Vignettes #59

In 1981 I made a six-week grand tour of the United States with 2 of my pals. We started with New York City and from there it was Florida, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Los Angeles, St. Louis and then back for a full week in NYC. Besides sightseeing I intended to get to as many record stores as possible and find rare stuff that you couldn't get in Europe. Of course I was successful. However, I did have the stupid idea to bring along some German records, hard-to-get music on independent labels, which I thought I could trade in at some stores. Well, nobody had ever heard of the likes of bands like Missus Beastly, a 70s fusion rock band, so I never got rid of them. At one small second-hand record store in St. Louis which had a wonderful variety of rare and obscure titles I tried to do the trade-in, but there, too, they said no. So I did ask whether there was any interest in German or European music at all. "Oh yes", the store owner replied. "I'll pay any price for a Conrad Schnitzler album." Well, I was only vaguely familiar with that name, Schnitzler was a founding member of the German electronic band Tangerine Dream and later with Kluster, afterwards releasing and distributing his work all on his own. At that time I didn't have much respect for that kind of music and was a bit surprised there was a market in the States for German electronic music. I assume it was initiated by Kraftwerk's success in the USA. Conrad Schnitzler remained a hardly known experimental composer and he released a last album, Consequenz 010B, a collaboration with Wolfgang Seidel, a few weeks ago. Conrad Schnitzler died from stomach cancer in the evening 4 August 2011.