by Michael Haeflinger
We are sitting at a 24-hour bar on Schönleinstrasse. To the one side of us, Hermannstrasse b
uzzes into the evening, traffic streaming and horns interrupting the stillness of summer. Sirens wail and people rounding the corner shout like breaking bottles. To the other side, old drunks cackle in echtige Berlin speak, their unassuming dogs circle the foot supports on the steh-café tables wondering what kind of wondrous one-sided conversation they will be victim to later on a swervy walk home.
The Cowboy Killers are no strangers to this part of town. They spend their evenings playing gigs all over Berlin, and when they aren’t gigging, they are on the streets of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, bringing the music to the people where they are: in bars, on bridges, in cafes, and at parties. I sat down with these three fine young musicians hiding out from New York City to deconstruct music in New York’s poorer, sexier European cousin, the one you see at parties and wonder about, the one the kids in high school made fun of but secretly wanted to be more like.
Let’s say hi to The Cowboy Killers: Mike Ellison plays the guitar, harmonica, and provides the lead vocals; Charles Alabaster Booth hammers the banjo, howls in the kazoo, and provides the other lead vocals; and Sulzberger Morland holds the rhythm on washboard and washtub bass.
How does your music work in Berlin? Does the history of the music show up in the appreciation?
C: I’ll start by paraphrasing Mike’s argument, which is that Americans dig American roots music in a way that other people can’t dig it or don’t dig it. Which I don’t think is total bullshit, but I think it’s severe bullshit.
I think that Berlin is an electronic music city. There was the huge techno fiasco in the mid-90’s and I think when we first started playing, a lot of people’s reactions were like, “wow! motherfuckers playing their instruments live, right now, not through a laptop or MD player.” One guy said to me at a show, “your music is really low to the ground.”
I think that’s one part of it. But the other part is that [when] we played at White Trash Fast Food and somebody yelled out, “fried chicken!,” and think a lot of the Germans have this weird exotic thing about American roots music and there’s this creepy web of words like “banjo,” “O, Brother Where Art Thou?,” “Dueling Banjoes,” “fried chicken,” “rednecks”…
M: “Yee-haw”
C: “Yee-haw.” There’s all these words that sorta hold each other together and [they] come to it from that angle by way of movies or whatever they’ve been brought up with, so I think in that way, it’s shallow.
S: But in a way, it’s because we’re exotic that we are successful in Berlin. On some level it’s that our music is different, that it’s something they know little about, that they have all these associations, [they say], “oh yeah, awesome, let’s listen to it.”
Even if we say it feels shallow or that it feels weird that they say, “yee-haw,” or “fried chicken,” at the same time, it’s the reason we get gigs. It’s the reason why we can make me money playing music in Berlin. And in a way we can’t in NYC.
C: Yeah, but there are also other reasons why couldn’t make money in NYC.
Such as?
M: It’s really fucking expensive.
C: It’s really huge that we can go out and busk in bars and cafes and make 30 or so Euros each a night.
M: Minimum.
C: Yeah, 60-70 on a really good night. If we sell CDs. And in NYC, that doesn’t happen. It’s Washington Square Park, it’s in front of the Met, it’s out on the streets and it’s not in actual places, so it lets you live as a musician here. That’s a massive thing.
M: I agree with what Booth is saying, but I think one of the reasons people dig it here, and everywhere, is because American music is all over the world. They didn’t grow up with Robert Johnson, but they grew up with Elvis and Elvis is what we are playing, except shittier or whatever. I mean, Elvis is better than us, but the music we are trying to steal is better than Elvis.
The difference, I think, in America is the language, and if you are German and you speak English and you saw a million Hollywood movies, there is an American language that you are not gonna get that is in American discourse. Like Sadie, “I shot Sadie down…” The way things are said. Germans don’t and Europeans don’t, have that same way of speaking.
That doesn’t mean they can’t relate to it or have an experience with it, it’s just what kind of experience are they having? And I don’t think there is anything wrong with having a dance experience or on a that-kinda-reminds-me-of-a-Beatles-song experience, but it’s definitely different than the American experience.
What attracts you to this music’s history?
M: What I am really interested in is that the more you listen to, the more you see the connections. And not just in the words, but when you hear a word and a musical phrase and you can hear the same word and the same melody come back with certain ideas, that really blows my mind.
Like songs about throwing people in a river, a lot of them have very similar musical structures. Like “I gotta woman, six foot four,” that keeps coming back. Every time it’s in a different song, it’s means something different.
C: There’s a long history in American folk music being an urban phenomenon, of urban cats going down and discovering these people and then separating where these people come from from the music that they make. Like the music is a separate thing, outside of the landscape, for example. The lyrics aren’t arbitrary, they come from a specific place and specific experience. I think it’s a real shame to divorce the music that we are playing from the place that it comes from. Part of my job is to respect and figure out where that music is coming from.
Were you guys playing together in NYC?
C: Mikey and I were playing together in NYC.
M: Charlie and I have been playing together for like five years. The first songs we learned :“Rolling in My Sweet Baby’s Arms”…
C: … some Band songs…
M: …a whole bunch of Band songs….
C: Before we came to Berlin we played with Roots n’ Ruckus, a roots music collective in NYC.
M: They used to have a weekly show every Wednesday at the Village Mah Café, which was a Thai restaurant on MacDougal Street…
C: …right down the street from where Van Ronk and Dylan used to play, near the Gaslight…
S: And that’s when they started learning. I’d go down and see their shows and they sucked. They got up, they’re playing this stuff and they’re really nervous about everything. Seven people in the crowd, Mikey’s drunk a half bottle of Jack Daniel’s ‘cos he’s so nervous, he gets up there, he can’t sing, the banjo’s outta tune…
C: The banjo’s still outta tune…
S: …it’s a total train wreck. I said, “alright guys, you’re doin’ it, but you gotta kinda step up…”
M: If you can le
arn to play with a lotta soul in front of three people, you’re set.
C: And play the same songs.
M: We were playing a lot of bluegrassy shit and there was this band called the Powder Kegs and they were playing bluegrassy shit and they were a five piece band and they were really well rehearsed and we were like, “oh shit, we can’t do this.”
C: A lot of the stuff they were listening to was really instrumental to me. Pre-War gospel, American Primitive, the Harry Smith collection I hadn’t really been turned on to, all the Southern Journey Lomax stuff…
M: The truth is we were playing Ramblin’ Jack Elliot songs.
What are your musical roots? What did you guys come up playing and listening to?
M: Nirvana really popped my cherry. From there I went to punk rock and then I got in to Dylan and the Band…Pretty much everyone in the scene in NYC came through punk rock.
C: I saw this Irish band in Providence play with my dad [a professional children’s and folk musician] when I was 15 or 16 called Cordelia’s Dad. They had these huge Black Flag tattoos on their arms, and they were playing punk rock. They were playing Irish music, but it was punk rock. Folk music is the original punk rock. It’s live, it’s DIY, it’s raw.
M: There was this period in the 70s when punk got really rockabilly, and I was listening to that stuff a lot. Then I thought I should listen to the original stuff and started listening to original stuff and then I got the Beatles somehow. Then into mid-60s Beatles, Revolver, Rubber Soul, and then Dylan.
S: I come from a very different tradition in this regard. I’ve inherited my mother’s terrible singing voice, and she was very sad about this when she was raising me. When I was six, we moved to Rye, NY and my mother signed me up for the choir, where I sang for like two or three years, and was really into, but was never that good. It was her attempt to provide me with music, so that I could have a good singing voice, but it didn’t work out.
In sixth grade, I really wanted to play something and it was either going to be drums or saxophone. I shoulda chosen drums. I think I’d be in a really different place if I had chosen drums. In high school, I got quite serious about playing the saxophone, but I was playing concert band stuff. When I got to college I got really into classical saxophone, actually, alto and soprano. I played two, three, four hours a day.
I started playing this music in Berlin. These guys moved over and were really excited about playing, I was gonna be the manager, I actually came up for the name back in NYC.
C: Did you?
S: I sure did. These guys needed something to fill out their music. It was kind of by accident that our next door neighbor found a washboard and gave it to use and I started playing with them. As a teenager I was contra-dancing, like a New England derivative of English country dancing, with this rocking music. The body is a rhythm instrument.
A lot of the way I play the washboard, I interpret it as a dancer. I listen to these guys and what they are doing, and I do with my hands what I normally would do with my feet. And it’s cool, ‘cos I think that the music that we play is rocking music. And the washboard is great ‘cos I can play with any musician here in town. I also picked up the washtub bass, which is also rhythmic, but I am learning how to play melodically.
What do you look for in a song that you do?
S: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing…
M: A lot of what we did originally was that we stole songs that other people were playing in NYC and I told them, “when I go to Berlin, I am going to steal your song.” And they were like, “ha ha ha,” but then I did it, so…
C: There are always a lot of songs that I want to play. [Recently] I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a lot of Memphis Minnie, Memphis Jug Band stuff and it’s tricky because we are going to play it differently because we have different instrumentation. You have to listen to a song thinking about the players you have and the sound you’ve got.
M: What I don’t want to do is play a song the way somebody else did. That’s a cover song If I hear something and I hear how it could be…If you can play something that’s been around a hundred years in a way that it’s almost unrecognizable, then you’ve done your job.
Do you think that there is an element of “contemporization” in the way you play these tunes?
M: The beauty of this type of this type of music is that the same things keep coming up over and over again. It recognizes that the meaning of something is what is put into it, what surrounds it. There’s no meaning in just because of what it is. When we sing a song today that someone sang 80 years ago, it can’t mean the same thing.
A friend of my mom’s teaches method acting and I think of these songs as a vehicle for putting whatever you feel into the song. I can’t relate to the 1920’s era of Prohibition or the 30s Depression era, but the 
feelings they put into it, I try to figure out what they are trying to say and what it says to me and what I can put out from myself that I can put on an emotional level.
S: Gaudi says originality is the return to origin, and I think that’s right on. I think that what’s amazing about American roots music is that it’s all a return to origin. I think you can get caught up in contemporary art, in wanting to create something new, something that hasn’t been created before, but I think on the other hand, a return to origin, and not that you make something that hasn’t been done before, but that you are genuine about it. I think when we play music, whether we can understand going to prison or shooting our woman or doing cocaine or whatever, the point is that the music is something that we feel. I think that’s what makes something original or contemporary.
