to begin at the beginning,
in October nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, my saxophone flies with me to New York.“Message in a bottle“ by the Police is on the radio, the Gramercy and Chelsea are fully booked. The first days a wooden floor, near Columbia University, is night’s lodging. The weather is warm. Californian avocados are offered on street corners, big as honeydew melons and tasteless. Landet with Erinna König, Beuys Meisterschüler at the artist Arleen Schloss in Downtown in a treasure, a bed. Conveniently, a stage with a bed. Arleen spontaneously invited Beate Bartel, the Mania D bass player and me to perform. Just the two of us, bass and sax? SAMO©, who showed COLOR XEROX that evening, supported us with a WASP synthesizer, and another member from his Band test pattern, all improvised.
The next day SAMO© and I start inventing music in Arleen`s bathroom with Michael Holman`s WASP synthesizer, the rhythm machine, the Selmer Sax, so we did not disturb our hostess. After the opening of the Beuys Retrospective in the Guggenheim, Erinna went back to Düsseldorf, Jean and I shared the chamber, Arleen had given to us.
Leaving NYC with Fredy Laker`s Skytrain, a DC-10, they crashed more often back then, he wrote in my suitcase dt. Koffer, blurred it with his salvia, so that he would always be with me. Had to swear to come back soon. I didn’t succeed. For decades, the suitcase had disappeared, rediscovered, I realized that SAMO©, the homeless, who looked like a tenth grader, was Jean Michel Basquiat. SAMO© ESTA EN ALGO and MAN MADE he wrote. It is an enigma I could solve through his entry in my diary and through his diptych SAMO© ESTA EN ALGO from 1981 showing a cross and a heart. On the one hand too cryptic, but on the other hand, once you’ve figured it out, it’s just logical.
The Lufthansa sticker from 5 August 1982. They day I flew to London to work there as a copywriter. Conny Plank, The German music producer who had just recorded the first Eurythmics LP, spoke to Dave Stewart and so I lived with Dave at 30 Albany Road in Crouch End for the first weeks. The suitcase stood open in front of the fireplace, like an open chest of drawers. Even Dave didn’t know that SAMO© and Basquiat were one and the same person. The best statement in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report from 2011 ‘This is not a suitcase’ is ‘his spirit has awoken’,
it’s mine. Curator Catherine Hug explained that she would exhibit the suitcase. Dieter Buchhart, the Basquiat expert, said he had never seen a private Basquiat like this before.
Enrico Navarra an art dealer declared, he would buy the suitcase instead of a vase for his Fireplace Room. Navarra, editor of the unofficial catalogue raisonné – there is no official one – also knew how to turn Walter Benjamin on his head. The Ruff photograph of the suitcase would lend it the aura of the original.The whole long rest is about whether the suitcase is a souvenir or art. At least four contemporary witnesses of our friendship are still alive. Gößling? ß old spelling for the double s.
