Late last year, I was tasked with the job of taking some photos of a hotel in Helen, Georgia during Oktoberfest. First, if you don’t know anything about Helen, Georgia, let me give you a little background.

Helen is nestled in the mountains of North Georgia and sort of looks like a smaller version of Gatlinburg….but more German. It doesn’t have the views that Gatlinburg does, but it doesn’t have the dense traffic and people either. All in all, it’s a very cool little place to visit. If you didn’t know about Helen, don’t feel bad. I didn’t know the place existed until last year.

As I was saying, I had to go during Oktoberfest and a German town can be a pretty cool place to be during that time….if you enjoy good food and a frosty cold one on occasion as I do. I won’t name the hotel I was working on (you’ll see why later), but it had a recognizable name and appeared to be pretty decent.

For what was needed, the job was only going to take about half a day plus some twilight images. Since I had never been before, I got to Helen early so that I would have as much time as possible to explore/experience the town. Unfortunately, It didn’t take long to start running into problems.

The shoot was scheduled a month in advance and the hotel wasn’t ready. Sheets needed to be ironed, rooms cleaned, pillows replaced, parking spots roped off, cars moved, etc. This kind of thing takes hours to accomplish and those are hours that we’re not taking pictures. My expected half-day quickly evolved into a full day.

Anyway, we finally get things moving in the right direction. We’re trying to locate another room to shoot and the manager says, “what about room #XXX?” Front desk says, “ooooh, ummmm….that’s one of our down rooms. It’s still off-limits.” Manager says, “we’ll be ok.”

Hell, I’m just trucking along thinking that the AC is out or some other minimal thing. We go to the room and I drag my equipment all through it to check out various views. I finally decide that the room won’t work and we walk out. As we leave the room, a pest-control guy walks out of the room next door. He looks at the manager and says “we’re gonna need to shut down this floor. These bed bugs are everywhere.” Nice. That was when I came to the realization that the room they issued me was 3 doors down from this one. Even better. I briefly thought about getting another hotel, but again, it was Oktoberfest. There wasn’t much available. I was gonna have to deal with it. So, I quickly proceed to get a new room on another floor.

Unfortunately, after I got all the work done, I didn’t have a lot of time to explore. Really, it was just enough time to walk up and down the main drag once and grab something to eat before having to make my way to the hotel for twilights. Once I finished those, I figured I’d hit the town again before she shut down.

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I get back, knock out the twilights and head out to the town again. The sound of German music and smell of German food permeates the air. As you might assume, I find the one place with live music that ISN’T German 😂 – It’s an open-air area and the weather is great. I hang out there for quite a while and partake in a supersized beer or two.

It was the end of the night and the singer was getting ready to wrap up. By that time, I had already jokingly informed him that he’s not allowed to play “Southern Man” by Neil Young in North Georgia without immediately repenting with a “Sweet Home Alabama”. He acknowledged the error in judgement, made amends and offered to buy me a beer the next night if I came back out and watched him “do it right.”

The coolest thing that happened here, though, was the last song of the night. There was a drunk guy next to me that had spent most of the night trying to get the singer to play Bob Seger all night. He persisted, but the singer kept turning him away. “I can’t sing Bob.” Finally, the drunk guy said, “well, I will if you’ll play it.” I’ll be damned if the singer didn’t agree to it and the drunk guy walks up on stage and says “let’s do Turn the Page.” Ah, classic. This should be good.

I’ll tell you, it’s a bit harder to remember the words in front of a crowd of people and no one to sing along to. This guy found that out the hard way. He would make it about a line or two in the song (he wasn’t terrible) before he would forget the next line. The singer would try to help him out and feed him the next line, but it wasn’t working out so well. The drunk guy finally looks up the lyrics on his phone, but I think that made things worse. Probably hard to read and sing lyrics when you’re seeing double.

You could tell, this guy was finally resigned to his fate. He wasn’t singing this song tonight. Then, everything changed. The crowd started singing along, urging, helping the guy make this happen. People started walking in from the street and we have, I’d guess, 100 people singing the loudest version of “Turn the Page” ever played in Helen, Georgia. The day had been pretty bad until then, but Helen turned it around. It was awesome.