Music is a trump card – do you know Richard Weiz?

If you talk to Richard Weiz about music, he constantly asks you: “Know?” And you have to say very often: “Nah”, even though you think you know what. Wheat talks a lot and likes to talk about people who have never heard of. He is one of these legendary types from the background of the music industry. A record collector that makes plates as re -publications. They are usually presented much better than the originals – this is really sustainable business.

This is usually only talked about, it is rarely practiced, but from Weiz since the early 1970s. This Monday he will hardly be known in public 80th, but among musicians. When Bob Dylan tours in Germany, his band leader says Tony Garnier, wheat should come by, with his employees.

You don’t know all the awards he received for his work, but they make up half of his Wikipedia entry. Federal Cross of Merit – okay, you know and also the price of German record criticism. But the W. C. Handy Award or the ArSc Award that existed 17 times? I also don’t know the place where Richard Weiz grew up: Bad Gandersheim, Lower Saxony, somewhere near the Harz. The first song that struck him on the radio was “bravo, bravo, almost like Caruso” by Vico Torriani. Then he was ten. Later he found Johnny Cash better.

You already know the two. But who is Lefty Frizzell? Born in 1928, he was one of the most important representatives of Honky Tonk in the 1950s. His compositions were represented in the country charts until well into the 1980s, «I read at Wikipedia. Lefty Frizell was dedicated to the first box that Richard Weiz and his record company Bear Family laid: 14 records were in there, 1984. It was called “His Life, His Music”. The “Washington Post” also noticed this and was surprised: Why does such a box appear in West Germany?

“If I do something, I seriously do it, otherwise it is pointless,” says Weiz at the beginning of our conversation. He founded Bear Family 50 years ago. A label for everything you should seriously know but not yet known.

Weiz has lived in the forest in the Elb-Weser triangle between Bremen and Stade on a farm in the forest for a long time. There is also the company logo, a large bear and two small ones, as a monument in wood. In original size, I would say, made by an artist from Monterey, where the first big hippie festival took place in 1967. Wheat had the bears embarrassed from California. He also has a smaller edition of it, I would say: hip high and car loadable. The bear team drove to the large department stores and organized sales campaigns. Back then, when the music departments of Karstadt or Kaufhof could still order their records themselves. That was the time when the phone was still on the phone. Today Weiz has the problem that he does not know who to call the record companies. Nobody can do it anymore.

Bear Family brought out a lot of albums, but is famous for the boxes, first with vinyl plates, then with CDs. There is a box with the music of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (7 CDs), the “Songs for Political Action” of the US Links from 1926 to 1953 (10 CDs). This is the music of the defeated they played when they didn’t know that yet. The “Blues Box” of the Sun Label (10 CDs) with Howlin ‘Wolf, Little Milton or Rufus Thomas, on the other hand, is the music of the rock’ n ‘roll preparers, who also did not know that either.

Chuck Berry (16 CDs), Peter Kraus (10 CDs) and Caterina Valente (9 CDs) knew better. All of these boxes are equipped with thick booklets in LP format, written by experts and demanding layouts: Coffeetable books for nerds, fans and scientists worth reading and seeing.

The thickest box is “Black Europe” (44 CDs) with the music that Black musicians recorded in Europe in the early 20th century. They came from jazz and played in shows and varieties, where they could also perform with white singers, which was unthinkable in the United States at the time. This box costs as much as a weekend vacation, but it takes longer.

Also quite a hammer is the box »Beyond Recall« (11 CDs), a documentation of Jewish music life from 1933 to 1938: Plates that were lost that could not be taken away when their Jewish owners from Nazi Germany had to flee.

Such boxes are bought worldwide by libraries and archives such as the Library of Congress in Washington because it is more practical than getting the individual plates themselves. Over 350 boxes have so far been published by Bear Family. In the best times, 40 people worked for the company, three of them alone, four on the phone, because you could order via hotline.

In 1975 Weizen founded Bear Family out of necessity. He had children, a woman and a house, just no money. And then he told the bank that he had a good idea. The third bank only believed this saying – or was it the fourth? In any case, it was a customer loan bank. These are those who give their customers money, but only to eat them with high interest rates if they are not careful. Much worse than bears. But wheat took care.

Before that, he had sold wine for the brothers Elmar and Kuno Pieroth, first in Northern Hesse and then in England, where it went better. Wheat was the third best among 500 sellers: you had to visit people at home and pour them the wine that you should buy. “You were in England as a representative of people, in Germany the representative is an ass,” says Weiz, while we are sitting in his study on chairs of the record company RCA and a clock from Sun Records ticks on the wall. A look like in a nostalgic diner, but everything is real.

In 1971 Weiz went back to Germany and then started with the records, direct imports for collectors, a bit like the German wine for English. Why did he not open a record store? Because he did not want to annoy the collectors. They would have come into the shop and would have known everything better without buying a lot – no thanks! Collectors are crazy, for wheat “some really belong behind the castle and bar”. For example, those collectors who call him because they think he hid a song on a CD three seconds early.

So he preferred to make mail order for music from which Bear Family developed, so to speak as an increase: bring out the music that no longer existed in this country. And with a new sales system – by computer. This only had corporations in the 70s, but Weiz had a buddy who studied mathematics and could connect a computer to a typewriter. The company Commodore only started in the mid-80s-Weizen was ten years earlier and leaked a Datic computer for DM 60,000.

At some point, a collector of twelve unpublished songs by Johnny Cash, including two he had sung in German, told him, because he founded his first volume as Gi in Bavaria. In 1981 Weizen drove to the USA for the first time, to Nashville, to get these recordings. He did it too. He found it irritating that the bosses of the big record companies were not interested in music at all. If you wanted information, you had to contact the sound engineers and studio musicians. And find a way to get into the archives.

When he viewed and listened to the ribbons of RCA, he suddenly heard Elvis Presley backwards. Spooked! But then he found out that the ligaments were so expensive at the time that they were used twice. Published in mono and sometimes not from the original band, but from the third or fourth copy, which you had just standing around. And when the plate came out in England, a copy of the US plate was pulled there, not from the assembly line, pure laziness. Before that, Weze had often wondered: Why do the English presses rush like that? Now he knew. And bought a digital recording device to do better.

When each plate was able to copy digitally at the turn of the millennium, the sales of the music industry fell to ten percent. Weizen didn’t care, he published in small editions, between 500 and 2000. “Because if a few publications suddenly sell 10,000 pieces, you think it will be the next time, and probably falls in with it,” he says. The only box that achieved such dimensions at Bear was that of the West Berlin post -war cabaret artist Günter Neumann – knew? And above all: who would have thought?

Therefore, Richard Weiz can say that he did not make the panels because of the money. And he didn’t give Heino his hand when he was introduced to him at a reception. Today it seems a little rude. But he keeps going, even after he sold Bear Family in 2015.

Now he brings records on his labels Richard Weize Archives and… and more Bears, for example the overall work of the doctors (33 CDs) in 2018. Or a box by James Booker (5 CDs), a brilliant pianist for jazz and soul on the piano – knew? Born in New Orleans in 1939, perished at heroin in 1983.

Booker was influenced by Chopin and Beethoven and played in the bands of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex. In 1976 he performed solo in the Haus der Junge Talenten in East Berlin and a year later again in the Leipzig Moritzbastei. He played a brilliant entertainer boogie blues and jazzed “for Elise” as well as the Beatles and Curtis Mayfield. Weiz published these concerts in 2023 under the title “Behind The Iron Curtain Plus …”, luckily – before they are forgotten. Or as Booker sings: “Save your love to me!” That would also be a company motto, knew?