In a world where you’re constantly being asked to differentiate to the point of utter brain exhaustion, it helps immensely to ask yourself a basic question every now and then. “Canvas? Or Oasch?” it says, which translates from Viennese into German as “super? Or shit?” means, and the man to whom this sorting criterion is based was so easy that after his death you run out of shame because it’s so sad as hell without him. His name was Willi Resetarits.
He died last Sunday when he fell down a flight of stairs at home, at the age of 73, the night before he had been on a stage, his last record, released last year, was called “Elapetsch, Tod”, and Resetarits announced in the title song : “It’s not my time, godfather, I’m sorry”. But that’s life, all too often a mean thing.
Resetarits was a great musician who sang insanely different songs for five decades: crass left-wing agitprop rock (“Proletenpassion”), heartfelt Schrammel music, Croatian folk songs, refined Gershwin standards, settings of HC Artmann poems.
The fact that he never appeared as if he had disguised himself and that his voice could be brutal and sensitive in one and the same song was due to the fact that he literally imposed the songs on himself instead of simply “interpreting” them. “My motto”, he once said, is: “Slave for the Song”.
The most serious thing that Resetarits threw themselves into was a second existence as an Ostbahn-Kurti with a band called “Die Chefpartie”, an artificial figure that came to the journalist Günter Brödl when he was thinking about how the American band “Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes” from New Jersey should be called if she came from Vienna.
Resetarits embodied this Ostbahn kurti with a suburban habit and a repertoire of songs by Springsteen, Steve Miller, Townes Van Zandt and others, which Brödl had translated into Viennese – but anyone who has heard the Chefpartie variants (and understood the dialect ) has made one wonder why the cover versions of American rock stars have been as ramshackle as the originals.
Willi Resetarits 1976 in the “Proletenpassion” with the band Schmetterlinge
Quelle: picture alliance / IMAGNO/Votava
“Last night I dreamed I held you in my arms / The music was never-ending / We danced as the evening sky faded to black / One step up and two steps back”, says Bruce Springsteen’s “One Step Up”, for example. at Ostbahn-Kurti it became: “Then I lie in a stranger’s bed / Next to me there rest of the foreign holes / And I know, I didn’t raise anything there, I have to walk / One step vire, two steps back.”
In Austria, “Ostbahn-Kurti & die Chefpartie” immediately became a legend: concerts in front of thousands of euphoric fans who could sing along to every word, wore “Leiwand oda Oasch” T-shirts and were happy that someone put themselves out there, whose music was a reminder of what music was originally invented for – to get restless, to want to drink and to dream away.
A red through and through
That went on for a few years, until 2000 Brödl died suddenly in his mid-40s, and Resetarits retired the fictional character he had long since become, in order to continue as Resetarits, with songs that were often just as good, but more intimate and more dimmed than the stadium hits. Every now and then, however, he brought out his Ostbahn-Kurti-ego again, and it was always as if he were singing not only for his own soul, but also for that of his listeners.
After all, Resetarits wasn’t just a folksy person, as they say, who knew all about chopping in the factory, life in the less well-known districts, spending the afternoons in the tavern and the anger and daydreams that in one haunting. But he was also a red through and through, who was constantly committed against the racism and hate speech of the Austrian populists, whether they came from the FPÖ or the Turkish feschists of the ÖVP.
And when someone like the Ostbahn-Kurti got involved with his street cred, that certainly convinced folksy people more than those hypermoral types who constantly have to explain the world to the people. Resetarits was a co-initiator of the associations “SOS Mitmensch” and “Asyl in Not” and founded the “Integrationshaus Wien” in 1995, which takes care of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in an exemplary manner.
He would of course have been the headliner at the solo concert “We Stand With Ukraine” in the Ernst Happel Stadium on March 19 if he hadn’t caught Corona two days earlier, and the very last official thing he did with his life, was the opening of the refugee ball in the Vienna City Hall on the evening before his death. Willi Resetarits was someone like that: an easy-going guy, the likes of which aren’t made too often these days.