Oh, what the hell. I´ll sleep later!
I went to the Messe with my colleagues from the Dutch musicians magazine Musicmaker and the Dutch bass magazine De Bassist. By coincidence our office is like 25 yards from Basvarkens office. I work from home in my spare time, so I don´t speak Rob that often.
When I told Uwe I´d visit his hometown he invited us to join him at a dinner and visit his office. Of course my three bass playing colleagues and I agreed in it!
After the Messe we took a cab to this large office building where I met Uwe for the first time in real life. I hided a small camera in my hat (that's why I didn't took it off...) and I filmed all the chrome parts. The evidence now is to the Dutch warfare office and they'll compare it wth this big list of MIA bicycles.
First we went to this great Italian restaurant near the office, where the waiter kept on opening more bottles of Sicilian wine. The food was great too, BTW. After like four bottles for the five of us (and we already had some free beers at the Messe; we are Dutch guys so we like free stuff), we were confident enough to see Ze Kollektion.
Walking into the office we spotted this corner with the more metal-ish basses like V's. Explorers and RDs. Inside the office all the EBs. Birds, et cetera were standing in rows just asking to be used.
Uwe has this big, skyline overlooking, downtown office, but we were so busy with the basses, we noticed the view only after two hours or so.
We are all different players. Maarten used to be a guitar player, marten is classical trained and a jazz player, Uwe's a pick player, Willem can do everything and I am a bad finger player so we all had our different favourites. I liked the one pupped white bird and the blue non-reversed. It just fitted me like I had played it all my life. Willem liked the old stuff like the Kalamazoos, Maarten went outside with the EB6 for an hour of... I dunno? masturbating? Marten liked the doublecuts.
Uwe told us a lot about all the basses, the history, previous owners, technical stuff and we were standing in line with basses, fighting over who could use the little amp. After like three hours everybody had tried almost everything and it was just nice.
Well, that's it for now. Loes is coming in and she wants Messe stories. More to come later.
BTW: We did mention the war.