So there she is in the tram, tugging at her blouse. On the phone with mom about the roast pork tomorrow at noon. “It can get late today,” she says. Because she’s on her way to him. “He hoit to you, like a storm-proof tree,” sings the Gampe. But is this the future or an illusion? She probably doesn’t know that herself: “And you dream of something like love, in the 19 tram.” Coming from Pasing, the 19 runs through the heart of the city – “In the direction of Laimnaus”, sings Reinhard Gampe. It’s the magic of his songs that you can grasp them, they have places, stories lie behind them, even if he only hints at them. “Tiny House Blues” is called Gampes on his own label released new album. He has been making music for a long time, in 2017 it was released by the Munich label Trikont “Huba Luba”, an album that, in its own way, reminded Trikont of the early days: with a solid proletarian consciousness, Gampe sang about work in many of the songs. A poet with dirty paws.
This time the title song begins with introverted dancing drums and a trumpet circling around itself. “Tiny House Blues” – a song about the centrifugal forces of life that push people apart. Where one then dares to set off again, on foot in the direction of Milan, and the other stays seated – at the window of the small apartment: “down in the Au”. No pear tree can be seen from this window.
Musical partner at Gampe’s side for years has been drummer Evert van der Wal, a professional who has played with many in his life and whom Gampe affectionately calls “the Dutchman”. This time Van der Wal took care of the sound design as musical director and made Gampe the singer. Division of labor that works and allows a nice variety to grow: from the gypsy brass rocker “Mala Figura” to the Heurigen farewell number “Wasserfall”.
With the hammer he knocks around in the engine compartment of the togetherness
Gampe drove to Vienna in a good-humored up-tempo rocker, and before Holzkirchen something jerked in the engine: “There’s something out of sync,” says the singer. This also applies to the relationship with the person sitting next to him. One immediately trusts him to tighten the screws of love with a ten key and to tenderly tap around with a hammer in the engine compartment of togetherness. Of course that’s the old man’s humor, but it gets to the core of the album. After a certain age, it’s natural to fall out of time. A poor sod and old white man is only who does not recognize that. Reinhard Gampe also made an album about it – about the passage of time, the rising memory and the boys of yesterday who suddenly talk like their own fathers.
“Old men, new times” is the name of the number that Gampe originally wanted to make the title song. To the shuffle beat, the electric guitar heaves through the verses: “Export shows greatness / Koana asks about the dead in the valley / Say, do you really want to know / Des san de Raucher von Reval”. You can hear them, their drinking with beer, their outdated jokes, their long-held opinions. At second glance, this is very finely drawn, right up to the full ashtray. Reval still knows Gampe from the time at the construction site, when people fetched snacks and cigarettes during the lunch break: Reval and Salem were the labor brands. Gampe doesn’t look through the window from the outside, he sits at the table: “You can gossip about this and that, but then I think you have to put yourself in the center, otherwise it becomes accusingly boring.”
Such a song creates its own reality
In the finish of his dialect you can still clearly hear the Upper Palatinate. He comes from Regensburg, where he started studying German, theater studies. Found an excuse in Munich to stop. Became a graphic artist. And has always enjoyed driving trucks. Today he drives an outside broadcast vehicle to sporting events for a media company. The goal is to remain independent. Having a lot of time, in the evening in the hotel or on production. For thoughts and songs. He now lives in Wasserburg and enjoys the short distance to the big city. He calls his songs musical-social sculptures. It is no coincidence that Joseph Beuys’ concept of art appears there. The core of the Gampe sound is still palatable pub blues rock, in the most powerful moments as heavy as zztop, in the subtle ones tending towards Dylan and the wide world of Americana. But never self-referentially hermetic.
“Old men, new times”: Gampe’s musical partner has been drummer Evert van der Wal (above) for years.
(Photo: Reinhard Gampe)
Of course, some who have heard his album have complained that you often don’t immediately understand what he’s singing about, he says. That sounds a bit questioning. But such a song is not an explanatory piece about reality, but creates its own reality and helps to build life. The wistful waltz “Red Moon” is such a case. Inspired by his mother’s story about a friend and her love for a GI. You don’t have to know that to feel the brief happiness and farewell.
Gampe is already thinking about the next project, a text-sound album with “Tales from the precariat”, just like they found him through his mother, for example. He is 61 now. And also broods over his father. At that time, he often got together with him politically. Today he feels sorry for some things because he didn’t see the pain that the war brought to the generation before him. Sepia-toned photos have found their way into the booklet of his current album. He found the cover picture, circus dromedaries getting out of a train wagon, from an art dealer in Wasserburg, the rest comes from family albums. The people in the pictures are no longer alive. But something remains. A photo, a word, a sound.