fritz rau

Fritz Rau is a German concert organizer. In 1968, he got the Mothers to play in Berlin, but the concert ended in a riot.

random notes

     From: Patrick Neve (splat@darkwing.uoregon.edu)
The German concert scene is largely associated with two names.  Fritz Rau, of the concert organizers Lippmann & Rau, succeeded in getting many of the United States' largest acts to play in Germany for the first time, from the Doors to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa.
On October 16th, 1968, Fritz and Herb Cohen battled fans at a Mothers concert at the SportPalast in Berlin.  From a translation by Konrad Steiner of an article called ALL THE TOYS ARE BROKEN:

 ...and then they grabbed this big fence, like a restraining device to keep the audience away from the performers at those events.  It was made out of pipes this big around with a chain link fence in between and concrete feet.  And about thirty of them picked it up and tried to throw it on stage, which would have killed both of our drummers by pinning them against the amplifiers, you see.  So our manager Herbie and this German promoter Fritz Rau caught it in mid air and threw it back on them.

Despite this heroic act, years later Zappa would commemorate Fritz on record for all time with the song, Shall We Take Ourselves Seriously?

     From: Johannes Labisch
Frank said he'd never play in Berlin again. But Fritz Rau, talked him into come back again. "He said, if you don't like what these people were doing, you should come back and tell them"
(FZ, quoted from memmory from an interview he gave here in 1988).

     From: unknown
Part of the May 21, 1982 show (including the premiere recordings of SWTOS) is available in the "Volare" bootleg.

In his "The Poodle Bites! or Repudiating The Poodle" Mike Keneally gives us further details on this song:

[...] the song is about German promoter Fritz Rau's contention that asparagus should not be offered to just anyone backstage, causing him to throw some sort of unseemly fit, which Frank of course immortalized in song.

     From: berger@uran.informatik.uni-bonn.de (Carl Berger)
This is the story of Shall we take ourselve seriously?  It happened at the show in Köln, 21st of May 1982. (The same show where When no one was no one and But who was Fulcanelli from the Guitar album were recorded).
This is the preamble to the song by Frank Zappa on that night:

"Ok Ladies and Gentlemen, this is something special. Come up to the microphone, Peter" (A guy walks onto the stage and translated that stuff into german) "The last time we played here in Cologne, something happened after the show that was unbelievable. As you know, there is a company here in the fatherland, that promotes concerts all over the place. And the man, who runs this company, his name is Fritz Rau. We have know Fritz for a long time.  But the last time we played here, he put on a performance, that was incredible. If you can imagine, grown man, sitting in the box office at 3 o'clock in the morning, argueing, because the roadies got to eat asparagus. Now, this was so amazing, that I had to write a song about it. Tonight, Peter is going to play the featured role of Fritz Rau. Now give'em the first part of Fritz's big speech."

Peter now gave the audience an imitation of Rau's german dialect. Pretty funny that was. I transcriped that from a tape recorded that night. I was 14 years old, standing first row. One of my first concerst (after Genesis and Supertramp :) The other guy mentioned in the song, Mike Scheller, is a concert promoter as well.

Filmography:

Concerts managed: (just a few)

Links:

Additional informants:
Kristian Kier (KrKier@rocco.wupper.de)