five fold shade. stuttgart kraut 1969. precursors of exmagma and coevals of the dauner posse.

stuttgart. southwestgermany. 1969. three or four or five schoolboys got down on their knees to worship jimi hendrix. and though they came to grief coming up to their goddess they invented a warship of their own: the five fold shade. loud kraut, bloody botchers, illuminated.

the stuttgart sixties scene was much wilder than you would dare to expect. we had our own little reeperbahn, where striptease bars were closed because beat clubs were more profitable. if you read in eddie shaw's book "black monk time" how and why the monks incidentally invented feedback here in the colobri bar, you know what i'm talking about. local groups hardly ever played downtown in the red light district, but they ruled at the outskirts. while the average stuttgart sound of the suburbs was tamer than we tend to remember (let's face it: it was the same everywhere. beatles, hollies, beach boys etc. had a lot more followers than the tough guys.), a handful of r&b-nuts could really raise the roof. the pretty things-, who- and hendrix-influenced five fold shade were mindblowing. too bad, we don't have recordings from their early days...

they got together in 1966 and the names of most of the very young founding members are gone with the wind (andy, thomas and axel: their first names were not completely lost in the process of growing old). the bass player at least was andy goldner, who later was in the experimental kraut band exmagma and, by the late 70's, in the proto-squattering fuckin' gute bürgerband. the tape we received from andy was recorded during the very last live date of the band in 1969 or 1970.

memories of who played and where it happened are more than cloudy, maybe it was tommy balluff (another future ex-exmagmanian) playing the organ, as the band never had a steady keyboardist in the line-up, but the 1999 revival concert had three (!) guys called tommy or tom or thomas, so most likely he was not. style had changed remarkably towards psychedelicundergroundprogressivekraut or whatever you like to label it, but the raw power, inspite of the relatively poor sound quality, is still there. on first hearing i started to sing along to "everyday", cause i thought it was their arrangement of "tv eye". but andy assured me that they knew nothing about the stooges in those days. anyway, take a listen and draw your own conclusions. (oh: and: the connection to the wolfgang dauner stuttgart posse you might want want to [not] dismantle your selves...)

now you are about to listen to the four tracks that have survived on second generation copies of long lost tapes, all converted to mp3, 256 kbps and all downloads will start immediately. the first three tracks probably are from 1969, the fourth seems to be a demo recording originating from some two years ealier.

the five fold shade:

• mary jane is coming
• happy (every) day
• girl loves me
• hush