Rio Reiser - Life

Life

His father was an engineer for Siemens AG, and the family moved several times because of his father's work; they lived in Berlin, Upper Bavaria, Nuremberg, Mannheim, and Stuttgart. Reiser was never really able to feel at home in any of these places. Many of his friends said, when they were asked in an interview which was broadcast on the TV-channel arte in 1998, that he started playing music to create a place where he felt at home.

Reiser was known by his friends as someone who had a very special mind of his own. For example he managed to persuade his mother Erika Möbius that he was allowed to stop attending school and start an apprenticeship in a studio for photography, which he then quit in order to join a music conservatory and later to follow his two older brothers to Berlin at the early age of 17 in order to put the world's first "Rock Opera" onto stage. His mother supported his musical and artistic ambitions since she had soon realized that he was an autodidact; he never learned things when he was taught by someone else. Thus he taught himself how to play cello, guitar, the piano and other instruments, wrote lyrics and poetry and later also assumed jobs as actor in some movies and TV shows or at the theatre.

He was awarded his nickname Rio as teenager from an eccentric artist friend of the family who invented the name "Rio de Galaxis" for him in an "intergalactic youth ordination". He kept the nickname and later decided to completely change his name from Ralph Möbius to Rio Reiser because he played a leading role in the movie "Johnny West" and needed a catchy artist name. He took the idea for the name Reiser from his older brother Gert who had occasionally used it as artist name before. The name makes reference to the main character of the autobiographical novel Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz.

As an adult, Rio soon discovered his musical talents which opened a way for him to express himself, thus enabling him to overcome restraints he otherwise felt due to a certain, intrinsic insecurity or shyness towards other people. The ability to reach out to others - even to the unknown masses in a concert audience - through his musical performance was later often referred to as being the core of his special talent to touch his listeners, or even to "build a relationship" with each of them for the period of a concert.

During his teenage years, Rio Reiser first discovered - and immediately became a big fan of - The Beatles at age 13 who represented the sound - and way of life - of the future for him and also inspired him to learn to play guitar, to compose his own songs and to form his first band. Later he preferred the rough, direct sound of The Rolling Stones. In reference to John Lennon and Paul McCartney - who were usually credited as "Lennon/McCartney" with respect of the songs they wrote - Rio and his band colleague and best friend R.P.S. Lanrue (real name Ralph Peter Steitz) as composers of most of the Ton Steine Scherben-songs were often credited as "Moebius/Steitz". Besides contemporary rock bands which became the soundtrack of the social changes beginning in the Sixties, Rio Reiser was also influenced by other music styles including orchestral film soundtracks, German "folk songs" and traditional music and German singers such as Marlene Dietrich.

Reiser was unique among German rock stars of his time in being openly gay, although he didn't come out publicly until the 1980s. At the beginning of his career Reiser sometimes felt misfit among the political groups and various movements which, in the early Seventies, did not strongly approve of homosexuality, but later gained more confidence while working with artists who were engaged in the newly forming gay movement of Berlin, including the gay performance group "Brühwarm" which recorded two LPs with music composed by Ton Steine Scherben.