One day at the local Salvation Army, going through dusty bins of old LPs, searching for that elusive Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass's Whipped Creme and other Delights album, I found Udo Jurgen's greatest hits! I remember listening to this scratchy album in shock! Perhaps it was innocence, perhaps ignorance but I hadn't realized rock and roll came in any form other than english! Udo Jurgen crooned to me every evening that summer! Little did I know that Germany had other musicians in their German music arsenal. When I told my sister's German exchange student friend, Astrid that I loved German Rock and Roll and that I was a big fan of Udo Jurgens, her reaction wasn't the one I expected. She laughed and laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. Well, at that moment I almost decided to fixate on another country like Spain where the people were a little less cruel! Luckily before I bought the Matador costume, Astrid came to our house and presented me with a gift: a cassette tape full of REAL german rock and roll songs. Here on this Fuji DR-I Type I Normal Position cassette tape was the wonderful music of die Prinzen and Lucielectric and for years I bopped to the pop beat of: Kuessen Verboten, Bombe, Warum Hast Du Das Getan, Schaurig Traurig, and Mädchen. When I went back to Germany in 1997, my goal was to bring back as many new German CDs as customs would allow. In the plane, crammed in my rucksack were the tapes and CDs of: Stephan Remmler, Trio, Die Toten Hosen,Die Aertzen, Mario Mueller Westernhagen, Herbert Groenemeyer, etc. German music, to me, seems to be a hybrid of punk rock and 80's bubble gum pop music, and amazingly it works.

Below I have compiled a list of my German Music albums. My hope is to provide a Beginner's list of German music so that if you, dear reader, have the desire to listen to German music, you won't need to start with Udo Jurgens. Eventually I will link them to CDNow and write litle mini-reviews of those albums listed. [sigh] If only I had motivation!