Right about now the shit would be hitting the fan in my mom’s small village in southern Germany. The Winzerfest wine festival, which only happens once every two years, was in full swing. And by the looks of it the weather was perfect: warm and sunny, the last weekend before fall.

Mom sent me a photo of some guys in Lederhosen and it made me want to get my pair on. I just don’t have any reason to. The Lederhosen are leather breeches with adjustable suspenders, pockets and a belt flap. Once worn by peasants in mountainous regions around Bavaria they became fashionable during the beer and wine festivals in September. The complete look includes checked shirts, knee-high woolen socks, special shoes and a Tyrolean hat with pins and feathers. Some are pointed and look like a dunce’s cap. So you put people in costumes like this and get them drunk and no wonder it ends badly.

That last time we were there for Winzerfest was 10 years ago now, when a Minneapolis boogie-woogie blues band played four nights in a row and we saw every show. I remember feeling immediately disappointed by this. You go on vacation to some exotic German village and it’s not always nice seeing other Americans; it can be a bummer (like looking in the mirror). But it didn’t take long to see how good they were. A lot of that was the singer, Cadillac Kolstad, beating on the piano and gesticulating, howling, that crazy pompadour and devilish look. How that manic music filled the narrow, crowded streets and spilled over everyone.

The next day the band could be spotted late morning hunched over a table outside one of the town cafes sipping a coffee or smoking, looking pale and fragile. This is the state I found Cadillac in when I was asked to photograph him and the band like professionally, even though that’s something I can’t really do, but to get close up with a good camera while they were playing and share the photos with one of the restaurant owners so he could post them on Facebook. It made me feel like an insider, like a local, but it still wasn’t enough to make me feel like a photographer because I am not. I’d been listening to one of Cadillac’s earlier records I told him, which he was surprised to hear, as someone must have leaked it on Spotify, news to him.

Cadillac brought the proverbial house down four nights in a row. We had a friend Uwe who fronted another band that played up by the Bürgermeisteramt but it wasn’t the same thing. They were doing rock covers, crowd favorites, phoning it in. For Cadillac it was different, it was real. He was in his metier. And drunk as a skunk but hitting every note, somehow getting better it seemed, more electric. It was Dionysian, ecstatic, and all of us were feeling it too.

And then add wine and funny outfits. I wore mine around the house even, and recall a time I fried sausages and onions for breakfast one morning while drinking a beer, wearing my Lederhosen. I hadn’t drunk beer in the morning like that before and it felt like I’d cross some line. I had Cadillac’s record playing and it sounded like he was in the other room. Mom lived so close to the stage you could almost make out the words from her house when he was singing. But it was more a kind of muddled noise, mixed in with the smear of German laughter and voices, glass breaking, sirens, men pissing on the pavement.

Cadillac wound up staying in the area for years after that Winzerfest (years). And I don’t blame him. The Germans went bananas over his music and Cadillac made friends with Berne, the owner of the Hirsch, who helped find him more gigs. He got romantically involved with a school teacher who let him sofa surf or crash at her place. He skated through Covid without a visa. Mom said he’d hinted at maybe crashing at her place too but she wisely declined. And then one time I visited and he was just gone (though we still have a lot of his unsold merch at mom’s house, just outside her Hungarian lodger Laszlo’s room).

I’m going back myself next week and will be glad to miss the wine fest. But will always think fondly about that Winzerfest of 2015, and share some memories of it here.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Besigheim, Cadillac Kolstad, Creative Nonfiction, Oktoberfest