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Intro

 

by Corinne Tâche- Berther

We met Yannick more or less by chance when he contacted us to announce the release of his CD “Widewings”, an album featuring an array of Ethno instruments, which has been producing over the last two years. Of course I remembered the interview with his brother Chany, who moved to the States as one of the first Swiss skaters ever to do so. During our interview he told me about his brother, who was bed-ridden with an inexplicable and excruciating pain. I had a hard time not breaking down to cry when I heard such a gloomy story. So when Yannick contacted 7sky in September, his call seemed like an obvious sign. This man was supposed to be part of the eMOTION issue! He is someone like you and me, with dreams and a fate that is hard to accept. Despite all the torture he is a person who sees hope in the future and will never give up.

www.widewings.org

 

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Scorched wings

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by Yannick Jeanguenin

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It all began in 1971 when a lost soul decided to enter the world in the body of a frail baby in Biel, an outstandingly beautiful region next to a lake surrounded by typical Swiss forests.
His parents, who were both very talented at sports, chose for him the first name Yannick, and four years later, a younger brother named Chany arrived on the scene to complete the happy family. That’s the stage set, now the story can start.
My story, and what a story it is. Why the devil did this soul choose me of all people? Why this particular town in this particular country, and with what objective? What is the reason for my earthly existence and what does the great cosmic intelligence have in store for me, what future has it planned for me? A future of joy, pain and suffering? One much like all the others, or something really extraordinary? It has to be said that most young people do not ask themselves this question, and I was thirty before I seriously thought about it myself.
At that time only one thing mattered to me – to enjoy life to the full. At the start of the nineteen eighties, my main interests were sport (football, table tennis, skateboarding, skiing, cycling…) and nature. My father, who was very well-known on the football scene at the time, naturally encouraged his two sons to follow in his footsteps. From time to time we went with him into the mountains to gather mushrooms and each time I was captivated by the beauty of the region. I learned to carve bows and arrows with my little pocket knife and also took a mischievous delight in hiding out, melting into the environment, holding my breath in order to sense the presence of animals. I readily tuned into the instincts handed down to us by our ancestors over millennia. I also felt very at home in the Swiss Alps, despite being a bit sensitive to the cold. Every winter, the whole family spent one or two weeks in Wallis where we stayed with our uncle who owned a chalet in the middle of the village of Chandolin, which is still very picturesque.
Apparently I first had skis on my feet at the age of two. The atmosphere that pervades a forest covered in fresh snow with no tracks is overwhelming in a very pure sense. That’s why, in the true spirit of Jack London, we avoided the prepared pistes most of the time. We were always on the hunt for adventure. In town, we frequented the building sites for our games of hide and seek, preferably at dusk with torches. In summer, during the long school holidays, we went into the forest again where we spent six weeks building dens, first on the ground, then underground, and finally in the trees and with several storeys.
Because we often slept in the forest, we soon learned to respect it. We didn’t throw litter on the ground, and this respectful attitude was to remain with us our whole lives long.
Up till then, everything had gone well, and I think I could even have described myself as a model child with a promising future before me, because if it’s true that you reap what you sow, then I had done nothing so far that I could have reproached myself for.
One of the advantages of the forest, it has to be said, was to keep us away from “civilisation” and prevent us from being led astray. Anyhow, I had a moped and spent a lot of time tinkering around with it. But city life did not appeal to me particularly and I wasn’t one of those boys who went to discos and chased girls.
When Rocky and Rambo came out, our lives went off the rails: mine, my brother’s and those of our mates in the neighbourhood. One of the direct effects it had on us was the need to beef up our image. From now on, we roamed the forest in camouflage trousers from the “Army Shop” with huge survival knives at our belts – that was the moment when the pace ratcheted up. Our games developed. We amused ourselves by frightening walkers and boy scouts, fired slingshots at light bulbs, stole materials from building sites (tarpaulin ropes, tools…) and from the “Army Shop” and other shops, because none of us could afford this equipment at the time. Our activities became more physical and more dangerous and were sometimes so rash that we came really close to actually dying (Tyrolean traverses across high mountain torrents with broken ropes from building sites, climbing with belts made of string, really demanding assault courses, dizzying leaps that could have cost us our knees and ankles. We didn’t seem to realise that Rambo only existed on film and never performed his climbing stunts himself… When he appeared with a crossbow and arrows with explosive tips, we launched ourselves into a bold struggle to recreate this wonder. It didn’t end happily. So please don’t tell me that Hollywood films, clips or video games don’t have an influence on our children!

The eighties also stood for some very special styles of music. Like most people my age, I followed the charts avidly on Radio FM21 which featured Madonna and Sandra. But there was one group that stood out from the crowd and that I still listen to today: the amazing Depeche Mode. Then hip hop came to Europe, and in my neighbourhood lots of people got into it – the whole thing knocked us for six with all its paraphernalia, the break dancing, the mix tapes, tags and graffiti… But I soon swapped hip hop for the punk movement because it went better with the skateboarding that my brother and I were really into at the time – it was the famous time of Skate and destroy. The first skateboard videos brought a new sound from across the Atlantic, one that’s never left me: noisy indie with Dinosaur Junior, the Pixies, Sonic Youth or the harder stuff: Fugazi, Descendents, Black Flag… When I started my apprenticeship as a metalwork design engineer, it wasn’t unusual for me to turn up to the workshop with a Mohican. It was a career chosen at random, because you have to earn money somehow, but I never really liked it with all the welding gas, swarf, injuries and burns. Despite everything, I spent 14 years in this career, for want of a better alternative, because for the moment I needed my energy for two magical boards, the skateboard and the snowboard, and I hung up my skis for good the day I saw a kind of alien being on a board zoom down the slope followed by a hoard of villains on monoskis (Apocalypse snow). I was immediately hooked. Because you couldn’t exactly buy those things from the corner shop, and certainly not at an affordable price, I had to improvise: two cut-off old skis screwed underneath a board, two leather straps – and that was it. I could ski down the cycle ramp outside our house and jump the four steps that followed. But curves were absolutely impossible. With two other mates from Biel, we took part in the first competitions that were still pretty arbitrary, and honed our technique in the summer at the legendary Wild Duck camps. Then we were accepted onto the staff team and that enabled us to train cheaply, because everyone knew that snowboarding was a rich people’s sport. For a young person, it was very difficult to take part in competitions and the Swisscups that took place all over Switzerland without serious sponsors (something we didn’t have at all); not only that, but the Swiss Air Force Team bagged the first 10 places anyhow, which was pretty annoying. Without a proper jury, supporting a sponsor or just mentioning the name Swiss Air Force was often enough to influence the jury members. However, I still came regularly in the first 15, which is not so bad when you realise that at that time the number of applications was well over 140.

Over those years, my weekends were all about harnessing the force of gravity, and I lived at full throttle when it came to skateboarding, snowboarding and mountain biking. I had just one goal: faster, higher, more technical… either totally blanking out the dangers or pushing at their very limits. The interruptions to work were numerous and I continued to push forward with my dream of a snowboarding career. Where skateboarding was concerned, I preferred street skating, but competitions didn’t appeal to me, although I reckoned I was at a flawless standard. I was more and more attracted to the natural urban spots and discovering different Swiss towns. At that time all you needed to do to impress the locals was just get off a train and do a few ollies. In those days, they accepted you with open arms and showed you their best spots. This is actually making me feel quite nostalgic, because that kind of solidarity has pretty much disappeared nowadays. Now, it’s more like “Who the hell’s that?”, “He’s doing my head in, shit, have you seen what he’s wearing…”. Rivalry and sneering, the Punk Rockers against the Ghetto Boy Skaters, the Kamikaze Rail Killers against the ones who are really into technique and that. The spots are kept secret and jealously guarded; it’s a shame… And that’s nothing compared with the deep hatred the skaters feel for the inliners or the BMXers. Wake up guys, you’re all on wheels and riding the same parks…

At the start of the 1990s I got behind a mic for the first time with various amateur bands who started out by imitating the big names on the alternative French scene (Berrurier Noir, Oth, Parabellum) and then, like them, went for noisy indie in a big way. With our most serious band (Tenterhooks), we did a few gigs at unusual venues and recorded a vinyl 45 in 1996. Incidentally, the track “Daredevil” was included in the “Transworld video five (interface)” and combined with a part by Chany. Alongside this, I was actively helping design a skate park in Biel. As soon as we had a covered hall with some of our own modules and a large ramp, skating would become more important again. Now I felt drawn by a fascination for the halfpipe, because I could now train regularly. I made rapid progress and was getting the buzz of snowboarding a thousand times over without it costing me a penny. It was great not to have to get up at six in the morning any more, travel for miles and then have to queue, being dependent on the weather, snow conditions, worn pipes that almost looked like miniramps. A blessing in the purest sense, and I was following in the footsteps of Hosoi (2 metres at least).
The slams were less frequent than on the street, but if you copped for it, it could still be really painful. And in 1997 came the finale that definitively put an end to my skater/snowboarder career. While attempting a lean air 360 to fakie, I hit the ramp hard in the middle of the turn. My kneecap was dislocated and smashed underneath the kneepad so that my cruciate ligaments, sinews and part of the meniscus were done for. That was the last flight of the vulture (my handle). It took me a year to recover and then of course I had to find something else to do. That was when I connected with my former affinity with nature. I bought myself some camping gear and a new full suspension mountain bike and enjoyed some more leisurely expeditions. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to resist the temptation to go fast on the downhills, but with a bit of luck and a good assessment of the risks, I avoided any serious falls.
In 1998, when I was recording with my band to bring out a CD, differences of opinion and different motivations brought this enjoyable adventure to an end, and after appearing as the support for the legendary Norwegian combo “Motorpsycho”, the “Tenterhooks” played their last gig, at the same time as the “Maniacs” – so that was the end of two groups. I gathered together my hundreds of disks that I’d collected over the years, and decided to start a DJ career; at least if I did that, I alone would be responsible for my failure, if indeed I did fail. Anyway, I worked hard on it, and every month I watched it eat up my wages. But good things come to those who wait, and eventually my efforts started to bear fruit. Just when things were getting interesting, I was hit by another blow of fate – something that often seems to happen in my life just when I’m really near to reaching my goal. Once again, it was my health that let me down, as if my body wanted to get revenge on me for all the years of bad treatment. After a long working day (8 ¾ hours on my feet), I started to feel strange and worrying pains in both legs. I was totally exhausted, my legs were heavy and in the evening I had to lie down. It was the start of a difficult time. I tried to ignore the pain and told myself it was normal to be tired after a break from work and long expeditions on foot and on the bike, and that it would surely pass. But the opposite happened, and the whole thing took on alarming proportions. I could hardly stand for four hours behind the turntables when I was DJing in the evenings! What was to become of me? I decided to find a cartilage specialist, because my first thought was that my cartilage might have been worn away after all the years of faithful service. The X-rays didn’t show up anything, so I went to a neurologist, who couldn’t find anything either. It was a mystery. By chance, I was working for a company where I could weld parts together in a sitting position, but despite this stroke of luck I was still just as tired in the evenings. It was hard to accept the fact that I couldn’t do any more sporting activities outside of work. Although I didn’t like my job, at least before I could compensate for that by skating or cycling and so keep some kind of mental equilibrium. But now I just lived for my work! I clung to my hard-earned DJ status like a madman and bought myself a special chair that looked like a tractor seat on wheels and that now accompanied me everywhere. I dragged myself back out into the great outdoors and bought an inflatable professional canoe that enabled me to stay sitting and watch the landscape pass by while still feeling like I was doing sport. My destiny was rapidly catching up with me, the adrenalin hit I got from a white-water ride was almost indescribable, so I challenged death again in the merciless washing machine. I nearly drowned and came out of it with blue blotches. Even skateboarding hadn’t ever been so physically punishing! I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if I had drowned, because what the rest of my life had to offer wasn’t exactly promising. I wasn’t able to enjoy my canoe for long. Very soon, I couldn’t stand up even for five minutes any more (not to mention packing and unpacking the gear and transporting it to the river). I had to give up my job. Getting myself to work, changing my clothes and preparing my small components before I sat down to weld them together had become a barely surmountable effort. Now the problems really started. No one wanted to help me. My family doctor took me for a malingerer and sent me to a psychiatrist who also didn’t believe me. SUVA (the Swiss Accident Insurance Fund) and my last employer’s insurance company were playing a game of ping pong. What were the causes? An illness or the result of an accident? There was no answer to this, and so began the to-and-fro from doctors to specialists of every description; they’d find something, that was for sure. I rushed from one appointment to another, hoped, waited, was depressed… I was pushed like a puppet from pillar to post and each time I entered a practice, I left it ten minutes later with no answers. I started to believe that no one was interested. They all said the same thing: sorry, I can’t do anything for you. You’ll have to try elsewhere. So I started doing my own research and looked all over for an answer. I’m no doctor and I had no idea where I should go. I was scanned with high-tech equipment from head to toe, and because no one had analysed my records as a whole, the costs of all the arbitrary investigations were exorbitant. For instance, I was forced to go to three different neurologists who all subjected me to exactly the same investigation – no wonder the health funds are becoming so outrageously expensive! My life became a nightmare, the pains in my legs, which started at my knees and went right to the soles of my feet, remained a mystery – a scientific riddle. It all advanced unbelievably fast and didn’t seem to want to end. Now even sitting was difficult, my legs burned, the blood and the energy wasn’t circulating properly any more. It was almost as if fire was licking at my skin. I was wrestling with death and was close to suicide. Pain was my constant companion. I tried everything I could. After conventional medicine, I turned to alternative medicine and went to see a lot of alternative healers. My mother, father and friends took turns driving me all around Switzerland to see all sorts of mad people. Because the health fund wouldn’t pay the costs, it cost me a fortune – several thousand franks – and my account was dangerously close to the red. All the money I’d earned by the sweat of my brow and saved over the years that was actually intended to help me change careers (to DJing) melted away like pack-ice in the Arctic and there was nothing to slow this process down, because I had no income any more. I had to do something so I registered with social welfare and engaged a solicitor (who fortunately was paid by the UNIA union that I belong to), in the hope that he would bring some clarity to the situation and at most get the insurance companies to pay a disability allowance, the proceedings for which involve a two-year wait. I was granted 1100 franks a month – a scandal! Without the support of my parents I wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet. So not only did I have to battle with pain all day long, I also had to fight for an allowance I was entitled to – that really drains your energy and doesn’t exactly make for a good quality of life. The music kept me going, even when I soon couldn’t make any music myself any more. My home studio was slowing down and eventually came to a standstill. Now I had to stay in bed day and night because I noticed the pain was less severe when I was able to stretch my back and legs. How long would I be like this? The pain increased further every three months and I didn’t know how I could alleviate it. I laid cooling compresses on my legs or rubbed Tiger balm into them several times a day.
Blow by blow, my life fell apart: my girlfriend left me, my grandfather died, numerous “good friends” abandoned me and my social life disappeared. Like an obsessed prisoner, I sat between my four walls and could no longer control my emotions: rage, hate, the desire to kill myself or others and railing against the whole world… Why, why, why?!?

2002 had a lot of surprises in store for me. During a visit to the Inselspital Bern, a specialist discovered from my X-rays that I was suffering from dysplasia (a congenital abnormality). The professor actually burst out laughing in front of me. Mr. Jeangenin, do you know what a round joint is? Now, yours, on the other hand, look square! Imagine a square-shaped femur head sitting in your hip bone socket. After all the movements when you were skating etc., all that’s left there now is a pulp. It’s all worn out, kaput, total arthrosis.
The good news was, there was a possibility that this was the source of the pains in my knees, but the bad news was that an operation was urgently needed to stop the whole condition from getting any worse. It was a difficult operation, normally carried out in two stages at yearly intervals to maintain a certain amount of mobility and enable movement on crutches. It was certain that I was going to end up on the operating table twice and would have to be patient for two years. At any rate, I still can’t walk any more even now so nothing much changed. I said to do what was necessary. I still had a smile on my face when I arrived at the hospital, laden with various instruments (guitar, djembe, accordion, mouth organ…) and a suitcase full of books because I was going to have to stay there a month and a half. That operation and everything that followed it was easily the worst experience of my life, a real nightmare. For several weeks, both my legs were fixed in a kind of tube to stop me moving. Morphine, sleeping pills, sleeplessness, digestive problems, pain of all kinds… When it was all over, an alternative practitioner in Wallis discovered that I was suffering from advanced calcium deficiency. For her, this was the cause and not my hips. It was true that my fingers started to hurt when I played guitar. So had I been operated on in vain? No, because they had filed my femur bones to round them off and prevent the wear from advancing any further. The doctors said they couldn’t give me any guarantees for the operation and that I would have to come back to fit the implants. When I thought of what I had already gone through, a cold shiver ran down my spine. The thought of the whole circus starting up again was unbearable to me. After the hips, knees and my bones, the next things to play a dirty trick on me were my ears and I had bad tinnitus – this time it affected my last secret bastion, the music that I had clung to like a lifebuoy. Now I had no more reason to live, because I knew that my hypothetical music career would not get off the ground because I wouldn’t be able to cope with the high decibel levels in the clubs any more. I couldn’t even manage to play acoustic guitar any more without ear protectors. What was to become of me, was I cursed?
Some alternative healers felt a sinister presence at my side, someone who wished me ill and stopped me moving forwards in my life, but all that was very vague. In any case, these pronouncements didn’t scare me because I felt myself that there was something there that wasn’t a part of me. What should I do? I had already been to see people with clairvoyant abilities who could communicate with lost souls, but for the moment, nothing could help me. Some healers, however, regularly succeeded in relieving my suffering using magnetism. Each time, I was seized by an inestimable joy and believed myself finally free of all the evil, but then one or two days later everything was back to the way it had been before. The positive aspect of this whole strange story was that my body was apparently able to function normally again for two days, which meant that nothing was definitively shot to pieces, it was just a question of finding the part that was causing the machine to malfunction and patching it up. I clung to this idea. At that time, my healer in Wallis had managed to increase my calcium level again (according to her, it amounted to no more than 15 %) so that I could use my hands again and hoped the same thing would happen with my legs. But unfortunately nothing moved, or at least almost, or in the wrong sense. To combat these damned pains I had to take morphine and I dreaded the moment, but knew I would end up taking it when nothing else helped.
I tried all sorts of medicines: drops, natural essences, homeopathy, cannabis tea… or classic acupuncture and acupuncture with lasers, visualisation techniques, autohypnosis, meditation, sweat techniques from a real shaman from the Amazon, and even worse - I visited churches and their seminars about miraculous healings… and osteopaths, chiropractors, vital practitioners, biomechanics practitioners, energy healers, I had bioresonance, various massages, in short, I could fill pages with this… In total, I must have visited hundreds of doctors and just as many healers, sent my photo or a tuft of hair all over the world, all with equally disappointing results. Driven to extremis and completely desperate, I researched a number of esoteric works on my own account and decided to write my biography to serve as a guideline for my quest, which had started in 2003 and goodness knows when it would end. Everything depended on the final outcome that awaited me. For the moment, I drew my life force from ethnic music from four continents – a new passion that I had discovered through meditation and the search for samples that I could integrate into my music. After buying excessive quantities of vinyl, I started doing the same thing with instruments, because I was finding sampling too limiting. I started learning several dozen instruments: percussion, flutes, didgeridoos, kalimbas, basses, guitars, banjo, accordion and mouth organ were my new medicines – oh and I should add that the health fund had now conceded and paid out a tidy sum. Out of fear that this money could be taken away from me again, I invested it in buying instruments and studio material. Then I tackled the second major challenge of my life after writing a book: I wanted to record an album. That was to be my therapy and I put everything into this project. Then my earthly existence would at least leave traces behind, no matter what happened. The task was huge and I decided to attempt it without anyone’s help. I fought alone against my demons and recorded piece by piece, without repetition and totally improvised. I arranged the parts of the puzzle into a particular order until it produced something plausible. Stone by stone, the building took shape. The work was very strenuous. It was very arduous recording the percussion and I only had just over five minutes a day when I could sit! When it came to the wind instruments (flutes, didgeridoo…), I didn’t have enough puff because I was always on morphine.
As far as my illness was concerned, I had finally found a fantastic doctor who worked hand in hand with an equally brilliant naturopath from Quebec – two rebels working at the very fringes of traditional medicine. They cared for me for a year and a half. Then it was discovered that my body was totally poisoned with heavy metals, particularly mercury. My career with all the metal dust I breathed in when I was welding was no doubt also responsible for this… A long detoxification procedure began, during which I had all my amalgam fillings removed and replaced by synthetic resin. I swallowed a whole load of remedies, detoxification agents based on algae and other things, and subjected myself to numerous injections and footbaths to get rid of as much heavy metal as possible. Could this be what was causing my suffering? I was just as convinced as my two doctors, and they knew a lot about the subject because they had both nearly died as a result of heavy metals. Since then they had decided to devote their work to the numerous side effects these cause and to help the victims. Despite my burgeoning enthusiasm, I very quickly realised that nothing was improving apart from my allergies (hayfever, cat fur) – my respiratory tract thanked me if nothing else. But my legs remained immobile. Because I had to stay lying down almost round the clock, other side effects began to appear, particularly hellish back pain that neither the osteopaths nor the masseurs could relieve. I even feared that my spinal column would be distort for the rest of my life. Between the mental suffering and physical torment, I kept asking myself how I would find the strength to carry on. It seemed that I had some guardian angels.
After several thousand hours lying in my bed performing self-analysis, I knew the human species and its ego-dictated basic behaviour patterns and limitless hunger for power and I had to say that I had been exactly like that. Pain teaches you the most valuable, but also the hardest, lesson you can learn in life. Through my experience, I have benefited from a lesson that certainly settles a large karmic debt that had built up throughout my previous life.

When someone wins the lottery, you say they’ve been lucky. For me, I believe that the probability of winning the lottery was statistically greater than being struck down by this mysterious disease. So should I regard myself as lucky? I really want to say: yes!!! Since the start of 2007 and seven years of purgatory, I feel like the worst is past – particularly thanks to my meeting two outstanding healers from Biel, one of whom is a former classmate who I hadn’t seen for over twenty years. I still can’t tell you the real reason for my illness, because I don’t want to spoil the suspense for anyone who reads my future book – and besides, the story’s not over yet. We are working together on the long journey towards recovery. At the moment, my pains have slightly eased, although I’m still in bed and have to take small doses of morphine. But I sincerely believe that I wouldn’t still be on this earth if I had doubted for a single moment my chances of finding a cure. Music is my most valuable companion, it carries me ever onwards, and numerous projects are buzzing around in my head (DJing, concerts, opening a music school, composing soundtracks for feature films or documentaries…) and my instrument collection that now numbers 250 is still growing. I would like to finish with some words of hope for people who are suffering. No situation in life is definitive, as long as your inner being does not try to flee from it and protect itself from something that you don’t want to deal with. If you want to change the world, you must first change yourself.

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Michael Calabrò

By Sanja Vidackovic

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Friendships require no contemporary witness. They evolve in different ways, like all beautiful natural phenomena, and survive the signs of time with the same variation. Michi is our friend. His eyes radiate good-naturedness and trust, it is hard to do justice to the energetic versatility of his character in a few words. Like us, he was very moved by Yannick’s story and optimism, but unfortunately the short period of time available meant it was not possible for these two passionate musicians to combine their feelings in a joint work. But as everyone knows, what cannot be done now might be possible in the future; ultimately this is just the start of a wonderful adventure for us all.
www.trippingmonkey.ch

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Lyrics:
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“Wings on Fire” by Michael Calabrò
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It’s 1971 when it all begins
A lost soul starts to unfold
Yanni gets born
His story unwritten and untold
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The odds in his favor
A rolling stone gathers no moss
Tasted all of lives flavors
A day spent inside seems lost
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Ripping mountains on a Snowboard
Exploring City’s on a Skateboard
Gravity his true companion
Riding full speed down the Canyon
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And he’s not gonna bend
And he’s not gonna break
Don’t need to worry about tomorrow
He’s the author of his own tale
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He’s prepared for all the challenges
That are yet to come
Made many friends
To walk with him all along
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In 97 his dream had ended
The ‘The Vulture’ abruptly landed
His legs won’t carry him no more
Nothing’s like it was before
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He’s lost in between
Fighting pain with Morphine
And put new meaning to his life
Awaiting good news to arrive
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But hope seems long gone
Cause all the doctors have been wrong
His savings are gone too
No results to hold on to
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And he’s willing to bend
And he’s willing to break
He worries about tomorrow
Cause nothing will change
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His blaming himself
For not paying more attention
In his younger years
While he was seeking for adventure
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Icarus had known
That if you fly to high
You burn your wings
And fall from the sky
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