translation into English by Regine Uhe

A clenched load of nostalgia is floating through the sticky warm room. A pleasant weight of memories comes to rest on everyone’s shoulders. This is a night of meet-agains, reviving friendships and recognizing one another.

What is happening on the stage of the sold-out Quasimodo is probably one of the most emotion-loaded, charming concerts to be seen and heard in Berlin for a long time. But what reunited these old "long-time-no-see" acquaintances and friends was actually much more than a concert.

In the seventies, a handful of musicians from the U.S. shared a huge apartment on Hagelberger Straße 14 in Kreutzberg. Back then, these singers and songwriters not only inspired and stimulated the Berlin club scene, they also captured bits and pieces of the way of life, the feeling of living in Berlin at that time in their songs.

Some of them went back home to America, some stayed in Berlin. The scene changed and folk clubs closed down one after another. Now, after all these years, some of the old friends from Hagelberger Straße got together for a Cd, that was released shortly before the concert. Tonight they are reunited on the stage of the Quasimodo to grippingly bring it all back to the present day. They have always played music, even though John Vaughan (Me and Whiskey), the talkative, soft voiced entertainer is taking care of Lufthansa customers as a steward, even though Bob Williams is today a professor of linguistics in New England, Wayne Grajeda keeps active producing for US television, and Jesse Ballard, once know at Go-In, Steve Club, Banana and Folkpub as the James of the duo Tom and James (with Tom Cunningham), came to the Spree from his avocado farm on the west coast.

Tom Cunningham stayed true to Berlin, working here as a producer, singer and songwriter, John Vaughan stayed around as well, as did Francis Serafini, who is driving a taxi in Berlin.

Together they revel in the past, in musical memories, with lots of stage guests, like singer Ron Randolph or Stephen Miller, who plays dobro guitar and who as a pleasant surprise to everyone in the audience flew in from Canada. A tonal declaration of love to the past revived live on stage, further accentuated by posters of the Go-In, Folkpub and Steve Club, that function as stage decoration.

Very late into the night another reunion took place, the revival of Jesse Ballard’s Paradise Island Band, so popular in the Berlin seventies: Jesse, Saxophone Joe Kucera on sax and flute, bassist Hans Hartmann, and percussionist Tommy Goldschmidt, it seemed like a second concert instead of an encore.

The applause was long like the night – and just as irretrievable.