The African American blues was often imitated and appropriated by white musicians and fans. It didn’t hurt him.
The reactions to his essay were different. “Can white people play the blues?”, Corey Harris asked himself on his blog in 2015 – only to immediately formulate a negative answer. The African-American blues and reggae musician from Denver, Colorado, based himself on seemingly simple considerations: “Music is the voice of a culture,” he said. “Separate the two and the music can never be the same.” Just as klezmer is the music of Jews, the blues belongs to the culture of African-Americans.
My passion for “modern” music was probably aroused between 1958 and 1964 at the “Jahrmarkt” and the “Ziegenbrink-Schützenfest” in Osnabrück. The opportunity to listen to hip rock’n’roll and beat music on “der Raupe” and to escape from the German Schlager world of the early sixties was certainly great and was connected with a lot of anticipation for all the coming fairs. That’s why I went straight into the Swiss Casino Online!
As far as I know, there were no discotheques, youth centres or the like for kids at that time: certainly not for pubescent little boys like me. If you want to see the Blues Billboard-charts, just click here: https://www.billboard.com/charts/blues-albums
The hits of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who and the Small Faces were in a way my ROOTS, i.e. my first access to styles like beat, rock, soul, blues, jazz etc., just to name a few bands and music forms at this point. At that time, classical music and opera embodied something like the forced music culture at Sunday family lunches. One simply let it pass over oneself. Hope for “growing bigger and older” was in any case the order of the day from now on.
This article from the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first German tour “September 11, 1965: The first Rolling Stones concert in Germany”, aptly describes the situation of many young Beat fans at that time.
German rock music of the early 1970s
More or less I am concerned with the subject of Krautrock (not to be confused with German rock), or the status of some German rock groups from the late 1960s, early 1970s. Since my, our family’s visit to New York, Easter 2017 and the personal aha-experience in the hip district of Brooklyn-Greenpoint, where the piece Halleluwah from the album Tag Mago by the German avant-garde band CAN was played as background music in a big record store, I have been thinking about the international status of some German bands from the above mentioned time in the present!
Maybe in retrospect there was much more musical creativity involved than many music freaks at the time thought: Krautrock mostly sounded different than the most progressive mix of hip British and Anglo-American bands.
Blues Rock
From the end of the sixties blues-rock was quite popular with me. That hasn’t changed much until today. Based on the so-called British Blues, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Fleetwood Mac and Ten Years After were the first stars of this symbiosis of the 12 bars of the Blues, a groovy rhythm section and a dominant solo guitar and vocals. Jimi Hendrix also started his career in London and the time of the guitar heroes took its course.
Today, the internet provides information and You-Tube videos about them, which in the earlier analog era one could only dream of. The music show “Beat Club” or the later Rockpalast were in my “TEENIE, TWEN-and YOUNG_Adults_Time” the only possibility to get national and international, bands on the then still analog tube monitors – i.e. TV sets. Until the invention of the video recorder, however, this could only be viewed once.
American rock music and the soul era from 1965
The hippie culture that developed, especially in San Francisco from the mid-1960s onward, in turn brought forth very individual musical styles. Westcoast Rock, Psychedelic Rock or Latin Rock were also characterized by new, experimental sounds that had not existed before. This is what group names like Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Doors or Santana stand for. And of course one of my absolute favourite bands: the Doobie Brothers!
With soul music, which was also very popular from the mid-1960s onwards, I naturally associate names like Artetha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Picket or Sly and the Family Stone. James Brown and Ray Charles must also be mentioned here.
Discotheques
In Osnabrück in the second half of the 1960s there was, among other things, a rather hip discotheque with the beautiful name Drehorgel. From the end of 1968, when I was sixteen and in the second year of my toolmaker apprenticeship at Karmann, people often met there with friends and listened to the good soul music that was played there. There was also close dancing. I only say: when a man loves a woman or je t’aime. The DJ was sitting in a hollowed out piano frame. But at 10 o’clock the fun was over for us, because we were not yet “eighteen”. In retrospect, it was a relatively carefree time, marked by a spirit of optimism. I would not like to miss it.
Passion for collecting
I have finally managed to collect a currently incomplete list of my vinyl collection. In a way, this is my answer to the 500 best albums of all times from the magazine “Rolling Stone” from 2003.
Here is my answer. My vinyl records for the desert island!
As is well known, pictures say more than a thousand words. That is why there is always something to see and hear.
