Xmas 2023

Krautrock Books

My esteemed publisher has compiled a list of almost all available book publications on the subject of krautrock:

Click here.

An interview with Yours Truly

 Todd L. Burns of Music Journalism Insider made an interview with me about TIMES & SOUNDS. 

Orginal source: https://musicjournalism.substack.com/p/jan-reetze-interview

I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. If you’re not familiar with the newsletter already, click here to find out more.

Jan Reetze is author of the new book, Times & Sounds. It’s all about Krautrock, a subject that Jan is intimately familiar with. He grew up in Germany, and has been writing professionally since 1987. Times & Sounds, however, is his first book in English, and is specifically geared to Krautrock fans outside of Germany.

How did you get to where you are today, professionally? 

Originally I'm from Hamburg, Germany. In the 1970s, I completed a sound engineering traineeship and was co-founder of a light show group. Later I studied Sociology, with Political Science, Journalism, Systematic Musicology and Social and Economic History as subsidiary subjects, ending up in 1992 with a doctorate from University of Hamburg for "The Reality of Media". It was about the interdependencies between digital technologies, media, and music and the beginnings of artificial intelligence: What does "reality" mean in this upcoming digital age, and what is the influence of arts on how we will experience it?

I've been writing professionally since 1987, my first book was about the changes in music production after the appearance of synthesizers, sound samplers and computers. I have also written radio features and documentaries for NDR Radio and Deutschlandfunk, mainly about music, art topics, media history and media research. And yes, some screenplays for crime series and a court show, and for a while I wrote storylines for a daily soap.

Besides this, I jobbed as a project manager at a polling institute, I was a collaborator on a research project at the Institute for Sociology at University of Hamburg, I was a freelance collaborator at music publishing house Erdenklang Music, I did media work for some independent record labels in the Electronic and Gothic scene. In 2004 I started a music publishing house myself with a partner, Sternklang Music. We produced and distributed music and audio books.

I've been a fan of Kraftwerk since their first album. In the mid-1990s, when the internet was still a relatively new thing, there was a mailing list about this band (if somebody remembers what a mailing list was). There was one thread that brought me into a discussion with a woman. She happened to live in Pittsburgh, and to make a long story short: Since 2008 we are happily married to each other. Of course we had to decide whether she would move to Hamburg or I would move to Pittsburgh. The decision was made, and—well, here I am. And now, Times & Sounds is out. It's my first book in the English language, written especially for Krautrock fans outside of Germany.

Can you please briefly describe the book?

Times & Sounds is a ride through the depths of Germany's modern musical roots. At the beginning of the 1970s, experimental and progressive music in Germany developed far from the mainstream. Although few initially noticed it, it is now internationally celebrated as a cult phenomenon called “Krautrock.” Today, bands like Kraftwerk, Can, Amon Düül II, NEU!, Cluster, Tangerine Dream and some more are considered pioneers of groundbreaking sound experiments. But Krautrock didn't fall from the sky. It developed out of something before, and it became the impulse for music that followed when the Krautrock wave was over. 

In order to understand the Krautrock era and its impact, I thought it might be interesting for readers to delve deeper into the history of German rock music. You get the story of the mechanisms of post-war Germany’s music industry and the diverse musical styles we had and their mutual influences and connections. 

All this is combined in a sort of cross cutting with the political and sociological key events of the respective decades—the economic miracle, Sixty-Eight, student riots, New German Film, Baader-Meinhof, the hippie movement, the alternative scene, the movement against nuclear power—all this stuff the Germans went through between the 1950s and the early 1990s.. You will read about German early Jazz and Swing orchestras, schlager, the first rock'n'roll bands around Hamburg's Star-Club, agitprop and left-wing protest songs, the avant-garde compositions of Stockhausen and his presumed disciples of Krautrock, the electronic bands, and finally the Neue Deutsche Welle. All this stuff is interconnected, and the musicians needed to be fit in several genres to survive. Times & Sounds is what the title says: a journalistic diary tracing Germany's dynamic culture from the late 40s to the early 90s.

How did you come to this subject for a book? What made the topic so interesting to you?

I lived in Hamburg, and as this is Germany's second-biggest city, all the bands played there. Between the 1970s and the 1990s I heard nearly all of the bands that go under “Krautrock” today, live and from records. I discovered Can and Kraftwerk when I was 14, and I fell in love with their music. Music was always something I loved, especially electronic music, but there were also interesting things going on in jazz and avant-garde, and I was endlessly curious. Later at university I was even able to make this part of my studies.

Tell me a bit about the process of securing the book deal.

This was indeed not easy. My first book came into existence by pure chance, but it opened the door to NDR radio, and so I slid into the writing business. Times & Sounds is my first book in the U.S. I wanted to do it in English and tried to find an agent or a publisher. But I learned very quickly that nobody here is interested in what I did in Germany, and they didn’t trust in the topic. 

In the end I was already thinking about self-publishing, but then something unforeseeable happened: You might have seen that I have a blog, mainly about music and media. One of the most-clicked posts there is an article about the adventurous story of the German music producers Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettmann aka Sternenmädchen. It's based on a manuscript from the mid-1990s which was commissioned by a radio station, but has never been produced, so it slept in the drawer for a long time, and finally I decided to put it on my blog. Another thing I did is a website about the British music producer Joe Meek. I did a lot of research about his tragic story, intending to make this a screenplay. But no film producer was interested in this story, so I finally put the stuff online, just for fun.

One day last year, I got an email. A certain Thorsten of Bremen got into touch with me. He had the idea to start a book publishing house, and as he had seen my online stories, he asked me whether I would be willing and able to write something for him. And I said: If you could imagine it in English, then I might have something for you. And so it happened! Times & Sounds is the first release of Thorsten's newly-founded Halvmall Verlag—which, by the way, is Low German and means something like "half-crazy". That's probably what you have to be when you plan on starting a publishing house in these times. I'm completely happy with the result. It would have been impossible for me to do the book myself that professionally.

What did the research process look like?

I heard all these bands when they were around, live as well as on records. I have a very good library and a good archive. That's the main point. And what I didn't know, I simply asked. Most musicians are open for questions as long as they have the feeling you take them seriously. And I do that. 

Besides this, as you might guess from the things I did in my life, I have a good knowledge of the music and record business, as well as of recording and music production. In fact, I played synthesizers and keyboards myself during the 1980s. Not professionally, but in the 1980s, synthesizers became affordable, even for a student. I also have some basic knowledge about playing guitar, bass and drums, but my favorite instrument is still the vibraphone. 

And on the other hand, I'm in the States for nearly 13 years now, that's why I’m able to see the story of German rock also from this side of the Atlantic. Of course I follow several forums on social media. So I know what people know about German rock, I have an idea what they don’t know and where the state of information is weak.

How did you go about writing the actual book?

First thing I did was to update the mentioned Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser story, which, in a way, is the core chapter. Then I started writing about the kind of music I heard when I was little, and the atmosphere and zeitgeist of Germany at that time. Based on these two storylines, the whole book grew somehow out of itself along them. I just had to follow. And of course, when you write a book, a screenplay or a radio script, you have to go through it again and again, rewrite it, rearrange it, follow the recommendations you get from the editor and proofreader, correct things. It's just work. No shortcut available.

What are a few tracks / videos / films / books we should also look at, in addition to your book, to get a better sense of the topic?

There's a lot of stuff about Krautrock available on YouTube, music as well as documentary material. But especially the latter is something to watch with a critical mindset. There's a lot of nonsense circulating on the web. And don't forget how long ago this Krautrock era is—40, 50 years. Sometimes you can get the impression of watching a veteran's club meeting. 

What's one tip that you'd give someone looking to write a music book right now?

As a German news anchor once said: Be curious, be a good observer, be open, but keep distance. Be present, but don't belong to it. And one thing I would like to add: Don't forget to double-check the spelling of names.

What's next for you?

I don't know yet, but I’m sure something will come up. I always had the feeling that things come to me when I expect it the least.

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Edgar Froese: Force Majeure -- Die Autobiografie

Es muss so um 1973 gewesen sein. Da sendete das dezidiert kleingeschriebene ZDF-Kulturmagazin "aspekte" einen Beitrag über Rockmusik aus Deutschland. Zum ersten Mal sah ich dort Tangerine Dream mit in ihrem Proberaum improvisierten langaushallenden Orgelakkorden, die wohl einer Farfisa und einer Vox entstammten. Das gefiel mir, und so erstand ich am darauffolgenden Tag bei Govi das Album Alpha Centauri von 1971 -- an dem Tag das einzige, das sie dort hatten. Das gefiel mir auch gut. Mehr aber auch nicht. Ich habe die Band dann nicht weiter verfolgt und die Platte auch selten wieder gehört.

Aber dann, wohl um 1975, da hörte ich nachts im NDR den x-ten Teil einer Serie über, ich glaube, David Bowie (wenn mich nicht alles täuscht, war die von Heinz-Rudolf Kunze und nicht mal schlecht, auch wenn er lange auf Bowies angeblichem Hitlergruß herumritt, den es so nie gab). Danach war noch reichlich Zeit bis zu den Mitternachtsnachrichten, und die wurde genutzt für "Ricochet Part 2" von Tangerine Dreams aktuellem Album Ricochet -- und was soll ich sagen: Das hatte mit der Gruppe von 1971 nichts mehr zu tun. Selten hat mich ein Musikstück unvorbereitet derartig aus den Socken gehauen wie dieses, und einen Tag später hatte ich alles, was Tangerine Dream bis dahin gemacht hatten.

Danach hatte ich dann eine ungefähr zwei Jahre anhaltende Phase, in der ich "normale" Musik kaum noch ertragen konnte. (Ich muss darüber immer noch schmunzeln, weil die von mir geschätzte und leider viel zu früh verstorbene Ingeborg Schober mir irgendwann mal erzählte, dass es ihr ebenso ergangen war; bei ihr war der Auslöser allerdings Eberhard Schoener gewesen.) Tangerine Dream sah ich live zum vierten oder fünften, auf jeden Fall letzten Mal live im Jahr 1982 auf ihrer "Logos"-Tour, bis zu ihrem Hyperborea-Album habe ich die Plattenveröffentlichungen noch verfolgt, dann habe ich das Interesse verloren. Die Band hatte sich inzwischen auf Filmmusik spezialisiert, und die empfand ich im wesentlichen als akustische Auslegeware.

Und nun hat also Edgar Froese seine Autobiografie geschrieben. Jedenfalls steht das so auf dem Cover; ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob ich das Buch so bezeichnet hätte. Froese hat die Arbeit an diesem Buch nicht abschließen können, da er unglücklicherweise mittendrin, im Januar 2015, seine kosmische Adresse wechselte. Zwei Jahre haben die Subskribenten letztlich warten müssen -- die von Froese abgeschlossenen Kapitel mussten sortiert werden, dann tauchte plötzlich eine Festplatte mit weiteren Kapitelentwürfen auf, die bearbeitet und eingefügt werden mussten, dann gab es Probleme mit der Übersetzung (das Buch ist parallel in identischer Aufmachung in deutscher und englischer Sprache erschienen), auch Fotorechte waren nicht in allen Fällen einfach zu bekommen, und so wurde der Erscheinungstermin ein ums andere Mal verschoben.

Nun kann man sich darüber freuen, dass das Buch doch noch erschienen ist, aber man wird das Gefühl nicht los, dass es nicht dem entspricht, was Froese wohl vorschwebte. Die Kapitel in Force Majeure sind zwar einigermaßen chronologisch von 1967 bis ungefähr 2014 geordnet, eine zusammenhängende Chronologie bilden sie aber nicht. Eher haben wir es mit einer Sammlung von Einzelepisoden, Histörchen und Anekdoten zu tun. Etliche davon sind schrecklich banal und machen einen, mit Verlaub, hingehauenen Eindruck; ich bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass sie von der später aufgetauchten Harddrive stammen und in dieser Form gar nicht zur Veröffentlichung vorgesehen waren. 

Durch fast das ganze Buch zieht sich ein Hauch von Freudlosigkeit. Immer wieder laufen die Schilderungen ins Leere und verlieren sich in endlosen, geschraubten Formulierungen, die Froese wahrscheinlich für eloquent und unterhaltsam hält, die einem aber irgendwann nur noch auf die Nerven gehen. Konzerte und Tourneen scheinen eine einzige Anhäufung von Widrigkeiten gewesen zu sein, ausgelöst zumeist durch dämliche Veranstalter, Gewerkschaftsidioten, stupide Hausmeister und verstärkt noch durch begriffsstutzige Journalisten, denen Froese vermutlich nicht mal einen Bleistift anvertraut haben würde. Wenn er von seinen Mitstreitern, Freunden oder Verhandlungspartnern berichtet, oder auch von David Bowie, der eine kurze Zeit sogar in Froeses Wohnung lebte, gelingt es ihm nicht, sie in ihrem Wesenskern zu erfassen und nachvollziehbar darzustellen. Selbst belanglose Zwischenfälle werden stets bis ins Hysterische hochgedreht, und man fragt sich, wie überhaupt je ein Konzert heil über die Bühne gehen konnte. 

Seinen Mitmusikern stellt Froese Beurteilungen aus, die sich wie Kopfnoten im Schulzeugnis lesen -- oft fehlt nur noch "er hat sich stets bemüht, die ihm zugeteilten Aufgaben zu unserer Zufriedenheit zu erfüllen". Die jedem Fan bekannten Spannungen zwischen Froese und Christoph Franke zeigen sich im Buch nur darin, dass Froese ihn durchweg als "Franke" bezeichnet, während andere immerhin einen Vornamen haben. Worin die Spannungen aber nun bestanden, das bleibt im Dunkeln. Über Johannes Schmölling erfahren wir im wesentlichen, dass er seine Selbstdrehzigaretten in der Tasche herstellen konnte. Immerhin auch eine Leistung; ich konnte das nicht. Interessant immerhin, wer im Buch nicht namentlich erwähnt wird -- Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser beispielsweise, obwohl der immerhin die ersten vier Tangerine-Dream-Alben auf seinem Label veröffentlichte.

Dabei hätte Froese ja durchaus einiges zu berichten. Seine Erfahrungen mit der amerikanischen Filmmusikproduktion sind schon interessant (und desillusionierend). Die Vorkommnisse vor einem geplanten Konzert in Marseille lassen einen wirklich nach Luft schnappen (nein, ich verrate hier nicht, was dort passiert ist). Der Abschnitt über die deutsche Community in Florida, die von der Band Countryrock und Tanzmusik aus dem Kohlenpott erwartete, könnte wirklich witzig sein, wenn sich Froese nicht so endlos verquatschen würde. Am schrecklichsten wird es immer dann, wenn er sich an Dialogen versucht. Die sind so umständlich und so hölzern, dass man geradezu den Wurm darin ticken hört.

Edgar Froese war eine knorrige Eiche, trutzig in die feindliche Landschaft gestellt und vom Sturmgebraus zerzaust. Angenagt immer wieder von dahergelaufenen Würmern, die nichts anderes zu tun hatten als ihm das Leben schwer zu machen, umringt von Figuren, die irgendwo auf dem Weg zum Primaten hängengeblieben waren, so stand er da, er konnte nicht anders. Des Lebens Unbill lastete zentnerschwer auf seinen Schultern, der Mann stand mit Jean Cocteau auf und ging mit Schopenhauer schlafen. Seite für Seite spürt man sein Kopfschütteln über die Banalitäten, die ihm das Leben tagein, tagaus zumutete. (Dass Froese über Kants kategorischen Imperativ promoviert habe, ist ein Wikipedia-Märchen.) 

Nur im letzten Viertel des Buches, da passiert ein spürbarer Sprung. Da spricht plötzlich ein persönlicher Froese. Da berichtet er plötzlich von seiner familiären Situation, vom Tod seiner Frau, von seiner neuen Liebe, vom Zoff mit seinem Sohn. Da reflektiert er plötzlich über Musik und Gesellschaft. Und dazu hat er wirklich etwas zu sagen. Wäre das gesamte Buch auf diesem Level, man könnte sich nicht beklagen. Literarische Meisterleistungen erwartet man ja eh nicht.

Force Majeure ist erschienen in Froeses/Tangerine Dreams  eigener Vertriebsfirma Eastgate Music & Arts und kann auch nur dort bezogen werden. Obwohl das Buch nur Text und eine Fotostrecke ohne Großfotos enthält, hat man sich dafür entschieden, das 420 Seiten starke Buch im unhandlichen Coffeetable-Format zu veröffentlichen. Einen ersichtlichen Grund dafür gibt es nicht -- die Kosten mögen eine Rolle gespielt haben. Auch einen professionellen Buchgestalter wollte man sich anscheinend sparen, und so verschwindet jetzt der jeweils innere Rand des zweispaltig layouteten Textes annähernd in der Bindung, wenn man die Seiten nicht ständig flachgedrückt hält. Die Fotostrecke ist auf besserem Papier gedruckt, leider aber -- in meinem Exemplar jedenfalls  -- schief ins Buch eingebunden und schlägt Wellen.

Tangerine Dream -- Force Majeure
Die Autobiografie, geschrieben und zusammengestellt von Edgar Froese,
Add-ons von Bianca Froese-Acquaye
Eastgate Music & Arts
ISBN 978-3-00-056524-3
Berlin 2017

(Diese Besprechung wurde zuerst veröffentlicht in manafonistas.de)

Christian Wheeldon: Deep Distance -- The Musical Life of Manuel Göttsching

(deutscher Text hier bei Manafonistas!)

Manuel Göttsching, guitarist, keyboardist, composer, looks back to a career that started in 1971 (he was active even before, but not on records). Stations of his career are Ash Ra Tempel, Ashra, albums under his own name, collaborations with Klaus Schulze, Steve Hillage and several others, he also worked as a film composer. Of late he is even part of a Japanese krautrock exhibition -- as a wax figure.

The British librarian Christian Wheeldon, after six years of work, comes up now with a long overdue biography. This very well-written book leads chronologically through Göttsching's life and time as a musician, following events as well as his records. Usually, the author first tells the well-researched story of the record and its production, followed by a review of the record. Especially it's nice that he includes not only Göttsching's own records but also some works of his long-time companions; the solo album Synthesist by drummer Harald Großkopf as well as the long forgotten project Central Europe Performance or the recordings Lutz "Lüül" Ulbrich did with Nico.

You will notice immediately that a fan wrote this book. Sometimes it's just too obvious that Wheeldon is not willing to touch his hero. Without question Göttsching made a lot of enjoyable records, but, as it's unavoidable in a more than 40-year-spanning career, some are not as good as others. It wouldn't have done any damage to the book if he would call a spade a spade in these cases. For Wheeldon everything seems to be "masterpiece", "genius" or "incredible", also the term "legendary" is used much too often in this book. Again and again Wheeldon uses Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley as standards of comparison -- I would be open to reason about the latter, but Glass, even more Reich, definitely play in a different league.

Another little rub in this book is the fact that the author several times doesn't get the meaning of German puns, phrases or words with double meanings, and so his translations are blurred, misleading or wrong. One example: Göttsching wrote and recorded a sort of "suite" about the "Mulde", a little creek near Leipzig. The last part of this suite is entitled "Zerfluss".  This word doesn't exist in German, it's combined from "Zufluss" on the one hand, which means something like "feeder creek", and "zerfließen" on the other hand, which could be translated into "melting away" as well as into "to dissolve". Of course it's not possible to find a direct translation of "Zerfluss", but the meaning could be explained. Wheeldon simply translates it into "inflow", and that means: He misses the key point. Unfortunately, this kind of flaw is something to be found constantly in English publications about the German rock music scene.

It remains to mention that, probably for the reason of cost-saving, this book is set in an extremely small typeface. To make matters worse, it's a sans-serif one. For an old geezer like me it's simply a torture to read this.

But this is all there is to complain about. Without dwelling on too much krautrock nostalgia this book makes you feel like going to the turntable to have a new listen to the old albums -- without forgetting the new ones. A couple of website recommendations and a well-done index complete the book. 

Christian Wheeldon:
Deep Distance -- The Musical Life of Manuel Göttsching
King's Lynn, GB 2015
ISBN 978-1-91069324-7

The book can be ordered only here.

Florian Fricke / Popol Vuh: Kailash

Immer hatte Florian Fricke ein Solopiano-Album machen wollen. Zu seinen Lebzeiten ist ihm das nicht vergönnt gewesen. Nun liegt doch eines vor, als CD/LP 1 des Kailash-Boxsets, das auf Soul Jazz Records erschienen ist. Dazu gibt es den Soundtrack zum gleichnamigen Film auf der CD/LP 2, und als Sahnehäubchen gibt es den Film noch als DVD (PAL/NTSC, ohne Regionscode) dazu.

Schon mit 12 oder 13 Jahren ist Florian Fricke als Piano-Wunderkind gehandelt worden. Davon ist hier nichts zu hören, eher hat man den Eindruck, in einem hingetupften akustischen Skizzenbuch zu blättern. Die Aufnahmen sind zwischen 1972 und 1989 entstanden, und auch, wenn sie sich beim ersten Hören gelegentlich irgendwo zwischen Roedelius und Satie zu bewegen scheinen, so sind sie doch ganz eindeutig Fricke. Es ist sein harmonischer Stil, es ist seine typische Melodieführung. Manchmal hört man Hintergrundgeräusche oder Beckenklänge, manchmal singt Fricke leise mit, manchmal hätte man sich das Instrument besser gestimmt und die Aufnahmen etwas professioneller gewünscht, aber man muss sie als das hören, was sie sind: Studien, ursprünglich sicher nicht zur Veröffentlichung vorgesehen. Einige Stücke dürften Notizen sein, die letztlich im Album Hosianna Mantra ausgeführt wurden, andere schweben frei (und manchmal ein bisschen ziellos) umher und nehmen den Hörer mit auf eine Reise durch Frickes Gedankenwelt.

Die zweite CD/LP enthält den Soundtrack zu dem Film Kailash — Pilgerfahrt zum Thron der Götter, den Fricke und sein musikalischer Mitstreiter und Kameramann Frank Fiedler 1995 erstmals auf Video veröffentlichten. In den Credits des Films findet sich der Hinweis: "Music: Popol Vuh and Tibetan Nomad Music", letztere treten offenkundig als Samples von anderen Platten in Erscheinung. Der Mix aus Keyboards und eingearbeiteten Field Recordings ist faszinierend, über Strecken atemberaubend und macht wieder einmal ganz deutlich, dass Popol Vuh als musikalisches Projekt konkurrenzlos dastand. Man sollte aber kein ausschließlich neues Popol-Vuh-Material erwarten; zum Teil sind Ausschnitte aus früheren Popol-Vuh-Alben verwendet worden (etwa aus der Shepherd's Symphony), auch einige der Samples wurden auf anderen Platten schon in anderem Kontext eingesetzt.

Bevor man sich diesen Film zu Gemüte führt, empfiehlt es sich, einen Blick auf das Stichwort “Mount Kailash” in Wikipedia zu werfen, um sich eine ungefähre Vorstellung zu verschaffen, welche kulturelle und religiöse Bedeutung diesem Gipfel zukommt. Der kommentarlose Film erklärt dies nicht, und ganz ohne Hintergrundinformationen wird nicht klar, was da eigentlich gefilmt wurde, was Menschen in dieser fast völlig von der Welt abgeschnittenen Region Tibets suchen, oder weshalb der Berg nur umrundet, aber nicht betreten werden darf. Weiß man das allerdings, erhalten die Bilder in Verbindung mit der Musik eine beeindruckende Zusatzdimension, die weder der Soundtrack noch der Film jeweils für sich allein bieten könnten. Film und Musik sind restauriert, und verglichen mit der früheren Videofassung hat sich das gelohnt.

Während ich die Piano-CD eher als stimmungsvolle Zugabe sehe, ist der Kailash-Soundtrack für mich schon jetzt ein früher Kandidat für die Platte des Jahres.

Edgar Froese 1944-2015

Probably in 1972 I saw Tangerine Dream in a TV docu about German rock music. Long organ chords with loads of reverberation, I was fascinated. These were sounds I've never heard before this way. One day later I walked into our local Govi record store and bought the one Tangerine Dream album they had: Alpha Centauri (1971, the original "Ohr" pressing!). It was more or less what I saw in this TV docu, a bit pathetic, a bit druggy, but still today I like side 1.

 But then I forgot about Tangerine Dream. A couple of years later, NDR radio had a radio essay about something, it was late at night, and they had 20 minutes time until the next news had to be aired. They filled this time with Tangerine Dream's Ricochet, Part 2 (1975). This was completely different from the Alpha Centauri stuff, much more clear, organized, composed. I was completely floored, and the next evening I had this album.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Tangerine Dream became one of the important soundtracks of my life. There were times when I was hardly able to listen to any "normal" music instead, and Tangerine Dream were surely the big force that made me starting to play several synthesizers myself.

In the 1990s my interest in Tangerine Dream declined. There were too many recordings, especially too many film soundtracks for second-rate movies -- too uniform, too much stuff to follow. I rediscovered Tangerine Dream when a friend sent me the link to a video from their "Electric Mandarine Tour" from 2012:

With this line-up I enjoyed them again.

Edgar Froese was the only constant member of Tangerine Dream for the more than 40 years of their career. He was heart and soul of the band. You have to listen to his solo recordings to really get how much his ideas were the fundament of what the band did. One of my favorites is still Epsilon In Malaysian Pale (1975, the original, not the later remix version) -- which was a favorite also of David Bowie and Brian Eno.

Edgar Froese left the building unexpectedly on January 20, 2015, after suffering a pulmonary embolism. As he once said, death is nothing but changing the cosmic address. However, Edgar, under your old address you will be missed.

Alan Warner: Tago Mago (33 1/3)

(Die deutsche Version dieser Besprechung finden Sie hier bei Manafonistas!)

Of course, all Can fans know the dog barking on the track "Aumgn". And now we finally get to know who its creator was: a schnauzer named Assi who belonged to Irmin Schmidt.

Most of the news we get from this book is similar thrilling.

Since its start, the book series 33 1/3  picks up mainly rock classics and commercially successful albums. More difficult stuff wasn't ignored, but it was the exception. Since the series went from Continuum Books to Bloomsbury, this tendency seems to grow, as a look at the forthcoming publications shows.

Up to now there has been no book about any albums from German bands. Volume 101 is the first one: Alan Warner's book on Can's double album Tago Mago from 1971. That's not a bad choice. Tago Mago survived all turbulencies of the decades, is musically nearly intangible, and - others than most products carrying this attribute - it can be called "legendary" for sure.

What is left to be written about a work that now, at the age of 43, is probably more popular than at the time when it was new? Alan Warner, to foreclose it, did not find a convincing answer. Of course, this question goes for several other albums of the series, and usually the authors go one of the following two ways: Either, the album is analysed musically and/or in view of its reception history. Sometimes this works fine (as in case of Geeta Dayal's book on Brian Eno's Another Green World), but it also happens (as in Dan Breithaupt's book on Steely Dan's Aja) that this concept turns out to be rather complicated and theory-loaded. Or, the second possibility: The album is seen as a sort of leitmotif through the author's own (more or less interesting) life. Alan Warner's book falls clearly into the second category.

Whoever hopes to see new information on the history of making or the reception history of Tago Mago won't get very happy with this book. Through the first hundred pages, Tago Mago is not much more than a frame, over long passages it's mainly about Warner's youth.

Alan Warner was born in 1964, grew up somewhere in the Scottish backwater and was 7 when Tago Mago was released. Soon it becomes clear that he discovered Can not before the 1980s when the band had disbanded already, and his access to them were the Sex Pistols - John Lydon had said something about Can's drummer Jaki Liebezeit. Punk and New Wave bands, a couple of jazz musicians and life in a smalltown make the context of Warner's search for Can, and he comes back to this background all over again. There are some nice anecdotes about this time - like, to name one, he visits with his mother a local very white-bread record shop to complain about a damaged copy of Ian Dury's LP New Boots And Panties!!, and when the shop assistant plays the record, Dury a cappella roars the first line: "Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks ..." through the whole shop.

Tago Mago was not even the first Can album he got into touch with. Before that he had discovered their 1979 self-titled album (the one with the spanner cover) at a Virgin Megastore in Glasgow, but this album is very different from the earlier Can stuff. Along with that he had all this myths and fairytales about German rock musicians and their hippie-esque way of life in his head - all the stuff that had been planted there by the British music press. Among other things he had heard that the Can members lived in a castle, and he tries to envision how it might look there, whether the musicians grow their own vegetables, and he speculates about Malcolm Mooney's washing habits.

And when one thinks on page 97 that now finally Warner will talk about Tago Mago, one has to learn that first the conditions of Schloss Nörvenich (the "castle" near Cologne where the band had their studio for four years) are characterized, followed by several pages of thoughts about theory, reality and mysteries of tape editing. This is not even uninteresting, but it has much more to do with Teo Macero and several Miles Davis albums than with Can.

It's not before page 108 that finally really Tago Mago is in the center of view. But there's no real news coming up. The author conducted interviews with Irmin Schmidt and Jaki Liebezeit, but the yield is meager (except maybe the Assi thing). That the band never lived at Schloss Nörvenich, that Tago Mago is a result of excellent tape editing, that none of the tracks was recorded in one go, and that it's to thank Irmin Schmidt's wife Hildegard (Can's manager) that Tago Mago became a double album - all this is long known. Warner's perception and way of presenting his results is mainly descriptive; neither there are musical analyses, nor will you find a paragraph about the musician's then conditions of work and living. 

It looks as if really anything about this album has been said already, but not by everybody. With this book there is one more voice in the choir, but that's it. And that's a bit too thin for a complete book. But at least it is well written, so for a nice read at the beach or during a train ride it's fine, particularly as it is small enough to fit into every pocket. And when the result is that one listens again to the album, then it has done its job.


Alan Warner: Tago Mago.
Bloomsbury Academic 2015.
142 pages.
ISBN 978-1-62892-108-3.

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser & Gille Lettmann: The Cosmic Couriers Story

(In deutscher Sprache hier!)

Please note: An updated and in some points edited new version of this blog entry is to be found in my book TIMES & SOUNDS, released in 2020. Information and order here.

"Currently I make 6000 marks a month.

That shows what an idea of mine is worth."

(Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, 1968)

"Everybody creates his own reality."

(Gille Lettmann, circa 1972)

The story of the German record labels Ohr, Pilz and Kosmische Kuriere - and of course of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettmann who ran them - is an interesting chapter of German media, music and contemporary history. It is four decades ago now, but still today these names come up pretty regularly on mailing lists and discussion forums about German rock music. Especially in the U.S. there is currently a boom of German rock music from the late sixties to the mid-seventies.

Usually one gets oneself into hot water when stating this, but anyways: Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and his girlfriend Gille Lettmann were important figures for the German rock music landscape. Still today there are people who deny this, but seen from today it’s clear that they were important. When nearly no one else dared to do this, the two of them bet on German rock music without reserve. And only few people have been thrown down to the pit as mercilessly as the two of them. Especially their former followers in the music press later doused them with buckets of malice. Some do it still today, probably because there is nearly no risk anymore that suddenly Kaiser could reappear and hit back.

Kaiser and Lettmann were not the only ones who rendered outstanding service to the beginnings of German rock music. There were some more people. But credit where credit is due: When it comes to the time when German “beat groups” transformed into rock bands, leaving behind their imitating phase and starting to develop their own musical style, then it's not possible to ignore these two.

Kaiser’s and Lettmann’s importance becomes obvious also when one looks at the endless guessing about their whereabouts. The speculations became more and more abstruse over the years. Some claim to have seen Kaiser at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He’s supposed to walk around on the central market in Cologne in the early morning, begging for food. But he’s also said to live in America, working as Erich von Däniken’s promoter. Not least, he has been declared dead.

Kaiser

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, nicknamed sometimes "RUK", was born on June 18, 1943, in Buckow (in Brandenburg near Berlin), was raised in Osnabrück (Lower Saxony) and Berlin, later he studied German language and literature, philosophy, sociology and dramatic theory in Cologne.

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser at WDR TV, 1971

His first enduring contact with German music, aside from the “schlager” genre, was the first of the now legendary folk festivals at the Waldeck Castle at the Hunsrück (Rhineland-Palatinate) in 1964.

Essener Songtage

Kaiser became an active part of the scene in 1968 when he managed to get a guarantee of 300,000 Marks from the City of Essen to start the “Internationale Essener Songtage” (International Song Festival Essen). Kaiser himself announced the event with all modesty as the "biggest thing that ever happened in Europe". Okay, puff is part of the trade, but it was Germany's first real rock festival, that's for sure. Managing director was Bernd Witthüser, press work was done by Henryk M. Broder, the program was designed by graphic artist Reinhard Hippen – these names will re-appear later. Performing artists from Germany were Hanns Dieter Hüsch, Franz Josef Degenhardt, Peter Brötzmann, Tangerine Dream, Amon Düül, Guru Guru, The City Preachers, Floh de Cologne, Hannes Wader and others, and there were also foreign acts like Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity, Family, Alexis Korner, The Fugs and The Mothers Of Invention with their boss Frank Zappa. The latter was a bit irritated: “Apparently the audience can’t decide whether they want to discuss music or listen to music.” The Amon Düül members were completely stoned and played the same riff over and over again like a tape loop; some festival visitors still remember the repeated announcements: “Amon Düül, stop playing please, we need to change the setting!”

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser on stage at Essener Songtage, 1968

In the thick of all this chaos Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser ran around. To him the whole thing was a giant adventure playground: “A music happening that, mind-expanding and mind-expanded, psychedelic, opens up new ways of experience and, in an emotional way, puts the vested and accepted habits into question”, as he stated somewhat muddleheadedly. The organizational confusion he had caused with his inexperience and unconsciousness he tried to minimize by "incontrovertible regulations", big words and a walkie-talkie: "We will crack down on this."

The festival ended with a loss of 80,000 marks - real money at that time. Kaiser tried to get money by selling broadcasting rights but played the stations off against each other in such a clumsy way that finally only 4,000 marks came in. Bavarian Radio and TV (BR) editor Wuermeling: "Had Mr. Kaiser negotiated early enough and seriously, he could have proceeded a much higher amount."

Panoptikum 

Around the same time, Kaiser, under the pseudonym "Fritz Baas", used the protestant news service "Kirche und Rundfunk" to slam in general all youth shows made by German radio stations as "boring" and "a real pest". Parallel to this, he praised a new radio show by WDR radio in Cologne. It had not aired yet, but he described it as "up to date" and "ambitious" and called in advance for more airtime.

This radio show was called "Panoptikum", describing itself as "radio collage", and miraculously, Kaiser himself was a freelance member of the team that had developed the concept. One of his co-collaborators was again Henryk M. Broder (who later became a columnist for “Der Spiegel”, now works for newspaper "Die Welt" and still is an excellent writer and highly gifted polemicist).

 "Panoptikum" ad poster (graphics: Heinz Edelmann)

We'll have to come back to "Panoptikum" later, because for Kaiser, this radio show became important in a completely different connection.

Books

Several books followed. Kaiser was a good writer, he was busy as a bee, and in contrast to other people who simply discussed their ideas, he put his into practice. His never-tiring typewriter was legendary, as an early bird he could be found at his desk already at 5 in the morning, typing. Temporarily "the man with the many pseudonyms" (Der Spiegel) worked for more than 60 newspapers, magazines and radio stations.

Some of his books were regarded more seriously and were released by respected publishing houses like Econ or Kiepenheuer & Witsch, others were obviously shots from the hip, released by “kinder der geburtstagspresse” (“children of birthday press”; decidedly in small letters) - which in fact meant they were self-published. Kaiser had founded this company in 1968. This, as his shrill house advertising said, "super publishing house of German underground" existed a couple of years, Kaiser published not only his own books, there were also two or three books written by other authors.

He also published a magazine (he called it a "counter newspaper") named "popopo" - "Zeitung für Pop & Politik & Pornografie" ("paper for pop & politics & pornography"), edited by Henryk M. Broder, Reinhard Hippen, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, Fred Viebahn. In one of his later books he stressed its especially "psychedelic layout". Via mailorder he offered a couple of U.S. music magazines that were hardly available elsewhere in Germany, but mainly he imported some American sex magazines for 25 cents and sold them for 5.50 marks.

Still worth a read are “Das Buch der neuen Popmusik“ (The Book Of New Pop Music, 1969) and “Rock-Zeit – Stars, Geschäft und Geschichte der neuen Popmusik” (Rock Time – Stars, Business and History of the New Pop Music, 1972); both can easily be found in second-hand book shops. 

The former book also was translated into Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian language (strangely there was never an English translation), the second one exists in German only. 

Consecutively read, the books show in a stunningly precise way Kaiser’s development. His talent to put facts and circumstances into short, crisp sentences and label them with catchy buzzwords is obvious immediately. In “Rock-Zeit” Kaiser delivers a lot of hot air, slips (he continuously misspells Bob Dylan's famous album as "John Wesley Hardings", to name just one) and arbitrarily constructed arguments, but there are also bright, sometimes razor-sharp analyses. But too often his conclusions are over the top and set their sights too much on simplistic blowoffs instead of serious insight.

Interestingly, Kaiser seemed to be well aware of the fact that he was in danger to criticize as a journalist what, in his function as a music producer, he had to execute himself - and by admitting this openly he tried to make a virtue out of necessity: “This book carries a contradiction in itself. Apparently. In it, I strictly criticize the rock music that ended up being pure profit music; and I identify myself exposedly with a part of this rock music. ... This is different from the non-fiction books we are used to, and I'm well aware about this. I didn't write an abstractly so-called objective paper, I compiled the musical aspects that are currently most important to me and have been part of my life for several years. And I think it is a good thing when the reader is able to recognize the author.”

A comparison of the first edition of “Pop Music” with the extended second edition had shown already the author's increasing affinity to hashish and LSD. But now, in "Rock-Zeit", he openly mentions “the trip” as an important part of his perception of music: “Seen this way, this is an intimate and dedicated book.” True. And of course Kaiser didn't leave out any chance to promote his own artists.

These two books offer a sort of key to his way of thinking. Already here the fantasy building in which he was going to lose his way during the following years becomes visible in rough outline. 

But Kaiser wrote some more books, like "Underground? Pop? Nein! Gegenkultur!" ("Underground? Pop? No! Counterculture!", 1969) or "Fabrikbewohner - Protokoll einer Kommune und 23 Trips" ("Factory Residents - Journal of a Commune and 23 Trips", 1970). They are less important but revealing as well.

Both books are printed multi-colored and are collages from short essays, records of talks, interviews, photos and drawings, made in collaboration with Reinhard Hippen, and they show a couple of Kaiser's special quirks. One of those is his persistent urge for a hierarchic numeration of text paragraphs to suggest the existence of essentials where in fact nothing like this is visible. And it's also notable that for his chapters he always uses the term "trip".

Even more interesting in both books is the permanent mentioning of addresses. The idea of "Gegenöffentlichkeit" ("counter public") fascinated Kaiser - it's obvious that when he studied sociology he had deeply delved into "Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit" ("The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere") by German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, published in 1962, a sort of "must-read" at that time, and Kaiser now puts these perceptions into use for the scene he writes about. This is why he profiles domestic and foreign flat-sharing communities, projects for the arts or alternative manufacturing, musicians, theater people and other artists - he calls them "new people" -, and following his idea of "counter-public" he tries to let the reader be able to cross-link with all these people. For this reason he lists - sometimes several pages long - their addresses and telephone numbers. It is understandable that names like Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol's Factory, Tuli Kupferberg (boss of The Fugs, a band Kaiser deeply admired) or "Rechtsanwalt Schilli" (he means Otto Schily, a lawyer who then defended several terrorists of the "Red Army Faction"; the tabloids saw him as very left-wing for that reason) are listed. But there are also hundreds of completely unknown persons, and one can only guess why they are named there. And why he lists the private New York address and telephone number of singer Nico who for sure had not the slightest interest in "counter publics" of any kind - that will remain Kaiser's secret forever (if someone is interested: 134 E 16th St, near Andy Warhol's then Factory, but she doesn't live there anymore). Collecting addresses must have been a sort of personal obsession of Kaiser's; as journalist Andreas Hub reports, Kaiser kept a folder with thousands of addresses.

Kaiser saw the society's future in building up alternative networking scenes all over. Actually, most of these projects didn't work for more than one or two years, if at all. Kaiser was far from being the only one running after this illusion. But most participants woke up after a while.  

It's hard to say whether also Kaiser did. While he continued his publicistic course without any changes, he started his now-following career as a music producer under the roof of a fully commercial group of companies. And - in spite of his existing analytical perspicacity - he became a barker in the matter of mind-altering drugs, ruined his own credibility, that of his artists, and finally his own existence.


Meisel

1970: Entrance Peter Meisel (born 1935), music producer and publisher in Berlin. In 1962 he had founded Hansa Music Production, two years later a record label of the same name. 

Peter Meisel, 1970

His demesne was mainly the schlager genre with singers like Conny Froboess, Manuela, Drafi Deutscher, Giorgio Moroder and others. But his field of interest didn’t end there. He already had signed Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, Xhol Caravan and Birth Control, but he was a bit clueless what to do with them now. At this point Kaiser entered Meisel’s sphere of activity, and he was what Meisel needed. The result was the founding of Ohr Music Production.

Ohr

The company had its place in Berlin, Wittelsbacher Straße 18, in the same house where Meisel’s other companies and branches were based.

The slogan „Macht das Ohr auf“ (open the ears) came from graphic artist Reinhard Hippen (now Ohr’s design head), and it was not without subtle humor. It was a pun on the slogan “Macht das Tor auf” (open the gate) which at that time the West Berlin edition of tabloid “Bild” had in its logo, framed with barbwire. Of course what “Bild” meant was the Brandenburg Gate, as a symbol for the closed border crossing between East and West Berlin. Hippen hit the zeitgeist with this pun because at that time, rock music usually was expected to be politically left-wing, and “Bild” was one of the biggest identity-forming concepts of the enemy the student protest scene had. And Kaiser and Hippen knew exactly how to adjust the Ohr ads ads to this scene.

(Reinhard Hippen later published several books and anthologies about German kabarett history and founded the Deutsche Kabarett Archiv in Mainz which he ran until 1989. He passed away in April 2010.)

 Reinhard Hippen

In mid-1969, Meisel had started first music productions with his new bands. After Kaiser’s entry, Ohr Records hit the market in March 1970 with three LPs: Fließbandbabys Beat-Show by Cologne-based agit prop band Floh de Cologne (a song cycle in a contrived cool language, straying around between sexual revolution and class struggle), Mandalas by Limbus 4 and Lieder von Vampiren, Nonnen und Toten (Songs of vampires, nuns and deads) by Bernd Witthüser (Walter Westrupp was involved already, but the record didn’t go yet under their later name “Witthüser & Westrupp”).

In April, Opal by Embryo followed, in June came Electronic Meditation by Tangerine Dream and UFO by Guru Guru. Especially these three albums are seen as classics today – rough diamonds that were unpolished yet, but it was obvious that there was real new potential on the way.

Also a couple of 45s were released. The Birth Control one shown below was the fourth already but the first release with a serious chance of selling commercially.

Kaiser was able to acquire Dieter Dierks, later also Conny Plank, as sound engineers for his productions. What especially Dierks elicited from the equipment at his studio in Stommeln near Cologne was – for German standards at that time – practically unrivaled. 

Dieter Dierks (upper photo), Conny Plank, early 1970s

 The recording quality and production creativity of many of Kaiser’s productions is stunning still today. Kaiser was also an early adopter of new trends. Several of his records were mixed in SQ quadro (a four-channel system that could be pressed into standard vinyl records and was compatible with stereo equipment, but it became a flop anyway).

In addition, the LPs had a lavish design, usually gate-fold covers, good graphics, often they came with posters or gimmicks like a balloon or gadgetry like the extricable giblets on the cover of Floh de Cologne’s album Profitgeier (something like “vulture capitalist”); the record itself came in day-glo red vinyl.

Soon it became part of Kaiser’s strategy to present an increasing number of new discoveries. The problem was that in fact the pool of really good bands in Germany was not that big. In nearly no time Kaiser had signed around 30 acts to his label. Among them were first-class bands like Tangerine Dream, Guru Guru, Popol Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel. Probably they would have made their way even without Kaiser. But there were several “second-tier” bands – Anima, Emtidi, Hölderlin, Mythos, Wallenstein, Witthüser & Westrupp and others – and without Kaiser we probably would have never heard of them. He claimed to have signed „the best German rock groups“, but this, of course, is a matter of taste. He did not have Amon Düül II, Can, Cluster, Kraftwerk, and later Neu!, so it could be rightly stated that the most important bands were missed in his roster.

Competitors

Can and Amon Düül II appeared on Liberty/UA in Munich, which under the direction of producer Siegfried E. "Siggi" Loch became one of the first labels taking the risk of releasing German bands – and it really was a risk. After the early successes of Liberty and Ohr other record companies also woke up and tried their luck by signing German bands, but they remained cautious. Intercord from Stuttgart started the sub-label Spiegelei, EMI in Cologne added some German acts to their Harvest label, Bellaphon from Frankfurt put on Bacillus, in Munich the Kuckuck label was started, and Polydor in Hamburg established a sub-label named Zebra, but it didn’t take off and soon was re-integrated into the mother label.

Probably Ohr would have been a good place for Amon Düül II, but it’s hard to imagine that the likes of Can, Kraftwerk or Neu! would have been very happy about the marketing circus Kaiser started now. His record output was growing in such a way that finally the Deutsche Metronome (the company that distributed Ohr) had to put the brakes on.

Pilz

Kaiser and Meisel then founded the label Pilz and looked for a second distribution channel. In 1971 they found chemical giant BASF which had stepped into the record industry in 1969. (In the first place they produced German schlager but also distributed the MPS label with its first-class jazz records. BASF stopped its trip into the music industry in 1976.) BASF product manager Jürgen Schmeißer had developed a sub-label named Mouse and already prepared a couple of productions. But when the inquiry from Kaiser and Meisel came in, BASF decided to turn down the Mouse project and took over the distribution of Pilz instead.

The already finished Mouse recordings were transferred to the new label; the distribution was managed by Ulrich Rützel (born 1944; in 1979 he became co-founder of the Ars Electronica in Linz (Austria), probably the most important European festival for electronic arts; in 1981 he founded his own record label named Erdenklang). In principle, Pilz was meant to release the more quiet and folk-oriented productions, while Ohr was dedicated to (psychedelic) rock music. But this got mixed-up very soon.

Charts

Kaiser saw himself as politically liberal (as the term is seen in the U.S.) or left-wing, but he never had any problems with the fact that money had to be made with music. But in his target group this was frowned upon. As said, most rock fans at that time defined themselves as “somehow left-wing”, and the art & entertainment critics did even more. Watching today an early-seventies issue of a cultural TV magazine like "Aspekte" can give you goosebumps. The pseudo-left-wing complacency these journalists showed is breathtaking. But this was good form then - everybody wanted to criticize. Music critic Bernd Gockel, for instance, closed the review of Amon Düül II’s album Wolf City in "Sounds" with the conclusion: “It would be a great pity if one day we had to find Amon Düül in the hit parade.” At that time, charts had a maximal disgust factor. If a band managed to place a tune in the charts, then immediately this disqualified them in the eyes of their fans: The band now “was on the commercial trip” (“sold out”) and couldn't be taken seriously anymore. Nobody realized that a hit parade simply shows which records are currently selling best, and salaried critics like Gockel didn’t seem to get that with remarks like the mentioned they simply expected the bands to prove their credibility by making no money. How they should make ends meet? Who cares.

The same spirit could be seen when in 1971 WDR TV aired a round-table discussion entitled "Pop & Co. – die ‚andere‘ Musik zwischen Protest und Markt“ ("Pop & Co. – the ‘other‘ music between protest and market"): Panel member Nickel Pallat (manager of the Berlin-based agit-prop band Ton Steine Scherben) berated Kaiser as vassal of the high finance, acting in cahoots with the capitalists. Kaiser stated his point of view: His record label would never tell its bands what to do or not to do, but of course Ohr couldn’t be a benevolent society. Pallat finally ended the (as he called it) “fucking liberal” discussion by pulling an axe out from under his jacket and tried to smash the (very stable) studio table. When that failed more or less, he stole some microphones (“for prisoners!”) and disappeared. Probably still today he doesn't know what he wanted to say with this action. The snippet can easily be found on the web.

Interestingly it was just Ton Steine Scherben who had to learn the hard way where this attitude would lead to: A concert snippet from 1976 shows their singer Rio Reiser, highly on edge, trying to explain that a political band like Ton Steine Scherben could not be expected to play only solidarity gigs without being paid – even left-wing musicians need a minimum of income to make ends meet. The audience stared at him like: “What the heck is this guy talking about?”

Business

As shown, it was better to be careful with messages of economical success - they could backfire. However, according to their own statement, capitalist Meisel and his vassal Kaiser had sold around 250,000 albums in their first two business years – seemingly a good number, but only at first glance. Assumed this number is correct (nobody can verify this today), then we have to see that it refers to no less than 18 productions, and an average album by an average German rock band at that time usually sold something between 1,000 and 3,000 copies. The market had an extremely small volume: Only 0.5 per cent of all rock albums sold in Germany came from German bands, 99.5 per cent were allotted to British and American bands. In comparison: Kraftwerk’s first album (released in autumn 1970 on the Philips label) sold around 60,000 copies within one year. This was seen as "quite well" and probably is the dimension also the top sellers of Ohr and Pilz (Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Guru Guru) reached. In addition to this, the costs for production and studio were usually paid by the record companies at that time; license deals were still the exception.

This shows where the problem lies: The two or three best-selling Ohr albums might have been successful and profit-making, but the revenues they generated were not high enough to cover the costs of all the other albums. Ohr had sold a quarter of a million records, but yielded only a small profit (if any) at that time, although the company was able to place a couple of deals with U.S. labels.

One year later, in early 1973, Hansa stated that of all the now circa 50 albums released under Kaiser's direction, especially the seven records with the new electronic "cosmic music" were selling well. But this time no figures were given anymore.

Promotion

Kaiser now included more and more obscure and half-baked products in his roster and obviously mixed up turnover and profit. In addition, he planned on boosting the mentioned market share of German bands from 0.5 per cent to more than 90 per cent – and this within just a few months! To succeed in this, he compensated missing artistic quality with increasingly strange promotion and massive ad campaigns. And for a while this seemed to work. There was this psychedelic and politicized scene, and Kaiser knew exactly how to sell their own pipe dreams to them: records plus image. He didn’t sell records, he sold a way of life. Probably he had not even any qualms about this; we can be sure that Kaiser believed in his own writings - and we are in a time when he was still seen by many as a serious journalist. He knew the slang of his target group because it was his own; the music press immediately adopted his catch phrases – one just has to read album reviews of that time in “Sounds”, “Musik Express” or the Swiss “Pop”. Kaiser started a bi-weekly PR magazine named “deutsche popszene” with background stories about his artists and the zeitgeist in general, just for editing staff, journalists and media people, and for every new album he designed voluminous press kits and sent them to any magazine, radio and TV station in reach.


Kaiser also knew how to make use of the good old "calculated scandal" concept. The best-known example for this strategy was the Birth Control album Operation from 1971. Kaiser "precisely and deliberately" included its cover (which had no connections to the topics of the songs) into the band's "career plan" ("Der Spiegel").

The cover showed a giant insect eating babies under the blessing hand of Pope Paul VI - the Pope who in 1968 had released the disputed encyclical "Humanae vitae - On the regulation of birth". Today this provocation may look harmless, but at that time it was enough for catholic priests in Germany to mount the barricades against this "porn group". In Switzerland, concert posters of the band were banned, and in England the workers of a record distribution center refused from dispatching this record.


Ulrich Rützel: “Kaiser was enormously talented in PR and marketing, and we thought it was absolutely amazing how systematically he started dusting off this completely boring German music industry.” And Kaiser remained busy as a bee. Rützel: “You know, we had no answering machines at that time, and often enough Kaiser called me up at night because he had a new idea. In the beginning I thought: Okay, that’s rock‘n‘roll. But after a while one would like to sleep again without interruptions …”

Peter, you have to slow this guy down

Finally Kaiser got to the point of overdoing his activities in such a way that Hansa marketing head Hans Blume thought it was time to take his boss to task: “As someone with his feet on the ground I soon had the suspicion that this thing was going to go wrong. And I said to Meisel: ‘Peter, you have to slow this guy down!’ But we were in the record industry, and so we always wanted to try something new. And well – it could have been …”

Gille

Meanwhile Meisel would have needed to slow down not only Kaiser but also his companion Gerlinde Lettmann, nicknamed Gille, textile designer from Cologne. 

Gille Lettmann, 1973

In spring 1968, Düsseldorf-based journalist Hubert Maessen took the train to go to WDR in Cologne. He had a suitcase full of LPs with him, flipping through them during his trainride. Vis-à-vis in his compartment sat an 18-year-old: That was Gille, asking him about the records. For a short time, a little love affair resulted from this chance encounter. During the following weeks, Maessen took Gille, who still lived with her parents at that time, a couple of times along with him to the editorial meetings for the radio show "Panoptikum". The relationship between Gille and Maessen ended soon, but it didn't take long for Gille to find herself a new boyfriend: Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, the monk and berserk writer, who, as we might remember, worked as a freelancer for this editorial team. It must have been the love of their life; they always came as a pair from then on.

Hubert Maessen describes Gille Lettmann as "wide awake, self-confident, resolute, inquisitive". In the beginning, she was mainly Kaiser’s girlfriend, but somewhat in 1971 she started playing a more and more decisive role in the company. To slow her down was even harder to do; she and Kaiser always drove each other from idea to idea.

Leary

A second thing happened in 1972 - seen from now, the beginning of the end: The American LSD trickster and fired Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary (1920-1996), after his escape from U.S. prison finally ended up in Switzerland with his wife. Among his hosts were Ohr artist Sergius Golowin from Interlaken. He provided the contact between Leary and the Kaiser/Lettmann crew.

In Leary, Gille found her personal guru, in the drug he propagated she saw the way to go. And as somebody from their entourage put it: Kaiser, who didn't need to be convinced about LSD anymore, from now on tried to be for Gille what she saw in Leary. This constellation also marks the starting point of their personal tragedy.

Still in Switzerland, they schlepped the Ash Ra Tempel musicians to a studio at Bern and had them recording their album Seven Up with Leary. As a krautrock fan one was used to incompetent singers anyway, and so Leary’s vocals didn’t stand out very much. It was – as often – owed to the class of the musicians and not least to sound engineer Dieter Dierks again that the resulting album was tolerable.

Decay

If someone watched closely, the forthcoming decay was visible already. In 1972, two of Kaiser’s most important collaborators left: Bruno Wendel and Günter Körber, who both felt that things had gone downhill. They talked to Deutsche Metronome, the distributor of Ohr, and developed the sub-label Brain Records. It didn’t take long until Brain became the No. 1 address for German rock music – and Kaiser’s hardest competitor as well, especially because the two of them took along a couple of important Ohr artists.

Günter Körber finally in 1975 founded Sky Records which became very meritorious in its own right. He passed away in September 2013.

 

Finally, in May 1973, also Peter Meisel left – it had become clear to him that this ship was now heading for the iceberg. (In 1984, Meisel migrated to the U.S. where he became joint partner of fast food chain “Wendy’s”. After the Fall of the Wall he went back to Hansa at Berlin and discovered Die Prinzen, a highly original vocal group from Leipzig, and later Lou Bega. Peter Meisel passed away in 2010 in his adopted home Pinehurst, North Carolina.)

The Ohr & Pilz Musikproduktion, now under the direction of only Kaiser & Lettmann, moved to the Berlin Europa-Center, besides this, Kaiser still had his old home address in the Cologne neighborhood of Dellbrück, which became a second head office.

Cosmic Couriers

We are the Cosmic Couriers.

At first, we send our music,

later we will expand into a more beautiful world.

(Press release)

Under Leary’s lasting influence, the two of them were irrevocably struck by cosmic lightning now. They founded a third label and called it Kosmische Kuriere (Cosmic Couriers), because this was what they felt they were. The graphic design reminded more to a newsletter of the rural youth movement than to adventures in space, but only a short time later they re-named it to Kosmische Musik (Cosmic Music) and changed also the visual appearance.

Not that there hadn’t been any drug connections on the Ohr or Pilz releases – already at the “Essener Songtage” Kaiser had talked about “expansion of consciousness”, and his books were full of this topic as well. This was not only Kaiser's private quirk, it was also part of the then zeitgeist, evident not only in music but also and especially in advertising – the “Afri-Cola” cinema and TV ad films created by Charles Wilp are a good example, but even an arch-conservative fashion chain like C&A placed ads with psychedelic graphic elements. And so did Ohr and Pilz.

First, the psychedelic messages came as graphics, were musically encrypted or – as in case of Witthüser & Westrupp – were borrowed from "The Lord of the Rings" or mixed with friendly absurd humor. With the Cosmic Couriers, this changed. Kaiser and Lettmann now saw hallucinogenic drugs as sort of savior for themselves and the rest of mankind. The playful atmosphere, to a large extent, was lost and replaced by plain propaganda. Leary’s “instructions” were incorporated in some songs without much modification; one example (of several possible ones) is “Interplay Of Forces” by Ash Ra Tempel from their album Starring Rosi. Also in this case, it has to be said, it is amazing again that still today the album is worth listening due to music and production.

LSD in your tea

It is said that sometimes in the studio, Kaiser and/or Lettmann dosed the musicians with LSD in their drinks. Klaus Schulze even states in an interview: “Partially, we’ve been forced to take drugs to be allowed to take part in those monster sessions.” – It cannot be verified today what really happened, but probably it didn't happen at gunpoint. And doubts come up at latest when one sees Walter Westrupp in his autobiography joking around with the term “Kaiser’s Kaffee” (which was also a part of the name of a supermarket chain at that time). It is obvious that at least some of the musicians knew quite well what this coffee was about. But apparently not all of them. Singer Bettina Müller-Hohls who participated in the Seven Up sessions did not know about the content of her soft drink. Gille later asked her whether she had "come through well". Klaus Schulze: "Rolf-Ulrich would like to have us always high in the studio, but I can't improvise while tripping." Probably because, as Witthüser & Westrupp sang, "if you take LSD in your tea, you will feel it in your knee." In most cases, luckily nothing further remained, but "definitely, from the inner Kaiser circle, which was a group of several dozen people, at least five ended up in a psychiatric ward" (Hub).

Where Radha and Krishna are dancing their love

All activities of Ohr and Pilz were now bundled into the new project Kosmische Kuriere. And had the promotion of Ohr and Pilz already been quite something, then what the Cosmic Couriers started now turned out to be a promotion overkill never seen in Germany before (and not seen again until the “Neue Deutsche Welle” in the 1980s arrived). 

They called the music “sonic LSD”, nothing went without cosmic connections. Giant ad campaigns were placed in the press, the press kits turning out somewhere between linguistically spaced-out and infantile. Finally even good-willed fans and journalists couldn't help smiling or shaking their heads: "You are invited to a flight through your childhood, into the fields of joy, to the centers of your nerves, into the white light of the elemental force of your life" - this came with the release of the mentioned Leary LP, a "guided trip through the seven levels of consciousness" was promised, the sapiences of "magicians and alchemists, philosophers and psychologists" were announced, and the press kit of Lord Krishna von Goloka by Sergius Golowin stated: “Krishna is not a legend from India! Krishna is you! – Let’s go to the White Alp, where Radha and Krishna are dancing their love.” 

This kibosh was mainly written by Gille Lettmann instead of Kaiser. More and more she took over the helm now.

It was her idea to put the musicians into fantasy costumes she had designed herself. Those would have been okay for bands like The Sweet or glam rock acts like them from Ilja Richter's "Disco" (a popular music show on German TV). As news magazine "Der Spiegel" stated, Kaiser started wearing "beautiful new clothes, velvet and latex with silver sequins and several sorts of bling bling", but none of his musicians were ever seen in these costumes. So Kaiser and Gille and seemed to be the only ones wearing her creations.

Sternenmädchen

And it was at this time when Gille Lettmann transformed herself into a new personality she named Sternenmädchen:

"Hello, galactic people. I am the star girl (Sternenmädchen). I've been blown to earth to bring you joy. Now you own one of the records I produced for you. Close your eyes and dig it. From a cloud, with regards - Gille, Sternenmädchen."

As can be seen here, Gille signs this press release still with her real name and identifies herself as "the star girl". Later this changed; we will come back to this.  

Kaiser rented a railway car, had it painted colorfully, put his artists into it and visited local newspapers all over Germany, he gave journalists a bus ride to press conferences somewhere deep in the woods where he had installed a sound system and assembled inflatable white plastic chairs. For the release of Walter Wegmüller's album Tarot they even printed a complete Tarot Deck, designed by the artist. In the U.S., Kaiser was able to score an especially big hit when he managed to take out an ad in the “Rolling Stone” that looked like an editorial essay on German rock music. Parts of these activities were handled by an especially founded company, "Sternenmädchens Media Service GmbH (= Ltd.)" in Cologne.

In this connection it is interesting to know that apparently, when you had to deal face-to-face with Kaiser and Lettmann, the two of them were not as spaced-out as one might think. In an article, Archie Patterson describes an interview that a friend of his had the opportunity to lead at their (rather middle-class furnished) apartment in Cologne: “He spent the afternoon with them, and told me when he returned they were nice, rather reserved, and not at all the spacy cosmic type of their public image. In fact, he said they were very business-like and their reality did not seem to match at all the mythos their promotion suggested.“

Musicians

Many of the musicians claim today they always had been “against it”. But this, it has to be said, is more or less sort of “protective statements”. Of course, from time to time there were quarrels about royalties and conditions of contracts, but only rarely it ended up as with the band Xhol: In March 1971, they released their new album under the title Hau-RUK. (This pun is hard to translate. "Hau-ruck!" in German means something like "Heave ho!", but "hauen" also means "to hit". So "Hau RUK" can be read as a call to beat him up.) However, it speaks in RUK's favor that he didn't stop this title.

But this was the exception anyway. Most of his musicians believed in all this hype, at least for a while, they took part in it, and probably not even unwillingly. If anybody doesn't believe this, it's useful to take Kaiser's "Rock-Zeit" and to read there the statements of his own musicians. And even years later, Wallenstein keyboard player Jürgen Dollase said: “Kaiser had the idea to include magicians and spiritual teachers into the productions as an energy source – and he had a point there.” (Today, Dollase is restaurant critic of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” – in a way, that fits.) The whole Kaiser-Reich was sort of one big family: “I had rats in my apartment, but in the studio I felt safe and secure”, Wallenstein’s drummer Harald Großkopf says. “Mother Dierks cooked for us, Rolf-Ulrich and Gille, a couple of years older than we musicians, were eloquent and literate. As the generation of our parents, seen from our ‘68 perspective, was still part of the Nazi generation, I absorbed anything there that otherwise only a family could have conveyed to me. I was all the more distraught in my tiny little love-and-peace hippie world later when all these lawsuits started.”

Sunshine contracts

A controversial thing in the opinion of the musicians were Kaiser's so-called "sunshine contracts" (after the street name of his preferred LSD compound). These were a way to pin bands down to the label on long terms. To understand these contracts, one has to know that at the then time every band had to buy their own P.A. system (P.A. = public address; the loudspeaker system for the audience). There were no P.A. rentals like we have them today. The consequence was that most bands had to go deeply into debt to buy this equipment - otherwise there would have been no way for them to play on stage.

Kaiser's sunny offer: He provided equipment amounting to 40,000 marks plus a monthly advance payment of 1,000 marks. As return service he demanded 25 per cent of all earnings the band made from creative activities. (For ordinary mortals, 40,000 marks were a nearly irreal amount at that time. To give a comparison: Yours Truly, working as industrial clerk in the mid-1970s, made circa 1,300 marks gross a month.)

Kaiser did not invent this sort of contract, several record labels had something like this to offer. There is nothing unfair with this sort of contract, it's a clear deal the band could accept or not. But if they did, they suddenly were deep in debt to their record label. And that meant they were nearly unable to leave the label - because then they had to pay back this money. Most bands couldn't afford that; not even Tangerine Dream at that time. So it is understandable when Edgar Froese wrote to Kaiser: "What you do is simply to utilize the situation at the expense of others. If this should be your principle of joy, I decline politely."

Lawsuits

For the business year 1973, Kaiser and Lettmann had set up a finance plan that reminds one of the proverbial “wondrous increase of currency”: They envisaged a turnover increase of more than 600 per cent, which meant revenues of nearly 3.5 million Marks; 1.8 millions they intended to re-invest in new productions (Hub).

Besides this, they had the idea to hand over the management of several bands to Liz Elliot and Brian Barritt, Leary's remaining European followers (Leary meanwhile had been taken into custody again). Edgar Froese, to put it mildly, was not too happy with this: "From definitive experience we know to which high degree they are addicted to the syringe", he wrote in a letter to Kaiser. And that wasn't all. "It comes along that I cannot comprehend your interpretations of necessary drug use."

He, as well as Klaus Schulze, had become fed up with all this excessive hype, and they felt peeved by permanently being pestered to use drugs. They both wanted to cancel their contracts with Kaiser, but of course he didn't want to lose his top sellers. And he feared that other artists could follow their example. He insisted in keeping the contracts.

In June 1973, Froese and Schulze went to court. In May 1974, the Berlin District Court pronounced a judgment: “There is no need to explain more closely that the magniloquent style (of the record company) is exceedingly liable that the musicians affiliated to him (Kaiser) are seen as ridiculous by a not insubstantial part of the expert circles.”

Froese then filed a second lawsuit, this time for missing royalties. He had a long way to go. Four years later, after going through all levels of jurisdiction, the Federal Court of Justice finally proved him right.

But he never got any money – no wonder, all the money had existed only in Kaiser’s and Lettmann’s feverish fantasies and business plans, nothing was real. In fact, Kaiser and Lettmann were not even able to pay their lawyer.

Probably it was not even intended fraud. Kaiser, as Jürgen Dollase puts it, in the end "was taken by his own delusions."

Cosmic Jokers

1974. Kaiser and Lettmann struck out on a new coup – their last, as it turned out: They took several tracks from their repertoire, slightly remixed them, added some unreleased session material (by Klaus Schulze, Wallenstein, Tangerine Dream, Jerry Berkers, Ash Ra Tempel, Witthüser & Westrupp and others) and put some echo-laden, reverberated comments and break-ins by Gille, Kaiser and Rosi Müller into the mix. They made five albums from this material and released them under the project name The Cosmic Jokers: "The time ship floats through the galaxy of joy. In the sounds of electronics. In the flashes of light. Here you will discover Science Fiction, the planet of COSMIC JOKERS, the GALACTIC SUPERMARKET and the SCI FI PARTY. That is the new sound. Space. Telepathy. Melodies. Joy." (Press release). They even managed to get Planeten Sit-In sponsored by “Hobby” (a German magazine for techies, shut down in 1991).

 

Hate instead of joy

But from the beginning, the joy they looked for was flawed. The fifth of these records, Gilles Zeitschiff (Gille’s Time Ship; sub-title: Sternenmädchen visiting the magicians), reflected a conflict between Kaiser & Lettmann and pop magazine „Sounds“ (at that time Germany’s most important). In its edition from April 1973, the magazine reported on Timothy Leary’s layover in Switzerland, and this report was not what Kaiser and Lettmann would have liked to read.

So Gille published a press release (she called in an “open letter”): “Timothy Leary is hunted by CIA. The magazine with the supposed ‘progressive’ image so far prints three photos of Timothy Leary that come from the CIA archives. The CIA doesn't need Sounds. But the Sounds editors don't understand how the CIA works. ... They publish hate instead of joy. ... By doing this, Sounds turned against Leary and the principals of joy. In favor of fear, horror and CIA. We predict: This Sounds is dead.”

Under the headline "My spaceship" (not "time ship", for some reason), the sleeve of Gilles Zeitschiff had the following liner notes, as confused as choppy: “Come in. We are flying to America. We've met Tim, the Sci Fi Courier. And with him, more than 30 millions young people. Then, the C.I.A. steps in. Tim is arrested. He flies to Algier. To Switzerland. Arrested again. Friends showed up. Lord Krishna from Switzerland. He's also a Cosmic Courier. Hartmut, Rolf and I went to see Tim at home on the lake. Tim is Joy. Tim is busy making the LP. Seven Up. His first SciFi Rock LP. I Am The Changer. This is the second one. The four big adventures of our life. Here. On earth. And when we are flying, we meet the Cosmic Courier 'Bon Chance' Brian Barritt. He explains us, why he and Tim and a lot of other Cosmic Couriers are with us. We are flying to Basel. Walter Wegmüller. The Cosmic Painter. We played Tarot together. Is Tim a wizzard? Mr. Tarot gives us the answer. And we have already stepped into TIME. TIME is the new dimension. In it grows the Cosmic Music. TIME contains three big experiences. They make you fly to the Queen of Sunshine. Love is in TIME. Flight in Joy. -Gille.”

Apparently this record sleeve was the last time that the names "Gille" and "Sternenmädchen" appeared in parallel.

In his autobiography, by the way, Leary didn’t mention these episodes, not even in a footnote. That might show how “important” the cosmic couriers were for him.

The Cosmic Couriers stopped all advertising orders for “Sounds”. As they had to learn a bit later, with this boycott they punished not only that magazine but also themselves. Without “Sounds” they couldn’t address a big part of their customers anymore.

Allegedly, as some of the musicians later complained, Kaiser and Lettmann had not informed them about the Cosmic Jokers albums and didn’t ask for permission about the release of the session material. This complaint has also been found on the web and in the literature. This is another case that can’t be verified anymore, but at least Ash Ra Tempel guitarist Manuel Göttsching disagrees: "Of course I knew about the releases, of course I had contracts before, and I received royalties, even in advance. This all was very little money, but that should be no argument to spread around rumors like this. You can say many things about the producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser but I have no reason of saying him to have acted incorrectly so far."

Closedown

However, it is obvious: Kaiser and Lettmann had made a mockery of themselves and their music production company. In the music press they were called now “komische Kuriere” (something like “strange couriers” or “funny couriers”). As music journalist Barry Graves wrote, Kaiser had ruined "the reputation of his bands with a publicity that used non-seriousness as a sort of stylistic feature." 

In 1975 it was quitting time. The space ship went into bankruptcy. The remaining LPs were sold off in piles on the bargain bin at Karstadt (a big German department store chain) at a price of 2.95 Marks (today that would be equivalent to maybe 3 or 4 Euros; the regular price for a new LP at that time was 14 to 19 Marks). Many of the original LPs circulating today probably came from this sellout.

Crash

The crash was short and hard. First, the Cosmic Couriers had to leave their Berlin apartment as well as their office at the Europa-Center because they couldn’t pay the rent anymore. Kaiser and Lettmann retreated to their Cologne apartment, but also there they were evicted because they didn’t pay the rent. As writer and publisher Werner Pieper states, "finally an execution sales of their belongings took place. In the nineties, (journalist) Uwe Husslein found a couple of books from Kaiser's library on a Cologne flea market, some of them with very personal dedications by Tim Leary."

Speculations 

Soon - as depicted at the beginning - the whereabouts of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettmann became subject of wild and sometimes colorful speculations, and they are still going on.

The truth is more plain-colored. They moved to the house of Gille’s mother at Frechen-Königsdorf near Cologne where they lived until 1990. They abandoned the world completely. For a last time, Kaiser appeared when in the late 1980s the Hessian record company Zyx Records re-released the Ohr, Pilz and Kosmische Kuriere catalogue. Kaiser contacted the company to get his producer’s share of the royalties, but Zyx head Bernhard Mikulski (he passed away in 1997) had to point out to him that he had lost his rights in the recordings long ago (this is connected to the execution sales mentioned above; most rights are with Dieter Dierks now).

Silence

Since this time, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser remains silent. He has not been seen in public and doesn’t accept mail. Gille Lettmann does not accept her former name anymore. She can be addressed only as "Sternenmädchen". This is her name now, she's no longer "the" Sternenmädchen. “Over the decades (she) seems to have adopted nearly completely the quirks, ideology, manner of writing, even the identity of her companion whom she calls ‘Meson Cristallis’” (Hub). Her only sign of life: Since 30 years, Sternenmädchen - philosopher now, according to her letterhead - publishes an esoteric magazine which she sends to a circle of readers she specifies herself: old friends, politicians, industrialists.

After mother Lettmann's death in 1990, the two of them had moved to “a rented apartment not far from a German brewery at the Möhnesee” in the Sauerland area, as Walter Westrupp writes in his autobiography. This went well until 2003 when they stopped paying the rent. The landlady first got into touch with Westrupp (which shows that she was probably well aware who her tenants were) and asked him whether he could try to reason with them. He tried, but without success, and so she finally had to call in the appropriate authorities.

In 2006, for a planned book project, Werner Pieper tried to track down Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. His report confirms what already Andreas Hub had found: “As it looks, all written contacts to the world since 20 years ... come from Sternenmädchen, without exception.” Pieper tried to get into touch with Kaiser, but according to Sternenmädchen's reply letter, Cristallis cannot be reached under her address.

Finale

Cristallis and Sternenmädchen, who, in a former life, a thousand moons and a thousand trips ago, once were Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettmann, today live in a small town on the edge of the Sauerland area, now in a facility of the Catholic Church - a "palace", as Sternenmädchen puts it. They know about the internet, but they are not online. Cristallis is invisible. Sternenmädchen can be reached only via general delivery address; if somebody wants to write to her, there are a couple of rules he has to accept first. They don't want to be traced, they don't wish to see any visitors.

Our world is not theirs anymore. Or maybe vice versa.

*

This blog entry is based on an unpublished radio script from 1998. In May 2011 it has been updated and upgraded in collaboration with Archie Patterson. Some changes and supplementations have been added from time to time since then; latest update: December 22, 2012.

Sources:

• Eidam, Klaus and Schröder, Rudolf: Die Hit-Fabrik. Chronik eines Berliner Musikverlages. Edition Intro Meisel GmbH. Berlin 2001
• Habermas, Jürgen: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Frankfurt 1962 (English edition: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere)
• Haring, Hermann: Rock aus Deutschland/West – Von den Rattles bis Nena: Zwei Jahrzehnte Heimatklang. Reinbek 1984
• Hub, Andreas: Das Kraut der frühen Jahre. In: Rolling Stone (German Edition), April 1997, p. 42-46
• Intuitive Music (ed.): Biography Cosmic Jokers. LINK, retrieved May 7, 2011
• Kaiser, Rolf-Ulrich: Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik. Düsseldorf 1969
• Kaiser, Rolf-Ulrich: Underground? Pop? Nein! Gegenkultur! Köln 1969
• Kaiser, Rolf-Ulrich: Fabrikbewohner - Protokoll einer Kommune und 23 Trips. Düsseldorf 1970
• Kaiser, Rolf-Ulrich: Rock-Zeit – Stars, Geschäft und Geschichte der neuen Popmusik. Düsseldorf 1972
• Leary, Timothy: Flashbacks. New York NY 1997 (Somehow the imprint note is charming: “This book is printed on acid-free paper”.)
• Loch, Siggi: Plattenboss aus Leidenschaft. Hamburg 2010
• Morawietz, Stefan: Kraut und Rüben. TV documentary in six parts. WDR TV, Cologne 2006
• Morawietz, Stefan: Roboter essen kein Sauerkraut. Arte TV, Strasbourg 2008
• Patterson, Archie: The Mythos of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. LINK, retrieved May 23, 2011
• Pieper, Werner: Kaiser Schmarrn süß/sauer. In: Pieper, Werner (ed.): Alles schien möglich – 60 Sechziger über die 60er Jahre und was aus ihnen wurde; p. 50-55. Löhrbach 2007
• Schober, Ingeborg: Tanz der Lemminge – Amon Düül II: Eine Musikkommune in der Protestbewegung der 60er Jahre. Reinbek 1979
• Sounds - Platten 66-77. 1827 Kritiken. Frankfurt/M. 1979
• Spiegel 41/1968: Größtes Ding. In: Der Spiegel, October 7, 1968, p. 213-214. LINK, retrieved August 7, 2011
• Spiegel 29/1970: Zirpt lustig. In: Der Spiegel, July 13, 1970, p. 126. LINK, retrieved August 7, 2011
• Spiegel 43/1971: Szene - Popmusik. In: Der Spiegel, October 18, 1971, p. 177. LINK, retrieved August 7, 2011
• Spiegel 7/1973: Szene - Leary-Gesang. In: Der Spiegel, February 12, 1973, p. 103. LINK, retrieved August 7, 2011
• Spiegel 40/1973: Prinzip der Freude. In: Der Spiegel, October 1, 1973, p. 186-188. LINK, retrieved August 7, 2011
• Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.): Melodien für Millionen – Das Jahrhundert des Schlagers. Bonn 2008
• Westrupp, Walter: 68er nach Noten. LINK, retrieved May 7, 2011

 

Thanks to Andreas Hub, Hubert Maessen, Manfred Miersch, Stefan Morawietz, Werner Pieper, Ulrich Rützel, Günter Schlienz and Walter Westrupp.
Photos: Billy Bryan, PR photos and private archives. Screenshots: WDR TV.

Some Ohr candy: 

• Ash Ra Tempel: Starring Rosi
• Cosmic Jokers: Sci-Fi Party; Galactic Supermarket
• Guru Guru: UFO; Hinten
• Hölderlin: Hölderlins Traum
• Popol Vuh: In den Gärten Pharaos; Hosianna Mantra
• Tangerine Dream: Electronic Meditation; Alpha Centauri
• Wallenstein: Blitzkrieg
• Walter Wegmüller: Tarot
• Witthüser & Westrupp: Trips & Träume; Der Jesuspilz; Bauer Plath