Rio Reiser

The name makes reference to the main character of the 1785-86 autobiographical novel by Karl Philipp Moritz.

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 "Möbius/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.

The avant-garde director Rosa von Praunheim repeatedly gave Reiser artistic suggestions.

Reiser was unique among German rock stars of his time in being openly gay.

Ralph Christian Möbius (9 January 1950 – 20 August 1996), known professionally as Rio Reiser, was a German musician and from 1970 to 1985 the lead singer and main lyric-writer for the rock group Ton Steine Scherben.

After that band broke up, he worked as a solo artist.

Among his best known songs are Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht, Keine Macht für Niemand, and the Rauch-Haus-Song with the Ton Steine Scherben.

As a solo artist, his best known songs are König von Deutschland, Alles Lüge, and Junimond.

The theatre was very successful with young people and toured through Germany until 1969.

The involvement in the context of the student and youth movement—not only as musician and actor, but often in the political debates which were to follow the theatre performance as well, played an important role for Rio Reiser's development of political awareness and for his lifelong commitment—both privately and as musician—to liberation movements of various kinds, including, in particular, the left-wing political movement characteristic for the Sixties and Seventies (while he liked to put an emphasis on supporting the workers' and "simple people's" interests rather than the students' intellectual approach), the Gay liberation movement and later, the German ecological movement.

His musical work to a large extent reflects these political influences and convictions and thus can hardly be detached from his political positions.

Reiser supported squatting in the early 1970s and later the green political party Die Grünen.

After the German reunification, he joined the Party of Democratic Socialism.

His father was an engineer for Siemens, and the family moved several times because of his father's work; they lived in West Berlin, Upper Bavaria, Nuremberg, Mannheim, and Fellbach.

Reiser was never really able to feel at home in any of these places.

He came out in 1970 and lived openly as gay in his private life.

At the beginning of his career, Reiser sometimes felt like a misfit among the political groups and various movements which, in the early Seventies, did not strongly approve of homosexuality.

He later gained 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.

In 1970, Reiser recorded his first single with the band Ton Steine Scherben.

He kept the nickname and later decided to change his name from Ralph Möbius to Rio Reiser when he played a leading role in the movie Johnny West (1977 film) 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.

Reiser did not come out publicly until the 1980s.

In 1986 he began to discuss being gay in interviews and talk-shows.

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.

While he still went to school, Reiser became singer in his first rock band The Beat Kings.

The band had been founded by R.P.S. Lanrue (real name Ralph Peter Steitz), a boy living in the neighbourhood, who had heard of Reiser's singing talents and had asked him to join the band after letting Reiser perform a few songs to give a sample (as R.P.S. Lanrue later claimed in an interview, The Rolling Stones song "Play with fire" tipped the balance).

Lanrue, who was of the same age as Reiser, soon became Reiser's closest friend and musical counterpart; he went on to support Reiser as a musician and lived with him most of the time until his death.

After leaving school, Reiser left his then hometown, as well as The Beat Kings, to follow his two older brothers' call to Berlin in order to compose the music for their common project, the first Beat-Opera, which turned out to be, in the words of Rio, an "absolute flop".

Nevertheless, Reiser stayed in Berlin, where he was later joined by Lanrue.

After occasionally having toured the countryside with the theatre group "Hoffmans Comic Theater" (consisting in Reiser, his brothers and a group of friends), Reiser went on to continue theatrical projects in Berlin where he joined an improvisation theatre group which played scenes from the everyday life of pupils and trainees, thus adopting and reflecting the social problems among young people in West Berlin in the Sixties, as well as its tense and sense of imminent social change.

Many of his friends said, when they were asked in an interview broadcast on the TV channel Arte in 1998, two years after his death, 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 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 West 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, 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 given his nickname Rio as teenager by an eccentric artist and friend of the family who invented the name "Rio de Galaxis" for him in an "intergalactic youth ordination".