Intuitive Music

Cosmic Jokers featuring Timothy Leary

Founded by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser in1973, Cosmic Jokers was the most representative kosmiche rock German act, characterized by the use of phuturistic sci-fi sounds, psychedelia, and galactic atmosphears.

The origins of the Cosmic Jokers spin around the figure of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, a German music journalist who had wrote a number of books on 60’s psychedelic music, like a biography of Frank Zappa and “De Nieuwe Pop Muziek” (The New Pop Music) in 1970. Kaiser replaced Jurgen Schmeisser as a manager of the German psychedelic and folk rock label Pilz (mushroom), which was a subsidiary of BASF. During Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s management, the label released the works of new German bands such as Popol Vuh, Hoelderlin, Emtidi and Broselmaschine.

After the Pilz experience, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser decided to start a new label in Berlin called Ohr (ear), which was owned by Metronome Records, and he launched his career as a music producer. Kaiser’s figure was decisive for the existence of am autonomous German music product, and he was aware of this fact as he explained: “In 1970 there were no German record companies interested in German music. We showed the German People that they can trust their own music.” (Mojo magazine, April 2003)

Ohr records became an important platform for the German rock music, which released some of the early works of German bands like Tangerine Dream, Guru Guru, Ash Ra Tempel, Embryo, Birth Control, Emtidi, Wallenstein, Amon Duul and Mythos. The beginnings of Ohr records were difficult since they have to deal with the complex situation in the country since only the labour exchange was allowed to arrange work for other people. Kaiser remembers about the meager situation of the music industry in Germany at the time: “When we started there was no audience for German groups in Germany. The business was controlled by British and American groups. In Germany it is illegal to be a group’s manager. After three weeks of starting Ohr I got asked to go to the government office and they said, ‘You do something which is not allowed. If you go on you have to pay 30,000 marks fine”. (Mojo magazine, April 2003)

Such complex situation was that the friction between the people in the industry reached the media when, in 1971, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was protagonist himself of one of the most shocking and hilarious moments in the history of the German music. It was during a live debate on the German WDR TV about the German music industry featuring Nikel Pallat (manager of Ton Steine Scherben), Conny Veit (Gila), Bodo Albes (manager of Frumpy), Wolfgang Hamm, Hans G.Helms and Heinz-Klaus Metzger. After Kaiser and Pallat got into an argument about the capitalism in the german industry, Pallat took out an axe he had hidden under his jacket and started hitting the table provoking the stampede in the participants, then he kept some microphones in his pocket. At that point the TV channel stopped the airing of the show.

In 1971, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was the architect of one of the most curious experiments in the history of German music when he joined in the same team Ash Ra Tempel and the American psychologist and writer Timothy Leary, whose ideas about the spiritual benefits of the LSD shocked the universities and put him in the eye of the storm of the late sixties American countercultural movement. Leary was very popular for having coined the classic hippy phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and for appearing at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in in New York singing “Give Peace A Chance”. He was also an important influence to other rock artists such as the Moody Blues and the Who, and he was beforehand in touch with Brian Barritt, with whom he had experimented with heroin claiming that they could communicate telepathically.

Timothy Leary started having problems with the law in 1965 when he declared himself responsible of an accusation on her daughter for crossing from Mexico into the United States with marijuana. Consequently he was convicted of possession under the marijuana tax act and sentenced to 30 years in jail. In 1969, the marijuana tax act was declared unconstitutional, and Leary’s conviction was put down, but later in 1970 he was again convicted for the same charges and sentenced to jail, being assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison. In prison, Leary created a psychological profile to make the authorities believe he was incapable to represent any risk by faking the psychological tests that he had wrote himself many years ago. In the night of September 12th 1970, Leary scaped from prison, supported by the militant Yippie group The Weatherman and Richard Nixon described him as “the most dangerous man in the world”. Timothy Leary an his wife exiled to Algeria with a fake passport in the name of McNellis and disguised with a bald head. They later moved to Switzerland, the birthplace of LSD, where he got in touch with the cosmic music scene after Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, from the Ohr label, would fly to meet the man.

Kaiser had been in fact trying to contact for a while the beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg to get him involved in his projects but he had no luck. Later, Ash Ra Tempel’s Hartmut Enke did the same trip to meet Leary with the idea of working out a concept based on a map of the stages of conscience of the mind which Leary and Barritt had traced under the name of “the seven steps to a better karma of consciousness”. This was the inspiration for the album “Seven Up”. Eventually the rest of the band moved to Switzerland to record the new album with Leary at Sinus Studios in Munstergasse, Bern. The story tells how, just the same as a Beatles’ friend did in their tea, Timothy Leary’s son-in-law, Dennis Martino, dropped some LSD on a bottle of 7 Up drink and passed to the band without telling so. Leary also contributed in the album with some vocals, they said he could sing better than anybody else in the band.

During their stay in Switzerland, the whole crew moved to a farm in the mountains near Bern where they spent a several days tripping on acid and allegedly improvising some sort of sex orgies, though there are no records of the members of Ash Ra Tempel involved in. Bryan Barritt did and he can recall: “I remember that there was a lot of legs! Ten people or something like that, all fucking at random, moving on to one another, all out of our skulls. I got the blame for that.” (Mojo magazine, April 2003). Timothy Leary was also later involved in other projects for Ohr records’ chairman Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, like the later Cosmic Jokers albums. In 1974, Timothy Leary was detained by Interpol agents at an airport in Kabul, Afghanistan and he was extradited to the United States, where he was imprisoned again and later released in 1976. He died on 31 May 1996 of prostate cancer.

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettmann

After the “Seven Up” experiment Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser gave birth to a new brain-child: the label Kosmiche Musik. For some people Kosmiche Musik was a geniality that expanded the boundaries of the modern music and took a few steps ahead of it’s time, for other people it was just the result of having a bunch of tripping hippies improvising, and somebody pointed that it was just Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s way to raise his ego and recover the worship from his wife that Timothy Leary had stolen. Kaiser’s plan was simple and original at the same time, he reunited a collective of artists under the name of Kosmiche Kuriere (cosmic couriers) and invited them for a series of improvised jams, also called “acid parties” by some, which were recorded between February and May 1973 at Dieter Dierk’s studio in Stommeln. The collective involved Manuel Göttsching of Ash Ra Tempel and his girlfriend Rosi Müller, Klaus Schulze, Dieter Dierks, Jürgen Dollase, Harald Grokopf, and Kaiser’s wife, the former fashion designer and co-producer Gille Lettmann. Timothy Leary had also joined with vocals. The result was a free fusion of psychedelic rock and space rock and electronic music.

Ash Ra Tempel’s guitarist Manuel Göttsching, whose early discography was released on Kaiser’s labels, has a different memory of those recordings: “The drugs had actually little to do with the music (nor with the label), but they were present, as they were present at this time in general. I speak of marihuana/hashish, which were very popular in those days. Everyone under 30 smoked this and that, the elders did so years ago, and still the rivers flow… Drugs have been and will be a part of life, not necessarily because one is a musician, a painter, an architect, or a psylocybinien? They were around and took a great part of my time, but there was another drug that I fell in love with: “MUSIC”.

A year later, Kosmiche Musik released four albums with the resulting material of these sessions, all of them under the name of The Cosmic Jokers, including “The Cosmic Jokers”, “Planeten Sit In”, “Galactic Supermarket”, “Sci Fi Party” and “Gilles Zeitschiff”. All of the tracks featured the correspondent authors, but the musicians involved were not noticed about any of these releases and got no payment or benefit from any of the productions. It was precisely Manuel Göttsching himself who discovered the scam when he heard by chance one of the albums in a Berlin record shop and got absolutely shocked. After these many bands from the label such as Popol Vuh left the company, and Tangerine Dream refused to release their forthcoming “Atem ” album on the label to find out that Kaiser had already licensed it to the Polydor label in the UK without their knowledge. Klaus Schulze, who was involved in the “Kosmiche Kourier” sessions, took legal action against Kaiser, provoking the withdrawel of all of the Cosmic Jokers’ albums from the market. Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser lost the case in court and eventually the musicians got their rights back. Then the Ohr and Kosmische Musik labels closed and Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser apparently disappeared from the country and quit the music industry for the rest of his life. Manuel Göttsching, who was one of the most involved musicians in Kaiser’s projects, has a different version of the story: “It’s probably one of Klaus D. Mueller’s (Klaus Schulze’s manager) myths about this story of the Cosmic Jokers Sessions. Of course I knew about the releases, of course I had contracts before, and I received royalties, even an advance. This all was very little money, but that should be no argument to spread around rumours like this. You can say many things about the producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser but I have no reason of saying him to have acted incorrectly so far.”

When Stephan Kaske, from the German band Mythos, was asked if he had any news on Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettmann he said: “Not really. After they had blown away their brains with dope they lost their credibility, reputation and at last their music and imperium. Dieter Dierks got all this in ‘78 or ‘79 as far as I know. Now his organizations (i.e. Venus Records) are managing the labels and pay my licenses. In 1980 “Starmaiden” (Gille Lettmann) wrote me a letter with extreme confused “cosmic” stuff. I answered her letter shortly to wish her good luck (honestly), but my letter returned unopened. “Sorry, Mr. Kaske. I cannot open this letter addressed to Gille Lettmann. Please send it again to “Starmaiden”, she had written on the envelope. Anything left to say ?!?.”