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Sauzipf Rocks!

Fill up your van with petrol and head south! In the heart of Europe, near to the Italian border you turn left and enter the Austrian Alps, which is one of the most beautiful areas of this continent - not only during winter time - but also when the sun is high and the summer rain is filling the air with steam and drags the clouds so near to the ground that you feel like walking in heaven...

By Foxy

Most snow enthusiasts probably know the region south of Salzburg in Austria as the perfect location for skiing. This is where the Alps begins. This is an area full of deep lakes, high mountains, large green forrests, long and dark highway tunnels and houses that look like they were part of the set for Heidi -The Movie... But deeply hidden in the countryside of this pittoresque location there is something really progressive going on each year in August. For the last six years an old ice-skating stadion had been transformed into probably the most beautiful festival in Europe by a group of idealistic young rock-fanatics. Welcome to Sauzipf Rocks!

The Trip Begins
For Yours Truly the trip begins already last year in September in München where my band, The Davolinas, had the honour to join the München-version of the Swamp Room Mania-Festival (readers of the past issue of Lowcut would maybe recognize the name 'Swamp Room' from the article about the Hannover-version of this venue...) Anyway, it was last year in München we ran into two of the founders of Austrian Saupzipf Rocks Festival, who apparently digged our music enough to book us almost right after the gig - with the result that we almost a year later found ourselves on the way to Austria for this festival. Well, not directly on the way, since we had a little detour to Belgium before going to Austria... My band is well known for driving fucking long distances to rock, and we're furthermore consequently the band with the sorest asses in Europe from sitting such long hours in a bloody van! But all that aside: Friday 12. august we entered Austria heading for Döbiach - the scene of this festival. Blue skies above, dark green mountains all around, a bright red sunset and suddenly we were there at 10 o'clock in the evening heading for the lights and the massive sound of rock'n'roll reflecting in the hills. It had been raining all day and our first encounter with the festival was getting stucked in a large pool of mud, but fortunately the Austrian drunkheads/ drugheads are nice people who are more than willing to give a hand pushing your wheels out of the trouble...

Hypnotic Psychopaths
The thing about most of the smaller festivals we've been to during this summer is that they're mostly genre-specific festivals, celebrating one type of music in particular. But Sauzipf Rocks presents a broader range of genres - from death/doom to folk-rock and everything in between. Furthermore the bookers have a talent for booking bands from a wide spectre of European countries, which adds a cool vibe to the atmosphere of this festival. This night we were just in time to enjoy the Slovenian band Psychopaths, after realizing that muddy'n'wet boots were going to be part of our reality for the next 36 hours in the mountains. The band plays a strange kind of noisy, abrupt, aggressive rock and features a female vocalist on half of their material. Her voice reminded me a bit of an early Nina Hagen and she had a very progressive way of grapping the audience's attention during the fascinating set of this band.
Next up was our friends from Belgium, Hypnos69, who we'd been joining north of Bruxelles the night before. The basic of this indeed longhaired band is a very dynamic trio with a sound that is best described as stoner-jazz with an indie-noisy tendency... Confused? Well, check them out! This night as often before Hypnos69 was joined by their jazzy friend on sax/ organ, who adds the atmospheric dimension to the band's long sonic trips into space. One of the trademarks of this band is their playing with rythms - they have a cool tendency to transform the classical 4/4 into some really weird metrics like 15/12 or 9/8 and then kind of naturally drift back into the powerful 4/4 parts again. The guys gave a cool show this Friday night in the Alps and the audience was litterally tripping!

The night ended with heavy rock seen from the bar while we tried to keep warm by drinking a large amount of the local Schnapps and while having a long discussion about the former Great Austrian Empire with a local man in his mid-fifties... This is also the beauty of this festival: It's supported by bands, punks, bikers and rock-freaks from all over Europe along with the local inhabitants of the nearest villages, and there's a fundamental spirit of idealism, enthusiasm and true love of music.

Who'll Stop the Rain?!
After pushing the van 200 meters through the mud at shit'o'clock in the night we ended up in the 'band-domicile': A great 3-store house in old Austrian style, where all the bands were sleeping. Saturday morning we woke up with the sun shining in our faces in a room that was 150 degrees warm, but getting up, opening the doors to our private balcony and being greeted by the breath-taking view of mountains all around instantly took away all headaches we might be having...WOW! Heading back to the festival area we were confronted with a horde of muddy festival-goers who'd been passing out in the nearest pool overnite and who were now ready to rock on after a warm portion of gullasch and a lurk Schnapps.

First band up this afternoon was a local rockband and I'm sorry to say, but I've forgotten the name of this band. They started out with some ska-music with horns, sax and everything, but the drummer was unfortunately not really tight which is a shame in especially this genre. After 5 songs or so they got a friend on stage playing the harp, and then the band suddenly played traditional blues-rock. The harp-guy turned out to be blessed with the coolest and roughest rock-vocal that reminded me a bit of - well, yeah - the good old Mountain! The band, that is. In my opinion he should find himself a better band to play with - this guy definitely had something!

And then it started raining. The thing about the mountains is that when it rains the skies come down to earth, and very soon we were all surrounded by wet, wet fog and the pools of mud turned into rivers of shit. All afternoon and early evening band after band struggled against massive amount of water, but the audience couldn't care less: At this festival they're used to the showers and that's not gonna ruin a good party! One of the highlights of this early evening was Tanqueray, an Austrian band with an ass-kicking female bass player, playing some sort of folk-hardrock mixture. Some of their songs we a bit like the Walkabouts or even with reminisences of Jefferson Airplane while other songs were more straight and hard rockers. Nice gig indeed!

A little past 10 in the evening we entered the steamy stage - which had a hole in the roof, it turned out as Per (drums) had a constant dripping of rain right in his head during our entire gig. The crowd was pissed drunk and really rocking - and for the first time ever we had the rare experience that people actually knew our songs very well and could even sing along. And to make it even better the rain stopped for exactly that hour and a half we were playing... We humbly thanks the grace of the weather gods and cool audience for giving us this goooooood trip on stage!

Lord Fuckin' Bishop
Headlining this night was American born Lord Bishop and his Sex Rock Band. They went on stage right after us and while collecting my gear on stage after our gig I was greeted by this enourmous black man wearing a leppard-skin cowboy hat telling me that we were fuckin' kickin' fuckin' ass and asking if his manager could get my address... The Lord started his show with dragging the audience back closer to the stage after the break by shouting: "I wanna see your fuckin' asses up here, man! I wanna see your fucking hands in the air!" It worked... The crowd joined the sex party that lasted more than 2 hours. The band plays traditional bluesy rock'n'roll and has a lot of attitude on stage and this gig contained both their own material with songs like "Fuck Bush" and a lot of classics like "Hey Joe" and "Foxy Lady" as well as a girl called Lisa from the audience taking off her bra on stage for a free t-shirt backstage after the show... Yeah! Good old genuine rock'n'roll - you bet, baby! The show was truly professional, but there was a little too much fuckin' shouting in between the songs for my fuckin' taste... But that's just fuckin' me, I guess.

Dark skies, heaps of mud, hectoliters of rain. At very-late-o'clock Saturday night the band Böttleheäd took over the stage. With wet and cold feet and a burning stomach from too much Schnapps and chili-burritos we had the pleasure of hearing this Motörhead-clone from Salzburg, I believe. Entertaining old-school stuff indeed, but not really the world's seventh wonder - though I still wonder why they were wearing wigs... And after this came this nights' last band, Orgasmatoth, who delivered an aggressive blend of stoner and doom. Pretty ok, actually... By then the audience had lit an enormous camp-fire at the festival area, everyone was totally blasted, and Per (our drummer) had disappeared... Only to re-appear next morning in his bed - fully dressed with shoes on and everything - still drunk and suffering from a pain in his back that he couldn't remember achieving the night before...

Sunday the party continued for the hardcore Austrian audience, and we hang out till late afternoon and started heading back to Copenhagen - which we hit Monday morning at 10, after 18 hours on the road with an over-heated engine, endless traffic jams and nightly highway-driving... Just in time to go directly to work: Rock'n'roll, brothers and sisters!