BURIED TREASURE
Live Injection
This month’s lost artefact dredged from obscuria: the Rock & Roll Junkie from the Lowlands.
Need for speed: rock’n’roll wild child Herman Brood, Paradiso, Amsterdam, November 19, 1977.
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Herman Brood & His Wild Romance
Shpritsz
BUBBLE, 1978
‘SHPRITSZ’ IS a word of Yiddish origin which may be German slang for a hypodermic syringe. It could also signify ejaculate, high spirits, verbal riffing, or being squirted by a clown with a soda siphon. Herman Brood – hailed as ‘The Most Famous Hard Drug User In The Netherlands’– would likely have been OK with any of these interpretations.
Born in Zwolle on November 5, 1946, the young Brood played rock’n’roll piano in The Moans, and picked up a taste for pills when playing American army bases in West Germany. After being kicked out of Neder-bluesers Cuby + Blizzards for drug use in 1969, he dropped out of music, later recalling stints in prison and mental institutions, opium smuggling in Israel and a career as a housebreaker. “I was completely into junk and crime,” the William Burroughs-admiring Brood told Sounds’ Phil Sutcliffe. “The success of a break-in was as satisfying as having a hit record.”