MR. ROCKPALAST - 40 years ago PETER RÜCHEL wrote television history with the "1st Rock Night"

The inconspicuous row house under the Bayer Cross resembles a hiding place. And even inside, there is nothing to indicate that someone lives here who has spent his professional life with youth culture and rock music: no framed pictures with friends, no golden records, signed instruments or other devotional objects. Not even Billy shelves with LPs. Instead, Peter Rüchel's study is overloaded with books and magazines. Sorted by a system that only he knows. And he likes to sit in the dark or in the semi-darkness. When eclipsed strikes in the early afternoon with him in Leverkusen, it is still light. When we say goodbye two and a half hours later in pitch-black darkness.

In between there's coffee, and Rüchel, who still wears his snow-white hair shoulder-length, but doesn't want to be an old hippie, talks a lot - calmly, matter-of-factly, hot off the press. Almost as if he were dictating his memoirs, and with a taste as if he were still heavily active. And somehow he is: "The Rockpalast is a central part of my life. That was forty years of continuous activity. And it wasn't a must, it was absolutely what I wanted to do. So I earned my money with what was close to my heart."

And that was bringing live music to German television. First with a weekly thirty-minute show produced at the WDR in Cologne's Südstadt, then with the so-called Rocknights, which take place twice a year between 1977 and 1986 at the Grugahalle in Essen, with festivals on the Loreley open-air stage as well as club concerts in Hamburg, Berlin and Bochum, where many exciting artists and bands take part. He organizes all of this in a control center measuring almost ten square meters on the seventh floor of the Cologne Vierscheibenhaus, which often resembles a war zone. "Every few months the office was overgrown with LPs, and I gave everything away to be able to work halfway there."

Lest mehr im eclipsed Nr. 189 (04-2017).