databank said:

armybrat said:

Ditto, from India.

Chandigarh

Glad to see you're still among us

Of course, "4ever"

JonnyBoyRebel said:

Livingstone, Zambia.

How popular is/was Prince in Zambia?

[Edited 9/2/18 2:40am]

fakir said:

Cameroonian from Tokyo

How popular is/was Prince in Cameroon?

Oh great. Now I have to take a shot from the steps of Verse Eye.

[Edited 9/2/18 6:38am]

[Edited 9/2/18 6:45am]

My second home

bonatoc said:

[Edited 9/2/18 6:38am]

[Edited 9/2/18 6:45am]

bonatoc said:

Oh great. Now I have to take a shot from the steps of Verse Eye.

CatB said:

bonatoc said:

Oh great. Now I have to take a shot from the steps of Verse Eye.

Questionnaire:
Who's stalking who?

NoSwan said:

Buongiorno amici purpurei! From Italy

Ciao, ragà!
"Purperei"? Vabbè che viola, poi... ma... "purpurei"?
Pare uno che non avrebbe capito le parole e canta: "purpurei, purpurei".

Empress said:

Cindy said:

🇨🇦, eh!

Awesome!

Pas d'québecois dans la place, Calice?

databank said:

French, currently living in China.

.

.

I see some people from the former Eastern block here: IDK how old y'all are but was Prince already famous there before 1989 or did he rise to popularity in the 90's?

.

I'm Hungarian, currently living in England.

.

.

There seem to be quite a few misconceptions regarding the so-called Eastern block countries in how much access we had to Western culture in general. It's understandable though – and of course it is true that the Iron Curtain did mean very real restrictions, but those restrictions weren't always ideology-based, but often simply results of the economic structure of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Eastern Germany, Albania, Bulgaria (and to some degree: Yugoslavia) that was quite disconnected from the free market. A lot of the misconceptions actually originate from the cold war, when both the USA and the USSR were busy spreading propaganda about each other, and I vividly remember some American friends who were studying at a Hungarian university in the mid-'80s telling me how positively surprised they were when they arrived to see that people weren't dressed in grey uniforms as they were led to believe by Cold War propaganda and that we had a vibrant cultural life and how much they enjoyed the country.
.
Don't want to write a history book here but it's worth noting that the first half of the '50s were the worst in Hungary, both politically and culturally. The 1956 revolution was brutally punished by the Kremlin, but from 1957 onwards restrictions started loosening gradually. Slowly but surely a big part of contemporary Western literature was made available by the state-owned publishers (don't forget that until the mid-'80s practically every company was state-owned), though with notable exceptions such as Orwell. We did get Steinbeck, Miller, Hemingway, Heller, Vonnegut, Salinger, Updike, Kerouac and even Ginsberg (with the foul language edited out), just to name a few.
.
Keith Richards once said that effectively it was music that brought down the Berlin wall and there is certainly a lot of truth in that. Music gets through walls, it cut through the Iron Curtain, despite all efforts of the authoritarian regime. Even before the 1-2 state-owned radio channels started broadcasting jazz and pop music (which they called "beat"), Hungarians frequently tuned their radios to Radio Free Europe and Radio Luxemburg with tape recorders ready to capture the latest Western music, though these mid-wave frequency bands were systematically disturbed by the regime to render them almost unlistenable. Still, that is how new music was spreading amongst music fans, by endlessly making private copies of these horrible-sounding radio-tapes.
.
Forbidden fruit always tastes nicer so jazz and "beat" music grew in popularity very quickly, and soon (by the early-'60s) very few of them were actually banned, they just simply weren't easily available – and they were frowned upon by the regime. Radio Free Europe's frequency bands remained disturbed/blocked until the end of the '80s, but the Hungarian state radio station was broadcasting more and more pop and rock music from the second part of the '60s, when the first big wave of extremely popular pop and rock bands who wrote their own material started to emerge.
.
The primary intent of the regime was to maintain control, not necessarily to ban things. As long as they maintained control over pop and rock bands, they let the youth have their fun. The control was real though: up until the late '80s there was only one, state-owned record company. (If you weren't favoured by them, you couldn't make a record, period.) There weren't any independent radio or TV-channels either of course, and if you were a musician, a state-owned (and corrupt) agency decided whether to grant you a licence to perform on big concert stages and tours or not. Another, also state-owned and corrupt agency dealt with all the invitations from festivals and promoters abroad: if this agency said yes, you were granted permission to travel abroad to perform, but the money you made abroad in hard currency was confiscated by the regime and you were only partially compensated in Hungarian forints.
.
Which leads us to the main reason behind why Western music wasn't easy to obtain behind the Iron Curtain: our currency wasn't freely exchangable into the so-called hard currencies of Western countries. The economies of the Eastern block countries relied heavily on state subsidies and on trading goods between the Soviet Union and the Eastern block countries. Trade was heavily controlled by the Kremlin and they were adamant in trying to make these countries survive by trading goods between each other, so apples produced in Hungary went to the USSR in exchange for soldering irons or whatever... The goal was to avoid importing anything from the West as much as possible, not only for ideological reasons, but also simply because our countries didn't have the hard currency for that. We were used to our "Monopoly-money" that was only worth something between the Eastern block countries, but it was practically worthless in the West.
.
Our countries simply didn't have the hard currency to import records from the West to sell in shops. Furthermore, the raw material (the vinyl mould) needed to manufacture records also had to be imported from Western Europe for hard currency, so that limited the number of releases the state-owned record company could produce in a year.
.
Imagine this: the state-monopoly record company is only able to produce 15-20 album releases per year (in a country with a population of 10 million), and this includes not only the biggest pop-rock releases (those often sold above 100,000 copies), but some jazz, classical and folk titles too. Yet Western bands too were extremely popular, even though the records weren't easy to obtain – they mostly came in by private import (aka smuggling), brought in by tourists and truck drivers. So the music DID get in through various channels (radio, private taping etc), but the records themselves were pretty hard to obtain, especially during the '60s and '70s.
.
By the '80s a few labels in Yugoslavia and India were already licensing Western rock and pop records for local mass-production and some of these Yugoslavian- and Indian-pressed albums started to appear in Hungarian shops too, as they were cheaper (and a bit lower-quality) than the Western European editions. The Hungarian record company also started licensing a few (very few) albums from the West, so a few of the biggest sellers like Sting's 'Nothing Like The Sun' etc were available. The 'Graffiti Bridge' double-LP came out in a gatefold sleeve in Hungary, by the way.
.
As for what bands were actually known and popular? I have to point out that obviously, in such a very controlled market where only a select few releases are available, those few will become even bigger than they would normally become against a healthy competition. In other words: the biggest names did cut through the Iron Curtain far more easily than the rest. So The Beatles were hugely popular, just as the Stones were, and the best Hungarian bands of '70, '71 were already playing Cream, Hendrix, Traffic etc – and their own material too.
Practically all of the biggest international stars and the biggest musical trends were popular in Hungary too, all the rock, the biggest soul and jazz names, glam rock, hard rock, disco, reggae, punk, hiphop, new wave etc, etc.
.
Prince became popular right after Purple Rain, although the film wasn't shown in cinemas, but the Syracruse concert video was played on the Austrian TV and that was viewable in the Western parts of Hungary too. MTV Europe started to become available around 1986, so we were soon glued to that as teenagers.
.
Also, the Hungarian state radio had a series of "The complete recordings of Prince" in 1987 and a lot of us were busy taping all of it. (As with many of such radio shows at that time, it was aimed at people like me who obtained new music primarily from the radio so the presenter didn't talk over the music and played whole albums uninterrupted for easy home taping.) This "Complete recordings of Prince" series included all of the albums from 'For You' to 'SOTT', a lot of the singles and B-sides and even some bootlegs(!) such as 'The Chocolate Box', so I was in heaven.
(Funny thing though, when they played the '1999' album, they edited out a few bars of 'Let's Pretend We're Married: the lines "I want to, I want to, I want to want to, I want to fuck you" and "Look here Marsha, I'm not sayin' this just to be nasty I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth" weren't allowed to be broadcast, apparently. Yet nothing else was edited from any of the other albums.)
.

[Edited 9/2/18 11:09am]

bonatoc said:

CatB said:

Questionnaire:
Who's stalking who?

I'm at and in Versailles a lot, we may have bumped into each other without knowing.

Kares said:

(LONG POST, SORRY! )

.

There seem to be quite a few misconceptions regarding the so-called Eastern block countries in how much access we had to Western culture in general. It's understandable though – and of course it is true that the Iron Curtain did mean very real restrictions, but those restrictions weren't always ideology-based, but often simply results of the economic structure of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Eastern Germany, Albania, Bulgaria (and to some degree: Yugoslavia) that was quite disconnected from the free market. A lot of the misconceptions actually originate from the cold war, when both the USA and the USSR were busy spreading propaganda about each other, and I vividly remember some American friends who were studying at a Hungarian university in the mid-'80s telling me how positively surprised they were when they arrived to see that people weren't dressed in grey uniforms as they were led to believe by Cold War propaganda and that we had a vibrant cultural life and how much they enjoyed the country.
.
Don't want to write a history book here but it's worth noting that the first half of the '50s were the worst in Hungary, both politically and culturally. The 1956 revolution was brutally punished by the Kremlin, but from 1957 onwards restrictions started loosening gradually. Slowly but surely a big part of contemporary Western literature was made available by the state-owned publishers (don't forget that until the mid-'80s practically every company was state-owned), though with notable exceptions such as Orwell. We did get Steinbeck, Miller, Hemingway, Heller, Vonnegut, Salinger, Updike, Kerouac and even Ginsberg (with the foul language edited out), just to name a few.
.
Keith Richards once said that effectively it was music that brought down the Berlin wall and there is certainly a lot of truth in that. Music gets through walls, it cut through the Iron Curtain, despite all efforts of the authoritarian regime. Even before the 1-2 state-owned radio channels started broadcasting jazz and pop music (which they called "beat"), Hungarians frequently tuned their radios to Radio Free Europe and Radio Luxemburg with tape recorders ready to capture the latest Western music, though these mid-wave frequency bands were systematically disturbed by the regime to render them almost unlistenable. Still, that is how new music was spreading amongst music fans, by endlessly making private copies of these horrible-sounding radio-tapes.
.
Forbidden fruit always tastes nicer so jazz and "beat" music grew in popularity very quickly, and soon (by the early-'60s) very few of them were actually banned, they just simply weren't easily available – and they were frowned upon by the regime. Radio Free Europe's frequency bands remained disturbed/blocked until the end of the '80s, but the Hungarian state radio station was broadcasting more and more pop and rock music from the second part of the '60s, when the first big wave of extremely popular pop and rock bands who wrote their own material started to emerge.
.
The primary intent of the regime was to maintain control, not necessarily to ban things. As long as they maintained control over pop and rock bands, they let the youth have their fun. The control was real though: up until the late '80s there was only one, state-owned record company. (If you weren't favoured by them, you couldn't make a record, period.) There weren't any independent radio or TV-channels either of course, and if you were a musician, a state-owned (and corrupt) agency decided whether to grant you a licence to perform on big concert stages and tours or not. Another, also state-owned and corrupt agency dealt with all the invitations from festivals and promoters abroad: if this agency said yes, you were granted permission to travel abroad to perform, but the money you made abroad in hard currency was confiscated by the regime and you were only partially compensated in Hungarian forints.
.
Which leads us to the main reason behind why Western music wasn't easy to obtain behind the Iron Curtain: our currency wasn't freely exchangable into the so-called hard currencies of Western countries. The economies of the Eastern block countries relied heavily on state subsidies and on trading goods between the Soviet Union and the Eastern block countries. Trade was heavily controlled by the Kremlin and they were adamant in trying to make these countries survive by trading goods between each other, so apples produced in Hungary went to the USSR in exchange for soldering irons or whatever... The goal was to avoid importing anything from the West as much as possible, not only for ideological reasons, but also simply because our countries didn't have the hard currency for that. We were used to our "Monopoly-money" that was only worth something in between the Eastern block countries, but it was practically worthless in the West.
.
Our countries simply didn't have the hard currency to import records from the West to sell in shops. Also, the raw material (the vinyl mould) needed to manufacture records also had to be imported from Western Europe for hard currency, so that limited the number of releases the state-owned record company could produce in a year.
.
Imagine this: the state-monopoly record company is only able to produce 15-20 album releases per year (in a country with a population of 10 million), and this includes not only the biggest pop-rock releases (those often sold above 100,000 copies), but some jazz, classical and folk titles too. Yet Western bands too were extremely popular, even though the records weren't easy to obtain – they mostly came in by private import (aka smuggling), brought in by tourists and truck drivers. So the music DID get in through various channels (radio, private taping etc), but the records themselves were pretty hard to obtain, especially during the '60s and '70s.
.
By the '80s a few labels in Yugoslavia and India were already licensing Western rock and pop records for local mass-production and some of these Yugoslavian- and Indian-pressed albums started to appear in Hungarian shops too, as they were cheaper (and a bit lower-quality) than the Western European editions. The Hungarian record company also started licensing a few (very few) albums from the West, so a few of the biggest sellers like Sting's 'Nothing Like The Sun' etc were available. The 'Graffiti Bridge' double-LP came out in a gatefold sleeve in Hungary, by the way.
.
As for what bands were actually known and popular? I have to point out that obviously, in such a very controlled market where only a select few releases are available, those few will become even bigger than they would normally become against a healthy competition. In other words: the biggest names did cut through the Iron Curtain far more easily than the rest. So The Beatles were hugely popular, just as the Stones were, and the best Hungarian bands of '70, '71 were already playing Cream, Hendrix, Traffic etc – and their own material too.
Practically all of the biggest international stars and the biggest musical trends were popular in Hungary too, all the rock, the biggest soul and jazz names, glam rock, hard rock, disco, reggae, punk, hiphop, new wave etc, etc.
.
Prince also became popular right after Purple Rain, although the film wasn't shown in cinemas, but the Syracruse concert video was played on the Austrian TV and that was viewable in the Western parts of Hungary too. MTV Europe started to become available around 1986, so we were glued to that too.
.
Also, the Hungarian state radio had a series of "The complete recordings of Prince" in 1987 and a lot of us were busy taping all of it. (As with many of such radio shows at that time, it was aimed at people like me who obtained new music primarily from the radio so the presenter didn't talk over the music and played whole albums uninterrupted for easy home taping.) This "Complete recordings of Prince" series included all of the albums from 'For You' to 'SOTT', a lot of the singles and B-sides and even some bootlegs(!) such as 'The Chocolate Box', so I was in heaven.
(Funny thing though, when they played the '1999' album, they edited out a few bars of 'Let's Pretend We're Married: the lines "I want to, I want to, I want to want to, I want to fuck you" and "Look here Marsha, I'm not sayin' this just to be nasty I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth" weren't allowed to be broadcasted, apparently. Yet nothing else was edited from any of the other albums.)
.

Great post, Kares. I always try to shake that past but I can't. I still get nostalgic - and most often thanks to the music.

Having grown up in East Germany until I was a teenager, I always saw Western music as something magical. There was so much secrecy and many moments that had a huge impact on defining who I am today. Beginning with being grateful for the "little" things. Treasuring things that many people just consume like fast food.

I remember collecting bubble gum wrappers and the tiniest snippets from TV mags. Those things were curreny among us kids. Trading and swapping those things. I remember how I lost my very first Michael Jackson picture in a game (I got it back later). Those things were traumatic. Today I can laugh about it but part of me still feels the same.

How we got music was often very adventurous indeed. I remember how my big sister got MJ's Thriller album from under the counter and only because she was working for a publisher at the time. And she got the album years after it was released. I didn't even know it at the time. I found it years later, when I already had the BAD album. My sister gave me that Thriller copy, I still have it today and I think it's cool to have a Thriller copy "Printed in GDR" and with things written on the sleeve that just make any fan cringe. It says that Michael's brother "Paul" played guitar on the album, that the solo on "Beat It" was played by Eddi van Halen and that partners for future collaborations included Queen chief Eddie Mercury

As for the Wall - I also believe it was music that helped bring it down. Not that it was David Hasselhoff like the Germans are still joking but that music from the West made us want OUT. The way I discovered Prince and MJ illustrates this as well. When I was 11, in the summer of 1988, we had no access to MTV where I lived and in my family it was not allowed to watch any Western TV. Of course, my grandmas did it and they let me watch it too but my father and stepmother did not. When I was alone I did watch, of course, like any other kid in our part of the world. On Sat1 TV (the channel that featured P's performances in the late 90s too) they had Breakfast TV, something that didn't exist elsewhere in Germany at the time. And they'd play a single music video every day. I remember Vanessa Paradis' "Joe le Taxi" and two other videos they played that summer were MJ's "Dirty Diana" and Prince's "Alphabet St." I didn't even catch Prince's name back then but something made me say, Those are my brothers, and in my childlike believing I just knew that one day I was gonna meet them. I don't know where this belief came from, it was just there. I even told my father that I was gonna go to concerts of Western musicians one day. He just laughed at me saying, "You do know that we have a wall here, don't you? And you don't have a way to ever go there."

It discouraged me only for a moment. For me it was just never a question that once I was an adult I would just be free to travel and also go to their shows and meet them. And I did. And ironically when I met Prince it was only meters away from where the Wall used to be. And when he played at the Traenenpalast that night - that was extra special. I guess many people don't know where the place got its name from. Our history.

As for Western acts playing in East Germany - I later heard how there had been negotiations with Honecker back in '88 that MJ was actually going to play the BAD Tour on our side of the Wall. It was a huge thing back then. Honecker was a fan, they said. Being young, we even believed it. Many Western acts played in East Berlin without us even knowing. As you grow older you see those things differently. It was all about Honecker's power "to give the kids Michael Jackson". Anyway, the people living near the Wall heard the whole show anyway - and for free.

I don't want to make a long post either but yeah, that's where we come from and it's part of who we are.

[Edited 9/2/18 9:48am]

CatB said:

Kares said:

.

There seem to be quite a few misconceptions regarding the so-called Eastern block countries in how much access we had to Western culture in general. It's understandable though – and of course it is true that the Iron Curtain did mean very real restrictions, but those restrictions weren't always ideology-based, but often simply results of the economic structure of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Eastern Germany, Albania, Bulgaria (and to some degree: Yugoslavia) that was quite disconnected from the free market. A lot of the misconceptions actually originate from the cold war, when both the USA and the USSR were busy spreading propaganda about each other, and I vividly remember some American friends who were studying at a Hungarian university in the mid-'80s telling me how positively surprised they were when they arrived to see that people weren't dressed in grey uniforms as they were led to believe by Cold War propaganda and that we had a vibrant cultural life and how much they enjoyed the country.
.
Don't want to write a history book here but it's worth noting that the first half of the '50s were the worst in Hungary, both politically and culturally. The 1956 revolution was brutally punished by the Kremlin, but from 1957 onwards restrictions started loosening gradually. Slowly but surely a big part of contemporary Western literature was made available by the state-owned publishers (don't forget that until the mid-'80s practically every company was state-owned), though with notable exceptions such as Orwell. We did get Steinbeck, Miller, Hemingway, Heller, Vonnegut, Salinger, Updike, Kerouac and even Ginsberg (with the foul language edited out), just to name a few.
.
Keith Richards once said that effectively it was music that brought down the Berlin wall and there is certainly a lot of truth in that. Music gets through walls, it cut through the Iron Curtain, despite all efforts of the authoritarian regime. Even before the 1-2 state-owned radio channels started broadcasting jazz and pop music (which they called "beat"), Hungarians frequently tuned their radios to Radio Free Europe and Radio Luxemburg with tape recorders ready to capture the latest Western music, though these mid-wave frequency bands were systematically disturbed by the regime to render them almost unlistenable. Still, that is how new music was spreading amongst music fans, by endlessly making private copies of these horrible-sounding radio-tapes.
.
Forbidden fruit always tastes nicer so jazz and "beat" music grew in popularity very quickly, and soon (by the early-'60s) very few of them were actually banned, they just simply weren't easily available – and they were frowned upon by the regime. Radio Free Europe's frequency bands remained disturbed/blocked until the end of the '80s, but the Hungarian state radio station was broadcasting more and more pop and rock music from the second part of the '60s, when the first big wave of extremely popular pop and rock bands who wrote their own material started to emerge.
.
The primary intent of the regime was to maintain control, not necessarily to ban things. As long as they maintained control over pop and rock bands, they let the youth have their fun. The control was real though: up until the late '80s there was only one, state-owned record company. (If you weren't favoured by them, you couldn't make a record, period.) There weren't any independent radio or TV-channels either of course, and if you were a musician, a state-owned (and corrupt) agency decided whether to grant you a licence to perform on big concert stages and tours or not. Another, also state-owned and corrupt agency dealt with all the invitations from festivals and promoters abroad: if this agency said yes, you were granted permission to travel abroad to perform, but the money you made abroad in hard currency was confiscated by the regime and you were only partially compensated in Hungarian forints.
.
Which leads us to the main reason behind why Western music wasn't easy to obtain behind the Iron Curtain: our currency wasn't freely exchangable into the so-called hard currencies of Western countries. The economies of the Eastern block countries relied heavily on state subsidies and on trading goods between the Soviet Union and the Eastern block countries. Trade was heavily controlled by the Kremlin and they were adamant in trying to make these countries survive by trading goods between each other, so apples produced in Hungary went to the USSR in exchange for soldering irons or whatever... The goal was to avoid importing anything from the West as much as possible, not only for ideological reasons, but also simply because our countries didn't have the hard currency for that. We were used to our "Monopoly-money" that was only worth something in between the Eastern block countries, but it was practically worthless in the West.
.
Our countries simply didn't have the hard currency to import records from the West to sell in shops. Also, the raw material (the vinyl mould) needed to manufacture records also had to be imported from Western Europe for hard currency, so that limited the number of releases the state-owned record company could produce in a year.
.
Imagine this: the state-monopoly record company is only able to produce 15-20 album releases per year (in a country with a population of 10 million), and this includes not only the biggest pop-rock releases (those often sold above 100,000 copies), but some jazz, classical and folk titles too. Yet Western bands too were extremely popular, even though the records weren't easy to obtain – they mostly came in by private import (aka smuggling), brought in by tourists and truck drivers. So the music DID get in through various channels (radio, private taping etc), but the records themselves were pretty hard to obtain, especially during the '60s and '70s.
.
By the '80s a few labels in Yugoslavia and India were already licensing Western rock and pop records for local mass-production and some of these Yugoslavian- and Indian-pressed albums started to appear in Hungarian shops too, as they were cheaper (and a bit lower-quality) than the Western European editions. The Hungarian record company also started licensing a few (very few) albums from the West, so a few of the biggest sellers like Sting's 'Nothing Like The Sun' etc were available. The 'Graffiti Bridge' double-LP came out in a gatefold sleeve in Hungary, by the way.
.
As for what bands were actually known and popular? I have to point out that obviously, in such a very controlled market where only a select few releases are available, those few will become even bigger than they would normally become against a healthy competition. In other words: the biggest names did cut through the Iron Curtain far more easily than the rest. So The Beatles were hugely popular, just as the Stones were, and the best Hungarian bands of '70, '71 were already playing Cream, Hendrix, Traffic etc – and their own material too.
Practically all of the biggest international stars and the biggest musical trends were popular in Hungary too, all the rock, the biggest soul and jazz names, glam rock, hard rock, disco, reggae, punk, hiphop, new wave etc, etc.
.
Prince also became popular right after Purple Rain, although the film wasn't shown in cinemas, but the Syracruse concert video was played on the Austrian TV and that was viewable in the Western parts of Hungary too. MTV Europe started to become available around 1986, so we were glued to that too.
.
Also, the Hungarian state radio had a series of "The complete recordings of Prince" in 1987 and a lot of us were busy taping all of it. (As with many of such radio shows at that time, it was aimed at people like me who obtained new music primarily from the radio so the presenter didn't talk over the music and played whole albums uninterrupted for easy home taping.) This "Complete recordings of Prince" series included all of the albums from 'For You' to 'SOTT', a lot of the singles and B-sides and even some bootlegs(!) such as 'The Chocolate Box', so I was in heaven.
(Funny thing though, when they played the '1999' album, they edited out a few bars of 'Let's Pretend We're Married: the lines "I want to, I want to, I want to want to, I want to fuck you" and "Look here Marsha, I'm not sayin' this just to be nasty I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth" weren't allowed to be broadcasted, apparently. Yet nothing else was edited from any of the other albums.)
.

Great post, Kares. I always try to shake that past but I can't. I still get nostalgic - and most often thanks to the music.

Having grown up in East Germany until I was a teenager, I always saw Western music as something magical. There was so much secrecy and many moments that had a huge impact on defining who I am today. Beginning with being grateful for the "little" things. Treasuring things that many people just consume like fast food.

I remember collecting bubble gum wrappers and the tiniest snippets from TV mags. Those things were curreny among us kids. Trading and swapping those things. I remember how I lost my very first Michael Jackson picture in a game (I got it back later). Those things were traumatic. Today I can laugh about it but part of me still feels the same.

How we got music was often very adventurous indeed. I remember how my big sister got MJ's Thriller album from under the counter and only because she was working for a publisher at the time. And she got the album years after it was released. I didn't even know it at the time. I found it years later, when I already had the BAD album. My sister gave me that Thriller copy, I still have it today and I think it's cool to have a Thriller copy "Printed in GDR" and with things written on the sleeve that just make any fan cringe. It says that Michael's brother "Paul" played guitar on the album, that the solo on "Beat It" was played by Eddi van Halen and that partners for future collaborations included Queen chief Eddie Mercury

As for the Wall - I also believe it was music that helped bring it down. Not that it was David Hasselhoff like the Germans are still joking but that music from the West made us want OUT. The way I discovered Prince and MJ illustrates this as well. When I was 11, in the summer of 1988, we had no access to MTV where I lived and in my family it was not allowed to watch any Western TV. Of course, my grandmas did it and they let me watch it too but my father and stepmother did not. When I was alone I did watch, of course, like any other kid in our part of the world. On Sat1 TV (the channel that featured P's performances in the late 90s too) they had Breakfast TV, something that didn't exist elsewhere in Germany at the time. And they'd play a single music video every day. I remember Vanessa Paradis' "Joe le Taxi" and two other videos they played that summer were MJ's "Dirty Diana" and Prince's "Alphabet St." I didn't even catch Prince's name back then but something made me say, Those are my brothers, and in my childlike believing I just knew that one day I was gonna meet them. I don't know where this belief came from, it was just there. I even told my father that I was gonna go to concerts of Western musicians one day. He just laughed at me saying, "You do know that we have a wall here, don't you? And you don't have a way to ever go there."

It discouraged me only for a moment. For me it was just never a question that once I was an adult I would just be free to travel and also go to their shows and meet them. And I did. And ironically when I met Prince it was only meters away from where the Wall used to be. And when he played at the Traenenpalast that night - that was extra special. I guess many people don't know where the place got its name from. Our history.

As for Western acts playing in East Germany - I later heard how there had been negotiations with Honecker back in '88 that MJ was actually going to play the BAD Tour on our side of the Wall. It was a huge thing back then. Honecker was a fan, they said. Being young, we even believed it. Many Western acts played in East Berlin without us even knowing. As you grow older you see those things differently. It was all about Honecker's power "to give the kids Michael Jackson". Anyway, the people living near the Wall heard the whole show anyway - and for free.

I don't want to make a long post either but yeah, that's where we come from and it's part of who we are.

[Edited 9/2/18 9:48am]

.
Thanks, CatB.
.
Indeed, our pasts always remain with us, no matter where we live – and sometimes it is almost impossible to explain the depths of the effects authoritarian regimes can have on people who grew up in them. They made us develop some special skills too though: such as the ability to read between the lines, for example.
.
And I can totally relate to what you're saying about how silly little things such as bubblegum-wrappers could gain meaning. How a can of Coke in the '60s or even in the '70s meant a taste of freedom, of a better world that we had no access to.
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That's exactly why Western music was also about a lot more than just music for us too. It was a way of trying to connect with the free world.
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[Edited 9/2/18 10:11am]

Kares said:

CatB said:

Great post, Kares. I always try to shake that past but I can't. I still get nostalgic - and most often thanks to the music.

Having grown up in East Germany until I was a teenager, I always saw Western music as something magical. There was so much secrecy and many moments that had a huge impact on defining who I am today. Beginning with being grateful for the "little" things. Treasuring things that many people just consume like fast food.

I remember collecting bubble gum wrappers and the tiniest snippets from TV mags. Those things were curreny among us kids. Trading and swapping those things. I remember how I lost my very first Michael Jackson picture in a game (I got it back later). Those things were traumatic. Today I can laugh about it but part of me still feels the same.

How we got music was often very adventurous indeed. I remember how my big sister got MJ's Thriller album from under the counter and only because she was working for a publisher at the time. And she got the album years after it was released. I didn't even know it at the time. I found it years later, when I already had the BAD album. My sister gave me that Thriller copy, I still have it today and I think it's cool to have a Thriller copy "Printed in GDR" and with things written on the sleeve that just make any fan cringe. It says that Michael's brother "Paul" played guitar on the album, that the solo on "Beat It" was played by Eddi van Halen and that partners for future collaborations included Queen chief Eddie Mercury

As for the Wall - I also believe it was music that helped bring it down. Not that it was David Hasselhoff like the Germans are still joking but that music from the West made us want OUT. The way I discovered Prince and MJ illustrates this as well. When I was 11, in the summer of 1988, we had no access to MTV where I lived and in my family it was not allowed to watch any Western TV. Of course, my grandmas did it and they let me watch it too but my father and stepmother did not. When I was alone I did watch, of course, like any other kid in our part of the world. On Sat1 TV (the channel that featured P's performances in the late 90s too) they had Breakfast TV, something that didn't exist elsewhere in Germany at the time. And they'd play a single music video every day. I remember Vanessa Paradis' "Joe le Taxi" and two other videos they played that summer were MJ's "Dirty Diana" and Prince's "Alphabet St." I didn't even catch Prince's name back then but something made me say, Those are my brothers, and in my childlike believing I just knew that one day I was gonna meet them. I don't know where this belief came from, it was just there. I even told my father that I was gonna go to concerts of Western musicians one day. He just laughed at me saying, "You do know that we have a wall here, don't you? And you don't have a way to ever go there."

It discouraged me only for a moment. For me it was just never a question that once I was an adult I would just be free to travel and also go to their shows and meet them. And I did. And ironically when I met Prince it was only meters away from where the Wall used to be. And when he played at the Traenenpalast that night - that was extra special. I guess many people don't know where the place got its name from. Our history.

As for Western acts playing in East Germany - I later heard how there had been negotiations with Honecker back in '88 that MJ was actually going to play the BAD Tour on our side of the Wall. It was a huge thing back then. Honecker was a fan, they said. Being young, we even believed it. Many Western acts played in East Berlin without us even knowing. As you grow older you see those things differently. It was all about Honecker's power "to give the kids Michael Jackson". Anyway, the people living near the Wall heard the whole show anyway - and for free.

I don't want to make a long post either but yeah, that's where we come from and it's part of who we are.

[Edited 9/2/18 9:48am]

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Thanks, CatB.
.
Indeed, our pasts always remain with us, no matter where we live – and sometimes it is almost impossible to explain the depths of the effects authoritarian regimes can have on people who grew up in them. They made us develop some special skills too though: such as the ability to read between the lines, for example.
.
And I can totally relate to what you're saying about how silly little things such as bubblegum-wrappers could gain meaning. How a can of Coke in the '60s or even in the '70s meant a taste of freedom, of a better world that we had no access to.
.
That's exactly why Western music was also about a lot more than just music for us too. It was a way of trying to connect with the free world.
.

Very true, Kares.

^^^ Thank you Kares and Cat for those lenghty replies. That was super interesting to read

CatB said:

Kares said:

.
Thanks, CatB.
.
Indeed, our pasts always remain with us, no matter where we live – and sometimes it is almost impossible to explain the depths of the effects authoritarian regimes can have on people who grew up in them. They made us develop some special skills too though: such as the ability to read between the lines, for example.
.
And I can totally relate to what you're saying about how silly little things such as bubblegum-wrappers could gain meaning. How a can of Coke in the '60s or even in the '70s meant a taste of freedom, of a better world that we had no access to.
.
That's exactly why Western music was also about a lot more than just music for us too. It was a way of trying to connect with the free world.
.

Very true, Kares.

.

Another thing worth noting is that although we didn't have a lot of Western pop or rock bands playing concerts in Hungary, those rare occasions when truly big stars visited us became extremely important events not only culturally, but politically too – such as Louis Armstrong's 1965 concert in Budapest's biggest stadium, for an audience of at least 80,000.
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The late '60s, early '70s brought artists such as the Traffic, the Spencer Davis Group, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Fairport Convention – in the '80s we had Tina Turner, Manfred Mann's Earth Band (they made a live album in Budapest), Motörhead, Uriah Heep, Johnny Cash, Santana, Chick Corea, Iron Maiden, Dire Straits, James Brown, Deep Purple, Queen (they filmed and released it), Jethro Tull, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, Metallica, Cure, Nirvana etc, etc... So we weren't THAT isolated as one might think.
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Not that far from USA, of course, but foreign nonetheless. New Brunswick, Canada here. Highest tides in the world baby!

[Edited 9/2/18 11:34am]

databank said:

^^^ Thank you Kares and Cat for those lenghty replies. That was super interesting to read

Sometimes it's good to remember. Reading Kares' post made me realize how much all that is a part of us although it's so long ago.

Kares said:

CatB said:

Very true, Kares.

.

Another thing worth noting is that although we didn't have a lot of Western pop or rock bands playing concerts in Hungary, those rare occasions when truly big stars visited us became extremely important events not only culturally, but politically too – such as Louis Armstrong's 1965 concert in Budapest's biggest stadium, for an audience of at least 80,000.
.
The late '60s, early '70s brought artists such as the Traffic, the Spencer Davis Group, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Fairport Convention – in the '80s we had Tina Turner, Manfred Mann's Earth Band (they made a live album in Budapest), Motörhead, Uriah Heep, Johnny Cash, Santana, Chick Corea, Iron Maiden, Dire Straits, James Brown, Deep Purple, Queen (they filmed and released it), Jethro Tull, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, Metallica, Cure, Nirvana etc, etc... So we weren't THAT isolated as one might think.
.

That's all so interesting. A couple of years ago there was a program on TV where East and West German "celebs" (we didn't really have a celebrity culture, we were all the same, that's why I guess I've never been star-struck) talked about the old times and how things were operated and it was then that I heard for the first time that greats like Joe Cocker, Springsteen and even James Brown had been playing in East Berlin! I mean I lived in that city for years and I didn't know. My friends didn't know either. That's how much they controlled everything. It's so weird.

What many also don't know is that Robert De Niro studied drama at the Volksbuehne Theater in East Berlin. As a youngster he hitchhiked through East Germany (no idea how) all the way up to East Berlin to meet with the director of the theater and he stayed there and took classes given by the director and his wife.

New Zealand, but I have an American passport.

CatB said:

databank said:

^^^ Thank you Kares and Cat for those lenghty replies. That was super interesting to read

Sometimes it's good to remember. Reading Kares' post made me realize how much all that is a part of us although it's so long ago.

That's all so interesting. A couple of years ago there was a program on TV where East and West German "celebs" (we didn't really have a celebrity culture, we were all the same, that's why I guess I've never been star-struck) talked about the old times and how things were operated and it was then that I heard for the first time that greats like Joe Cocker, Springsteen and even James Brown had been playing in East Berlin! I mean I lived in that city for years and I didn't know. My friends didn't know either. That's how much they controlled everything. It's so weird.

.

.

Some of the foreign bands who played in Budapest during the Soviet regime actually played for a lot less money than their usual fee because they respected the fact that ticket prices couldn't be as high as in the West but they were interested in playing for their fan bases behind the Iron Curtain too.
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Some of them had some personal reasons to visit Hungary too, like Dire Straits (the Knopfler-brothers' father was Hungarian who emmigrated after the '56 revolution), Carlos Santana wanted to see his idol's (Gábor Szabó's) hometown – or Jethro Tull, because as Ian told me he loved the beautiful girls in Budapest, hence his song 'Budapest'...
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Romar71 said:

Not that far from USA, of course, but foreign nonetheless. New Brunswick, Canada here. Highest tides in the world baby!

[Edited 9/2/18 11:34am]

One of the rocks looks like a one-legged Donald Trump with a duck foot.

Romar71 said:

Not that far from USA, of course, but foreign nonetheless. New Brunswick, Canada here. Highest tides in the world baby!

[Edited 9/2/18 11:34am]

bonatoc said:

databank said:

French, currently living in China.

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This is an interesting thread because it seems there are VERY few people on this board that aren't from Western countries. Even Japan, where Prince is very popular, didn't send many emissaries on the Org. I wonder to which extent Prince is/was popular in South America, the Middle East and Africa. I know from my experiences in various Asian countries that outside of Japan, he (as well as most Western pop stars from before a decade ago or so) is virtually unknown.

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I see some people from the former Eastern block here: IDK how old y'all are but was Prince already famous there before 1989 or did he rise to popularity in the 90's?

French as well! I consider myself as an hardcore fan: firts concert in 1986 in Paris, followed by many more, trips to MN, collecting all official items, loving is music (mostly 82-86)...

databank said:

^^^ Thank you Kares and Cat for those lenghty replies. That was super interesting to read

I want to thank Kares and Cat, too, for their stories. They're testaments to what a powerful and meaningful influence music can be in people's lives.