Times & Sounds: Germany’s Journey from Jazz and Pop to Krautrock and Beyond by Jan Reetze

Author:Jan Reetze [Reetze, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Halvmall
Published: 2020-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Its tasteless cover, which had not even a connection to the songs, was a “precisely and deliberately” developed part of the band’s “career plan”11. The cover shows a giant insect eating babies under the blessing hand of Pope Paul VI, who in 1968 had released the much-disputed encyclical “Humanae vitae – On the Regulation of Birth”. Today, this provocation may look harmless, but in 1971 it was enough for catholic priests in Germany to mount 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 to dispatch this record.

Ulrich Rützel: “Kaiser was enormously talented in PR and marketing, and we thought it was absolutely amazing to see how he systematically started dusting off this completely boring German music industry.” 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 said to myself: ‘Okay, that’s rock‘n’roll.’ But after a while one would like to go back to sleeping without interruptions …”

Finally, Kaiser got to a point of overdoing his activities in such a way that Hansa’s marketing head, Hans Blume, got the feeling it would be time to talk to his boss: “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, so we always wanted to try something new. And well, it could have been …”12

Gille

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

It was in spring 1968, when Düsseldorf-based journalist Hubert Maessen took a train to go to WDR in Cologne. He had a suitcase full of LPs with him, flipping through them during his train ride. 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 the time, along with him a couple times to editorial conferences for the radio show “Panoptikum”. The relationship between Gille Lettmann and Hubert Maessen ended soon, but it didn’t take long for Gille to find herself a new boyfriend: Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, the “monk”, as he was called, the berserk writer, who, as depicted before, worked as a freelancer for this editorial team. It must have been the love of their lives; they always came as a package from then on.

Hubert Maessen describes Gille Lettmann as “wide awake, self-confident, resolute, inquisitive”.13 In the beginning, she was mainly Kaiser’s girlfriend, but in 1971 she began to take on an increasingly decisive role in the company. To slow her down was nearly impossible; she and Kaiser drove each other from idea to idea.

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