IT AIN’T WHERE YOU’RE FROM,
IT’S WHERE YOU’RE AT

Miland Petrozza stared into space. He dropped his guitar case on the floor and pushed the strap of his duffel bag from his shoulder. Never before had he returned home feeling so useless. He could still feel the back slaps from the show the night before, but the last few hugs and handshakes had felt more like farewells to the best times of his life. The band was in shambles. Metal was on its deathbed. It was late February 2000 and everything Petrozza had lived for over the last fifteen years had ended.

The tour with the young, gothic metal band Moonspell as a headliner had been a painful farce. With all due respect, Kreator opening for Moonspell? Nobody had made any money from the tour. Management, promotion, line-up, producers – nothing fit together anymore. Too much smoke in the air, too many ice cubes in the bong, too many false notes played.

Farewell, youth of Thrash, Altenessen. Welcome, age of tedium, Essen.

One more band dumped, like overburden on the coal mine spoil tip: wrung out, lifeless, worthless. Nothing justifies the existence of a band that doesn’t believe in itself anymore, a band whose audience only loves them for what they used to be in their glorious past. To leave everything behind would be so simple.

But Miland Petrozza doesn’t give up that easily. He thought of his band mates. He thought of Speesy, of Jülle. Mille made a call.

“We need to talk. We have to remember what made us great, what made us something special. We have to go back to our roots and get that old energy back. We need new blood – call the Finn! He fit in well when he toured with us two years ago. We need a fresh start. Fuck writing for the record company! We’ve got to take everything back into our own hands. We have to keep thrashing, blow everyone away and remember how it all started!”

One part of this story was born deep in Calabria in the toe of Italy’s boot, where the sun beats down relentlessly and you had better find yourself shade lest it burn you to a crisp. There, a shoemaker fed his family from film screenings and making prosthetic limbs for soldiers who lost their real ones in the last war. This life sustained his family until the shoemaker passed on, leaving his 12-year-old son to look after his mother. Some years later, the son decided it was time he seek his fortune somewhere far away.

Another part of the story began a bit further north, in L’Aquila, not far from Rome, where the earth threatens – with terrible grinding noises – to swallow up the houses, with no regard for how many hundreds of years they have stood. From there, three brothers went to Germany and one to France in search of happiness.

Finally, the roots of this story also grew in Poland, East Prussia, as well as east of Berlin, in places where hardly anything remained after the World War II commanders and their troops had ravaged the area.

Kowalski, Schimanski, Petrozza, Kokoschinski, Wiesioreck, Kopec, Fioretti, Grzeca or even Trzebiatowski. Whatever name it was your parents carried, a common denominator among the boys was that their surnames looked absurd. You had to figure out some way to pronounce them, so consequently, the names soon turned into nicknames. This potpourri was a normal expression of a motley crew. Demarcation unnecessary. Solidarity inevitable. No matter if you were Italian, Yugoslavian, Turkish, Polish; or whatever, your nationality was just another personal characteristic rather than a social division. Unter Tage* sind alle Fratzen grau. Down in the coal mines, all faces are grey. Everyone was the same; all human. Only there, where a glimpse of blue sky, a breath of fresh air was never found, did the fathers meet. From them is where this story derives its origin.

The Ruhr region, 1970s. Northern Essen, Altenessen.

In the shadow of the highway, Emscherschnellweg, a street called Hohendahlstraße bends in a U, right across the road from the Emscher School. Around the corner to the right is the Thiesstraße, where, within a few yards of each other, a gaggle of boys all around the same age grew up together. Their fathers worked in the mines while their mothers stayed home to tend to their broods. The apartments were small, the families large, and the boys’ childhoods, through their teenage years, were lived in the streets.

Young Jürgen was eager to help when his father and their neighbor worked on their cars through the evenings, tinkering away. “They did everything themselves. When the transmission case broke down, they went to the junk dealer for replacement parts. My father first had a Käfer, then an Opel Rekord, then an Opel Granada, and our neighbor had a Commodore. They even exchanged engines right there in the yard in front of our neighbor’s garage. They built themselves a derrick with a winder that my father got from the mines. That’s what they used to lift the engines out. As a little kid, I used to hang around them all the time, watching. No wonder I wanted to be a mechanic later on. That way I could always help my father out.”

Working in the coal mines was out of the question for Jürgen. “My father had told me all the horror stories. Even then he said to me, ‘You can do whatever you like for a living. Anything at all. But I do not want you to be a miner.’ He did not want that for me. Obviously, he wore his arguments in plain view: On his shoulders were coal scars made blue from the coal trapped under his skin, and marks from the biggest to the smallest accidents he had endured.”

Despite this, father Reil worked in the mines, well aware of the risk that his son might have to grow up without him. A little more than two years later, when Jürgen’s younger brother was born, Mr. Reil changed jobs in the coal industry and stopped his work in the mines.

He keeps an old photograph in his house: of Jürgen standing in line with Miland in front of a slide.

“The kindergarten was right down the road from us. I’ve known Miland for thirty-eight years now.”

Mille’s family lived just around the corner. There was always music playing in the Petrozza residence. “My grandfather played the banjo and the piano. My father played acoustic guitar in an Italian orchestra. That was in the ‘60s. They played at dances on Sundays, and from time to time he sang with the Italian Catholic congregation. Father was a music fan with a very broad, varied taste in music. He liked everything from Italian operette to German schlager. I learned early on not to limit myself to a single genre of music. Father recorded everything that was on TV. He recorded the sound from the TV using a special cable: disco, hits and the show Musikladen. We listened to the tape over and over until the next show was on, and then we used the same tape again for the next recording.”

Mille, a comic book nut, devoured everything from Marvel that he could get his hands on. Spider-Man in particular appealed to him. This interest is what drew him to the KISS characters in their makeup, like superheroes themselves. “We stood in front of the KISS posters in Karstadt. It was glamour, it was surreal. I was most fascinated by the cat character.”

At thirteen, a dream came true for Mille: KISS had an internal band crisis and cancelled the tour, but they were coming back to Germany the following fall. Everyone who listened religiously to Mal Sondock’s radio show on West Germany’s radio every week was up to date. (Sondock was not only the one who brought American pop culture to West Germany, he was also a self-declared buddy of KISS.) Mille begged his mother to let him go to the Philipshalle in Düsseldorf. That way he could experience KISS a couple of days before everyone else in the Ruhr region, since the show in the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund was already sold out. Mille was allowed to go, in the company of his older cousin. He describes his memories from the show in Rock Hard magazine, issue #250:

The train ride itself was an adventure! There were all sorts of cool people on the train, some of them in makeup like Paul, Gene, Ace or Peter (even though the drummer had left the band before the tour in Germany and was replaced by Eric Carr – the fox). There were lots of rockers with long hair as well as many pretty girls on the train. I felt like the odd one out in my very uncool kiddy anorak that I used to wear at the time, but in the parking lot outside the Philipshalle I bought myself a tour scarf. Now I belonged!

The opening act was an unknown band called Iron Maiden. They were pretty cool too – mostly because of their monster that came out on stage during the last song – but I was waiting for my American heroes!

The temperature was rising. After Maiden the hall was lit up again and I saw how big the crowd was. In Essen, my hometown, I knew maybe five people who liked KISS, and here there were thousands! [...] I can still remember that I...