Dear friends!
We were very surprised to recieve your letter, for up until now we have recieved hardly any response to our music from overseas. The main reason for this is our trouble with the record buisness over here who have showed little interest in releasing our records in foreign countries. We have recently signed a new contract with Warner Bros. and are hoping for more support from them than we have had so far.
While reading your magazine and seeing what outstanding programs you're broadcasting daily, we again realised how backward the German music scene is. We are extremly grateful for your acceptance and support of which he knew nothing so far. We are great fans of American groups like the Grateful Dead, Mahavishnu, Loggins and Messina etc... ,but we never dared to believe that anyone in the US had acknowledged our existence. We are honoured to hear about this from you. Now to answer your questions.
QI.Musical background of the group and experiences? Mani Neumeier our drummer played free form jazz in Switzerland and Germany for many years until he decided to take one more step toward musical freedom and founded Guru Guru Groove ( as they used to be called) together with Uli Trepte on bass. The guitarist Ax Genrich joined the group in 1970 and has played On all four records. He had preiviously played with numerous Rock-groups in Berlin and W Germany. Two weeks ago a new bass player joined Guru Guru. His name is Hans Hartman (and he's been on the European Jazz-scene for many years and is known to be one of the best bass men around. We are extremely happy to be together with him now, and expect many new changes to come soon, thanks to his musical ingenuity. The strongest experience that this group has had next to Hendrix was a visit by American Traditional Indians for two weeks during the spring of this year. Besides the infinite spiritual gifts, the group was given the rhythm the Indian Ghost Dance once given to the Indians by the great Vovoka. We will include this dance of friendship with the good-willing people of the Turtle-Island, on our forthcoming L.P. which will be released this fall. We are thankful to our Indian friends for this valuable gift.
Q2. Have you ever played outside of Germany? Plans for U.S.tour? Due to the fact that we do not have a manager, we have had little experience in playing foreign Countries. We have been to Switzerland, Holland and France and have hopes for a tour in England this Fall. We have had very friendly and warm-hearted response s whereever we have played but we have never been on a well organised tour covering an entire country excerpt for Germany. We don't yet plan to tour in the States because we don't have the ways or means to do it but we're sure hoping that one of these da ys this wish will come true.
Q3. Influenced by Hendrix? Yes! He sure WAS the only music we listened to besides our own for about two years. we drank up everything he had to give and that was a lot of drink! We have aIso listened to everything from Jazz to Psychedelic and country and Rock and all the stuff. .
Q4. How much recording freedom,overdubbing? Release in the U.S.? He have all the recording freedom and creativness that we can pull out of ourselves. But so far we've had no real producer and engineer to help us bring out more than we already know. There Are few qualified and experienced record-people over here and no body really cares. We do some plabacks with guitar which is needed with a trio but not more than we consider absolutely neccesary. We play everything that we put on records live as well. Some people here are always complaining that our live performances are better than the records. We like to consider this a compliment but still we're working hard to get better studio productions. We would love to have our records released in the US. Besides living a good and happv life, we still suffer from great financial difficulties ( don't know how to pay the rent). By the way we live in the country outside of Highdelberg in a small village between mountains and forests,in an area called the "Odenwald" or Forest of Odes, together with our roadies and friends.
Q5. What is Oxymoron?
It's a word we use to describe dope that's no good or just anything that
pretends to be good for you, looks good, smells good, is bad and turns
you down. We've seen alot of stuff like that around here, you probably
seen it too.
