Читать книгу Anecdotes from Backstage - Peter O. Bischoff - Страница 7

Blowing In The Wind (Bob Dylan)

I was at a Bob Dylan concert in the Deutschlandhalle with Sarah when she spotted Elvis Costello. Immediately, she asked if she could get a photo, but Costello just pointed her in the direction of his manager who growled “I’m busy!”, ripped some tickets to pieces then turned and disappeared into the crowd. What an arsehole!

The first single I bought was “Cadillac” by The Renegades: “My baby drove up in a brand new… Cadillac.” I actually wanted “Poor Boy”, the latest single by Berlin beat band The Lords - but there wasn’t a single copy left in the small record shop I visited in Hauptstrasse, not far from where Bowie would live some years later. It was the kind of record shop where you could listen to the record spinning on the record player with one, single headphone - if you were lucky. At that time, a single cost 5 DM - a lot of money, especially to a schoolboy whose pocket money amounted to 5 DM for the whole week.

I still didn’t have my own record player but was allowed to use my parents’ radiogram. Their records weren’t really my thing; I didn’t like Elvis because my father did, and he called the music I liked “jungle music”. The second record I bought was “When I Was Young” by The Animals. I listened to it five times in a row then ran down four flights of stairs and out on to the street - no idea where I wanted to go, just packed full of energy!

Later, I started going to record shops with stereo listening booths. I used to hang around there listening to albums by Deep Purple or The Rolling Stones, for example, “Let It Bleed”. I often went there with a friend just to listen to some decent music. As a trainee, I earned no more than 130 DM a month - and there were plenty of other things I could waste my money on.

On my way home one night, Udo Jürgens (famous german singer) and Lord Knud (former drummer with The Lords, then a DJ) came staggering out of the pub next door. Udo muttered to Knud: “You have to limp more, or nobody will recognise you!” (Lord Knud had lost a leg as the result of a car accident). They both laughed then staggered past me in the general direction of Ku’damm. Something told me they were not completely sober.

My first tape recorder was a rather simple device which I used to record music programmes from the radio. After this Grundig, I moved on to an Akai and then an Uher Report. A transistor radio with both short- and long-wave reception had already stirred my interest in beat music - but Radio Luxemburg was my station of choice. Or the latest hits on “Schlager der Woche” with Götz Kronburger and Lord Knud at the microphone. Later I listened to SF Beat with Wolfgang Kraesze, Rock over Rias presented by Burghard Rausch (BelAmi) - all pretty good DJs. And no adverts! These were people who loved the music they played. They even played Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” in its entirety. I loved taking my transistor radio to the park round the corner and blasting out music - and watching the old farts getting properly annoyed.

Then there was Beat Club on Radio Bremen and The Monkees TV series on ARD on Saturday afternoons. Definitely not to be missed - this was well before the advent of the video age. I bought my first Betamax video recorder in the late 70s; a device without a timer so, in order to record something, you had to be there and do everything manually. I not only recorded music programmes but also feature films and TV series. I’ve still got 82 episodes of The Muppet Show, and loads of Rockpalast shows including Mother’s Finest, Mitch Ryder, Little Feat and ZZ Top, and any numbers of cassettes packed with LPs and music programmes of the 70s. I sold my complete record collection at some point and kept only a few albums of personal value - white labels and test pressings mainly. I’ve also still got lots of cassettes of live recordings of concerts by Level 42, Herman Brood and Wilson Pickett. Last but not least: in recent years, I’ve gathered quite a number of shellac records with music from the 50s including Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Nat King Cole, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Krupa and Frank Sinatra.

The first album I bought was “Revolver” by The Beatles. A schoolfriend of mine asked me what the title track was like and I had to admit it was strange for an album not to be named after one of the tracks on that album (there is no track titled “Revolver” on the album).

In the local church youth club, there was a common room - kids would probably call it a chill-out zone today - as well as a room for table-tennis. There was also a record player and one single album: “Abbey Road”. Everyone who came in said, “Hey, great - Abbey Road!” and when they reached the end of the album, someone always put it back on again… and again. The whole evening long.

Concerts were relatively cheap compared to the ticket prices being demanded these days, for example, the first tickets I bought cost around 10 DM. But even so, we were always trying to come up with ways of getting in for less.

For example, when John Mayall played, we gathered up lots of ticket stubs from the main entrance and tried sticking them back together again. You couldn’t tell the difference with the naked eye, but if you ran your fingers over the reconstituted tickets, you knew immediately they were faked. One of us became quite expert at this technique, but the tickets were changed and made fakeproof pretty soon after - and the stewards cottoned on to our scheme - so we had to go back to the drawing board again.

I’ve still got one “reconstituted” ticket from 1970. On the 13th of June, MAN, Alexis Korner, Atomic Rooster and Status Quo played in the Sportpalast. One of our gang knew someone on the door so he helped us all slip through without too much trouble. That’s why I’ve still got the ticket.