it’d be amazing if you could write a piece on your experiences with Rainer, his contributions to the music scene and the meaning and importnace of his work. Plus any interesting stories that make for good reading.

Having recently become obsessed with Rainer’s music (and ordered as much as i could from Patti) it is a real honour to write an article on him, especially as both yourself and Patti have contributed heavily. Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and time.

All the best,LE

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i am sitting in chicago … my 5 minutes before my plane was canceled i gave it shot to call the folks and see if  they could change my flight to a more direct one

they said no

then they said yes

and so they did

10 minutes later the flight i was supposed to be was canceled altogether

so i sit here in chicago happier now

and with 3 hours to think about the rainer particle

and this, of all towns, is where he grew up just before i met him years later in tucson

i have not re read this .. as i usually do .. and offer some editing

it was a soaking to sit here and dive deep

so i will just send it off for now because it will probably be some time and several time zones later when i could get around to trimming it

or add to it

so be it

love
howe

it was like this:

i came from a broken family. rainer came from a broken city. my home was destroyed by flood waters from a wicked river i loved in pennsylvania. rainer’s home was left behind in germany and everything the family had of value was hidden in his baby carriage as they simply walked out past the barbed wire gates of east berlin into west berlin, before the wall was erected to stop such walkable escapes, and then his home was left behind too.

we both ended up in tucson arizona in the same year, 1972. i saw his name from time to time on a coffee house flyer and it drew me in that someone was named after the ‘rain’. so i changed my name to josh howard and tried to get a gig at that coffee house too.

i was still terrible. i had no ear for music. no one in my family played music. but i heard music all the time. i heard it when i would touch the tiles in the shower and they each made a tone only i could hear.

rainer heard something too. he heard a dobro slide guitar and followed that sound when his family migrated to chicago. maybe because he was half czech, but he was one of the few people to realize the origins of the dobro and national metal slide guitar and that they were invented by 5 czech brothers named dopya who came to america to invent this guitar in order for guitar players to play in the loud horn bands that were popular in the 20s and 30s.

it wasn’t until 1976 that i would finally meet rainer.

i was tripping on acid for 3 days, and it went like this. some weeks before i met a woman named helen from aberta, canada who needed a place to park her camper. i gave her my curb. she gave me a guitar strap she made.

later she began dating this man who was named after the rain. when she set up the time to meet him, i was just finishing up a 3 day acid trip. i was 19 years old. and on the way to meeting him, i stopped at the little movie theater that was above the coffee house where i first saw his name, and watched a film by roman polanski called: “the tennent”. have you ever seen this movie ? my advice is to never see it on acid, and not in the 1^st row either.

and then we walked past my house that was located on helen street where helen had parked her truck, and continued down to the helen street café to meet this rain man.

when i arrived, rainer was playing his dobro on a tiny corner stage and blasting out rocking rhythms all alone. in between songs helen introduced us while i was still sitting at a table and he was on that little stage. she said i played piano and rainer asked me to come and join him then on the old upright piano. i could not refuse rainer, but i was hoping he was playing in a key like G that i was familiar with.

it turned out that his whole guitar was tuned in the key of G and i was so relieved. we began playing and just held on to  G forever. in fact, i could not stop hanging on to G forever. i could not bare facing the crowd of people now behind my back, so i never stopped playing, i just kept playing like the song didn’t have an ending. rainer didn’t seem to think this was a problem, and he just kept playing too.

now my acid plan was to keep playing until the place closed down and all the people behind my back would have to leave so i wouldn’t have to face them.

rainer just kept playing too. we played for 45 minutes in the lovely key of G. i heard the owners begin to kick people out cause it was finally past closing time. and then when the shuffle of feet ended behind me, rainer and i ended the song.

his tip jar was over stuffed too.

that was how i met him. what is called a “trial by fire”. a sacred psychedelic spiritual endeavor of endurance and chance. a coinci-dance. from that point on i designated him my older brother. he had 5 years on me. i needed an older male figure in my life, since my dad had left through divorce when i was young and his dad died when he was a baby.

the thing i was still unaware of was i was from an austrian, hungarian family line, and rainer was from a german, czech family line.

when i think back now, i think focus in what drew me to him. there was a storm in him, and i loved storms, and there was a hefty calm in his eye, and that made a lot of sense to me. he had a large smile that could instantly light up a room. we were of the counter culture, him and i. too young for being hippies and not yet punks. we liked to live simply, but he had it down already and i was just heading there. he had a way of showing me things without really showing me. he would very quietly point out something in a song that he knew i should pay attention to. i understood this. the quieter he would point something out the more i took it in. bob dylan,david bowie, robert johnston, jimmie rodgers. these were our forefathers and he would understand their encoded messages and stop time for a moment to hand me a clue. i knew i loved this music always, but didn’t know why. he would fill me with more and more of it.

we would continue to jam endlessly like the first time on one chord. we would dare each other not to get bored and so without speaking we would change the jam as it went along and it would turn into a sonic escher print. maybe that was the german aurstrian in us that made another kind of sense.

playing with rainer was the most pleasurable experience i have ever had the privilege of having.

there was something in him i knew was very good before anyone else had figured it out, but it just felt like being a little brother to. warm and secure and full of adventure and laughter.

sometimes rainer played it too traditional, although better then anyone else i had heard. i would always offer up an experimental variation and several train wrecks on whatever we were playing. rainer loved trains. we had elements of what each other needed some of. but he was the reasonable one. a quiet logic that he could amplify when desired. he had structure and could understand the things i could never understand. i had always been slightly crippled, with a built in wobble. he had the makings of a strong foundation. we made a pact to not record any music that would embarrass us 20 years into the future.

his music today still reveals coded information that he built into it so long ago the way old jazz records do. with every year passing his music sounds better.

he had developed a style of playing that no one lese had, including using his left hand fingers left of the fingered slide to change the slid major chord into a minor chord. he tried to report this technique to “guitar player” magazine, but they dismissed it, and probably couldn’t grasp his literal grasp of it.

there is a tape of us as a 6 piece band playing in germany.  at the rose club in cologne. the video tape is a copy of a copy of a copy and the image is so soft and blurry and dreamy and surreal. but the camera is very close to the band and the details of our faces are revealed, and the smile on rainer’s face and the smile on my face is like a human fusion of joy unfolding. that was 1986. just the day before we had played berlin and realized we had to fly him there from hamburg because he never had the proper papers to go back through east germany. but once we were all met up on the west side, i had never seen a look like that on his face when he was staring over the wall on a platform built for the west berliners to search for their family members walled in on the east. maybe that was also where the smiles came from that night following in cologne. the joy of being.

in 1976, when i was 20, i was visiting my sister’s ex-boyfriend. his name was curtis john tucker, and he taught me a lot about country music too. one day while visiting him, there was a girl there. she had something pulling me, but i had to leave anyway. and in the days that followed we became friends. and one day after that it occurred to me that i was supposed to introduce her to my friend rainer. i never know why or where these thoughts come from. but they usually pan out.

that was patti.

rainer and her were together ever since.

as i grew older and went on my way to discover various lands and dangerous places, rainer was content to stay behind and form a family, fill up his little 2 room shack with love and domestic chores and hold down a steady job fixing guitars in order to keep it all together.

i went on and would always return and we would sit around and smoke the free dirt weed arizona always had available and coffee it up while we would play each other songs we had collected or stumbled upon from our individual journeys.

one day while i was in the steak house restaurant that would let us play our brand of music in late at night, i witnessed a billy gibbonswanna-b esitting at the bar, and chuckled to rainer about it. when rainer got done with his set at the empty club, a massive body guard came over to our stoned table and requested that rainer please join billy gibbons at the bar. billy became an instant fan that night seeing him live.

some years later the same thing happened in London with robert plant. and i remember the day like most other days when we’d drop our kids off at school and then settle in to do nothing but enjoy each other at his little 2 room shack, supping black coffee and smoking bad weed, and playing each other some music. that day he calmly plopped in a track hi and robert recorded of “whole lotta love”.

it was like my 3 day acid trip never ended really.

there was still this time warp unravel occurring around the proximity of rainer.

when he came down with his first seizure, it was 1996. he fell off his bike and plunged to the earth braking his shoulder. when he woke up, the world was completely different. he had brain cancer in the shape of a small cloud.

after a while he couldn’t remember how to do some basic things. he couldn’t tell that the number 8 was the number 8, until he traced it with his finger, then it came to him. he brain was transporting him now.

and he couldn’t remember how to play the guitar.

as he went through the treatments of chemo and radiation, he was almost killed by the infection of pneumonia.  i sat with him one night alone in the hospital, with just an ancient turn of the century guitar and although he was unconscious, he kept an irresistible rhythm on his breathing machine. we jammed. i know he could hear the soft tones of the gut strings and they helped to spurl away the time there in the void basking in the bad light and creepy shouts down the hall. when we’re down like that, we can probably still hear, and it rainer’s case, probably still jam.

he was extremely wise. he would spend afternoons alone at the main library reading history books. tons of them over the years. he began reciting certain events to me like he used to teach me certain passages of music. now it was bigger passages of time, which in a way is all that music is. passages of time.

rainer got well and taught himself the guitar again and then one day when i heard him ‘wood shedding’ i realized he had surpassed the prowess he had before he was sick, but i don’t think anyone had stopped to realize that yet. maybe not even him. he was doing things on the guitar he never did before. impossible things. and then the songs were happening. songs that were also better then he had ever done. well .. i mean they had growth, the way we hope all our work will continue to evolve. i could hear it in a whispered thing he was writing called “the inner flame”. and so without thnking, i just do that thing that he must have done to me. very quietly suggest that maybe its time to record. and the next day he came up to me and said let’s go record. so we did.

rainer had a certain priestly power from the ancients. when i heard of a mutual friend abusing smack, i would just mention it to rainer and he would stop his guitar repair and get this look on his face that also froze time. then he plunked the guitar work down and said we were going over that dude’s house right now to talk to him. and he did. i stood there from the sidewalk and watched him walk up to the porch. our friend came out and rainer had that eye to eye talk with him. days later that friend was clean again from heroin. how does that ever happen ?

i owe my children’s life to rainer. i would have absolutely never have had them if it wasn’t for him.

i never thought i wanted a family or cared to get married or knew how to deal with any of that stuff.

but it came to pass because rainer showed me how without really showing me how, just living it, and then i understood.

one day on the road i got the call from patti. 20 months after his first seizure, he was hit again with one. we thought, we had hoped, he was truly cured.

but no.

i was on my way to berlin when i got the call. the same route we all took 10 years earlier. i flew home from berlin right away. the doctors told patti and i that we had to tell rainer he was going to die.

i cannot tell you how to do this. there is no one way for everyone. it begins to form an earthquake inside your gut until you let the shaking out. until you look him in the eye and tell him he is going to die.

he told me once after he finally overcame the ‘cure’ for his cancer and felt like his old self again. his life had returned very close to normal. one sunny day he turned to me and confided that he actually missed that focus he had when he was on the verge of dying. it was a clarity. when clarity is the charity from above. when you can really see clear and not be diverted with the wires and coin and tangle of every day that steals untold measures of our lives away like a wicked eroder.

so it was with this reminder i could only offer in light of the tremendous weight i now had to saddle him with. the end. his face froze in that way he had when he fell into ponder, never unbearably long, but just long enough to allow himself to really digest and come to conclusion. first his smile returned, then he looked back at me, and his eyes were shining. and he accepted it then and there. and we were a little less crushed from his gift of making us feel better having to tell him this.

the days that followed informed us that i should maybe mention he might want to record some of these new songs. and the next day or so, he said maybe we should. and so we went up to a studio that was just built in our friends house in the desert. his name was harvey and he had just finished a wonderful beautiful clean new studio with vintage gear and full length windows that spanned the stunning desert hills. and here we recorded rainer’s last songs. some done absolutely impossibly constructed. others simply sweetly to the point where every word, every note, meant the world. he was on the precipice of existence and was still handing out information to us who could take it in and maybe reveal it self years into the future.

then on the 3^rd session he could no longer handle it.

we were very near the end. and then rainer, who showed me how to behave during the birth of children, showed me how to brave the death of my best friend. the night was long. patti requested that he not die on his young daughter’s birthday and so somehow his body held on so it would pass into the following day. and then at that point my face erupted in a heated water and shook with the emptiness that this world immediately became.

that was rainer. and this is still rainer. he had the goods and he did not need to be here any longer except for those of us who needed him here.

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one time .. we went on a solo tour in Europe together with a couple of eurail train passes. we found ourselves in vienna running for a train, and we forgot to follow the rule about getting the tickets stamped at the first station or there would be a penalty charge.  so there we were on the train and the conductor who spoke no english was insisting we pay the penalty charge and he would keep holding our tickets, leave to attend other riders and then return to argue with me. rainer just sat there like a zen master and i wondered why he was being so calm and collected. by the 3^rd time the conductor came back i had become severely frustrated in trying to explain anything to him. i was feeling my jewish roots start to tingle with how things were around these parts only 50 years prior. i was losing it. long hair and torn jeans. and losing it in austria, land of my grandfather.

at that point, rainer stood up and calmly approach us from the far side of the car and suggested we simply pay the fare and use the unstamped passes another day. but he did this in perfect german. he had neverspoke german before in all the years i had known him, and so he sat there drawing upon the memories of his childhood in berlin and slowly reassembling the words in sentences he had heard as a toddler. and then executed here perfectly and completely avoided world war 3 in our little train car. the conductor instantly smiled beautifully and handed the tickets back. and we were on our way again jamming in perfect passage.

-howe gelb : October 1, 2010