In 1967, I was still in school and played guitar in a band called Spirits of Sound in Düsseldorf. George Harrison, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton were my idols. Then Jimi Hendrix came- and everything changed. In March 1967, he and his band- with Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass, performed for …
The 13th Floor Elevators weren’t only innovative for their time. They were so different- I liked that from the first moment I discovered them. Like me, they came from a boring small town, and they established a musical independence that was new in its consequence. Optically they looked like backward hillbillies, but stylistically they conveyed …
My older brothers were ahead of me with The Jam, but I was the one who discovered the Stone Roses. Hell knows what would have become of me without this record. It’s not only the soundtrack of my youth, it IS my youth: beautiful, sun-kissed pop songs with guitars. The Stone Roses was released in …
I’m not a person to regret things, but there’s nothing to sugar-coat: the phase of my life that I went through in the mid-90s after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers shouldn’t be an inspiration for anyone. It almost destroyed me- I lost my teeth and gained scars on my arms, but I was very …
I bought X In Search of Space the week it came out, which allows some unpleasant conclusions to be drawn about my age. I got the album at ‘Jack’s Music Shop’ in Red Bank/New Jersey. Bestseller records were displayed prominently and promoted, but Hawkwind barely had any press and didn’t get much attention. So I …
I have bought Devo’s debut in 1979 after the track “Mongoloid” somehow made it into the Friday-Top-Ten of the wicked local Disco “Kaisersaal”, which was called ‘Ballhaus Vaterland’ (“Fatherland Ballroom”) before. I had wrongly perceived the album as punk- like everything that was gloriously going on one’s nerves. The subversion that emanated from the album …
People will hate me for this choice, because the record is quite a rarity that came out on Record Store Day 2013, with an edition limited to 3500. On green vinyl by the way. I’m surprised myself at how often I have listened to Stephen Malkmus‘ version of the Can album Ege Bamyasi. It’s the …
Banned in D.C. with a thousand more places to go. Gonna swim across the Atlantic, cause that’s the only place I can go.You, you can’t hurt me, why I’m banned in D.C. Bad Brains, Banned in D.C. People say that the best about the Bad Brains is the fact that they were all black and still …
The Idiot is the most important album of my life, because it almost made me give up music forever. I have to explain this. It was 1994, I was 21 and still playing with Kyuss. Back then I almost completely refused to listen to anything else than Kyuss. I was young and stupid, and I …
Up to a certain point, art is the satisfaction of personal vanity. That is part of its nature. Nevertheless, as I get older I find that simplicity is the most complicated and at the same time most worthwhile thing for me as an artist. In cinema, but especially in music. Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, …
