RAW Kinder: What Are Words For?

In Berlin Mitte, on the old East German side of the still-palpable Berlin Wall, there is -- or was, it's been a few years since Mr. Cyrano called Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg home -- a squatters' house down on Linienstraße festooned with spray-painted spider webs on the streetside facade, zany psychedelic designs splashed in the front uncurtained rooms, and slogans and graffiti crabbed along the inside and outside walls. On the back of the building, facing West, the squatters appealed to that troubled city with gentle painted words of accumulated wisdom, scrawled billboard-size and peering into the old Jewish section (now a counter-Kultur center): "Children and Fools (Kinder und Narren)," they say, "do not understand Hate."

The three members of RAW Kinder, the young poetry-rock ensemble which takes its name from the German word for "children" (pronounced to rhyme with "tinder," not as in "find her"), would agree with the sentiment -- and, no doubt, with its anarchic presentation as well. Their music is childlike (not childish), wide-eyed and sometimes mischievous. Not naive, but gleeful and full of joyous curiosity about learning to see and feel again with the fresh spirit of children. Garrison Keillor, the author and storyteller of Public Radio fame, has talked about the unbridled pleasures of childhood, as when a toddler will shriek and clap and crow with excitement at nothing more than a game of peekaboo or a skyward lift and toss; the impenetrable, giddy, almost erotic thrills of being hung upside-down, or swung about, or chased or tickled or scared in a hide-and-seek game. We never, he says, live so much again ... that purity is something lost in the maze of adult life.

RAW Kinder remembers all that, though. Not to say that the band is some sort of idyllic "wish we were kids again" fluff ensemble -- between the three of them, they've done a lot of living, some of it easy and some of it as gritty as it's made. Inevitable canny adulthood is always present in their songs, as an afterthought, or a backdrop. Renée sings, for example, of kids playing with dolls, and the image in that song (drawn from a vivid dream, as many of her song-poems are) evokes a kind of trailer-park idyll. But they are dolls, as the next line notes, "with holes in all the right places." That might sound like a recipe for depression, but Renée's writing doesn't go there: she doesn't pine for days long gone, but rather recalls them with a full and gentle memory. She's got -- to use the horrid catch-phrase of the 90's -- her Inner Child fully cultivated, wide-eyed and vulnerable and at the same time a source of innate wisdom, informing her stories and filling her observations with enthusiastic, infectious feeling.

RAW Kinder's music for the most part skips the pop standards of swift love and hot bonking, and explores instead the sense of lost (or postponed) childhood which is such a feature of modern City Life, flirts with character study (wearing another skin, entering another life), or navigates our skin-deep Amerikan standards of beauty and success. Their occasional love songs aren't sappy "Ooo you're so sexy" summer fling tunes. Like the old heyday Doors days, when radio-unfriendly cavalcades like "The End" took you on journeys you couldn't rightly describe, RAW Kinder at their most mystical do strange-day odysseys that cover huge territories before coming to roost. The RAW Kinder tracks on "Burner" range from a story of a man about to jump into a river to a vast pastiche of rural obsession and sexual intrigue served up as thick as Faulkner. It's a music of thought and impulse, cobbled together simply and with appropriate awe at all the glories, positive or taboo, of the world.

Blah, blah, blah. We didn't mean to write a term paper here. Bottom line: this is something strong and heady. Although the band protests the comparisons, audiences are often reminded of Patti Smith and Jim Morrison when they see RAW Kinder in action. That's the sort of energy that's at work -- a music that is full and broad, and at the same time tuneful and full of rocking vigor. You can sink your mental teeth into it and still move your feet.

We said elsewhere that RAW Kinder came about through poetry and beer, and you thought we were kidding. NOT. Renée really did meet the rest of the Kinder whilst wearing her Bartender hat and arming the beer taps at the superb East Village beer and fine spirits resort d.b.a. A certain kind of culture downtown gravitates sensibly to bars like this one, where one kind of spirit can lean back for a stretch in another; the sensitive and the numbed rub contented shoulders and rest their hearts and minds in calm tumult.

Renée was running a words-and-music bi-weekly poetry night across the way in the mirrored, exotic basement of Cafe XVI, where such luminaries as HO's own Mr. Cyrano appeared to read and listen. As a sort of beer dream/artist maven, she was in a natural position to meet musicians. Sean Smith of Pawnshop was a periodic audience member there, as well as a working compatriot at d.b.a. on many a night. Mark Stewart, the phenomenal guitarist whose track "Trummings" appears on "Burner," was also a fan. The band came together out of this nurturing, dabbling, unrealistic and vital environment, and it really couldn't have been any other way.

RAW Kinder comprises Renée Annabel Wilson as poetess, singer and songwriter, Charlie Carroll on frangible guitar and cool cap, and Ian O'Brien holding down keyboards, electronic percussion and an increasingly amazing array of sonic effects. When we first inflated this page early in February of 1997, the band was planning their move into the studio to lay down the tracks which anchor "Burner." After that experience, which was as successful as any of us might have hoped, they've been writing new songs and revisiting and reinterpreting old material, with six unerring eyes on the future.

Partially Formed (one of these links probably doesn't work yet):

• The Early Days: The Story Antetinues
• Later On: The Story Goes On