In 1982, the loudspeaker of the orange record player with the beautiful name Mr. Hit rumbled: “Pfiat di Mama, pfiat di Papa, let me know, because it works for me now”, “I’ll sit on my party bag and drive no a little goodbye!” The weird rock number with the beautiful title “Familienlem” was the first song on the record “Negamusi” by the legendary Bavarian blues rock band Sparifancaland by then it had long been one of the classics of the genre.
Sparifankal, that’s the old Bavarian term for a slightly over the top and very crazy version of the Prince of Hell that you can’t really take seriously. And since 1972, the band Sparifankal was, so to speak, Carl-Ludwig Reichert’s predominant form of musical expression. The guitarist and singer was one of the inventors of Bavarian dialect rock and blues, and he had previously appeared as a dialect poet together with Michael Fruth under the pseudonym Benno Höllteufel.
However, his poetry was miles away from the verses of the much better known Helmut Zöpfl. Rather, they were avant-garde, anarchist poems that were more reminiscent of the great Austrians HC Artmann or Ernst Jandl. A completely different Bavaria was shown here, a much wilder and freer one than the CSU allows. At that time, Carl-Ludwig Reichert lived with the other Sparifankal musicians in a country commune on the Leitnerhof in Kreuzpullach, and the songs they played were called “Dees Land is koid”, “Dabraun Baaz”, but also “I mechd di gean amoi nackad seng”.
The laconic, insidious thing was his thing all his life. Hence perhaps his great love for the blues, whose most outstanding representatives and classical canon he studied intensively. Early on he had videos and DVDs sent to him from the USA with concert recordings of the blues greats, which even in America only circulated among special nerds. A certain cheerful melancholy, which tackles the perils of life with humor, is inherent in the blues. And she also went very well with Carl-Ludwig Reichert. He discovered the blues at the tender age of twelve or 13, he later said when he visited his aunt in Zurich.
And there, in the Afrikana jazz club, there was a black bar pianist who occasionally played the blues in the afternoons when there was nobody else but little Carl-Ludwig. The pianist was Champion Jack Dupree, one of the greats of piano blues. But at the time, hardly anyone in Europe was aware of that. Later, as Reichert music moderator, among other things for the ignition of Bayerischer Rundfunk (and stayed for 41 years), he interviewed Dupree and told the anecdote in his typical, idiosyncratic way.
Born and raised in Ingolstadt, Reichert was a rebellious spirit from an early age – at least as far as the intellect was concerned. Although undoubtedly a genius himself, the cult of genius was completely foreign to him, as many collective works bear witness to. His first major book publication was, for example, “The Ducks – Psychogram of a Family” in 1970 under the pseudonym Grobian Gans; Reichert wrote the sociological parody together with Michael Czernich and Ludwig Moos. With Herbert Kapfer he wrote “Overthrow in Munich” about writers in the Soviet Republic, and with Hans Well about the Biermösl Blosn he translated Asterix into Bavarian. As a soloist, Reichert, who studied classics and literary studies, not only wrote popular monographs on the blues (of course!) and folk music for the Deutsche Taschenbuch-Verlag, but also biographies on Frank Zappa and the Ingolstadt author Marieluise Fleißer. He always found unusual approaches that nobody else found. And despite his amazing knowledge, he always refrained from peddling facts. Only sometimes did he hint that he could if he wanted to… But that never happened without an ironic glow in his eyes.
Between and after all the radio shows and books there was always music, sometimes with the band Wuide Wachl and later also with Sparifankal 2. Reichert was denied great success, but strictly speaking he never aimed for that, even with the first Sparifankal version. Basically, making music was fun enough for him. Unfortunately, the beautiful line from the “Family Lem” quoted at the beginning has now come true: “I seil’ mi ob, because I’ve got it now!” Carl-Ludwig Reichert died this Monday evening at the age of 77.