With Sunday being a hangovered Sunday courtesy of Gaststätte W. Prassnik, I was really looking forward to a mellow acoustic evening celebrating life and music of legendary protest singer Woody Guthrie. The good guys over at the ExBerliner Mag had put me on the guestlist for what had been announced as a ‘Woody Guthrie 100′-show, and I was especially looking forward to see Tom Morello a.k.a the Nightwatchman play his solo show in honour of Woody (who’s 100th birthday is this year). However, the show at the Kesselhaus in the Kulturbrauerei turned out to be the final show of the 2012 Berlin ‘music and politics festival’, a weeklong festival with panels, discussions and music promoting all sorts of leftish political songwriting. This being a German political event, I was one of the youngest people in the crowd. I’m 34. With rows of chairs set up in front of the stage, it seemed to become the quiet evening I was expecting, so I took to observing the stage and the crowd from the safety of the bar.

Opening act were the 4-piece ‘Woody Sez‘, a very likeable group of musicians who are named after a column Woody once wrote for a socialist newspaper in California, and who retell Woody’s story by playing his songs in chronological order using instruments like a battered accoustic guitar, a kazzoo, banjos, accordeons and fiddles in a proper 1930s setup.

Next up was German ‘Liedermacher’ (or songwriter) Wenzel. Allegedly a very famous musician in the former GDR, watching him perform for the first time he struck me as quite pretentious. Announcing his songs in a artificially hoarse voice, he and his backing band played songs of Woody in German translation (Wenzel has published an album of Woody Guthrie songs in German in 2003), and a few Wenzel-songs in between. What he did not do was to honour the one instrument that Woody used to write his songs: the guitar. Wenzel mostly used a squeaking 70s-keyboard as main instrument to interpret the songs, and in all fairness: if nobody would have told me in advance that he was covering Woody, those songs may have well been played by Heinz Rudolf Kunze (or Chris Rea, for that matter) at a local beerfest. Especially his variations of Woody’s children songs (’TICKY TOCK TICKY TICKY TOCK’) made me cringe. The pensioner next to me liked it, though. She whirled her handbag over her head and started shrieking whenever Wenzel looked in our direction.

To my relief, Wenzel stopped after about 45 minutes to make way for one quarter of Rage Against The Machine, or The Nightwatchman. Tom Morello had been booked for this single Berlin gig only and had flewn over from Los Angeles, but stormed the stage with no apparent jetlag. Tom was the only musician on the bill who I could identify as actively supporting political movements, having played at Occupy Wallstreet and for other protest movements, so his set was more aimed at participation and interaction than he initially received from the seated audience in front of the stage. But after a few foot-stompers like ‘The Fabled City’, ‘One Man Revolution’ and ‘Union Town’ he finally got the crowd to their feet for the last few songs – some of them seemed to remember their past and even flashed peace-signs at the stage. Also was Tom not playing any Woody Guthrie-covers beside ‘This Land Is Your Land’, which he performed as an encore with all other musicians on stage, all venue lights on and a somewhat jumping (more hopping) audience singing along.

Oh, and he played RATM’s ‘Guerilla Radio’ with only a guitar and a harmonica, with an energy that would have made Woody proud. I just wonder if somebody told Tom that the ticket price for the event was 30 Euros, not really a bargain that would have interested any political protester without a job. But I reckon they had better things to do anyway.