Prost to Rocktoberfest
I opened the crate and look what I found.
Germany.
Not exactly the first place you might expect to find a dusty crate overflowing with rock 'n' roll. But then again, this isn't a crate of oompah bands, beer hall singalongs and someone shouting Ein Prosit every thirty seconds.
This is the B-Side Man's crate.
And somewhere underneath the familiar names, the obvious hits and the records everybody already knows, there is an entirely different German rock story waiting to be discovered.
So grab your stein, turn the lights down, and let's go digging.
The ones you thought you knew
Let's start with the obvious. Scorpions.
You probably know the songs: Rock You Like a Hurricane, Still Loving You, Wind of Change. But go back a little further and the band sounds like something else entirely. Before the stadiums, the power ballads and the MTV years, there was a darker, stranger Scorpions; a band capable of stretching hard rock into psychedelic territory and letting the guitar wander somewhere considerably more dangerous.
Sails of Charon is one of those moments. It's not the Scorpions most people walked into the record shop looking for, which, naturally, makes it exactly the sort of thing we want to find.
And then there's Accept. If Scorpions were heading towards the arenas, Accept were busy making the walls shake. Udo's voice sounds like somebody dragged sandpaper across a chainsaw, while the guitars are all sharp edges and forward momentum.
Everybody knows Balls to the Wall, but buried elsewhere is Fast as a Shark. It arrives like somebody has kicked open the door. Suddenly we're no longer browsing the German section.
We're running through it.
Then the crate gets weird
This is where German rock really starts to reveal its personality. While some bands were making rock songs, others seemed determined to ask: What else can we do with this?
Enter Can.
Forget the conventional verse, chorus, verse approach. Can could take a groove, stretch it until it became hypnotic, throw guitars, percussion, electronics and strange vocal fragments into the mix, and somehow make the whole thing feel like one enormous piece of machinery.
Then you find Mother Sky.
Fourteen minutes. One groove. And somehow you don't want it to end.
That's not a song you casually put on in the background. That's a song that grabs you by the collar and says:
You're coming with us.
And if Can opened one door, Neu! kicked another one off its hinges.
Hero is rawer, more aggressive, almost punk before punk had fully worked out what it wanted to be. The guitars grind, the rhythm keeps moving, and the whole thing sounds like a machine that has decided it doesn't particularly care where the road goes.
This is where the crate starts getting dangerous.
Space. Prog. Psychedelia. Whatever.
You turn another record over. Eloy.
Now we're heading into space.
Eloy were never particularly interested in keeping things small. Their music could be huge, atmospheric and cinematic, with keyboards, guitars and rhythms creating something that felt less like a three-minute rock song and more like a journey.
Poseidon's Creation is exactly the sort of track you discover at the bottom of a crate and wonder why nobody told you about it.
Then there's Jane, another name that might not immediately jump off the shelf. But put on Daytime and suddenly the room changes. Slow, melancholic, with organ swirling around the guitars, it's the sort of track that doesn't demand your attention. It simply waits until you give it some.
And then there's Lucifer's Friend.
Now we're talking.
Ride the Sky comes crashing out of the speakers with heavy guitars, Hammond organ and horns, somehow managing to sound simultaneously like hard rock, progressive rock and something that should probably be played considerably louder than the neighbours would appreciate.
This crate is getting better by the minute.
And then Germany gets heavy
There is a point where you realise this isn't just a collection of interesting old rock records. There is a thread running through all of it: a willingness to push things, make them heavier, stranger, faster, more mechanical, more atmospheric — sometimes all at once.
And that's probably why German rock has always felt slightly different.
It doesn't always seem interested in asking whether something is supposed to sound like rock. It asks whether it feels right.
That's a very different question.
Once you've heard the likes of Can, Neu!, Eloy, Jane, Lucifer's Friend, Scorpions and Accept sitting alongside each other, the German rock crate starts looking less like a collection of records and more like a map.
Psychedelia over here. Prog over there. Heavy metal around the corner. Experimental rock hiding underneath everything. And somewhere in the middle, somebody has probably plugged in another synthesizer.
The B-Side German rock crate
So let's forget the greatest hits for a while. Forget the obvious playlist. Forget what you're supposed to know.
This is about the tracks that make you stop halfway through digging and say, "Wait... this came from Germany?"
Or perhaps even better:
"Why have I never heard this before?"
Because that's what happens when you open the crate. You don't know what you're going to find. You just know there's something down there.
And sometimes, that's enough reason to keep digging.
The Rocktoberfest Playlist
Scorpions — Sails of Charon
Can — Mother Sky
Neu! — Hero
Accept — Fast as a Shark
Eloy — Poseidon's Creation
Lucifer's Friend — Ride the Sky
Jane — Daytime
Prost to Rocktoberfest!
Germany gave us plenty of rock that everybody knows. But that's not what we came looking for.
We came looking for the stuff underneath: the strange, the heavy, the hypnotic, the forgotten; the tracks that slipped through the cracks while the bigger names took all the attention.
And somewhere in that dusty crate, between the psychedelic grooves and the screaming guitars, we found something rather wonderful.
A reminder that rock music doesn't have to stay inside the lines.
Sometimes you just need to open the crate and see where the music takes you.
Prost!
And as always...
follow the bside track.
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