Music is trump | Do you know Richard Weize?

When you talk to Richard Weize about music, he constantly asks, "Do you know?" And very often you have to say, "No," even though you think you know something. Weize talks a lot and likes to talk about people you've never heard of. He's one of those legendary guys from the background of the music industry. A record collector who reissues records. They're usually presented much better than the originals—that's truly sustainable business.

It's mostly just talked about, rarely put into practice, but Weize has been doing it since the early 1970s. He turns 80 this Monday. He's hardly known to the public, but he is among musicians. When Bob Dylan tours Germany, his bandleader Tony Garnier tells Weize to come along with his staff.

We don't know all the awards he's received for his work, but they make up half of his Wikipedia entry. The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany—okay, we know that—and also the German Record Critics' Award. But the W. C. Handy Award or the ARSC Award, which he won 17 times? I also don't know the place where Richard Weize grew up: Bad Gandersheim, Lower Saxony, somewhere near the Harz Mountains. The first song he heard on the radio was "Bravo, Bravo, almost like Caruso" by Vico Torriani. He was ten. Later, he preferred Johnny Cash.

We already know the two. But who is Lefty Frizzell? Born in 1928, he was one of the most important representatives of honky tonk in the 1950s. His compositions were featured in the country charts well into the 1980s, I read on Wikipedia. The first box set released by Richard Weize and his Bear Family record label was dedicated to Lefty Frizell: it contained 14 records, in 1984. It was called "His Life, His Music." The Washington Post also noticed this and wondered: Why is such a box set being released in West Germany?

"When I do something, I do it seriously; otherwise, it's pointless," Weize says at the beginning of our conversation. Fifty years ago, he founded Bear Family. A label for everything you should know seriously, but don't yet.

Weize has lived for a long time on a farm in the forest in the Elbe-Weser triangle between Bremen and Stade. There, too, stands the company logo: a large bear and two small ones, a wooden monument. Life-size, I'd say, crafted by an artist from Monterey, where the first major hippie festival took place in 1967. Weize had the bears shipped in from California. He also has a smaller version, I'd say waist-high and car-loadable. The bear team used them to travel to major department stores and hold sales promotions. Back when the music departments of Karstadt and Kaufhof stores could still order their records themselves. That was the time when people still used telephones. Today, Weize has the problem of not knowing who to call at the record companies. No one answers anymore.

Bear Family has released numerous albums, but is famous for its box sets, first with vinyl records, then with CDs. There's a box set with the music of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (7 CDs), and the "Songs for Political Action" of the US left from 1926 to 1953 (10 CDs). This is the music of the vanquished, who played it when they didn't yet know it. The "Blues Box" on the Sun label (10 CDs), featuring Howlin' Wolf, Little Milton, and Rufus Thomas, on the other hand, is the music of the pioneers of rock 'n' roll, who also didn't yet know it.

Chuck Berry (16 CDs), Peter Kraus (10 CDs), and Caterina Valente (9 CDs) were more knowledgeable. All these boxes feature thick LP-sized booklets, written by experts and featuring sophisticated layouts: coffee-table books worth reading and viewing for nerds, fans, and scholars.

The thickest box set is "Black Europe" (44 CDs), featuring music recorded by Black musicians in early 20th-century Europe. They came from jazz and played in shows and variety shows, where they could also perform with white female singers, something unthinkable in the U.S. at the time. This box set costs as much as a weekend vacation, but it lasts longer.

The box set "Beyond Recall" (11 CDs) is also quite a hit, a documentation of Jewish musical life from 1933 to 1938: records that were lost, that could not be taken with them when their Jewish owners had to flee Nazi Germany.

Such box sets are purchased worldwide by libraries and archives, such as the Library of Congress in Washington, because it's more convenient than purchasing the individual records themselves. Over 350 box sets have been released by Bear Family to date. In its heyday, 40 people worked for the company, three or four of whom were on the phone, as orders could be placed via the hotline.

In 1975, Weize founded Bear Family out of necessity. He had children, a wife, and a house, but no money. And then he told the bank he had a good idea. But it wasn't until the third bank—or was it the fourth?—that he believed his claim. These are the ones who give their customers money, but only to then devour them with high interest rates if they're not careful. Much worse than bears. But Weize was paying attention.

Previously, he had sold wine for the brothers Elmar and Kuno Pieroth, first in northern Hesse and then in England, where things went better. Weize was ranked third among 500 salespeople: You had to visit people at home and pour them the wine they were supposed to buy. "In England, as a salesman, you were a human being; in Germany, a salesman is an asshole," says Weize, as we sit in his study on RCA record company chairs, a Sun Records clock ticking on the wall. It feels like a nostalgic diner, but it's all real.

In 1971, Weize returned to Germany and started with records, direct imports for collectors, a bit like German wine for the English. Why didn't he open a record store? Because he didn't want to be bothered by collectors. They would have come into the store and known everything better without buying much – no thanks! Collectors are crazy; for Weize, "some of them really belong behind bars." For example, those collectors who call him because they think he faded out a song on a CD three seconds too early.

So he preferred to do mail-order music, which evolved into Bear Family, as a kind of progression: re-releasing music that no longer existed in this country, or had never existed before. And he did it with a new distribution system – via computer. In the 70s, only corporations had something like that, but Weize had a friend who studied mathematics and could connect a computer to a typewriter. The Commodore company didn't start doing this until the mid-80s – Weize was ten years ahead, leasing a Datic computer for 60,000 DM.

At some point, a collector told him about twelve unreleased Johnny Cash songs, including two he had sung in German, having formed his first band as a GI in Bavaria. In 1981, Weize traveled to Nashville in the USA for the first time to acquire these recordings. He succeeded. He found it irritating that the heads of the major record companies had no interest in music at all. If you wanted information, you had to turn to the sound engineers and studio musicians. And find a way to access the archives.

When he reviewed and listened to the RCA tapes, he suddenly heard Elvis Presley playing backwards. Spooky! But then he discovered that tapes were so expensive back then that they were being used twice. Releases were made in mono, and sometimes not from the original tape, but from the third or fourth copy, whatever people had lying around. And when the record was released in England, a copy was made from the US record, not from the tape, out of sheer laziness. Before, Weize had often wondered: Why do the English pressings have so much noise? Now he knew. And he bought a digital recorder to improve it.

When everyone could digitally copy records around the turn of the millennium, the music industry's revenues plummeted to ten percent. Weize didn't care; he released in small editions, between 500 and 2,000. "Because if a few releases suddenly sell 10,000 copies, you think it will be the same next time, and you'll probably get caught," he says. The only box set that reached such dimensions at Bear was that of the post-war West Berlin cabaret artist Günter Neumann—you know that one? And above all: who would have thought?

That's why Richard Weize can say he didn't make the records for the money. And he didn't shake Heino's hand when he was introduced to him at a reception. Today, that seems a bit rude to him. But he keeps going, even after selling Bear Family in 2015.

He now releases records on his labels Richard Weize Archives and … and more Bears, including the complete works of Die Ärzte (33 CDs) in 2018. Or a box set by James Booker (5 CDs), a brilliant jazz and soul pianist – you know him? Born in New Orleans in 1939, he died of heroin addiction in 1983.

Booker was influenced by Chopin and Beethoven and played in the bands of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Joe Tex. In 1976, he performed solo at the Haus der Jungen Talente in East Berlin and again a year later at Leipzig's Moritzbastei. He played a brilliant solo entertainer boogie blues and jazzed up "Für Elise" just like the Beatles and Curtis Mayfield. Weize released these concerts in 2023 under the title "Behind the Iron Curtain plus...", thankfully before they are forgotten. Or as Booker sings: "Save your love to me!" That would be a company motto, too, you know?