The short version
- Schulze's official site carries a German interview from 1988 in which he talks at length about the early years.
- He says he left Tangerine Dream because he was tired of only playing drums. Running a tape at the Essen festival brought it to a head.
- Christopher Franke, who replaced him, gave up the drums six months later and started programming sequencers.
- On the first album his name was printed as Claus Schultze, with the wrong birthday. He found out after the record was already out.
He got into the band because somebody else was missing. One evening the regular drummer could not make it. The place was a club called the Magic Cave. Edgar Froese came over and asked whether he could help out, and added that there would be fifty marks in it. That was the largest sum he had ever been paid for a gig, Schulze said in 1988. The evening went well, Froese said let's stay together, and he was suddenly in Tangerine Dream.
Where the words come from
The official site presents this as a German conversation from 1988. It does not say who asked the questions or where it first appeared, only that somebody found it, transcribed it and translated it. Schulze turned 41 that August.
The beginning he describes is a student who meant to become a teacher. That required German literature, with some psychology and philosophy alongside. Music he did not study properly, and he is firm about it: he sat in on the odd lecture on experimental composition when Blacher or Ligeti happened to be in town, and he would refuse any claim that he studied music seriously.
Told to stick to the drums
He does not take the long way round on why he left. The band experimented a great deal in those days, he says, but aimlessly. At home he had a small electric organ and a small tape recorder, and he was fiddling with backwards tapes and echo on his own. What Froese wanted was one thing: you hit the drums, I play guitar.
At the Essen Song Festival, Schulze ran a tape with backwards organ on it. Froese came over and said he would not be doing that again, would he, because it was impossible. Schulze answered that he was tired of playing drums all the time.
What follows is the other half of the story. Froese brought in Chris Franke from Agitation Free, and exactly the same thing happened to him. Franke played drums for half a year, then said he did not want to play them any more and started programming sequencers. At that point Froese gave up, Schulze says. For Cyclone the band hired a drummer again, Klaus Krieger, who later made two solo albums for Schulze's IC label.
The first record with the wrong name on it
Electronic Meditation comes up in the same place. The recording was made in a small private studio on Paul-Lincke-Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg, which in fact meant one Revox tape machine, over two or three hours of playing.
Shortly after he left, the Ohr label decided to put that tape out, and by then he was busy with something else. So the name printed on the record is wrong: Claus Schultze, with a C and a t. The birthday is wrong too. He saw all of it only after somebody told him there was an album out with their recordings on it.
He has something to say about the concept printed on the sleeve as well. As he sees it, that was a promotion text. Nobody was thinking about any of it while they played; it came afterwards. Having studied a little German literature, he adds, he had to read fifty interpretations of one Goethe poem. He calls the record the first electronic punk album.
When the machines were out of reach
It was not that they did not know about the Moog. They had no cash for one. Florian Fricke had that huge Moog very early. So the way left open was to alter an electric organ or play around with amplifiers. When the smaller, less expensive EMS case appeared, they all started with that.
Germany had builders of its own. Wolfgang Palm of PPG, and Matten & Wiechers, who built instruments to order because they knew what musicians wanted. The industry was not interested yet and did not know what these people were doing, so it could not deliver the right products. His first sequencer was built for him by Matten & Wiechers. Tangerine Dream were lucky and got the big modular Moog cheap from the Hansa studio in Berlin. And in December 1975 he bought Fricke's Big Moog, the one on Moondawn.
Even after a Grand Prix in France, he adds, he still could not afford a properly good synthesizer. They were extremely expensive.
The side where he was not alone
His tone shifts when Ash Ra Tempel comes up. Space rock is a better description than new age, he says. Hawkwind-like, with guitar, bass and drums, and him on organ as well. The point was that the music had to go off, and the three of them were fully under the influence of Pink Floyd at the time, which he says plainly.
Both bands were after the same thing, something new. Ash Ra Tempel was the closer of the two in human terms. The three of them went to clubs together and talked a great deal. Manuel kept a little distance. Still, the three had a fine relationship and it showed in the music, which held together better. The first album had direction in it, he says, where Electronic Meditation had none.
Where to get it
Where to find the records in this piece. New CDs and LPs are on Amazon; older pressings and used copies are on Discogs.