Review: Rock-O-Rama Records: The Outrageous Story Of The Bizarrest Music Label Emerging From The Punk Movement

Rock-O-Rama Records: The Outrageous Story Of The Bizarrest Music Label Emerging From The Punk Movement by Björn Fischer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brutal vomit

Until 1983 it was only OHL with ROR, who somehow had strange lyrics and were politically controversial, but they always talked themselves out of it by saying that they were simply neutral and didn't want to be pushed to one political extreme. We hadn't noticed any parallel failures of other bands in our area. Egoldt wasn't present during the recordings; we weren't there for his 'fantastic' mixing session. The result came as a surprise in the post. The ROR sound was generally shit, and BV sounded particularly crappy of all the bands. Maybe he mixed it himself, or the mixer must have used his typical ROR records style.

...

We didn't go to Egoldt's record shop, we didn't have the time, Max had to go back to his job in Allgäu. We had been customers of the ROR mail-order company until the day we received the Brutal Verschimmelt LP. We were horrified by the cover motif with the cleaver skull and the monster animal, which was smeared by us because we didn't like Egoldt's grotty cover. The collage we submitted for it, painstakingly made in a snippet layout-anti-war images of torn, mutilated war victims - was probably too political for him, and I never got it back. The collage also had an appropriate title, but I don't remember it. In the end, Egoldt did what he wanted without any consultation. All texts with left-wing political content were also omitted from the text sheet of his production. We were absolutely furious about the high-handedness and the unannounced 'surprise' and immediately added an extra sheet with a statement and the omitted texts to our 100 pieces of payment in kind...

M.a.f.rrr 24

"When we arrived in Cologne, we received the first setback from Egoldt when he drastically rejected the suggestion to call the LP Bomben über Deutschland [Bombs over Germany], arguing that otherwise people would think we were 'Neos' [Neo-Nazis] and that could damage the reputation of his label. Egoldt said it was very worrying that Karstadt [a big German department store chain] didn't want to sell ROR records. On top of that we had to change one of our titles ('Ficken' ['Fucking']) because Egoldt also thought it was too harsh, his suggestion ('Emanzipation ['Emancipation']) seemed too ridiculous to us, which made him angry". (Band statement in Anti System zine 1983).

Neos

The later Rock-O-Rama label band Brutal Attack, for example, was mentioned positively as a punk group in an early issue of the German punk zine Der Aktuelle Mülleimer, and their bassist made it onto the cover of the first Punk And Disorderly LP compilation. The band eventually found the punk movement increasingly commercial and hippie-like; they felt more at home with the skinheads.

"Early British punks deliberately used Nazi devotional material to annoy and provoke their parents and grandparents", recalls Thomas from Hamburg's A.d.s.W. zine, "it had nothing to do with politics. The fact that this was adopted by the West German punks, of course, shows their youthful lack of reflection and their British attitude; I don't exclude myself from this at all, I also went around with an Iron Cross (inherited from my grandfather, by the way) - it's obvious that this led to applause from irritating quarters when some pensioners suddenly praised me for my short hair and visible Iron Cross... Becoming a skinhead in West Germany was a fashion among (former) punks, at first apolitical, but from 1981/82 with a clear, at first provocative right-wing tendency, before it became visibly and tangibly unpleasant especially for the remaining punks! In 1982 I could walk past a horde of skins from Hamburg and Frankfurt/Main with dyed green and black hair without being made fun of, because most of them had been punks before - a year later this was absolutely unthinkable, because many hooligans who had not been punks before had now joined them. And from then on it became really dangerous, not only at concerts, but in general 'on the street' ...

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...Egoldt continued to pay for the studio time for his productions, in the case of White American Youth (W.A.Y.) it was 1,372 s for five days. In his book Romantic Violence, a late reckoning with his own political past, W.A.Y. singer Christian Picciolini recounts his encounter with Egoldt during royalty negotiations for the 1992 LP Walk Alone: "I showed up without an appointment to Rock-O-Rama headquarters in Brühl where I dropped in unannounced on owner Herbert Egoldt, a round, jolly old man who I quickly realized wasn't even a racist. Seemed he didn't give a damn about much of anything but making money. He was a capitalist pure and simple. As he led me into his office, I met his shallow eyes with a steely stare, letting him know I was onto him. He'd pay my band album sales royalties, never mind that Rock-O-Rama was widely known as a non-paying label. I would be the exception to his rule. I'd lead the way for him to start paying the bands he'd fleeced for years. Slime ball. He may have given us a platform to promote our message, but he'd be giving us our hard-earned money, too, if I had anything to say about it. Not for a lack of trying, I never got a dime from Herbert or the label. His bulky warehouse goons made sure of that. But I did manage to leave with a small box of about thirty various white power CDs...

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