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| Shortly before our first gig: the first stable SBE line-up after a long search for suitable musicians |
Terraplane broke up in the spring of 2007. I see that band as mostly a vehicle for my friendship with singer/bassist Christian Oelke, which was special for us in many ways back then, but like all relationships, this one had its difficulties. However, at that time our friendship had to pass through a difficult test because after getting together with a girl from Italy I decided to leave that safe haven of "good old" Wernigerode and venture into new experiences in Berlin. Terraplane still had a bunch of promising gigs ahead and even while I moved some 250 km away, I didn't want to break up the band, but Oelke saw it differently and decided for himself that this was the end. I still don't understand why he reacted like that after everything we had been through before, with all the line-up changes etc. but eventually had to accept his decision, and also watch another drummer leave with him.
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| Me and Thomas, first SBE-rehearsal room in Berlin-Weissensee, Summer 2008 by Ringo |
Shortly after I started jamming with Terraplane-bassist Florian Furtner and 16 year old Robin Niehoff on drums (video here). Robin was a dedicated fan and basically started his own musical path after seeing Terraplane, and our side-project Ians Experience, play at some of our "rehearsal room shows". These jams were already the foundation for Samsara Blues Experiment. I remember telling Oelke about my idea earlier and he replied it was a weird name. However, these early jams were very euphoric, not much structured at all, just fifteen minutes of guitar noodling and very intense. In a way, we were blown away by our own sound. But the line up didn't last although I tried to convince them to come to Berlin with me. So I moved there, alone but confident that whatever happened had to happen. I had no idea what to expect, the only person I knew close to there was Terraplane drummer Andreas in Potsdam, with whom I continued "the experiment". Finding a capable bass player was the more difficult part though. It took a lot of candidates (among them the bassist of Stonehenge/Kaskadeur) and weeks to get a first line up together. Soon we added a second guitarist as well, because I couldn't play guitar and sing at once. In fact I couldn't even sing and I was very shy, but felt like it would be my path.
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| I found Richard in the forum of stonerrock.com but there were actually two other bassists before him. |
Sort of coincidentally, a first concert had been arranged at Archiv Potsdam, together with Dzjenghis Khan, a band from San Francisco, with whom I must have been in contact through my music zine activities. They came all the way from The Hague in Holland by train for this one lonely gig in Germany! Back then you couldn't expect much anyway, most bands (even the more popular ones) played clubshows to a maximum of around 100 people. Also the festivals were very small, around 500 people at Stoned From The Underground until the 2010s! Back to our gig, where something extremely strange happened while the other three of us started setting up our backline at the nearby Archiv club: Andreas didn't show up and didn't respond to messages or attempts to call him! Funny enough, he was the one who had organized most of the gig. We got worried and waited for hours for a message from him, but nothing! So we had to give up and just went to see the other two groups, Dzjenghis Khan and Marogreen (Rob Niehoff's own group) play with our equipment. Andreas didn't show up only until two weeks later! He had serious problems in his relationship and eventually left the group because he had put too much on his shoulders at the time, with three bands, a full time job and a girlfriend waiting for him at home.
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| Promo with Michele, shortly before the demo was recorded. Berlin, July 2008 by Ringo |
Soon after bass player Björn also decided it wasn't for him anymore. I was a little perplexed, our rehearsals seemed pretty cool and everyone happy, but maybe I couldn't visualize my ideas very well, because it was clear to me that I wanted to "conquer the world", or at least the local scene. I was pretty cocky back then to be honest. I was convinced I was one of the best guitarists around, although I hardly knew anything. So the search for band members started again, and the second guitarist Michele (an Italian metalhead friend) and I found our new bass player Richard Behrens in the online forums of stonerrock.com while Thomas Vedder was recommended by an online friend. I will never forget the first day we all met. Thomas looked a bit like a character from Gillegan's Island with a sketchy kind of fisherman hat and Richard as always the smiling "sunny boy". We started jamming and already everything was there, the energy and the vibe that made SBE famous for all the years to come. In a way "a kind of magic" and a different intensity than in Terraplane, thanks to Thomas' powerful drumming and Richard's simple but effective bass. This young guy already owned one of those impressive "Ampeg fridges", so there's not much more to add.
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| Cool pic with Michele. The photographer Ringo asked us to wake up at 4AM for these pics! |
By the way especially for Richard, the name Samsara Blues Experiment didn't cause too much euphoria in the beginning. There were questions if we should really stick with that name, but I wouldn't compromise on that. I was the oldest and most experienced in this new group and yes, SBE was "my band" although I always gave the others more than enough freedom and never just imposed my own ideas. But I had my vision. Perhaps a bit naive, but confident, and I didn't want to wait too long with a first demo recording. After the long search for band members, a year in total, I couldn't wait to finally get back on stage. Luckily Richard had studied sound engineering at one of those fancy media colleges (SAE Institute) and owned the necessities to record a band: stereo condenser microphones and a simple interface that he plugged into his macbook and mixed in Logic 9. And that was already all the recording equipment we used for our first demo in 2008! We only had a few songs, but especially "Double Freedom" could stretch for almost 20 minutes, which seemed enough for a demo and also for live shows. Like I said, I was very impatient to get back on stage. But at that time it also became clear that Michele wasn't a very good fit for this whole idea of SBE, and we asked him to leave. I had never done anything like that in a band before, but it went pretty well, and we all remained friends ...
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| Rehearsal in our 2nd room: Thomas in trance & "big boy" Hans with his dreaded hollow body guitar |
So we recorded the demo as a three piece, live in the room, with few overdubs, mostly just the sitar and tanpura parts and vocals at the end. Sitar recordings never sounded as good as on that demo, not sure why? Also I already had a lot of contacts in the scene through Terraplane, my webzine Generated X and through my efforts to become a visual artist with gigposters and artworks for bands and festivals. When first reviews came in, they were all very positive and fueled my fire. I was convinced that SBE was going to be "big". I wonder how much that actually contributed to our success, while none of those early recordings (including the first album) weren't professionally done. But does that even matter? At that time I realized again that I wasn't ready for the double duty on guitar and vocals, so Richard suggested his buddy Hans Eiselt for rhythm guitar. Hans was barely 18 years old then (nine years younger than I), but already an experienced bass player with his band Rodeo Drive. He was rather shy then and barely spoke, but after an initial rehearsal with him, he seemed to fit. He liked the "right groups", which seemed to be even more important than his skills, but to be honest, I never took much time to work out things better with him, everything (more or less) happened in a certain group dynamic: We all liked similar music, similar sounds, and so things came together.
