The Cellar - Would you believe? Post something about yourself.

This is a little long, but this memory resurfaced with all the Pink Floyd talk lately.

Back when I was doing a semester abroad in West Germany in ’88, I had the opportunity to go see Pink Floyd in concert in a city about two hours away. Buying the tickets was easy enough, but my friends and I didn’t have any idea how we were going to actually get there. Eventually, somebody heard that a local record shop was organizing a charter bus to the concert. The “tickets” were handwritten scraps of paper, but we were assured that the bus really would be waiting for us at a local parking lot.

Arriving at the parking lot about 20 minutes early, we were encouraged to see a bunch of scruffy Germans standing around waiting for the bus too. But we got increasingly nervous as no bus showed up for an hour, and we were about to go beg another friend to drive us when a bus finally pulled into the lot. It looked a little old, but seemed just fine. We all got on, and the mood on the bus became very festive almost immediately.

We were barreling down the autobahn, with Pink Floyd blasting out of somebody's boom box. There was a lot of sweet smelling smoke mixed in with the ever present European cigarette smoke, and everyone was having a good time. This was the way to travel to a concert! No designated driver worries at all. Then I noticed we started slowing down. It was almost imperceptible at first. I looked out the front window, and there was no traffic causing our slowdown. Others started to notice as the bus really lost speed, and in no time, we were sitting by the side of the road.

The vibe was gone. Half the people were looking at their watches and trying to calculate how far we were from the concert and how much time we had left before the start. The other slightly more paranoid half was sure the driver radioed the cops, who were on their way to arrest them for smoking pot. The paranoid half got more paranoid when the angry looking bus driver slowly made his way to the back of the bus, where they were sitting. But he only bent down and opened the hatch in the floor leading down to the engine. He fiddled around for a while, making the engine rev and idle, rev and idle. Then he started talking to one of the passengers sitting next to the hatch. My German wasn’t that great, but it was obvious the driver was giving the passenger some instructions. I didn’t get it, until he put a small cable leading to the throttle into the guy’s hand.

The bus driver walked back up to the front of the bus. Put the bus in gear, and then yelled “NOW!” in German. The passenger pulled on the chain, and the engine responded with a loud roar. The bus slowly pulled back out onto the autobahn. The driver kept shifting through the gears with the engine running at the constant high RPM. I wouldn’t say it was a smooth ride, but we were on the road! Then once we were up to speed on the highway, and he was in top gear, he would call out “schneller!” or “langsamer” as we came up behind trucks, etc. in the lane in front of us. We stayed in the slow lane for the next 45 minutes or so until we got to the concert. It was a little dicey getting through the packed parking lot at the arena, but the passenger in the back seat and the driver in the front had pretty much figured out how to work the thing by this point.

We had a great time at the concert, and when we returned to the bus afterwards, the driver had fixed everything.

We got home without incident.