“In Turkey,” says Ali Ersin Koray, “the underground music scene is really underground, much more underground than here. In Turkey, for example, we don’t have that many famous punk rock bands. I could give you maybe two examples.”
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Koray came to the States on a work-study program—he was going to take a summer job at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a Bay Area amusement park. In fact his uncle had already bought him a plane ticket to San Francisco when he heard that a friend who’d preceded him had been turned away from the park for having a tattoo. Koray has a half sleeve of ink on one arm, so he decided not to bother even showing up for his job. When he arrived in California at the end of July, he hopped a bus to Chicago.
Deal’s Gone Bad had played a show in Istanbul in April, on their first European tour. They were one of the main attractions at an all-night ska blowout that also featured venerable New York band the Toasters and plenty of locals, and they stayed in the city for three days. That’s when Koray met them. “They were one of the first Western ska bands to come to Turkey,” he says. “People are hungry. They’ve never seen this kind of bands playing live. I know all kinds of ska and reggae bands, but for myself I love Deal’s Gone.”
After a “crazy” two-day Greyhound ride from San Francisco—”I’m foreign, so redneck people did not like me very much”—Koray showed up in Chicago alone and down to his last ten dollars. His parents weren’t yet aware of his change of plans, and he didn’t have any obvious way to support himself—with his student visa, he couldn’t work legally. He’d told the guys in Deal’s he was coming, though, and he figured they’d be able to sort something out.
Even if Koray never makes it back to Chicago, the city has already given him an education in punk. Back home he plays bass in a band called Dinamit (Turkish for “dynamite”), and its music is sure to benefit from what he’s heard. “It’s really similar to Rancid, which I don’t like so much,” he says. “I want more original sounds.”
