October 30, 2022
Today is the 25th anniversary of the best concert I have ever attended. On October 30, 1997, I experienced an amazing performance by my all-time favorite pop singer/guitarist, Rainhard Fendrich, and his band. His genre of music is called "Austropop," which is pop music by Austrian singers and musicians. During the concert, Austropop singer/guitarist Wolfgang Ambros made a surprise appearance and sang a duet on Fendrich's most famous song: "I Am From Austria." I am also a fan of Ambros.
The Fendrich concert was at the Wiener Stadthalle (arena) in Vienna, Austria. I enjoyed it with one of my many Austrian cousins, her husband, and more than 16,000 other fans. I was living in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the time. (I now live in southeastern Florida.)
Here is a video from that concert tour. Fendrich's song "Über meinen Horizont" was the second song he performed at the concert I attended. This ballad, which is one of my favorite songs, is from Fendrich's 1989 studio album "Von Zeit zu Zeit."
(Note: That is NOT Fendrich in the picture below; it's keyboardist/singer Gary Lux. Also, the Spanish guitarist is Mario Berger, and the saxophonist is Christian Felke. Fendrich's brother Harald Fendrich plays bass guitar.)
I first became a fan of Fendrich in 1983, while visiting many of my Austrian cousins in the westernmost Austrian province of Vorarlberg. This was my second of seven trips to Austria to visit my cousins and also to go skiing in the Austrian Alps. Anyway, I heard one of his songs on the car radio when my cousin was driving me to the airport in nearby Zürich, Switzerland, to return home. I was immediately hooked. I asked another cousin in the car who was singing. She told me, so I purchased Fendrich's second and third albums on vinyl at the music store in the airport. He only had three albums at that time. Several years later, I would discover his first album.
I purchased many more of his vinyl albums and CDs during my later trips to Austria, as well as many more CDs that I bought online. I still listen to many of his albums on my turntable. I have 47 (yes, forty-seven) of Fendrich's CDs, which includes duplicates of two of those CDs and one interview CD.
He writes (sometimes co-writes) all of his songs, which are all sung in the German language. His earliest albums from the early to mid-1980s are sung in the Viennese dialect of German. He soon switched to writing songs in "High German" (textbook German) so that more people could understand them.
I also have a videotape and several DVDs of his concerts and music videos; a photo calendar from 1987; a hardcover biography written in German; and two of his autographs, even though I have never met him. Also, at one time, I was the only non-European member of his official fan club. I lost that title when a man from Japan joined the club.
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