Klaus Dinger (24 March 1946 – 21 March 2008) was a German musician and songwriter most famous for his contributions to the seminal krautrock band Neu!. He was also the guitarist and chief songwriter of new wave group La Düsseldorf and briefly the percussionist of Kraftwerk.
1946–1971: The No, The Smash, and Kraftwerk
Klaus Dinger was born in Scherfede, Westphalia, Germany, to Heinz and Renate Dinger on 24 March, 1946. He was their first child.
Before he was a year old, his parents moved from the town, which had been badly damaged by an Allied siege at the end of World War II, to Düsseldorf.
In 1956 he attended Görres Gymnasium School for the first time. During his time there he was part of an a cappella choir, which he had to leave when his voice broke. He was part of the school swing band (as a drummer) despite having no prior musical experience. He left the school with a Mittlere Reife (German equivalent of leaving school at 16), later accusing the school of misinterpreting his "free mindedness" as misbehaviour.
After leaving school in 1963 Dinger began to learn carpentry. He also became more interested in music, and practiced drums with spare bits of wood until he could afford a drum kit. In 1966 he formed a band with friends Norbert Körfer, Lutz Bellman and Jo Maassen: The No. The band was influenced largely by English rock acts such as The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. The band sent a demo tape to EMI but the record label never replied. He also worked in a free jazz ensemble, making what he later called "noise". During a concert in Düsseldorf with this ensemble, he spotted Florian Schneider, with whom he would later work in Kraftwerk, sitting in the audience (Dinger said that Schneider "Had a face I will never forget"). Schneider was at that time part of a free jazz ensemble called Pissoff fronted by another future collaborator Eberhard Kranemann.
In 1966 Dinger also started studying architecture at Krefeld. However, in 1968 he took 6 months leave, after experiencing LSD for the first time, in order to become more proficient as a drummer. In 1969 The No split up and he joined cover band The Smash and began touring southern Germany. During this period he realised that he could make a living as a musician alone, and never returned to his architecture studies.
In Summer 1970 Dinger received a telephone call from Ralf Hütter. Hütter was bandmates with Florian Schneider in Kraftwerk and was three-quarters of the way through recording their debut album. Their previous drummer (Andreas Hohmann) had left to join sister-group Ibliss after only two of the album's tracks had been made. Hütter and Schneider set out to find a new drummer; in the meantime they recorded a third track without the use of a drummer.
Dinger's role would be to record the drum part for the fourth and final track: "Vom Himmel Hoch". Dinger recalls:
Having impressed both Hütter and Schneider, Dinger was installed as a permanent member of the band. The homeless drummer moved into the house of Florian's parents, Florian leaving shortly after, but Klaus was kept on as a lodger. Here he met Anita Heedman. Anita, or "Hanni", was a friend of Florian's sister (who died in 2002). Hanni would be Klaus Dinger's girlfriend for most of his time in Neu! and Kraftwerk.
After touring extensively with the band, Ralf Hütter suddenly decided that "he couldn't play anymore" and left the group. This left Schneider and Dinger without a guitarist or bass player. They toured with what Dinger called "a floating line-up" of ever changing musicians.
The line-up settled down somewhat by June 1971, and it stood as Dinger on drums, Schneider on flute and organ, Eberhard Kranemann (Florian Schneider's bandmate from Pissoff) on bass and Michael Rother on guitar, who had been poached from local band Spirits of Sound. Kranemann's talents as a bass player were not always needed and in 1972 the trio of Dinger, Schneider and Rother appeared on German TV show Beat Club.
The performance was different from the Kraftwerk style and is seen by many as a transition from that towards Neu!'s style. The track had originally been titled "Rückstoß Gondoliere", but was mis-pronounced by the television announcer as "Truckstop Gondolero" and has subsequently been known as the latter. Shortly afterwards Rother and Dinger seceded from Kraftwerk to form their own group: Neu!. Ralf Hütter returned to Kraftwerk at the request of Schneider, who was now without a guitarist or drummer. Kraftwerk would continue, recording Kraftwerk 2 at around the same time as Neu!'s debut album. The lack of a drummer would force them to pioneer the use of drum machines and electric percussion, and, in 1974, they made their chart debut with Autobahn.
In June 1971 Dinger's girlfriend moved with her family (her father, a banker, was unhappy about her being with Klaus) to Norway. Here Dinger visited her in the summer of 1971. During this holiday, Dinger recorded the "watery" sounds featuring on several of his subsequent songs (Im Glück, Lieber Honig, Gedenkminute, Lieber Honig 1981) whilst on a rowing boat with Anita. The pair would continue to see each other irregularly, and often with long intervals between meetings, through 1971, 1972 and 1973.
1971–1973: Neu! Having broken off from Kraftwerk, Rother and Dinger quickly began the recording sessions for what would become Neu!. The band was christened "Neu!" by Dinger (Rother had been against the name, preferring a more "organic" title) and a pop-art style logo was created, featuring italic capitals: NEU! Dinger later said of the logo:
The pair recorded in Star Studios in Hamburg, with the up-and-coming Krautrock producer Konrad Plank, as Dinger had with Kraftwerk. Dinger describes Conny's abilities as a "mediator" between the often disagreeing factions within the band. The band were booked into the studio for four days in late 1971, according to Dinger, the first two days were unproductive, until Dinger brought his Japanese banjo to the sessions, a heavily treated version of which can be heard on "Negativland", the first of the album's six tracks to be recorded.
It was during these sessions that Dinger first played his famous "motorik" beat. Motorik is a repeated drumbeat with only occasional interruptions, perhaps best showcased on "Hallogallo". Dinger claims never to have called the beat "motorik" himself, preferring either "lange gerade" ("long straight") or "endlose gerade" ("endless straight"). He later changed the beat's "name" to the "Apache beat" to coincide with his 1985 solo album Neondian.
Neu! sold well for an underground album at the time, according to Dinger approximately 30,000 copies were sold. In order to promote the release the record label, Brain Records, organised a tour. Ex-Pissoff frontman Eberhard Kranemann was brought in to play bass, the trio recording a "practice" jam in preparation. The recording of this would later be released as Neu! '72 Live in Dusseldorf. Only some of the tour dates allotted were ever fulfilled, Rother later saying that he felt Neu! were not a touring band and that he and Dinger were at loggerheads over performance style:
In summer 1972 Dinger and Rother went to Conny Plank's studios in Köln to record a single. Dinger later said that the record company had tried to dissuade them from making it as it was not commercially viable. Nevertheless, the single Super/Neuschnee was released. The A-Side, Super, showcased the proto-punk style that Dinger would later adopt for his band La Düsseldorf.
The following January, Neu! again entered the studio to record their second album: Neu! 2. Far more heavily produced than their debut, the first side was recorded relatively slowly in the first and second months of 1973, and was aimed more specifically at foreign markets—the opening track "Fũr Immer" was subtitled "Forever", an English translation. Brain's parent label Metronome Records licensed the Neu! albums and single to United Artists for release in Britain around this time, the first with an alternative cover featuring sleeve notes by Hawkwind's Dave Brock, hoping to mirror the success of other German bands, such as Faust and Tangerine Dream, but unfortunately sales failed to match their German counterparts.
The second side of Neu! 2 has become notorious in the music press since its release. It features various tape manipulated versions of the two tracks from the Super/Neuschnee single released the previous summer. There have been several conflicting explanations as to why this was done, the most quoted being Dinger's assertion that: "When the money ran out, I got the idea of taking the single, play around with it and put the results on side 2 of the album."
However, this has recently been contested by Rother, who claims that the second side was made to aggravate their record label, who they felt had insufficiently promoted the original release of the Super/Neuschnee single, and not as a result of financial problems. Either way, the second side of the album was poorly received by fans who thought, according to Rother, that "we were making fun of them." This issue contributed to the widening gap between Dinger and Rother, both creatively and personally. Dinger later said of the issue:
1973–1975: Neu! and La Düsseldorf Following the release of Neu! 2, Brain still expected the group to tour in support of the album, but the failure of the previous year's tour prompted Dinger and Rother to seek a new backing band and tour venues. To this end, Dinger travelled to London with his brother Thomas to try and organise a Neu! tour there. Although the visit was planned to last only six weeks or so, the Dinger brothers failed to return, staying for substantially longer. Despite this they achieved, in Dinger's words, "nothing," having met both John Peel and Karen Townshend (wife of Pete) and presented them with copies of Neu!'s debut, but - in spite of receiving an enthusiastic response from Peel, who played several tracks from the album on his BBC Radio 1 show - failed to drum up any commercial interest in the band.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Michael Rother had travelled to the famous Forst Commune, in an attempt to recruit Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster to play in an extended Neu! line-up. Rother, who unlike Dinger was interested in the Krautrock scene contemporary with Neu!, had been impressed by the track "Im Süden" from Cluster's second album Cluster II. After an initial jam between Moebius, Roedelius and Rother at Forst (captured in the track "Ohrwurm" on Harmonia's debut) Rother decided to stay at Forst and prepare a new album with Moebius and Roedelius as Harmonia, essentially abandoning his work with Dinger. Rother keeps a studio at Forst to this day.
Whilst Rother was at Forst, the Dinger brothers returned from London. Whilst in London, Dinger too had come up with a solution to Neu!'s problems, hoping to expand Neu!'s line-up to contain his brother and studio engineer Hans Lampe. Lampe had worked as Conny Plank's assistant throughout much of 1972, and was keenly interested in Neu!, having engineered Neu! 2 with Plank. Dinger began taking guitar lessons, in the hope that he would be able to take up the role of frontman in a new Neu!, with Rother on lead guitar and Thomas Dinger and Lampe both on drums: "During the recording of NEU! 2 I realized that I had done everything that I could do with drumming [...] I wanted to be more concreted and to reach more people."
In anticipation of this new line-up, the Dinger brothers and Lampe played several small concerts under the name La Düsseldorf whilst Rother remained at Forst.