I decided the quickest path between A (sober) and B (fun) was to hammer shitty Heinekens at a clip I hadn’t neared since fraternity rush. Each day, once we’d achieved a sustainable fun plateau, or SFP if you will, we’d start catching some bands:

Let me say that seeing the Roots without the exhaling geysers of weed everywhere is JUST PLAIN WEIRD. They absolutely killed it out there, but it was unfamiliar territory, comparing it to the previous 4-5 times I’d seen them. They still brought an immense amount of energy, and easily came off as being the most gracious of all the bands that performed. They hung out on stage for an extra 20 minutes to thank the audience, hang out, and throw random stage elements into the crowd, who in turn acted like hookers at a rally for free healthcare.

Groove Armada was insane. They are incredible, live. The crowd, as a whole, literally lost their minds during their set. And considering the lack of synthetics around, that is more than a little noteworthy.

Bih-stih-Boss (or, the Beastie Boys, as we know them) were solid. The Poles absolutely love these guys. Which brings me to another point about Poland: there is a very real Polish hip-hop movement. Which makes perfect sense, when you consider all the black people that live there. In fact, I think I saw one whole black person (two halves) the whole time I was in Gdynia. That’s a ghetto, man!!!

I don’t understand the hop-hop influence there at all, but it’s present, and it’s pretty well patronized. I’d make a comment on how good or bad it is, but considering idiots like Young Jeezy can sell a million records, I got to give the Polskis the benefit of the doubt here.

Lastly, let me add that during the festival's second day, I experienced my first ever flash-flood. Why this was actually awesome was because before I left Krakow, I had taken the extra 15 minutes (and $15USD) to buy waterproof boots. BEST. PURCHASE. EVER. 5% of the festival had waterproof boots on. We were like the captains of the football team, minus the overwhelming urge to date rape.

This is a really long entry. My apologies. I got rambling about a very cool yet strange weekend, and it became a meandering path of my stream of consciousness. I’ll try and be more brief (and more entertaining) in the coming entries.