Live Injection
This month’s lost artefact dredged from obscuria: the Rock & Roll Junkie from the Lowlands.
Herman Brood & His Wild Romance Shpritsz BUBBLE, 1978
‘SHPRITSZ’ IS a word of Yiddish origin which may be German slang for a hypodermic syringe. It could also signify ejaculate, high spirits, verbal riffing, or being squirted by a clown with a soda siphon. Herman Brood – hailed as ‘The Most Famous Hard Drug User In The Netherlands’– would likely have been OK with any of these interpretations.
Born in Zwolle on November 5, 1946, the young Brood played rock’n’roll piano in The Moans, and picked up a taste for pills when playing American army bases in West Germany. After being kicked out of Neder-bluesers Cuby + Blizzards for drug use in 1969, he dropped out of music, later recalling stints in prison and mental institutions, opium smuggling in Israel and a career as a housebreaker. “I was completely into junk and crime,” the William Burroughs-admiring Brood told Sounds’ Phil Sutcliffe. “The success of a break-in was as satisfying as having a hit record.”
He returned to music in the mid ’70s and formed his Wild Romance band, named for a line from Lost Mind by his hero Mose Allison. The group’s first line-up, which featured Focus’s Jan Akkerman on guitar, would only manage 1977’s Street before splintering.
A new formation would follow, including Belgian guitarist Dany Lademacher. A regular collaborator, he’s well placed to say how much of the myth of Brood is true.
“Actually, I never saw something in a magazine or on TV about him that was wrong,” he says. “What you read about him was true most of the time – which makes it more terrifying. When I joined the band, it was like, ‘Welcome to Hell!’ Everything was possible and everything was exaggerated. But it was fantastic. He was, not a great singer, but he had something different. The real Herman was a bit of a shy, quiet guy, and sometimes very nice, yet he was definitely in love with the stage. He even told me himself, that’s hard to analyse.”
Shpritsz was recorded at Relight Studio, Hilvarenbeek, which Lademacher notes was formerly a porno movie studio (Brood approved). As the group, he recalls, played 310 shows that year, recording occurred in fits and starts, often in the middle of the night, with no more than a week of work in all. “The album’s what we did live,” says Lademacher. “Herman was quite easy to work with, but you’re working with a guy who never sleeps and never stops working. Sometimes he didn’t go to bed for four days, and when he did sleep he just turned off, like, boom! Herman sleeps. I’m amazed he had such a long life.”
With 15 songs in 37 minutes, its full-pelt boogie, lowlands R&B and honking bar-room rock’n’roll recalls the contemporary output of Bruce Springsteen and Graham Parker, with shady Lou Reed junkie hassle thrown in. Prowling opener Saturday Night, with Brood’s saliva-y jive talk of neon lights and cold dawns, is just one song dealing with the intravenous life: the nervous Doin’ It, for example, speaks of speed-binge time-dilation, while the Stonesy R & Roll Junkie includes the fateful line: “When I do my suicide for you/I hope you miss me too.” Elsewhere he boasts of having crabs and chewing gum in his pubes (Back (In Y’r Love)) and advises against following his example with the yabbering Dope Sucks.
Lademacher reflects, “It’s not really obvious, but in the lyrics you can find that he was thinking about death quite a lot. It was something he always had with him. Nobody was thinking of that at the time, but it was there.”
The augurs were, nonetheless, good after the LP’s release: a hit at home, its single Saturday Night peaked at 35 on the US charts in September 1979. Shows including dates with The Kinks went down well, and that year Brood would also make his big-screen acting debut, alongside his then-girlfriend Nina Hagen, in crime/music caper Cha-Cha. Yet the movie would bomb, and Lademacher shudders when remembering a disastrous gig at the Bottom Line in New York. “The speed was finished and Herman had too much to drink,” he says. “He just fell in the audience. We actually blew the fucking tour just because of that one night.”
America would not be theirs and 1980’s Go Nutz was also poorly received: thereafter, the official biography reports, “Wild Romance fell apart and Brood’s career collapsed.” Though he continued to record, he later found acclaim as a painter and was hailed as a curious type of national treasure (in the 1994 film Rock’n’Roll Junkie he is both filmed shooting up and singing with old ladies on the street in Amsterdam).
Eventually, the years of hard living – and, says Lademacher, too much booze and a misguided final attempt to get off speed for good – caught up with him. Believing the game was finally up, on July 11, 2001, Brood jumped off the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton. His suicide note, according to the Amsterdam city archives, read, “I don’t feel like it any more, maybe I’ll see you again. Make it a great party.” His funeral cortège in the city was watched by thousands.
With musical tributes including Black Francis’s 2007 concept piece Bluefinger,
Brood has been commemorated in the Netherlands with museum and art exhibitions, films and documentaries, and even a series of commemorative coins. “You still find traces of Herman everywhere you see,” says Lademacher, who continues to play with the reconstituted Wild Romance, whose tour manager is Brood’s son Marcel. “Everyone loved him and he’s still very much alive. He was like a child, you know, a difficult child. He was the bad guy, but that was his way to be the good guy.”
“Sometimes he didn’t go to bed for four days.” DANY LADEMACHER