This Beat Is Military: A Personal Reminisce of the G.I. Disco Era

The year was 1981 when my dear dad returned from being trained in Howard Hughes’ Los Angeles chapter of the military-industrial-complex. He not only brought a massively daring moustache with him, but an even bigger blue steel box, filled to the brink with records.

Pretty much from that day onwards, America ruled the airwaves of our household. It took young Tor a while to figure out that the American Country Countdown wasn’t the only service provided by the Armed Forces Network, these days aptly baptized “AFN - The Eagle.” The son of the enemy of olde was listening closely. The occupied young German didn’t just learn about everyday life on a Cold War American army base (“If you see Russian license plates in your local area, report them to your superiors immediately!,” “Maxxed out that petrol card again?! Call Wiesbaden Airbase blabla-center at 0611-xxxx!”), but also educated himself in other ways of life. Make no mistake, The Eagle (at times) was a funky bird, especially at night.

Later, in our teenage years, we learned how that spawned a whole different layer to our country’s subcultures. In the proximity of the Armed Forces, you’d find plenty of establishments of various kinds, catering to the servicemen and their various needs. And as everything in America seemed bigger and better (the beats, the bass drums, the butts, sneakers from the PX – which gave you instant game right from the very second you strapped them on): the G.I. discos had the best soundsystems, a totally different dancing culture (read: a way to get down) and, of course, the latest import records. To get hold of a magnetic audiotape distilling these experiences would cause greater rushes than an entire trilogy of Indiana Jones badmen stumbling across a random grail in some Saharan oasis.

Getting to those clubs was a totally different ballgame, though. Interestingly enough, the more musically savvy ones were not in the big urban centers but mostly old school discotheques which were as close to the army bases as possible – and sometimes even on them. Something like Frankfurt’s Funkadelic had very little on the countless small nests along the stretch of nothingness also dubbed America’s biggest nuclear silo and aircraft carrier, unfolding for hundreds of kilometres from Bitburg (yes, the one from the Reagan-inspired Ramones song), Spangdahlem across Baumholder, Rammstein, Kaiserslautern down to Mannheim/Heidelberg and up via Frankfurt to the Fulda Gap (where the Russian tank invasion was expected in case of the daily awaited World War III).

With those piles of villages filled with “Thank God, it’s Friday” teens, often times away from home for the first time in their life, greenbacks stuffed in their roomy pockets, the world’s nightlife came to the most backwards of settlements. The names of the clubs were as pro-Western as they were poignant: Flash, Point, World, Oasis, Kajüte, Sam’s, Yvette. The interior was as tacky as you’d expect, but the bass was boomin’ and the moves were alien to any aspiring dancing bear from the forests. So herds of rural teenagers tried their best to emulate their idea of American apparel (sometimes with PX-bought jeans or trainers) and watched closely. Yet no matter how much one practiced the rest of the week, once Imagination’s “Just an Illusion” (curiously enough, an English tune) or Rufus & Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody” came on early in the AM, everyone knew that whatever went down next was no business for teenage dance freaks.*

Now, as we’re shuffling down memory lane, one doesn't have to be all too gray in the beard to remember when Germany’s TV selection consisted of three channels only.** One of the chaps on the government’s payroll happened to walk the streets of New York City and bump into a certain Chris Stein. As folklore would have it, Stein, acquainted to a foxy young lass by the name of Deborah Harry, was in the process of documenting certain phenomena around the less affluent part of the five boroughs on film.

Many tribulations later, that chance encounter between a German financier at ZDF and Chris Stein resulted in a movie called Wild Style, and nothing was ever the same again. It was via this hoodie-bearing documentary, where those who grew up sans the blessings of Caribbean soundsystem culture learned about the power of amplified youth cultures. In eager attempts to get some return for their investment while following up on their Bildungsauftrag (the broadcasting law, which included an education mandate), ZDF re-aired their little documentary again and again, until even the most backwaterish mongrel understood that it wasn’t about where you’re from, but where you at – and how you carry yourself while you move to the music.

Finally, this was the scent of the big wide world simmering out of your parents’ TV set, luring you out there to the universes where people gyrate their hips, rotate on their heads and boggle your mind. Or at least wore Spandex trousers and threw a big F-word into the faces of the parents who just didn’t understand. Even while listening to national radio the kids knew that when Harry “rhymed” in “Rapture” about “Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s fly / DJ’s spinning I said my, my / Flash is fast, Flash is cool / François sais pas, Flashe no deux / You don't stop sure shot,” the times, they are a changin’, indeed-ski. Only problem was: the chances of catching the rare airings of this song and those that came in its wake, were minimal. Enter the mobile cassette listening device. Enter the craft of pause-button mixtapes. Enter the mighty boombox.

Things took a turn to the absurd when my dear grandma of all people replaced her trusty kitchen radio with a Sony portable. Alas, a little one, not packing all too much oomph. Nevertheless, it was sporting all the features of that infamous design center, the EQs, the works. Dear Gudrun didn’t even really bother to adjust the radio dial right. Ah, the envy. No, she would not be persuaded to exchange for this or that device oh so much more fitting to her needs. Gosh, how young pre-puberty men can lust over machines.

All this longing I most certainly would have not survived without the trusty souls I met on school exchanges to Buckinghamshire, England. It was them who kept me alive, supplying me with a steady diet of the blossoming pirate radio scenes. The ones which more and more tended to spell revolution with a big R for rave. There’s still some crappy Radio Shack radio-cassette-decks gathering dust under my bed, acquired on various interview trips to the UK and US – trips which provided me with years worth of cassettes sporting names of DJs long retired and stations bankrupt, busted or rendered irrelevant in the modern marketplace. All recorded in urban hotel rooms while rushing into the streets in order to experience the promises other recordings had made years earlier, now finally in the flesh.

Boomboxes, and their smaller cousin, der Walkman, weren’t biased towards hip hop only. In fact, many a tape would feature the latest Def Jam album on one side, and some neck-breaking thrash metal or distant planet-searching Chicago house on the other. If you ever rode a skateboard during the heyday of Dead Kennedys, you know what I’m talking about. That blue box is still here, next to my desk, now filled to the brim with tapes from all corners of all our planet, each of them highlighting musical universes galore.

Torsten Schmidt has written for various publications, high- or low-brow, home and abroad. After editing GROOVE and SPEX in the ’90s, he co-founded the Red Bull Music Academy, which has been exploring the global musical world since 1998.

This wasn’t an ’80s-only thing by the way. Bonus cocktail trivia: German footballer and keen spotter of intoxicated pundits Rudi Völler, showcased unsuspected nightlife chops when he publicly stated how much he rated the Isley Brothers over German Schlager, thanks to the soldiers around Hanau, Hessia.

In those days, absolutely all broadcasting over Western Europe was financed by State-owned cash collection agencies, represented by gentlemen who’d ring doors, often wearing grey coats, to count receivers in the household.