Music as an important stimulation factor for my live and career

As mentioned already in former posts, I grew up as child in the middle of nowhere in a small village in the forests close to the city of Kaiserslautern in Germany. One of the very few really exciting experiences for me and my childhood friends there was the sporadic contact with US soldiers stationed allover this region and at the big european US airbase Ramstein, not really far away from my village. But “far away” has become a dubious expression for me during the last decades. As a child, living in that small village, to make one of the very few visits together with my mother to Kaiserslautern or to Mannheim, the other city quite close to our village just on the other side of the river Rhine, was a real travelling enterprise, which my mother used to plan days, if not even weeks, before and which always turned into a full day activity for us. 

Since many years I got used to real long distance travelling. Look at these two extreme examples. Sometimes I fly from Sao Paulo just for meetings of two or three hours to the beautiful city Recife, where by the way my beautiful wife is from and which is situated 2600 km away from Sao Paulo on the beautiful coast in the north eastern brazilian state Pernambucu. My early morning flight to Recife takes three hours flight time and in the evening my flight home to Sao Paulo from Recife takes the same three hours. So this means that for a meeting of two or three hours I am sitting six hours on airplanes. Crazy, isn`t it?! The other extremely long distance travelling challenges are my frequent flights from Sao Paulo to Australia. The shortest and most convenient (better: least unconvenient) travel route for me and my colleagues, with whom I use to do these trips together, is to fly from Sao Paulo to Santiago de Chile, from there to Auckland in New Zealand and finally to continue from there to Sydney. If I have appointments in Perth in Western Australia, where great part of the australian mining industry is located, I need another five hours long connection flight from Sydney to there. But in this case, if available, I prefer to fly from Sao Paulo to Johannesburg in South Africa and catch a direct flight from there to Perth as the much better option. Such a trip takes us “door – to – (hotel) door” easily between thirty and fourty hours of total travelling time. It`s true – we have become modern nomads. 

As far as I remember, the US GI`s which I met as a small boy of six or seven years in the woods around our village, called very much my attention with their Rock`n Roll and Soul Music, which they heard endlessly and wherever they moved. But to listen to this type of music during those times in Germany was all but an easy enterprise. German TV – black and white, only one channel, just for a few hours every day in the afternoon resp. evening – had just started, was still available only in very few households and did not show such, publicly not yet accepted, music during it`s first years. Thanks God and my mother, my hottest desire during these years found acceptation and I received one of those small transistor radios as christmas present at the still sweet age of eight or nine years. 

With this fine equipment I started to listen almost every night, hidden under the blanket of my bed, so that no other familly members could discover this, to the great “Jim Pewter Rock`n Roll Radio Show” sessions on AFN Europe, the American Forces Network radio station. This was – besides a little later-on the “pirate” (because stationed on a boat in the North Sea outside the 3 miles country zone) Rock Music radio station “Radio Luxemberg” – practically my only possibility, to listen to this kind of music.

A couple of years later, when I was twelve years old or so – still living in the miniscule boring village on the countryside – I accompanied the birth age of real Rock Music, with all these famous bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zepplin and many others. At this time, due to my complicated familly and generally spoken poor education situation after the early loss of my father, who had died on December 24, 1964, when I just was 6 years old, I made my first experiences with lots of other things like drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. By the way I still like drinking beer, but – and I consider this as one of my greatest achievements so far – I quit smoking at the age of twenty eight years and I have never missed it until today. And I let my hair grow long, which made some elderly villagers tell me “if Hitler was still here, he`d cut Your hair”, but this neither impressed me nor made me change my personal style and habbits. Today, when I am angry about my lovely fifteen year old son Gabriel, I just think back to my own times when I was at his age and this makes me immediately relax and feel friends with Gabriel again. Thanks God Gabriel does not keep company with such fellows as I was one at his age. I`d not let them into our house.

When I started going to secondary school in the small city Grünstadt, also not really far away from my small village, I bought my first music “single” with just one song on each side of the vinyl. It was this one:

To be true, I still like this deeply romantic, admittedly a little bit kitschy song, which during a short period was under the “top10” of the US charts at the beginning of 1971 and if this question came up, I definitely would buy it again. 

And here a mixture of some fotos of my early childhood years: