2017-12-01
Why i liked listening to this old guy
When i was really young, i discovered musician Heino while shopping with my parents. Back then, "compact discs" were a new thing, at least for us, because we didn't have a CD player. This is why i was looking through shelves with "cassette tapes". I saw this old blonde guy with black sunglasses on the cover art standing out, and i made my parents buy it for me. Since then, i kept looking out for him, because i wasn't exposed to a lot of music, except for the tapes my parents already had, and i liked to pick things i already know.
I got my first audio CD from our landlord Manfred Camphausen in Ratingen as christmas present. It was a album from Backstreet Boys, 1996. I was around ten years old, and we still didn't have a CD player at the time, so it took me a couple of months to expose myself to a new world of music. Because i wasn't listening to radio, or liking any specific songs at all, except for German "Schlager" in form of Heino, also known as Heinz Georg Kramm.
Back then, i was already occupied with Lego bricks and Lego trains, watching TV, taking things apart, collecting things, being outdoors, doing camping in the garden, biking, and discovering new places on my own. My mother was obsessed with Tetris, but after moving to Ratingen, i had the Nintendo Game Boy to myself. And i played with RC cars from my uncle, who came from Hong Kong for three years to help in the kitchen of our restaurant, till 1996. Later, in Bonn, i had RC boats and even a RC helicopter, long before quadcopters became a thing. But i learned the hard way that some things are too costly for me to maintain. I never played like the other kids, probably because i saw how exhausting my parents worked, and i didn't understand why.
Around ten years later, in July 2007, i was visiting his coffee shop in Bad Münstereifel for the first time, together with friends from school, Melanie Jülich and Matthias Kleist. It was nothing too special, except the owner was Heino, and the decoration was targeting to fans like me. I got a piece of cake and some photos as souvenir. I already lost track of him at that time, and my music taste changed, but it was fun to warm up memories, especially with people i like.