Manfred Ruerup - Tomorrow’s Gift

My name is Manfred Ruerup, I was born in June 1951 in Hamburg, Germany. I have a brother, Claus, who is 2 years older than I am. I started to take piano lessons when I was 9, or 10. Classical Piano. My brother Claus owned a few singles from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and so I started to become more and more interested in music. We listened to mostly bands from the UK like the Pretty Things, The Searchers, Remo Four and so on. Those days in 1966 it was not so easy to find these records. I bought myself a guitar, because all my favourite bands only used guitars, no piano and we started a band, my brother on drums. I was about 14 or 15. We call ourselves “The Angry Five” of course. We had 2 guitars, bass, drums and a lead singer. We played mostly during the weekends in so called “youth clubs”.

Wolfgang Trescher and Peter Grage at Star-Club Hamburg.

There was only one show on TV that was called “Beat Club”. Once a month for 45 minutes, a must see. Usually, we sit in a small coffee with a music-box and listened to the songs 10 times. After that we went into the rehearsal room and tried that song. So we played Top 40 songs. My brother had to go to the army, and we found a new drummer. Gerd Petzke. We got together with Bernd Kiefer on the bass guitar. We started to play more Soul music. Songs from Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding. Black music was cool. I`ve switched from the guitar to the organ. Bernd Kiefer introduced us to a female singer, Ellen Meyer. So we had 2 singers, a guy and a girl. Our guitarist Andreas started his own blues band and Carlo Karges joined us on guitar.

Uschi Nerke.

Tomorrow’s Gift circa: early 70’s.

Then a friend of us, who was a bit older convinced us to change our name from “The Angry Five” to “Tomorrow`s Gift”. He found the name on a science fiction book written by Edmund Copper, which includes a number of short stories. Carlo Karges and myself started to compose our first own titles together. Usually Carlo played a few chords or a little melody. Then I picked up the idea and tried some chords on the organ. There was no smart-phone or mobile recorder so we played the ideas over and over again in the rehearsal room. Wolfgang Trescher joined us, a flute player. Obviously, the band Jethro Tull had introduced a flute within a rock band. Our rehearsal room had been in the basement of a youth club.

Zabba Lindner.

Ellen Meier.

Bernd Kiefer.

Then we changed to a Club on St.Pauli (Cotton-Club, a Jazzclub), within the famous red light district of Hamburg. Just around the corner of the famous club, the Star-club. We did rehearse after school in the afternoon before the Jazzclub opened. After that we went to the Star-club every night. 2 bands played there on weekday`s and 3 bands on the weekend. So we watched Remo Four, Spooky Tooth, Vanilla Fudge, Black Sabbath (Earth, at that time), Rory Gallagher and so on. As I was 16 or 17 years old, I had to leave at 10pm or bribe the waiter with 50 pence. These star-club bands did influenced us a lot. In 1969 Tomorrow`s Gift played in the Starclub as well. We played all over Germany including one month in Fürth/Nürnberg in front of US soldiers. During this time we started to play more and more our own songs during a set but still some songs from Jefferson Airplane (White Rabbit) Richie Haven (Indian Rope Man) and so on. The second singer left the band.

G.F. Pfanz cut the band’s record.

The late legend Conny Plank.

We had a gig somewhere in Hamburg. After the gig, we got introduced to a person from the record company Miller International, Mr.Douglas. He offered us a contract with Miller International, for one record and paid us 10.000,-- DM as advanced payment, if I remember it correct. A lot of money for us. They did choose the producer, Jochen Petersen. They trusted him as he has worked for Miller International before. We drove to Dieter Dierks Studio nearby Cologne in a little village called Stommeln. His mother had a grocery store and you had to walk through that store to the backyard to get to the studio. In the following years he became very successful with the Scorpions.

Dieter was a person full of energy when he was sitting on his large mixing desk and recorded us on a 24 Track Tape machine. He pushed us during the overdubs over and over again and he was really funny. A very nice guy. This was completely new to us. None of us had ever worked in a studio before. Multitrack recording was opening a whole new world for us. They had a 16 Track Recording-machine. Most of the songs we played already live on our concerts, that means that the backings went fast. But then we started to do the overdubs.

After we finished the recordings and overdubs for 12 songs in about a week, Ellen Meier, Bernd Kiefer and Wolfgang Trescher left the studio and went home to Hamburg. Carlo, the guitarist and myself worked on more overdubs. After that we wanted to leave as well. Jochen Petersen, the producer reminded us, that it should become a double album and we had not enough material. On top of that, he insisted that the record company, Miller International, had paid 30.000, -- DM as advanced payment. Well, we only received 10.000 of that. We tried to reach Mr. Douglas on the phone, but he was gone. The company could not get him on the phone neither and we never saw him again.

So here we are, we needed to do another song. Dieter Dierks Grandpa had an old Saxophone upstairs which Dieter picked up. We started to do a Jam-session and Jochen Petersen played the Saxophone on this. The song is called Sandy Concert and it is 8.08 minutes long, enough for the double album. After the album had been released, we continued to play gigs. Open-Air festivals just begin to show up. We had a little tour as opener for Spooky Tooth in Germany and Austria. I think we sold about 5000 records but I don’t know, because we never received any figures and no additional royalties. Then a lot of things had changed. The guitar player Carlo Karges left the band.

He went to a group named Novalis. Later he went to play with Nena wrote the lyrics for “99 Luftballons” and was the only one from us who became famous. Wolfgang, the flute player began to study medicine and the drummer Gert moved to the UK. A new drummer came on board: Wolfgang Lindner, who called himself “Zappa” because he was a big fan of Frank Zappa. We found a new producer: Uwe Nettelbeck. He also produced “Faust”. He found an empty school on the countryside, 5 km distance from “Faust”. This was in 1971/72. His original idea was that Faust was experimental music and Tomorrow`s Gift should become more pop and commercial.

But we started to become experimental too, did a lot of jamming as a trio with some Jazz and Freejazz influence and Uwe Nettelbeck lost his interest in us. In Hamburg we found a new producer, Wilken F. Dincklage. He shared his apartment with Conny Plank. Conny became our recording engineer at “Goodbye Future”. Plank did, Kraftwerk, Neu, Cluster, Eurythmics and a lot of so-called Krautrock Bands. He was a giant and really great to work with. Most names of the Titles on the album came from him, like “Wienersatz, Jazzi Jazzi, Didden for Dunden”. On “Allerheiligen” you can hear me using a typical Mike Ratledge sound. Softmachine did influence us a lot.

The seventies were crazy with a lot of drugs and freaky stuff. All the musicians tried all kind of new things, new influences, new styles. We listened to 12-tone music as well as to Jazz and Worldmusic. We were also influenced by Frank Zappa which you can hear on “Jazzi Jazzi”. Very often we started concerts without knowing what we will play tonight. So the songs on the album helped us live on stage to use certain chords and structures. The album was not very successful. Tomorrow's Gift metamorphosed into the Release Music Orchestra. We moved to a large farmhouse about 100 km north of Hamburg and started to work with former drug addicts who had to be clean in order to play within the band, the Release Music Orchestra, but that is a different story. Release Music Orchestra did 5 albums with different musicians.

Release Musik Orchestra in Hamburgs “Onkel Po”, Wolfgang Thierfeld.

After that I played with the drummer and singer Carsten Bohn, first in his band Denis, after that in his band Carsten Bohn`s Bandstand. Finally the Jazz and the Rock was blown away by punk and New Wave. Beginning of the 80’s I’ve played with Inga Rumpf, a local famous singer. She started with Carsten Bohn the band “Frumpy” in the early 70’s. After that I’ve started a music software company with my friend Charly Steinberg. Steinberg software had a big influence on how music is produced all over the world till today. In 2022 I still make music in my home studio. Everything technical is possible these days, I love it. My message: Follow your heart, it takes you everywhere.

Thanks for reading this,

Manfred

Dakota Brown