> Hello Sailor! Perhaps you stumbled into Motor City, a Detroit-themed (duh) dive on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, saw all the drunken revelers wearing white sailor hats, and assumed it was Fleet Week. But if this mob is representative of our naval forces, we’ll all be speaking Mandarin by decade’s end. Fear not— it’s just a bar full of Turbojugend, the slavishly faithful fans of Turbonegro, playing host to their heroes following a raucous set at Times Square’s Nokia Theatre. “When you play a show like that, it takes hours to get the adrenaline out of your body,” says gloriously portly lead singer Hank Von Helvete. “You might as well use the energy to socialize.”
> Yacht Rock Much like the Hitler Youth that perhaps inspired their name, the Turbojugend are nothing if not organized. Just a couple weeks ago, the New York chapter put together a boating trip, despite the fact that the group’s president went A WOL. Asked what happened to his predecessor, Kevin, the current head (clad in the Turbojugend uniform of a crisp denim jacket adorned with Turbonegro patches) says, “We don’t know. He disappeared.”
> Chaps Optional Thanks in part to their bus driver’s nervousness about finding a parking spot, it’s nearly 2 A.M. before Von Helvete, guitarists Euroboy and Rune Rebellion, and bassist Happy-Tom make it to the bar, and they’ve changed out of their campy stage garb. In Von Helvete’s case, that means he’s lost his star-spangled chaps and Alice Cooper mascara and, mercifully, gained a T-shirt. (He salutes his full-figuredness in “Everybody Loves a Chubby Dude,” a standout from Turbonegro’s latest album, Retox.) “Once the show is over, the costumes are off and we’re just normal punks hanging out. That’s very important for our mental
> Last Call Tucked in the corner by the bar is Nick Oliveri, late of Queens of the Stone Age and presently of Mondo Generator, who opened for Turbonegro tonight. Wearing a DICK WON’T SUCK I TSELF T-shirt, Happy-Tom poses for photos with buxom fans and seems to have found a taker…or two. Three hours earlier, Von Helvete was leading people in a chant of “I got erection!” but as 4 A.M. nears, he slumps on a stoop outside the bar and speaks softly about his mission to make rock’n’roll rebellious again. “You got white middle-class kids walking around with saggy jeans and Glocks to show that they hate their parents,” he says. “We want to tell them it’s okay to play guitar and drink beer to show that they hate their parents.” STEVE KANDELL
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