As the head of the commune, Volker told me very sternly that I must write songs and nothing but, or I’d be ostracised. The group supported me. We fed ourselves splendidly for a few marks a day. Volker and I would go to the market at Klausenerplatz and buy food wisely—subsequently we lived like kings, at least in the culinary sense.
Volker was an orthodox left-winger so our group was drug-free, but heavy vodka drinking and smoking cigarettes were permitted.
Volker and Georg were studying architecture at Berlin University; Uwe was studying medicine. Volker had access to just about everything at the uni and brought me home a terrific reel-to-reel recorder, a Revox. Thanks to Volker, I started on the songs for my first album, Prussian Blue, my first ‘serious’ attempts at songwriting, which would emerge in 1973, three years down the line. I only owned two cassettes at this time: Neil Young’s After the Goldrush and David Crosby’s solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name. I can definitely hear their influence on Prussian Blue.
Volker decided that he would manage me, and that together we’d build a socio-political propaganda machine. I thought that the Marxist Communist Manifesto was the only feasible proposition for the world’s future, and embraced the philosophy wholeheartedly. Most of my early songwriting efforts were heavy with political messages.
During my early months in the commune, I feared I might be causing some consternation; I was totally dependent on the others for support. Gisela found me a job as greenkeeper for the British Embassy. Quite simply, all I had to do was mow the lawns every couple of weeks, and I could spend the rest of the time sitting in the sun writing lyrics. And the pay was excellent.
But when Gisela and I broke the good news to Volker, he threatened me with expulsion from the commune. His rationale was very simple.
‘Songwriters write songs,’ Volker insisted. ‘That is that!’
Georgie, Uwe, Volker and I went out that night and got horribly drunk. They drilled into me one simple fact: they had enormous faith in my musical ability; they wanted to be my patrons. I agreed, even if their charitable attitude seemed odd at such an early stage in my development. But their patronage made me all the more conscientious. By late 1970, I had written songs like ‘Poor Man’s Saviour’ and ‘Southern Germany’. Georg and Volker, both Bavarians, were immensely proud of these songs, so it all went around and came back around.
Volker made a concerted effort to place me with the best musicians in Berlin. There was a left-wing band called Agitation Free that mainly hung out at Kommune Einz, the notorious breeding ground for radical political activists and, allegedly, members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. These weren’t the cheeriest people, as you could imagine, so my early attempts to form a band were tainted by this pseudo intellectualism.
It’s here I first made contact with Michael ‘Fame’ Gunther and Michael Hoenig, who later joined the legendary German art-rock band Tangerine Dream.
I can’t exactly remember how we first stumbled across Burghard Rausch, our drummer, but being a real Anglophile, Burghard was the necessary bridge between me and ‘Fame’. We were rostered on at the Hochschule für Musik (the Highschool for Music) and placed under the supervision of Professor Tomas Kessler, a protégé of the avant-garde composer Stockhausen.
The school had its own sixteen-track recording facility and featured many weird implements with which to make weird sounds. We were rostered on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I’m forever grateful for this unique musical experience; I was able to immerse myself totally for almost two years and simply make music without all the extraneous bullshit that comes with being a professional musician. It was very pure.
At the Hochschule I really wanted to impress Professor Kessler—and stick it to Fame—and stated that I planned to learn Frank Zappa’s ‘King Kong’, a bizarre piece of musical mayhem, about 20 minutes long, absolutely hell to play. I was being childish, but I succeeded in impressing Kessler and denigrating Fame (and Burghard, too, for that matter). I stubbornly managed to learn the entire piece and play it—but don’t ask me to play it now! Not a chance.
Michael ‘Fame’ Gunther passed away in Berlin on 29 March 2014.
My two years in West Berlin were the happiest and most carefree of my life; the city was like an island of Western decadence behind the Iron Curtain. I can’t recall meeting another Australian during my time there, and I didn’t miss Australia until very late in my stay.
There was passionate activity everywhere; crazy Berliners creating music, books and magazines and films. The cutting-edge art movement was fantastic. There were eccentric technology boffins—1970s geeks—in garrets all over the city, inventing and designing amazing gizmos and concepts for different art forms. Volker was madly inventing weird devices to blow up Marilyn Monroe’s lips to the size of a football field, along with other bizarre concepts.
Having just lived through the golden age of British rock music and mixed it with the English hippies, I was now living out the last days of classic Berlin, the cultural hub of the universe.
I was one lucky hippie.
Berlin coffee houses and bars were packed with intellectuals and beautiful women, and Volker, Uwe, Georgie and I savoured every moment. Bratwurst and pommes frites were wonderful, vodka was fabulous, women were celestial, artists were inspiring, arguments were fucking great fun; it was simply great to be alive. Maybe because we were so poor we were totally liberated—and so very much alive.
Georg and Sabine bought a beautiful house in Wannsee, and a brand new Citroën. Our hippie life was suddenly distorted by luxury items, material things—and we no longer lived on the commune. We used to go out and get roaring drunk and pull up next to old people at the traffic lights. Georg would then make the car’s pneumatic suspension go up and down, up and down. The elderly Germans would be outraged at the sight of bedraggled hippies in a brand new Citroën.
One night, drunk again, we decided that we had to go to Munich in West Germany from Berlin in the East—it was a sort of pilgrimage. The East German border guards nearly arrested us; we would have ended up in Siberia. They were frustrated that my papers were in order, that I was a bona fide Berliner. Regardless, they dragged me into a hut, held me down and were set to hack off all my hair. Luckily a senior officer saved me at the last minute.
We literally drank our way south to Munich, and how we weren’t arrested in cafés and bars throughout East Germany still amazes me. We arrived in Munich without a pfennig, but decided that we could easily crash the Olympic village, built for the upcoming games, which had only just been completed. We climbed over a couple of fences and a brick wall, and squatted in the Olympic village for a few days.
I played at some of the Munich folk clubs, raising a few deutschmark, and every night we’d go out raising hell all over Munich and then scramble back over the walls of the village. I became so attached to the place that I was shocked when I saw news footage of the terrorists at the Munich Olympics. I’d had a similar experience back in London, when the sandwich shop I frequented each day, opposite the Old Bailey, was blown to smithereens by the IRA. Chilling experiences both.
I met Dieter Heisig at Kinney Records, simply by looking up the company in the phone book. Kinney was the forerunner of Warner Brothers, and later WEA Records. I played Dieter some of my songs and he began talking seriously about a deal with the label.
I couldn’t wait to get back to Berlin, knock the band into shape and start recording proper demos, do photo shoots, the works. This was all very exciting.
I returned to Berlin and got down to some serious writing, while Volker and I began planning our future career moves—we had that much confidence in Dieter Heisig.
‘We need the very best equipment,’ Volker said, so along with Fame we decided to drive to London in a Kombi van and buy second-hand Marshall amplifiers and any other necessary gear. Now that I had proper Berlin citizenship, I could enter the UK without any hassles. Two people I knew in London, Mick and Graham, agreed to put us up for a few days.
We drove via Calais in northern France and arrived on Mick and Graham’s doorstep late one afternoon. They were both pissed as usual, and began making tasteless remarks about the obvious—Germans, the war, blah, blah, blah. This overt nationalism struck me very hard. I was shocked. The only thing that was vaguely amusing was Mick and Graham’s insistence on watching Hogan’s Heroes and stupidly rolling about, killing themselves laughing. We got the hell out of there, Mick and Graham howling with laughter at our backs. Volker was distraught. His father, from whom he was estranged, had been a colonel in the Wehrmacht, which was the German military, not the Nazi Party.
Our couple of days in England were absolutely bloody miserable. I was staggered at the level of hatred to which these twenty-year-old Germans were subjected. When we asked for directions in a village street, a parody of the archetypal British squire went into a rage upon hearing Fame’s accent and beat the crap out of our borrowed Kombi with his walking stick. We bought our Marshall amps and headed back to Berlin posthaste.
Back in Berlin I befriended a guitarist from Spandau called Siegfried ‘Siggi’ Albrecht. He’s still to this day one of the better guitarists I have ever played with. But because he came from a rough working-class background, he and Fame—a snooty upper-class prat—were at each other from the moment they met. And Siggi was not only dealing LSD, much to Volker’s disgust, but also dropping multiple trips every day. Yet the acid seemed to have virtually no effect on him; he could function extremely well.
Siggi wasn’t long for the band but I maintained a friendship with him deep into the 1970s, until he moved to England.
I was endlessly fascinated by the strange assortment of men Gisela dragged home. At thirty-something she was still elegant and beautiful, as befitting a top European model, and brilliant, but she was also extremely neurotic. She played mind games ad nauseam, especially with Volker, who’d been her lover.
Gisela’s bedroom was decked out like the boudoir of silent film goddess Theda Bara—there was a huge white rug that could have been skinned off a polar bear, and her equally fluffy white Persian cat, which would glare at you with sinister eyes. Gisela’s bed was a modern twist on the decor in a Valentino movie. She made several attempts to seduce me; she’d try and initiate things by masturbating the cat in front of me. The atmosphere in her chamber became a bit like that of a witches’ den. Gisela unnerved me: she had strange hypnotic eyes, and a deep, almost masculine voice.
Her charades were designed mainly to undo Volker, so when she realised the depth of the friendship between Volker and me, Gisela began a bizarre campaign. She talked to me constantly and bluntly about sex, and became aggressive in her advances to me. She’d wander into my tiny bedroom, naked, and try to hop under the sheets with me.
As I was fiercely loyal to Volker, Gisela’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre. She began bringing home US marines; they’d smoke copious amounts of opium in her bedroom and fuck their brains out very loudly, all night long.
Volker was starting to crack; he was drinking heavily, stumbling into alcoholism. One night Volker and I arrived home drunk again, but Gisela had changed the lock on the front door. We caused such a ruckus that she made the mistake of coming to the door and opening it slightly. Volker pounced and threw her outside. Like two giggling schoolboys, we leaned against the heavy wooden door, laughing. The next moment: ‘THUD!’ ‘CRASH!’ ‘BANG!’ Gisela, in a psychopathic frenzy, had returned with an axe and was hacking the front door to pieces. She actually managed to hack the door down and then terrorised us for the better part of an hour, chasing us around the flat with the axe.
Gisela eventually collapsed from exhaustion; Volker and I threw a few things together and ran.
Sadly, we never did sort things out; that was the sordid end to my time in Klausenerplatz. No more picturesque markets in the square every Tuesday, walks in the grounds of Charlottenburg Palace or riding my yellow bike across the cobblestones in the nearby streets. No more hanging out with all the cool dudes in the neighbourhood.
Although Georgie and Sabine owned their luxurious house in Wannsee, Berlin’s most exclusive address, they had decided to spend most of their time in New York, leaving the furnished house unoccupied. Volker had moved in with a girl called Andrea (who was to become his wife), and so I lived alone in the big old mansion in Wannsee, at the end of the Berlin train line.
I entered an entirely different world. This was perhaps the beginning of my nightclubbing career, a lifestyle I embraced for about the next twenty years. There were many hip clubs in the centre of Berlin, mainly on Ku’damm, and I became a bit of a fixture. I was lonely at Wannsee, so I’d stay in the nightclubs until 6 or 7 a.m.—I became one of the vampires.
I started hanging out with Siggi again; being one of the local heroes, he introduced me to all the best girls, including Inge, who became my ‘Prussian Blue’.
To me, Inge was simply the best-looking girl in Berlin: she had cool blue eyes, strawberry blonde hair—she was oh so Germanic. She was also neurotic. Consequently, we had quite a tempestuous relationship. This was good and bad. The good part was the crazy, passionate lovemaking in the house at Wannsee, where we’d indulge ourselves for days on end. The bad part was my jealousy of all her admirers, and her thing for morphine, then the drug of the ultra hip.
I watched her best friend Lucia, also a beautiful girl, sink into the dark world of morphine addiction: she developed sallow, sunken facial features, exuded nothing but misery and deep depression, and the track marks on her arms became abscessed and ugly. One night I nursed Lucia in my arms for ages at the back of a nightclub. Later that night they found her dead. I wrote the song ‘Burning Ships’—which made my Prussian Blue album—as an obituary of profound sadness for Lucia.
I had an interesting creative life in Berlin; it’s where I learnt to be musically schizoid. I’ll always fiercely defend this quality of my musical career. At one end of the spectrum, I was playing with Fame, Burghard and often Siggi and Michael Hoenig, making weird experimental music, complete with Stockhausen sound effects. The music became a hybrid bastard of Pink Floyd—well, kinda sorta.
But my real passion lay more with singer-songwriters like James Taylor and Neil Young, as well as Bob Dylan and The Band. Siggi was easily the most proficient musician among us, and he became besotted with David Crosby’s songs, written with the most amazing guitar tunings, derived from Appalachian Mountain folklore. For Siggi and me, being a world away, this just seemed so exotic.
We used to pull reasonable crowds by default, because there were virtually no original bands in Berlin at that time. Inga Rumpf, a sensational singer with the timbre of Renée Geyer, but much rockier, used to come down from Hamburg, and locals Ta
ngerine Dream would play the occasional concert at the university, but that was about it. We went to see Frank Zappa at Deutschlandhalle, a venue much like Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion; that was a rare treat. The Germans loved Zappa, Leonard Cohen and American guitarist J.J. Cale—figure that one out!
I also befriended two American draft resisters in exile in Berlin. Both were immensely talented musicians, and played solo around the folk clubs. They lived a curious life, almost invisible, just in case the US government tried to hunt them down. They feared one day being caught and sent off to the killing fields of Vietnam. There were so many weird and wonderful people like this living in Berlin in 1970. I guess there was a little of that Casablanca quality to the place.
Wannsee, being the most exclusive area of Berlin, was an incongruous locale for a penniless hippie. Across the road lived a bearded intellectual called Edgar, who professed to be a traditional Maoist, but was the heir to a successful business. Edgar was delightful, as was his brother Michael and Michael’s girlfriend, who went by the name ‘Congo’. I became very fond of these three, as eccentric as they sometimes were. Congo once slept for over a week; this was just her way of escaping from the world. She’d performed this Rumpelstiltskin act a number of times before.
I was turning a little maudlin, and was getting further and further into the netherworld of clubbing and binge drinking. The Who had just released the song ‘Baba O’Riley’ and I was spending my nights dancing to it at Dschungel—a nightclub recently immortalised by David Bowie in his song ‘Where Are We Now’. I’d end up on the morning train with the factory workers drinking their early morning schnapps. This experience directly inspired my songs ‘Factory Life’ and ‘Poor Man’s Saviour’.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 5