Left-wing rock music: Lanrue generated good feelings for the uprising

The German Glimmer Twins were both named Ralph, but they were called differently: Rio and Lanrue. In 1996 one died in Fresenhagen at the age of 46, last Sunday the other died in Berlin at the age of 74.

Rio was five days older. They met as teenagers in the southern Hesse wasteland, between Darmstadt, Hanau, Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg, in a place called Nieder-Roden. One trained as a photographer, the other as a decorator. At that time, one Ralph was already called Rio – a friend of his older brothers, who did left-wing theater, had named him that: Rio de Galaxis. He kept the first name, and the last name became the name of their first band together: De Galaxis.

Then they went to West Berlin at a later date and founded Ton Steine ​​Scherben, a band for the history books. They wanted to play like Jagger/Richards, the Glimmer Twins of the Rolling Stones, but couldn’t do that and then became the first German punk band in 1970. They were almost called “Black Cloud.” With the different name, they became one of the most influential German rock bands ever because they had musical and political energy.

They told the underground magazine “883”: “We support every action that serves the class struggle.” Their first single was called “Destroy what destroys you” and conveyed the feeling of an uprising, like the Stooges and the others in the USA MC 5. In order to release them, they founded the first German indie label, David Volksmund Production. “We weren’t a normal band,” Lanrue said later.

He played guitar and Rio sang. They wrote the songs together, with Rio usually doing the lyrics and Lanrue doing the music. They never actually argued about it, Lanrue said in “Music is a Weapon,” the very good podcast about the band’s history.

From “King of Germany”, Rio Reiser’s autobiography, published in 1994, one remembers a regular argument from the early days: Rio smoked Lucky Strike, Lanrue Harvest 23. When the Luckys were all gone, Rio asked about a harvest and was regularly heard: “Buy some yourself, then you’ll know what the prices are.” Other profound conflicts are not known, but they are between the band and the Möbius brothers, the heirs of Rio. This meant that the shard plates were no longer available for a long time.

In 1964 Lanrue appeared on stage with Rio for the first time. At that time the former was still playing drums. “Lanrue was a very good drummer,” writes Rio, “because he had the PSI factor and hit the right note straight away. If the name Keith Moon means something to you, you know what I mean.” Later he had two new role models: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. »A bit strange for a drummer. Hendrix and Clapton had turned the guitars into voices.«

You gradually notice this in Lanrue’s guitar playing. At the beginning it is more rhythm guitar than lead guitar, then it gets out of hand with a bit of effort and artistry on “Keine Macht für meine”, the second album, and then in 1975 on “When the night is deepest…” on the third and musically best The band’s album sounds just right: bouncy, funky and elegant. Actually, just like Keith Richards a year later on the largely underrated Stones album “Black and Blue”.

Before he met him, Lanrue had already noticed Rio at the train station in Nieder-Roden, from where he traveled every morning to Offenbach for training in the photography studio and Lanrue for his apprenticeship as a decorator. “He was always late and looked good, had black curls and a Harpo Marx face,” he writes in his autobiography and also that he spoke a kind of French South Hesse – which he was never supposed to lose.

Lanrue, which is a corruption of “de la rue”, was actually called Ralph Peter Steitz and was born in Grenoble in 1950, the son of a German-French couple. His father had fallen in love with a French woman as a German prisoner of war. In 1963 they had to move out of their apartment; The father got a job in southern Hesse as an advertising manager at the “Verpackungs-Rundschau” and they moved as a family of six to Nieder-Roden, where an aunt lived.

There Lanrue started playing football, which he had previously only known from comics because in France he had played rugby, the national sport at the time. He was an attacking midfielder and was so good that he was summoned to Frankfurt for the DFB’s screening course. A football career would definitely have been possible, but he went to West Berlin with Rio in 1967.

One reason was that they wanted to escape military service, Rio from German, Lanrue from French. He later said in a “Taz” interview that it was “much easier” as a footballer than as a musician because you were only judged by your performance on the pitch. As soon as he was spotted as a left-wing musician on the Ku’damm in West Berlin, he had to answer in front of a plenary session about what the hell he was doing on this shopping mile, he said in the podcast about Ton Steine ​​Scherben.

Fun fact: After the band fled to the countryside in North Frisia in the mid-70s, partly because of such demands for political control, he quickly played in the local football club. He was in his mid-20s, in his prime as a footballer, and even became top scorer and “Player of the Year” without anyone knowing that he played in a radical left-wing band.

Lanrue stayed in Fresenhagen even after Ton Steine ​​Scherben disbanded in 1985, together with Rio, whom he initially helped with his solo career. The last time he was on stage with him was in 1988, when they played “The Dream is Over” in the Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle in East Berlin and the hall emphatically sang along with “This country is not!”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t this record either: Lanrue’s solo album, on which Rio appeared, could never be released because Rio was no longer an indie but was signed to CBS. Lanrue never took part in the various, mostly weak, broken glass replacement bands, but two years after Rio’s death he moved to Fóia, the highest mountain in the Algarve, and grew oranges and lemons. He also looked at the old tapes of the band’s complete work, which was released as a ten-part box set in 2006. But the dispute over copyright soon began.

And then his property in Portugal was destroyed by one of those forest fires you always see in the news, and he had to go back to Germany. There he re-founded Ton Steine ​​Scherben. Only he had the authority to do so. They played almost with the original line-up, expanded to include musicians from Lanrue’s family, including sisters, daughters and nephews. And look and hear: it was good, a bit like “The Beatles are back”. There were no new songs, but there was an old one that they hadn’t played since the early 1970s: “Macht sucht.” Lanrue thought the time was right again.