Junction Bar

The Junction Bar on Gneisenaustrasse in Kreuzberg is a little piece of Berlin music history. It's provided live music, offering a completely eclectic mix of bands and styles, every night since 1996. Older musicians from the West Berlin scene tell me that for a few years then it was THE place to see and hear bands. It was always packed, everyone who was anyone on the scene was always in and out of the place, and stories abound.
In 2007 it's a slightly different story. Don't get me wrong, it's not dead yet, not by any means, but it's no longer in the loop of the cool and the hip. There's still live music every night followed by a DJ. And for them to have stuck to that for over a decade now deserves a lot of credit. The bands are still eclectic, but also pretty hit and miss. Last time I was down there I was perusing the program and I was quite dumbfounded. A couple of the bands really looked like the kind of bands that you wouldn't imagine anyone, ever, anywhere, booking.
But then, we were playing there, so I suppose they do have intermittent good taste at least (insert clever comment here). Another bad point is that the sound system isn't really that great, and they have a system with setting up the sound that I really have never encountered anywhere before: as a band, you turn up to do the soundcheck, the sound engineer is there (nice guy, actually) and he sorts out the sound for the band and the mixing desk is somewhere off to the side in a back room(!)....Then he leaves. As in, and doesn't come back. So if it turns out when the room is full (as often happens) (it turning out like that I mean, not necessarily that the room is full) that the sound needs a bit of fine-tuning; or if the sound of the band changes in some way (like swapping between guitars for example), well then you've just got to live with it. Or send someone into the room to twiddle the knobs yourself. Which, obviously, you don't do because things would just go downhill from there...How did I find that out? Guess.
So...the Junction Bar: If you want a guarantee of some live music, go there. If you want a guarantee of good live music, people in the place, and a good sound, then do the other thing.