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“I can’t let go,” says Richard Weiz before his 80th birthday on August 4th. Who would have expected anything else from this perfectionist, who also often kept emotional distance at 1001 award/award, “because I knew it didn’t become as good as I would have liked to have.” There is a nice photo that shows the Bear Family Records founder in 2009 when accepting the “Echo” for “outstanding contributions to music”. Wheat almost seems scared as if someone had just put a badly made Lefty Frizzell box set in his hand. “After all, there were people from industry who roughly knew what I was doing,” he commented in retrospect. The appreciations from the USA were more important. Several Grammy nominations or the WC Handy Award, which already existed in 1990 for “Howlin Wolf: Memphis Days”.
Richard Weiz: A German on Mission
The son of a Buchbinder family can trace the history of his clan in Bad Gandersheim until 1492. However, unlike at the time, Christopher Columbus did not want to subdue the new world later, but only in various archives after old, unpublished shots rummage for a beautiful Waylon Jennings box. He was over three decades in the United States for a good three months a year, also in order to be able to monitor the recordings themselves. “If the first ligaments were shit, I just ordered them again, in the hope of getting better,” says the sponsor of the Federal Cross of Merit. And how did people find this German on his mission? “There were people on my line because they would have liked to do something similar but couldn’t. And there were those who hated me because I was better than them. And my boxes did not register for Grammy because they couldn’t put on the crown themselves.”
Give and take
Just as Weize for Bear Family once z. B. was inspired by Arhoolie Records, so he later gave himself a godfather for reissue start-ups. “The type of Light in the Attic said: You, without you we would never have started.” It is “always given and take”. I wasn’t always good, but just better. The others did not have this perversion to make things reasonable. ” In the 50th year of the label, his baby Bear Family Records has long been running without the father. “It is briefly broken,” replies Weiz and refers to a work on the beginnings of German broadcasting. “4 CD’s, 70 pages of book. Great pictures, horny recordings. But who else is that?” If he went over Broadway in Nashville today, “with a picture of Hank Snow and I would ask who that is, most of them would know about what it is about.”
Obsession? Certainly.
“I made a box with 192 versions of” Lilli Marleen “, recalls Weize. How could you forget it!? Or his 6 CDs search for the “Memphis Belles” (boxing title), the women in the slipstream of Elvis, who often only see demos in the Sun Studio. “I was never interested in money,” says Weiz, “but I was also lucky. Because I was able to do what I wanted. Most of it sold well and covered what was not sold well.” As stubborn as his work, he did not forget the contributors and contributors who made it possible. Like this technician in London, who somehow turned a broken Margot Hielscher acetate a master with the entire song. “It has been tinkering with it forever. But you need such people and you also have to appreciate. Because they want to deliver something reasonable for their 300 euros and not a shit.”
“I was just interested in history”
Wheat was dependent on external expertise, for example, the jazz historian Rainer Lotz when he continued to open his bear park beyond country, blues, rock’n roll. For a box about Vietnam or the Spanish civil war, for “Black Europe: The Sounds and Images of Black People Pre 1927” or Calypso from Trinidad (“West Indian Rhythm”). “. I was just interested in history,” says Weiz, not least past that of his own country. “Gone-Beyond Recall”, a collection of Jewish music from Nazi Germany, got a sad uptake in the face of resistant anti-Semitism … “I got very bad when I did this game when I discovered this game, for which she was not annoyed”. If you look at the development today, I can’t even think about it. “
At the end of August, Richard Weiz does not have to be celebrated a bit larger after the main holiday season. Letting go a bit in between cannot hurt the jubilee.