Rock Climbing

The boy scouts not only turned me into a songwriter, they also made me a rock climber. When I was 14 we met with a group of scouts in Rhineland-Palatinate. They don't have mountains there, but many 60 to 200 feet boulders which are ideal climbing walls. My fellow boy scouts taught me how to use rope and hook and overcome the fear of heights. After a few days I wanted nothing more than to become an extreme rock climber. A year after that summer camp my family moved from Stuttgart to Munich, and there the rock faces of the Alps were just right at our front door. It was a God given chance to perfect my new passion. I soon got to know my own limits. Though I spent, alone and with friends, many a weekend of my teenage years in the mountains, I never became very good at climbing, hardly made it to grade V. But I am still fascinated by that sport, and tend to admire great rock climbers as much as great rock musicians.

Lesson For Life

"Be Prepared... the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise. A Scout knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens."

Robert Baden-Powell

1954

Nowadays joining the scouts as a boy has become very outdated. When I was ten it still was a great way to get away from home over the weekends and during the school holidays. I loved hiking and camping and sitting with my peers around the campfire until late at night. We played adventure games in the woods, long before they became a pastime at the computer. The rain was pounding on the tent-roof when I tried my luck on a friend's guitar. At Christmas 1954 I got my own six string. From then on hardly a day went by without my practicing until my fingers bled. After I had learned to accompany some songs, I found it more interesting to invent new ones. That's how I became a songwriter. It's all the fault of my boy scout weekends and the bad weather in the summer of 1954.

Vanity Fair On Rebecca

America's number one magazine, Vanity Fair, devotes 13 pages of its June edition to Rebecca. The article by the respected journalist, David Kamp, tells almost the whole story of what happened to my musical in New York, true to the facts and totally unbiased. Whoever is interested in the real story of The Road to Manderley can read it now online, although without the four full page pictures from the show. The main question, though, remains unanswered: Who was behind all this?

Voltaire Once Again, Corrected

More often than not the last words of famous people are fictitious. Some celebrities, such as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, seem to be "quotation magnets", attracting clever statements others invented. In an earlier blog entry I quoted Voltaire who allegedly refused on his deathbed to renounce Satan with the words: "This is no time to make enemies." According to the Secret Diary Of Le Duc De Croy which I read last week that quotation is pure, if wonderful, fiction. It's true, though, that Voltaire refused to make his peace with the Catholic religion. When the priest who came to his bed called on Jesus, Voltaire hissed "Curse the wretch!". He told the horrified clergyman: "Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror...Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." This said the great philosopher closed his eyes and died peacefully.

Telegram

Remember the time when you sent a telegram to forward an urgent message? I used that idea because in 1977 the word telegram was the same in all European languages. Today some kids probably never heard of it. My Silver Convention girls ended up being number 8 in the Eurovision Song Contest.  Sylvester played the keyboards himself, and loved it. Admittedly it was not the greatest song, but 36 years later I still think the performance was excellent.

Eurovision Song Contest

My Texan friend Achim reminded me that this is the week of the Eurovision Song Contest. As always, this event will feature singers and songwriters from about 40 countries and attract more than a hundred million viewers. Nobody believes that the winning song will be "Europe's best pop song", and it's not even guaranteed to climb the charts. Nevertheless the basic idea to unite once a year the viewers of tv stations all over Europe for one joint program still works. No successful songwriter in Europe can avoid   to participate with one or two songs in the course of his or her career. I didn't keep count of the songs I wrote for that contest over the years, I guess between six and eight. Once I reached number three. But my favorite entry only made it to number 13. If the singer, MaryRoos, looks a bit absent-minded in the attached video clip from the show it's because her boyfriend broke off with her four minutes before she went on stage. She was still in tears when the conductor raised the baton.

Of course I had no idea that Mary's relationship was doomed when I wrote the lyrics. They fit amazingly well to the moment, though they probably didn't tell exactly what was on her mind when she sang: "Walk tall, walk tall, I've finally learned to get back on my feet whenever I fall".

Consolation

According to Marcus Aurelius "everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so". I am not sure if I'm ready to accept that as a fact, but as I get older I use this sentence as a consolation. And if I'm really disappointed about something, I think of a friend I knew who was outraged that he had missed his plane to Vancouver, only to learn the next morning that his plane crashed in the Rockies.

Historical Truth

"The Assembly has witnessed over the last weeks how historical truth is established; once an allegation has been repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it."

Dag Hammarskjold

Missed Career

There was a time when I was contemplating a career as an academic historian. There were several reasons why I decided otherwise, but an important one was that I realized that historians are nothing else but storytellers bound to specific traditions and academic rules. Beside dates, names and all kinds of artifacts here is no such thing as a historic truth. It's all subjective interpretation. How could it be anything else? Ask three people on the street who have watched an accident, and you get three different stories. Sten Gagnér, my beloved academic teacher, told me that a historian's goal must be to find out "how it really was". That sounded simple enough, but it dawned on me pretty soon that it was impossible.