Samsara

I still vividly remember the moment when I told my ex-bandmate/best buddy Chris Oelke about my new project plans while we were on the way to one of the last Terraplane-rehearsals in his beat up car, full of cold smoke and an indistinct feeling of change in the air. "Samsara Blues Experiment - that's kind of an odd name" was his reply and was what I heard also from latter bandmembers. I came up with the name after having read Herman Hesse's novel "Siddhartha". I don't recall where the blues experiment-part came from, I guess from the Johnny Winter-record, or just because it seemed to sound cool to me. Those were the days when I really was "a little hippie", collecting everything about the late 60s that I could find, sitting there in my 26sqm apartment in flares and batik shirt as if it was 1971. I also had just bought a Sitar in 2006 and the air was pregnant on Nag Champa-incense and juvenile dreams. 

In this period I also discovered the new possibilities to connect with people all around the world via Myspace - the pioneering days of social media. It was a time that may never return, full of naivety and oh the excitement. It really could make my day just when such silly things occurred like Frank Kozik accepting my friend request, while of course his involvement with "the scene" (Man's Ruin and all) was long history and I never even spoke a word with him. But Myspace also helped to connect with the other sex which was another problem while living in rural Germany, there was neither a lot of good enough musicians, nor many "interesting people" at all. So I connected with a girl in Rome, which would in many ways change my life through the next years. At that period in my life at 26 years of age I had barely seen anything in or out of Germany. The last time I'd been abroad was with my parents as a 16 year old and meeting that girl suddenly made me become a traveller.

I had no idea what to expect but all signs said GO! Even if the story went through a lot of troubles, in a way I owe it to her to be who I am today and that SBE became what it was: a travelling band with international success. I guess I would still be sitting there in the middle of nowhere if I hadn't decided to take this next step. Soon her and I decided to move in together in Germany but the place to be was Berlin. It seems all a bit funny to me now but back then in 2007 Berlin still was an exciting place. When I confronted Chris O., who wasn't just singing in Terraplane but my creative counterpart, he felt betrayed and left the band. I was perplexed as I did not want to end Terraplane that quick. We still had gigs booked and SBE still was only an idea in the back of my mind. But now it was the only option and gladly ex-Terraplane bassist Florian Furtner liked the idea enough to join me while Terraplane/drummer Edward Bernatek (who anyway wasn't the right guy - he loved Dream Theater...) saw no option for himself to continue. So this brought Robin Niehoff into the picture, a young guy who had just started with his own group Marogreen after being influenced from Terraplane and our short time side-project the Ians' Experience. I tried to persuade them to move with me to Berlin, especially because we all enjoyed our lengthy Psychedelic Rock jams and there wasn't a big future for none of us in the Harz mountains. But they decided otherwise and so we did not last for much more than two months in this line up.

So the big move was upon me, going to the big city and boy was it hard to find an apartment even back then when the rent was still more than affordable (imagine 270EU for a 60sqm apt), yet Berlin hasn't had the huge attraction that it seems to have today while in the same process a lot of what made Berlin interesting for me has disappeared over the last twelve years. So after quite a rough welcome there eventually I found an appartment and could start looking for new musicians. Pretty soon I got involved with ex-Terraplane drummer Andreas Herbst who had already lived in the nearby city of Potsdam and all we needed to find now was a bass player, which turned out to be a bigger problem. We tried out with a lot of people but they either weren't good enough or couldn't commit to another band. This was a pretty frustrating time for me, we had a rehearsal room in Potsdam and I took a two hours commute, often to be a bit disappointed from making such little progress while even the earliest jams in Wernigerode had been so amazing. I was very anxious to get things going. I started to put my ad in every place I could think of like rehearsal spaces, music shops, internet forums etc yet to no success. I was confused, wasn't Berlin supposed to be full of musicians?

Jurassic Park SBE w/Michele, Berlin 2008 by Ringo - We had to wake up at 4AM for this pic!

So, after almost a year, things finally moved in a better direction. Richard Behrens answered my ad in the Stonerrock.com forum (anyone still remember that?), and Thomas Vedder came shortly after as a recommendation of a mutual (online-) friend in Studi VZ, the German student network - ah, good old days of the early internet. Shortly before that Andreas Herbst had mysteriously disappeared, just before the first show he himself had organized for us and the garage rockers Dzjenghis Khan from San Francisco, who had traveled all the way from The Hague by train for this one gig! It's so funny to remember it now, but at that time we were frustrated and even a bit worried because the drummer left us without any note just a few hours before the actual gig.

At that time there was also an Italian guy named Michele Gambarrara on rhythm guitar, but when we recorded the first demo with Richard and Thomas, we saw that he didn't fit so well into the band. Being a metal guy at heart, he lacked the right feel for the kind of weird stoner blues I had in mind for SBE. So we recorded the two-track demo in July and August 2008 in our first rehearsal room in Berlin-Weissensee. Richard was still in another band at the time, but it was about to break up, so it was a pretty smooth transition for him to come from a kind of punk band called Dead Crap to SBE. He also brought the classic "Army Of Ignorance" which had been rejected by his other band! Thomas on the other hand had played in a kind of Kraut-Prog band called Ewok and had quite an eclectic taste in music, he was a big fan of all the Canterbury bands, Soft Machine, Camel, Caravan etc. but also Man, Hawkwind and so on, while Richard and I were still more into Stonerrock, I also a lot into 70s Hardrock. Having listened to Sabbath, Zeppelin and Hendrix as a teenager in the 90s, by the early 2000s I also had discovered groups like Josefus, Bang, Captain Beyond, etc.

At that time I was still very insecure with the double duty of lead guitar and vocals. I had spent only a few months singing in the band. I used a lot of delay on vocals and was honestly always shy about presenting new lyrics to the others. We just felt that there should be a second guitarist again, and Richard suggested Hans Eiselt, who he knew from playing with his band Rodeo Drive. Well, Hans only showed up once for a jam, he seemed like a good fit and stayed with the band until the end. Sometimes the relationship between him and I later was a little difficult, which I partly attribute to the fact that he is nine years younger, and that I myself often felt in a competitive situation with other guitarists throughout most of my career. I don't blame him so much. It can be difficult to play in a band with me, I guess, but from then on things really got rolling, and rolling much faster in the right direction. 

The first gigs were booked shortly after Hans joined the band. Thanks to a handful of contacts I had through my webzine Generated X/Electric Magic, and another handful of contacts I had gathered as a poster artist, it was relatively easy to even play some of the early scene festivals like Yellowstock in Belgium. We played a first series of club shows in Germany and were far from the success that would follow years later. We were basically just playing for gas money, as many bands do, some even through-out their whole careers. Terraplane was such a band. I wasn't quite sure if I would always be kind of an outsider or if success would eventually come, not that it mattered that much, but if I really look inside myself, I've always been pretty competitive and striving for some kind of fame, blame it to my background in sports, perhaps.

Not long after we released the two-track demo as a free download on our website, we got a message from California. Two guys from Humboldt County (Adam and Ian of Redwood Curtain Booking) had discovered our band and liked it so much that they offered us a gig at one of their events in Northern California. We were thrilled to say the least, how was that even possible? At the time, I was spending a lot of time trying to make ends meet with the help of Myspace, trying to get in touch with bands to organize shows and tours, and also inviting potential fans to check us out. Some people might have been annoyed by friend requests or mails (well, sorry), but back then I thought that this was the one big chance we had to promote ourselves without label money, which then didn't even exist anyway - the stoner scene was fairly small still without the big youtube channels, facebook groups or whatever. Myspace was "the shit" ;) ...

And early try to shoot promo pics with Hans as the latest addition, January 2009 by Susy

So the dates for our US tour were getting closer. At one of our first gigs we had also already flown to Rome, the Italian capital, because I had some connections there. In retrospect, that was quite a daring move, we were still a very young and very inexperienced band at that time. At that time we didn't have a booking agent, no professional help, most of it was through contacts with other bands: "You lend us your equipment and book some shows in your area, and vice versa." With the help of myspace, I wrote to almost every band that came to mind. Many were helpful, but in the end the best contacts for our American adventure were Tommy Grenas and Farflung, Laurel from 420 Trainreck in San Francisco, and with the help of Redwood Curtain we also got in touch with a crazy band called Nudity and Tony Reed (Mos Generator, Stone Axe) in Washington State. Not to mention the fine folks at Treetarantula in Seattle who managed to book two shows for us!

At the moment I'm writing this, I feel like this whole early history of SBE is already material for a book, but I'll try to be brief here. It's probably because we were so young and none of us had been further away at the time, so it was all so overwhelming and will remain an important memory for our entire lives. Just before we left for our US adventure, when we had just rehearsed a few songs, two of bassist Richard's buddies decided to join us on this tour and help out, David and Konrad a.k.a. Drinkers and Drivers a.k.a. the Santa Cruise Crew. Without them it would have been a lot harder to make the long rides from one place to another. I have to say that we also went there without much of a plan at all. The weeks before we were full of tension, but also uncertainty. There were rumors that some bands had problems entering the States because they were so strict and suspicious of anyone entering with a guitar.

We didn't know much of what to expect, but the entry went without complications and then we were there. I still remember driving into downtown San Francisco and arriving at our first motel, the Green Tortoise in North Beach. My first thought was, "Oh, now I understand why they protect this country so well." It just all seemed so colorful and rich and overwhelming. A movie turned reality, the movie of our lives! We spent the first week running around like big boys in a big candy store. Although most of the guys were more after beer competitions and girls. Me, the slightly older guy, was more interested in exploring the country/culture itself, and not so much in partying. And then we slowly made our way to Los Angeles for our first show, right on Sunset Blvd at a pretty amazing venue, The Echo. I was full of adrenaline when we played the first notes of "Singata" and then had a problem with Hans guitar, and full of embarrassment I had to ask to light up the stage before the second song, so we could figure out what was going on. Thanks to Farflung, it was a pretty well-visited show (ca. 100-150 people), and a bit of an unfortunate start to it all.

But we went on, almost fearlessly. I must say, we were really full of prejudice and soon found out that the USA is not only one big crime scene (like in the movies), but that people were mostly very friendly and open towards us strangers. There were many with German ancestorswho were curious about us and came more for that reason than for the music, which was still in demo stage anyway. We created our CD-Rs there in the hotel in LA, which was very funny when I think about how unprofessional and naive we were. Then, our second show in San Francisco, at Bottom Of The Hill, went much better overall. In fact, that night it seemed like we already had a slightly bigger audience than the veterans of Farflung, which was weird - they were an amazing band and as I mentioned before, we could really barely play the songs we brought with us. Really half of our set was some geeky improvisation. "Double Freedom" just turned into a half-minute monster, and "Center To The Sun" was still pretty unstructured, but I guess our passion won over some of the people in the audience.

The rest of that US tour is a lot of memories, and I don't know if there's room for all of that here. Let's just say that we had lots and lots of fun there, even though as the number of shows we played on the West Coast increased, the audience got significantly smaller. Again, it's no surprise because we were total nobodies, and that was in the myspace era before youtube etc had any meaning. It was really a bit crazy to tour on another continent so early in our career, but it was worth it just for the memories. Of course, we didn't earn nearly enough to cover our expenses while we were there. But that wasn't important either. For me, one of the most impressive things was how some of those guys lived, so passionate about their music and art, even though none of them came close to what SBE later achieved. Some of these guys had recording studios and screen-printing workshops in their homes. The culture was just so different and exciting. I'll never forget walking into Tony Reed's house, which was full of old amps and equipment. After that US tour, we all returned as different people, a little more confident and very rich in memories.