Review 2023

There is certainly no other German musician who is as close to Bob Dylan as Wolfgang Niedecken. For decades, he has been shaping German-language rock music with his band BAP and as a solo musician, repeatedly engaging with the work of Bob Dylan: In 2017, Niedecken embarked on a journey in the footsteps of Bob Dylan on behalf of the TV station ARTE. Crisscrossing the USA, where he spoke with many former companions, photographers, journalists and musicians, who could competently give information about "Bob Dylan`s America" (the working title). His book is about this journey. He writes about cross connections to his own biography and the points of contact with the history of his band BAP, which has now existed for 45 years. Above all, he talks about the great influence Bob Dylan has had and continues to have on his own work as a songwriter. From his road movie-like book, written in a conversational tone, Niedecken reads selected passages and plays the songs in question. One can be curious to see whether the respective stories lead to a Dylan or a BAP song. Sometimes he even switches in the middle of the song, from English to Cologne, because there are his own cover versions of many songs. Pieces like "Songs sinn Dräume", inspired by a sentence in Dylan's autobiography "Chronicles" are also on the set list: "Songs are like dreams you try to make come true. They are like foreign lands that you travel to."

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His civil name is Christian Wesemann, he comes from Bremen-North (which he has never made a secret of to me, quite the opposite) and his jeans frock smells like his music sounds. GRILLMASTER FLASH (you can't choose your stage name, everybody knows that!) has never been too shy to drive kilometers just to play in front of 15 old punks in a porous youth center. He himself is somehow also a kind of porous youth house and this spirit of irrepressible energy, from the sticky floor after the underground concert, stinky stuffy backstage rooms, scribbled with sharpie and full of band stickers - all that is GRILLMASTER FLASH. He is the personified toast with the stadium cup, the eggy 80s rock record on the vintage turntable in the living room of the small-town house, and he is the wistful-sounding, standing chord that you love and can't get enough of. Where others try to create a tribute and homage to their favorite music and then unfortunately end up with only a half-baked persiflage rattling out of the amps, that's exactly where GRILLI has been tanking past everyone for years on a souped-up moped through cleverness and love, showing that emotions and conviction come before skills. He is obviously concerned not only with his relationship to the music itself, but to the whole framework from producing to visual appearance, picking out the most important and wacky moments in the history of rock music over the last hundred years.

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