(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: It's quite a media collection you have behind you.
Christoph Dallach: Yes. It's Spotify on a wall. One side of the room is filled with CDs. The other side of the room is filled with vinyl. The whole floor is covered with vinyl, and there are two more rooms with vinyl.
Lawrence: Oh my goodness.
Christoph: I can never move out of this flat. [laughs]
Lawrence: In general, is it important to you to keep all of it, or do you periodically get rid of any of it? What's your relationship with the media?
Christoph: The relationship is that it gives me a good feeling. When I decide I want to listen to music, there's some selection I can choose from. It might be some jazz, it might be some Stan Getz, or it might be Napalm Death. It's a wide range of music. It might be Kraftwerk, or it might be Metallica.
Lawrence: That's beautiful.
Christoph: I tend to keep a lot of copies of favorite albums. So The Village Green Preservation Society by the Kinks I have twenty times.
Lawrence: Just in case? [laughs]
Christoph: Yes, definitely. It's beyond madness, I know, but I have this strange original Swedish cover, the mono mix, stereo mix, and things like that.
Lawrence: Right.
Christoph: I know it's not sane, but it gives me happiness. My daughter said when I leave this planet, it will all be turned into a broken back.
Lawrence: Oh, it'll be on Discogs. [laughs]
Christoph: She will call some dealer. He's taking it all to his shop. But as long as I'm alive, it gives me happiness. From time to time, I stand at a flea market and I sell some and I buy more.
Lawrence: That's part of the sickness. Everything that goes out, for every one that goes out, two come in.
Christoph: Exactly. I sell ten, I buy twenty.
Lawrence: That's wonderful. Well, thank you for making time to do this. I'm so excited to speak with you. Tell me a little bit about your decision to choose the oral history format for your book.
Christoph: I've always liked that form. I remember when I started in this job at the beginning of the '90s, there was an oral history about Andy Warhol's factory, where all the people involved remembered how it was. What I like is the idea that people remember things differently. I don't believe there's one truth.
People don't lie. They just have a different recollection of how things went. For example, in my book, Faust—it's four guys who aren't too keen about each other, and they stopped talking years ago—but they all green-lighted all quotes, and they remember things really differently. But I think none of them was lying.
I always found that interesting. There's this very famous Japanese movie by Kurosawa about a robbery, a stagecoach robbery in a forest. After that, all people involved in the robbery remember how it went. And it's four or five very different recollections.
I've been doing interviews in my job since I started at the beginning of the '90s. I've done it for more than thirty years now. I like that form. I never liked it much if someone tells me how they see it. I always try to get people to tell me how they did it.
When I know the quote is right—and a lot of quotes I found on the internet while preparing for interviews are false, which I always find interesting—I never understand why people have fun in making up quotes. For the quotes in my book, all the people involved saw them. So everybody saw how I quoted them.
On one hand, it's great because everything is green-lighted. On the other hand, some beautiful quotes went out because people said, "Yes, I said that, but I don't want to see that in print."
Lawrence: Interesting.
Christoph: Yes, that's something I've had in my job as a journalist. Great stories, but I work for magazines where we always let the people who are interviewed have a look at it. And yes, it's fair play, but sometimes you say, "No, it's not how it went" when people say, "I want this out. I want that out. I want this changed." And sometimes I say, "No, let's scrap the whole conversation because it's not at least what we talked about."
Lawrence: So in a situation like that, where an interview subject has second thoughts about what they told you—
Christoph: Yeah.
Lawrence: Leaving aside specific examples, is it generally things like remarks they made about other people or just impolitic type things? What would be the type of thing that someone would not want to see?
Christoph: It's both. I won't name names, but there's one person in my book who isn't in my book but who plays an important role in it. That's all I'll say. He's famous in Germany for taking people to court. He's very wealthy. Even if I could say that I saw him buying a Coca-Cola in a shop, I would hear from his lawyers the next second. So every time this guy was mentioned—I think he's still mentioned quite a bit, but 80 percent of the prose about him is out because people just said, "Yeah, it's true, but we don't want to fight."
A few chapters of my book are from the '70s, where we had the Rote Armee Fraktion and the terrorists in Germany, which was a big thing then. Some of these musicians were involved a bit. Not that they did something, but they knew something. So they talked openly, and from the beginning of each conversation, I said that they could see it before I print it. Which makes a conversation different because I really keep to that promise that they can review it.
Lawrence: Sympathizers.
Christoph: Sympathizers, and helpers too. They let some people sleep at their place, for example.
Lawrence: And there were some notable holdouts in the book?
Christoph: Yes, of course. Kraftwerk, they just don't talk, but they rarely talk. I talked to Ralf Hütter a long time ago, and I asked someone who knows him quite well—not too many people know him well, but we have a friend in common. I asked him to ask Ralf, and he said, "I don't belong in this book. Kraftwerk don't belong here, we are not a rock band."
At some point, he's right. And at another point, he's wrong. Because, like Tangerine Dream, they're not a rock band, but they belong in this book. The other person who's missing is Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream. And with him, it's a bit sad because I personally, of course, I love Kraftwerk, but I love Tangerine Dream the same way.
When I was growing up, I was listening to Tangerine Dream a lot, so I wanted them to be in the book. And Edgar, if you will, was the band. He was the main character in Tangerine Dream. And he said yes, and then we had a date. But for some reasons it didn't work out. I had to cancel on short notice and we said we'd find another date.
Before we had the other date, he left this planet. And I was really sad about this because I think he leaves a gap. But through the magic of Discogs, I checked the names of people who worked with Tangerine Dream and I found Steve Schroyder, whose stories I loved a lot. What he says about early Tangerine Dream was beautiful. And I have Peter Baumann.
The most important artistically, in my little opinion, Tangerine Dream version was Peter Baumann, Christopher Franke, and of course, Edgar Froese—the Virgin years, as people call it. The era from '72 to '76, when they were with Virgin. And I have Peter Baumann in the book, which I'm really, really happy about. But otherwise, I have to say, I have everybody who I wanted.
Lawrence: To stay with Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk for just a moment, what do you make of the continuation of Tangerine Dream? As a fan, is that okay with you? Do you have a strong opinion? Are you willing to share an opinion?
Christoph: I have a strong opinion. It's a bit complicated. I wrote about that in Germany for Der Spiegel when that started, and in all honesty, for me it's a mistake.
Lawrence: Of course.
Christoph: Yes, I get the idea that his widow said Edgar gave his blessings to a couple of other young people to continue with Tangerine Dream, which somehow is okay, but on the other hand, it's very strange. Because now you have three people who—I don't see the connection with Edgar.
I went to a show last year in Hamburg. Yes, it was good. They tried to reproduce the Virgin years, which I like a lot. And they did it in a good way. They played a long show. It was very interesting. The whole time I thought, somehow for me, just for me, it's wrong, and they should change the name.
Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann are still alive, who were very important for Tangerine Dream. One of them should be part of this, I think, to make sense. This is like if Paul McCartney would say to a couple of young boys, "You could be the Beatles when I'm gone, you have my blessings." They're not the Beatles. And these guys, for me, with all due respect, are not Tangerine Dream. They should change the name. Tangerine Dream 2. Tangerine Dream Chapter 2. I don't know. The other version. And what they do is good. It's interesting. And it's not Tangerine Dream.
Lawrence: It's an interesting topic that I come back to often in other contexts because, especially as the classic rock generation of people leave us, it's interesting to ponder the fact that it's very possible that that music, big portions of it at least, are at risk of disappearing if it's not kept alive in a performance context. And who should be performing that music live? Is it a tribute band? Is it something sanctioned with proper arrangements? Is it a review? If you think about other genres of music, there's a canon, there's a tradition of performing music from the past as well as new works, and it's going to be very interesting to see over the next 10 to 30 years how the classic rock era is treated and what music, when we look back 20 or 30 years from now, still stands up because it's been kept alive.
Christoph: Yeah, but at what price is the legacy kept alive? I think you should accept when the story is over. For example, Queen. I grew up being a Queen fan when I was young. But I thought, there's no second Freddie. The new singer, he does a great job, but it's not Queen. He's not Freddie Mercury. I left that show after twenty minutes.
Brian May is fantastic on guitar. And it had really beautiful moments, but it's not Queen. It's something else. Imagine seeing Blondie without Debbie Harry. She's still alive. It's great, but if she would leave this planet, they should stop and things like that. I think you should accept when the story is over.
Like another favorite band of my early years were the Stranglers, punk band from Britain, and the only remaining original member is Jean-Jacques Burnel, the bass player. For them, somehow it worked. Hugh Cornwell left in the early '90s, something like that, they're still going. And I saw some great shows, it's always packed. This may be the exception to the rule for me. Maybe because their singer wasn't so charismatic. Hugh Cornwell was a great singer, no disrespect to him, but the other singers were great too. But in some cases, it's just not working. A lot of times I think people should accept when the story is over.
If someone needs the money, I can understand that they just do it for the money. But if they don't need the money, stop the story.
Lawrence: Do you think Kraftwerk will continue after Ralf?
Christoph: That's a very good question. I really don't know. I know that, for example, Gene Simmons once told me that he can imagine Kiss going on as holograms, something like that, which could be interesting. Gene Simmons, for me, is a genius, really, because the idea to appear as masked comic characters gives you every freedom you want to have.
Kraftwerk are a bit the same. This whole robotic thing, they could find a robotic way to continue. I think in the end, it's just Ralf who must decide if he wants the story to continue or not. I have no idea, but in all honesty, I think it's possible just to have four robots.
Lawrence: Wow.
Christoph: I went to this strange ABBA show in London where you have these holograms. And in all honesty, that was perfect. ABBA has all the money in the world. They prepared this for years. They're super perfectionists. But really, you had the idea there were four young people from the '70s on stage that talked to the audience.
It was beautiful and scary at the same time. And I went to the one-year anniversary show and I sat at the balcony next to the original members. When the hologram characters on stage said thank you, all lights went to the balcony right next to me. And then the original ABBA members stood up and said hello to the audience. And that was scary. So it was the ABBA musicians, around 70, 80 years old, and very young copies of them on the stage. But I think the ABBA performance was highly impressive. And I think we will see more of it. I'm pretty sure one day we will have Michael Jackson, Sinatra, and so on performing this way. ABBA opened a new door. And this may be, to get back to Kraftwerk, possible for them too.
Lawrence: Yeah, it's interesting because, to Ralf's point about "we're not rock"—and so many of the artists talk about that in your book, especially in that beginning chapter where they're addressing the word "kraut." It's so clear to me as an American, and to the British commentators in the book, they're much less comfortable with the "kraut" part of krautrock than the German commentators are. The Germans object much more to "rock." [laughs]
Christoph: That's true. And most of them are right. They just say we're not a rock band, which in 90 percent of cases is true. For example, you might call Can a rock band. Somehow they are. But in the end, what Can are is unique. But Tangerine Dream, they're not a rock band. Popol Vuh, they're not a rock band. Kraftwerk, they're not a rock band. And so on.
Brian Eno says in my book that he hates the term because he said it comes from the war. It was a disrespectful British term for Germans. So the British are more critical about it than the Germans now who see it as a joke.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Christoph: But Eno was very strict about it, and a few more British commentators said they don't like the term "Kraut." Daniel Miller, I think if I remember right, says he still hates it to this day—and he publishes all the Can records. But it's like Nigel House, who runs the Rough Trade Shops. Nigel says it's nonsense, because bands like Tangerine Dream and Can have nothing in common besides being German. But to put them in one section in your record shop helps to sell these records. So if you go to Rough Trade and you're looking for a classic Tangerine Dream, Amon Düül, Faust, or whatever record, Neu!, you go to the Krautrock section and you find it. And this is just a straightforward good answer.
Lawrence: Yeah. In a strange way, having that non-specific general term aids the music and the bands and the listener, right? I guess to the point about Rough Trade, if you go to that section and you close your eyes and pull out a few random records and take them home, you're going to have an amazing experience. And it's not going to be like they're variations on the same style of music. You're going to have a wonderful musical experience that you might not otherwise have if they were broken down into more specific categories. You might not walk over to the experimental rock section or the electronic avant-garde section or whatever it is, but having them all filed that way just gives them a framing.
Christoph: Yeah, it gives them a framing and helps, but you must always be aware that some of the stuff—and I won't name names again—is complicated listening and you must be prepared for it. Like, it's easy in some way to listen to Tangerine Dream.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Christoph: But listening to early Cluster—ooh, it's complicated if you're not prepared. Which doesn't make Cluster bad records. It's very interesting music, but you must be prepared for what you get.
What I like about this age is, when I grew up, for example, very important for me was Julian Cope's book about Krautrock, Krautrocksampler. Maybe 60 percent of the bands he mentions I'd never heard of. But back then, there was not a chance to get these records. He was writing about it beautifully, and I would have loved to listen to it. But back then finding a Popol Vuh record—impossible. Finding a Cluster record—impossible.
Lawrence: Even in Germany?
Christoph: Even in Germany. Nowhere. You found Kraftwerk, of course, Tangerine Dream yes, if you were lucky you found Neu! at the flea market. But most of it you couldn't get. And these days you have, if you like it or not, you have Spotify, you have YouTube, and you just Google "Cluster" or "Harmonia" and you can listen to it the next second.
And even the very rare records like Zweistein and Suzanne Doucet, which is very rare still to this day—you could listen to it. If I read about it or see her mentioned in my book, for example, you Google it and a minute later, two clicks away, you can listen to that album. And if you decide that you like it, you can buy it. You can pay a lot for the original or you could buy a new edition. But I think this helps these musicians, that the music is still available. And if you like it, you can go to the Krautrock section at Rough Trade or somewhere else and get these records. Most of them are available now.
Some of the bands are still touring. I just saw that Guru Guru, for example, are playing in Hamburg next week, which is fantastic. And so it helps these musicians too, because it helps them to be discovered by a very young generation.
Lawrence: I appreciate you saying it that way because at different points in time, I've romanticized that time of growing up and getting into music. You mentioned Gene Simmons. I think about Kiss when I was a kid, or when I was a teenager, some of the prog bands like Renaissance. Bands that nobody really—like to come across a picture of Kiss when I was a kid, for how big they were, there was still very much a mystique about them and it was very beautiful.
Christoph: Yeah.
Lawrence: And it's easy to romanticize that, but there's also something very beautiful about the fact that I can find this obscure music now, not only find the music, but probably find a page of search results of people who have written essays and combed the whole discography and created a listening guide.
Christoph: Which is beautiful, which is beautiful.
Lawrence: I appreciate so much that the music's available, that I'm willing to lose some of the feeling of ownership and the mystique, because I just need more music. [laughs]
Christoph: But I'm with you when you talk about mystique and mystery. I'm not interested in what the Velvet Underground did, or if they trashed hotel rooms, who they had an affair with, things like that, I just don't care. I think it helps the music to keep some kind of mystique. And I think that some of the bands, especially in my book, still have that mystique. You don't know anything about Kraftwerk in the end. You don't know anything about Ralf Hütter. And this is great because he rarely gives interviews. In these interviews, he doesn't give too much away, which is great.
Lawrence: So I want to talk a little bit about the cultural context to the music. I realized we could probably spend hours just on that topic, but a couple of the very broad themes that emerge when talking to the artists and the people of the original generation of this music, it's this notion of either transcending, or reconciling, or escaping the past. That sort of—and the past being the World War II era, reconciling what their parents' generation may or may not have been involved with, or sympathetic towards, or in opposition to. So there's the sociopolitical aspect of it. There's also the post-war culture of Schlager music being the only thing left. [laughs]
Christoph: It was mainly Schlager and jazz. Jazz was always there even in Germany. It was the music of freedom. Jazz was forbidden in the war under the Nazis. There were tough kids who just played jazz, listened to jazz, and you went to jail for listening to jazz. It's unbelievable, but it's true.
So jazz meant freedom. Before rock and roll, jazz was music of freedom. And yes, the political aspect of these Krautrock musicians is very important in my opinion. I learned a lot through the interviews I did for this book. I grew up in Germany, but I never thought too much, to be honest, about growing up in the '50s and early '60s.
And again, in all honesty, for me, the '68 guys were a bunch of hippies for me for a long time. They looked strange, they looked uncool—hippies, not in a positive way. But I changed my view on that 100 percent and I understood how horrible it was to grow up in the '50s and '60s. People like Jaki Liebezeit, the Can drummer, he was being shot at. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, he went to a bunker because there were bombs going down. So they really remembered the war.
And then growing up in completely destroyed cities, with parents who were maybe absent, fathers being absent, or coming back and just being quiet. Not wanting to talk. And to be honest, I can understand that too. They must have gone through horrible things. Not everybody was a Nazi. There were a lot of Nazis, don't get me wrong, but if you went to the war, maybe you were very young, you didn't have any choice and it must have been super horrible.
Today, for people going to war somewhere in the world, if you come back, you have a lot of doctors taking care of you in Germany. There was a whole generation coming back from war, and no one took care because everybody was concentrating on rebuilding Germany. And of course, which was right. And on the other hand, I really understood that the so-called Entnazifizierung, denazification, didn't work at all, because you had to work with some of the people who were there.
So, you had Nazi teachers, Nazi policemen, Nazi people in all positions of society. Small Nazis, if you will, but in the end Nazis. Some of them were frustrated that things didn't go the way they wanted. I heard horrible stories of teachers in schools really being unhappy about the events. And the people in my book, they were the ones who opposed. When some Nazi teacher said some horrible stuff, they said, "What are you talking about?"
Lawrence: So I want to talk a little bit about the cultural context to the music. I realized we could probably spend hours just on that topic, but a couple of the very broad themes that emerge when talking to the artists and the people of the original generation of this music, it's this notion of either transcending, or reconciling, or escaping the past. That sort of—and the past being the World War II era, reconciling what their parents' generation may or may not have been involved with, or sympathetic towards, or in opposition to. So there's the sociopolitical aspect of it. There's also the post-war culture of Schlager music being the only thing left. [laughs]
Christoph: It was mainly Schlager and jazz. Jazz was always there even in Germany. It was the music of freedom. Jazz was forbidden in the war under the Nazis. There were tough kids who just played jazz, listened to jazz, and you went to jail for listening to jazz. It's unbelievable, but it's true.
So jazz meant freedom. Before rock and roll, jazz was music of freedom. And yes, the political aspect of these Krautrock musicians is very important in my opinion. I learned a lot through the interviews I did for this book. I grew up in Germany, but I never thought too much, to be honest, about growing up in the '50s and early '60s.
And again, in all honesty, for me, the '68 guys were a bunch of hippies for me for a long time. They looked strange, they looked uncool—hippies, not in a positive way. But I changed my view on that 100 percent and I understood how horrible it was to grow up in the '50s and '60s. People like Jaki Liebezeit, the Can drummer, he was being shot at. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, he went to a bunker because there were bombs going down. So they really remembered the war.
And then growing up in completely destroyed cities, with parents who were maybe absent, fathers being absent, or coming back and just being quiet. Not wanting to talk. And to be honest, I can understand that too. They must have gone through horrible things. Not everybody was a Nazi. There were a lot of Nazis, don't get me wrong, but if you went to the war, maybe you were very young, you didn't have any choice and it must have been super horrible.
Today, for people going to war somewhere in the world, if you come back, you have a lot of doctors taking care of you in Germany. There was a whole generation coming back from war, and no one took care because everybody was concentrating on rebuilding Germany. And of course, which was right. And on the other hand, I really understood that the so-called Entnazifizierung, denazification, didn't work at all, because you had to work with some of the people who were there.
So, you had Nazi teachers, Nazi policemen, Nazi people in all positions of society. Small Nazis, if you will, but in the end Nazis. Some of them were frustrated that things didn't go the way they wanted. I heard horrible stories of teachers in schools really being unhappy about the events. And the people in my book, they were the ones who opposed. When some Nazi teacher said some horrible stuff, they said, "What are you talking about?"
Like Irmin, who had really a tough school history because he was young and bright, and he checked every teacher in the school. And the thing I found really touching was that he said some of the teachers he really liked, he found out about them having some position in Hitler's army, and he made it public. And he said, "How could you do it?" He had to leave school a couple of times, and he fought with his father a lot about his position in the Third Reich. That was a tough war with his father too.
And he said his father wasn't a Nazi in the pure way, but he just worked in this whole situation and was tough on his family, on his teachers. Irmin is a bit older than most of the people in this book, but I found it really impressive how he checked the people in his direct surroundings, what their position in the Third Reich was.
And I think most of the people in my book, they just opposed. They didn't say, "Oh, yeah, that's the way it is." No, they said, "No, it's wrong." They fought with their families, they fought with their fathers. And their answer was art, if you will, in some ways. They decided they had to find a new way.
When they decided—I mean, the whole young German society was finding—the artists in young German society were trying to find a new way. There were new ways of literature, new ways of painting, and new ways of music.
Lawrence: Wow.
Christoph: In '68, and coming back to my idea of these being hippies—no. They were the ones who started the new Germany. If you will, in some way, the Second World War ended in Germany in '68, because there was a whole generation saying, "No, that's enough. Shut up, and now we are taking over" in a positive way. That's when a young, new Germany really started and they fought a hard war, if you will. These were tough fights and I found these really touching.
In my book, I think it takes like 200 pages until I come to the music. I concentrate on how these artists all grew up. There's not a Krautrock sound, and these bands couldn't be more different—again, like Tangerine Dream and Can—but there's a whole idea that keeps this together and this is the idea of starting at zero. Creating something new. Not just for being an original artist, but to get rid of the past and get rid of the Third Reich. Get rid of your parents and grandparents in some way and just make clear we are different. We are very different and we need a new way.
And this is what they all have in common. That's the urge to start at zero. Like Michael Rother said, he stopped listening to music. They didn't want to sound like the Beatles or the Stones—and not because they said the Beatles or the Stones are bad, but it's not their history. It's not their story. They didn't have the blues because it's not their history. They're not from Nashville. They're not from New York. They're not from London. They're from Berlin, from Düsseldorf, Munich, and Hamburg. And they had to find their own way.
And these Krautrockers I have in my book—there's always this big discussion. I'm making a bigger picture. I open a bigger picture. And what is Krautrock and what is not? And preparing for this book, I was in some Facebook groups checking what people see as Krautrock. And I was always surprised that every '70s German band is Krautrock for them. And I was like, no, it's not. It's just not. You don't know exactly what he does.
Lawrence: You'll end up talking to him about bicycling.
Christoph: Yeah, I just want to say, you know that he loves cycling, but that's it. And you know he lives in Germany. But you don't know if he's married, not for sure. You don't know what his hobbies are besides cycling. You just don't know it. Probably he can go into a McDonald's and have a children's menu and no one will know who he is, which is great, which is absolutely great.
And most of the artists in this book, even the famous ones—who knows how Irmin Schmidt looks? If Irmin goes out in France where he lives, nobody will recognize him. I know that sometimes Japanese fans come over to his house after long work of finding out where he lives. If you look for him, you can find him. But these are the maniacs, friendly maniacs. And in the end, most of these bands kept their mystery, which is great.
Lawrence: So I want to talk a little bit about the cultural context to the music. I realized we could probably spend hours just on that topic, but a couple of the very broad themes that emerge when talking to the artists and the people of the original generation of this music, it's this notion of either transcending, or reconciling, or escaping the past. That sort of—and the past being the World War II era, reconciling what their parents' generation may or may not have been involved with, or sympathetic towards, or in opposition to. So there's the sociopolitical aspect of it. There's also the post-war culture of Schlager music being the only thing left. [laughs]
Christoph: It was mainly Schlager and jazz. Jazz was always there even in Germany. It was the music of freedom. Jazz was forbidden in the war under the Nazis. There were tough kids who just played jazz, listened to jazz, and you went to jail for listening to jazz. It's unbelievable, but it's true.
So jazz meant freedom. Before rock and roll, jazz was music of freedom. And yes, the political aspect of these Krautrock musicians is very important in my opinion. I learned a lot through the interviews I did for this book. I grew up in Germany, but I never thought too much, to be honest, about growing up in the '50s and early '60s.
And again, in all honesty, for me, the '68 guys were a bunch of hippies for me for a long time. They looked strange, they looked uncool—hippies, not in a positive way. But I changed my view on that 100 percent and I understood how horrible it was to grow up in the '50s and '60s. People like Jaki Liebezeit, the Can drummer, he was being shot at. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, he went to a bunker because there were bombs going down. So they really remembered the war.
And then growing up in completely destroyed cities, with parents who were maybe absent, fathers being absent, or coming back and just being quiet. Not wanting to talk. And to be honest, I can understand that too. They must have gone through horrible things. Not everybody was a Nazi. There were a lot of Nazis, don't get me wrong, but if you went to the war, maybe you were very young, you didn't have any choice and it must have been super horrible.
Today, for people going to war somewhere in the world, if you come back, you have a lot of doctors taking care of you in Germany. There was a whole generation coming back from war, and no one took care because everybody was concentrating on rebuilding Germany. And of course, which was right. And on the other hand, I really understood that the so-called Entnazifizierung, denazification, didn't work at all, because you had to work with some of the people who were there.
So, you had Nazi teachers, Nazi policemen, Nazi people in all positions of society. Small Nazis, if you will, but in the end Nazis. Some of them were frustrated that things didn't go the way they wanted. I heard horrible stories of teachers in schools really being unhappy about the events. And the people in my book, they were the ones who opposed. When some Nazi teacher said some horrible stuff, they said, "What are you talking about?"
Like Irmin, who had really a tough school history because he was young and bright, and he checked every teacher in the school. And the thing I found really touching was that he said some of the teachers he really liked, he found out about them having some position in Hitler's army, and he made it public. And he said, "How could you do it?" He had to leave school a couple of times, and he fought with his father a lot about his position in the Third Reich. That was a tough war with his father too.
And he said his father wasn't a Nazi in the pure way, but he just worked in this whole situation and was tough on his family, on his teachers. Irmin is a bit older than most of the people in this book, but I found it really impressive how he checked the people in his direct surroundings, what their position in the Third Reich was.
And I think most of the people in my book, they just opposed. They didn't say, "Oh, yeah, that's the way it is." No, they said, "No, it's wrong." They fought with their families, they fought with their fathers. And their answer was art, if you will, in some ways. They decided they had to find a new way.
When they decided—I mean, the whole young German society was finding—the artists in young German society were trying to find a new way. There were new ways of literature, new ways of painting, and new ways of music.
Lawrence: Wow.
Christoph: In '68, and coming back to my idea of these being hippies—no. They were the ones who started the new Germany. If you will, in some way, the Second World War ended in Germany in '68, because there was a whole generation saying, "No, that's enough. Shut up, and now we are taking over" in a positive way. That's when a young, new Germany really started and they fought a hard war, if you will. These were tough fights and I found these really touching.
In my book, I think it takes like 200 pages until I come to the music. I concentrate on how these artists all grew up. There's not a Krautrock sound, and these bands couldn't be more different—again, like Tangerine Dream and Can—but there's a whole idea that keeps this together and this is the idea of starting at zero. Creating something new. Not just for being an original artist, but to get rid of the past and get rid of the Third Reich. Get rid of your parents and grandparents in some way and just make clear we are different. We are very different and we need a new way.
And this is what they all have in common. That's the urge to start at zero. Like Michael Rother said, he stopped listening to music. They didn't want to sound like the Beatles or the Stones—and not because they said the Beatles or the Stones are bad, but it's not their history. It's not their story. They didn't have the blues because it's not their history. They're not from Nashville. They're not from New York. They're not from London. They're from Berlin, from Düsseldorf, Munich, and Hamburg. And they had to find their own way.
And these Krautrockers I have in my book—there's always this big discussion. I'm making a bigger picture. I open a bigger picture. And what is Krautrock and what is not? And preparing for this book, I was in some Facebook groups checking what people see as Krautrock. And I was always surprised that every '70s German band is Krautrock for them. And I was like, no, it's not. It's just not.
And I don't claim that I was the one who coined that formula. That was, in all honesty, Julian Cope. And Julian Cope's book that came in the early '90s was a big thing in the UK. And they're only bands who have a different sound. They're not the Scorpions, and I have respect for the Scorpions, but the sound of the Scorpions could have come from New York, Los Angeles, Boston, or London. But Harmonia, they sound like Düsseldorf, or nothing you have ever heard before.
Kraftwerk sound like nothing you've ever heard before. And you have never heard something like Can before, or Popol Vuh, Amon Düül—all these bands, they're really unique. And that's what they all have in common. And this is a great concept.
Lawrence: Yeah, that's actually a really helpful and beautiful articulation of the boundary or the setting for what one can refer to as Krautrock, because it is not about being a German-born musician of a certain age. It's about something uniquely German in your work and in your art. And your point about the Scorpions, I think, is a great example. There's nothing wrong with the Scorpions, but they could have been a British metal band of that era. That's a really helpful framing. Just to be explicit about it for listeners, especially listeners who may not have read the book yet, what exactly was going on in 1967 and '68? I think listeners know 1968 was a pretty pivotal year socially and politically around the world, certainly in Western countries, youth movement, a lot of reaction against authority and authoritarianism. How was that manifesting specifically in Germany?
Christoph: Oh, exactly as you said, there were loads of demonstrations. It was mostly students who went to demonstrations and they fought against—there's this big German newspaper called Bild, Bildzeitung, which is the biggest yellow press newspaper. And it was very powerful in the '60s, very powerful. And is—it's super right. It's not criminally right, but ultra-conservative.
And back then it was even more conservative. And so it was powerful and police were more powerful. Police were going strong on demonstrators and there were big fights. There was a pivotal moment in Berlin when this one student was shot by a policeman, Benno Ohnesorg. And I think there are three people in my book who were not too far away from that and even heard the shot.
This is a big thing in Germany, the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, who was just peacefully demonstrating. And this is where some of the parents also checked—no, maybe our children are right. Because the state was, I think, a bit helpless. When even in Munich, ultra-conservative to this day—but back then, even stronger—in Munich, they just started demonstrating. The students started, there were fights between students and policemen on the street, and there was just this feeling of, we want a different society.
They didn't just say it. At the universities, they went out, and they asked the state for a fight, if you will. And they fought for two years, they fought intensively. And in the end, Germany was changed. Really, it was a changed country. And a lot came from it. And the Green Party, which later started—they all came from '68. Now here in the highest positions in Germany, in the end, they're coming from '68.
And so this changed the country radically, in a beautiful, positive way. And I think, yeah, in Germany, it was a phase of transition of young generation taking the old generation out for a fight. And there's not a winner, if you will, but both sides saw that, and the older ones accepted at some points that things had to change. And things changed.
And this is great, but they all had very vivid memories in my book, the ones who I talked to, of fighting with policemen and going to jail—fighting in the real sense of the word—really fights, and going to jail for this. And then there were the fights with their parents, but really fights, stopping talking to their parents for a long time and leaving their parents and things like that. It was a pivotal historical moment in German society and history and changed the country.
Lawrence: It seems like the closest analog for American listeners to the Ohnesorg shooting would be maybe the Democratic Convention in 1968 in Chicago or Kent State, the killings at Kent State, in terms of that really woke up not only the youth to what was happening to their generation but made the more sympathetic older generation say, "What are we doing? We're killing our children."
Christoph: Exactly. That was the same in Germany. A new thinking started. A thinking that, yeah, maybe they're not completely wrong. And on the other side, the old Nazis were getting older in '68. So it was time for them just to leave their positions. And it's still horrible to imagine how it was growing up with these guys being in positions of power. Horrible, horrible. But we can't thank enough the young generation who stood up and asked them out for a fight in '67 and '68.
Lawrence: Before we move on to more contemporary parts of the discussion, I did have one question about Schlager music. What would be the analogous music to either an Anglo or an American audience? Is it sort of adult contemporary? Is it easy listening? Like how should someone think about it?
Christoph: It's easy listening, and it's probably complicated because I really like American easy listening. [laughs] In a surreal way it's even more cheesy. It's a mixture of the Carpenters and Ray Conniff, if you will, but done in a really uncool way.
But it was just pretending everything is great after the war. Let's go to the sun, let's go to Italy. Let's fall in love. And it was everywhere. People didn't want to be reminded of the ugly past, which wasn't too long ago. Back then, being in a destroyed country, you listen to music that told you everything is great, we go to Italy for holiday, we have an ice cream, we find a great girl, we find a great guy, everything will be fantastic. The music was absolutely horrible, in no way beautiful.
It was very easy to not like it. Right now, there are a lot of interesting people who find Schlager somehow cool. I don't get it. But there are some people who might oppose me now from Germany saying, "No, Schlager is great." Yeah, maybe. I mean, there are some funny things. There's a legendary German Schlager duo called Cindy and Bert. They did a cover version of "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath called "Der Hund von Baskerville" ("The Hound of Baskerville"), which is a highly collectible seven-inch because all Black Sabbath fans are looking for it. And it's super funny.
But from rare exceptions like this—of course, some of the Schlager musicians were talented, really talented. Some were good, but to talk about American easy listening, to have a writer like Burt Bacharach, for me, is on the same wavelength as the Beatles. He was a genius writer. Hal David, the lyric writer, amazing. And that was just a different kind of music. And so it's hard for me to compare that to Schlager.
Schlager was like the basement for this, and they were the penthouse. The American easy listening music was beautiful then, and to keep on with Burt Bacharach—it's not easy listening, it's highly complicated music, which people think is easy, it's not. It's amazingly creative.
Lawrence: Sophisticated popular music.
Christoph: Sophisticated pop music, yes. In some way, like Steely Dan, if you will, in an easy way. But Schlager music still for me, horrible, and all this old stuff from the '50s. It was all very simple, the world is great. The only escape from this was jazz, and then rock and roll coming over was freedom too. Bill Haley coming over to Germany found really a joyful resonance here too—a young audience destroying places where he performed out of joy, not because they didn't like Bill Haley. Bill Haley was big here in Germany. And then the Beatles and the Stones and so on, that changed a lot. But before that, it was horrible. [laughs]
Lawrence: So you mentioned earlier about, and I think we talked around a little bit, the notion that even in Germany, a lot of this music remained sort of obscure over the years and either a connoisseur's music or a collector's music.
Christoph: Yeah.
Lawrence: You know, certain names were well known, obviously some weren't, but the music was always being made.
Christoph: Yeah.
Lawrence: For lack of a better way to say it, outside of the musicians who continued creating, what kept this music alive? Was there a journalistic tradition? Was there an academic tradition? Like, how was this music being transmitted?
Christoph: This music was being kept alive because to create this music was just to choose a way of life. I would say that 100 percent of these musicians, they chose a way of life. It was not because they wanted to make a living, they wanted to make money, they wanted to enter the charts or stuff like that. No, they really, really wanted to express themselves.
And most of them really lived from next to nothing. That means that a lot of these musicians were touring and touring. And in Germany, it's always—the Beatles were always more popular than anything from Germany. Every British or American band was more popular than anything from Germany. There were very few popular German rock bands, and the popular German rock bands were ones who copied the American rock bands, or the British rock bands.
Bands who sounded like the Beatles or the Stones, or like the Rutles or stuff like this. But these, if you will, strange records that the Krautrock musicians produced—most of the people in Germany were not interested. They said, "That's not music what you're doing." So it's interesting that, for example, to talk about Tangerine Dream again, they got their first really great record deal with Virgin Records. Klaus Schulze with Virgin Records. Can, they moved to France to live there. They toured more in Europe than in Germany.
Lawrence: Throughout the conversations that you had for this book, and as you worked on this book, were there any new revelations or new insights that came to you that you didn't have at the beginning of the book? Was there some big sort of learning that you took from it?
Christoph: Yes, of course. Again, the historical part about growing up in dark and still Nazi-infiltrated Germany. I had no clue. The other talk about the music is that I really would say that the story in Germany goes that electronic music was invented in Düsseldorf by Kraftwerk.
And I really found out, and I didn't know about it before, about Thomas Kessler's electronic studio in Berlin. Thomas Kessler, very interesting guy from Switzerland, interesting avant-garde composer, who had the studio with the first synthesizer they ever had in Berlin in '71. And he showed Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream the first synthesizer.
Edgar Froese's Tangerine Dream were a blues rock cover band. And then Edgar went to the Electronic Beat Studio in Berlin, and bands like Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Agitation Free, they all went to that studio. I'm very, very happy that I could talk for long with Thomas Kessler, who was a great guy, still alive, very bright, back in Switzerland.
But I would say now, if you really precisely look at when records were released, that electronic music was produced in Berlin before Düsseldorf, which people in Düsseldorf don't want to hear. But that's just probably historical truth, which I learned while working on this book.
Lawrence: My final question for you is, do you know the next story you want to tell?
Christoph: The next story I want to tell? [laughs] No, I'm just working on finishing touches and about a biography about a German concert promoter, entrepreneur who started organizing shows in the '50s and '60s and is now in his very late 80s. And it's a story of then creating a new way of culture in Germany too.
And he started out with jazz as the music of freedom. He's still a big jazz fan, and now he's a big friend of Herbie Hancock, for example. Herbie Hancock, who's married to a girl from Hamburg to this day, for a long time. And Carsten—he's called Carsten Jahnke—and Carsten and Herbie go back a long way, and the Marsalis brothers are big friends of Carsten, so he's quite a big name in the jazz world. So I'm just working on his life.
Lawrence: Well, I hope to have you back when we can discuss that. That era of impresarios are really the people who invented the modern music business or the live entertainment business and their stories are so fascinating. So I look forward to reading that.
Christoph: Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a character where you say these kind of characters, they're leaving this planet now too. Because now, everything you have is Live Nation, and it's just about the profits. And people like Carsten, or again, like the Krautrock people—it was more than that. They created stuff they really wanted to create.
Carsten was only making shows that he thought, "Yeah, I like this kind of music." And Tangerine Dream were creating stuff where they didn't care at all if someone was listening. And all these bands, they didn't care at all if someone was listening, they just wanted to do it. And something like this, I think, this is getting even more and more rare.
Lawrence: Throughout the conversations that you had for this book, and as you worked on this book, were there any new revelations or new insights that came to you that you didn't have at the beginning of the book? Was there some big sort of learning that you took from it?
Christoph: Yes, of course. Again, the historical part about growing up in dark and still Nazi-infiltrated Germany. I had no clue. The other talk about the music is that I really would say that the story in Germany goes that electronic music was invented in Düsseldorf by Kraftwerk.
And I really found out, and I didn't know about it before, about Thomas Kessler's electronic studio in Berlin. Thomas Kessler, very interesting guy from Switzerland, interesting avant-garde composer, who had the studio with the first synthesizer they ever had in Berlin in '71. And he showed Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream the first synthesizer.
Edgar Froese's Tangerine Dream were a blues rock cover band. And then Edgar went to the Electronic Beat Studio in Berlin, and bands like Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Agitation Free, they all went to that studio. I'm very, very happy that I could talk for long with Thomas Kessler, who was a great guy, still alive, very bright, back in Switzerland.
But I would say now, if you really precisely look at when records were released, that electronic music was produced in Berlin before Düsseldorf, which people in Düsseldorf don't want to hear. But that's just probably historical truth, which I learned while working on this book.
Lawrence: My final question for you is, do you know the next story you want to tell?
Christoph: The next story I want to tell? [laughs] No, I'm just working on finishing touches and about a biography about a German concert promoter, entrepreneur who started organizing shows in the '50s and '60s and is now in his very late 80s. And it's a story of then creating a new way of culture in Germany too.
And he started out with jazz as the music of freedom. He's still a big jazz fan, and now he's a big friend of Herbie Hancock, for example. Herbie Hancock, who's married to a girl from Hamburg to this day, for a long time. And Carsten—he's called Carsten Jahnke—and Carsten and Herbie go back a long way, and the Marsalis brothers are big friends of Carsten, so he's quite a big name in the jazz world. So I'm just working on his life.
Lawrence: Well, I hope to have you back when we can discuss that. That era of impresarios are really the people who invented the modern music business or the live entertainment business and their stories are so fascinating. So I look forward to reading that.
Christoph: Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a character where you say these kind of characters, they're leaving this planet now too. Because now, everything you have is Live Nation, and it's just about the profits. And people like Carsten, or again, like the Krautrock people—it was more than that. They created stuff they really wanted to create.
Carsten was only making shows that he thought, "Yeah, I like this kind of music." And Tangerine Dream were creating stuff where they didn't care at all if someone was listening. And all these bands, they didn't care at all if someone was listening, they just wanted to do it. And something like this, I think, this is getting even more and more rare.
The whole of Europe and Japan—Can were big in the UK. Klaus Schulze told me the beautiful story that, I forgot which one it was, but mid-'70s, one of his solo records was like top five in France. And coming back to Berlin, he went to a record shop and just wanted to look where his record was stocked. They didn't have it at all. They said, "Oh, we don't know about it. Should we order it for you?"
And so it's a bit sad because they really saw that in Germany, people weren't too interested. There are a few exceptions, of course. Can were making a living, and just because they had to make a living, they did soundtracks. So they did music for German TV thrillers. "Das Messer" was popular and was a top 10 track. And Kraftwerk, from Autobahn on, were popular. And then Tangerine Dream had their first hit—like Phaedra, which sold a million in the UK. Peter Baumann reminded me of this. He said, "We just sold a million in very good time in the UK."
And the very famous DJ John Peel said it's his record of the year. He played the whole thing through.
Lawrence: And they did soundtrack work as well in the '80s.
Christoph: They did soundtrack works, and a lot of them said, then they had the stickers on the German album covers, like, "It's a big hit in the UK, it's a big hit in the US." And then German listeners were like, "Oh, a big hit in the UK?"
Lawrence: Okay, yeah.
Christoph: But in the end, it's a frustrating story. And to this day, a lot of them, I find their relationship with the German audience difficult. Think like Michael Rother, from Neu!, which is a beautiful, great band. David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Radiohead—they're all fans of Michael Rother's work. But he plays to much bigger audiences in the rest of the world than in Germany.
Lawrence: Throughout the conversations that you had for this book, and as you worked on this book, were there any new revelations or new insights that came to you that you didn't have at the beginning of the book? Was there some big sort of learning that you took from it?
Christoph: Yes, of course. Again, the historical part about growing up in dark and still Nazi-infiltrated Germany. I had no clue. The other talk about the music is that I really would say that the story in Germany goes that electronic music was invented in Düsseldorf by Kraftwerk.
And I really found out, and I didn't know about it before, about Thomas Kessler's electronic studio in Berlin. Thomas Kessler, very interesting guy from Switzerland, interesting avant-garde composer, who had the studio with the first synthesizer they ever had in Berlin in '71. And he showed Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream the first synthesizer.
Edgar Froese's Tangerine Dream were a blues rock cover band. And then Edgar went to the Electronic Beat Studio in Berlin, and bands like Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Agitation Free, they all went to that studio. I'm very, very happy that I could talk for long with Thomas Kessler, who was a great guy, still alive, very bright, back in Switzerland.
But I would say now, if you really precisely look at when records were released, that electronic music was produced in Berlin before Düsseldorf, which people in Düsseldorf don't want to hear. But that's just probably historical truth, which I learned while working on this book.
Lawrence: My final question for you is, do you know the next story you want to tell?
Christoph: The next story I want to tell? [laughs] No, I'm just working on finishing touches and about a biography about a German concert promoter, entrepreneur who started organizing shows in the '50s and '60s and is now in his very late 80s. And it's a story of then creating a new way of culture in Germany too.
And he started out with jazz as the music of freedom. He's still a big jazz fan, and now he's a big friend of Herbie Hancock, for example. Herbie Hancock, who's married to a girl from Hamburg to this day, for a long time. And Carsten—he's called Carsten Jahnke—and Carsten and Herbie go back a long way, and the Marsalis brothers are big friends of Carsten, so he's quite a big name in the jazz world. So I'm just working on his life.
Lawrence: Well, I hope to have you back when we can discuss that. That era of impresarios are really the people who invented the modern music business or the live entertainment business and their stories are so fascinating. So I look forward to reading that.
Christoph: Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a character where you say these kind of characters, they're leaving this planet now too. Because now, everything you have is Live Nation, and it's just about the profits. And people like Carsten, or again, like the Krautrock people—it was more than that. They created stuff they really wanted to create.
Carsten was only making shows that he thought, "Yeah, I like this kind of music." And Tangerine Dream were creating stuff where they didn't care at all if someone was listening. And all these bands, they didn't care at all if someone was listening, they just wanted to do it. And something like this, I think, this is getting even more and more rare.
