A few days ago, we introduced you to Emely Krieger in the Facebook group. She’s been designing the images and other media for our Storyteller for several months now, including the current cover and profile picture showing Rod sitting on a stool in his smart clothes, with the band’s snapshot from Lisbon in the background. We’ve now spoken to her about Rod and her life as a Stewart fan.
Having grown up in a small village near the winter sports resort of Winterberg, the qualified industrial clerk discovered the singer Rod Stewart at the age of 17.
“It was more or less by chance that I first became aware of Rod,” says Emely. “Out in the countryside where we lived, you could learn all about cows and pigs, but when it came to international music, we were rather out of touch.”
One balmy summer evening, she was out with friends at the annual shooting festival, enjoying a performance by a cover band well-known in the region. “They played everything from rock to pop to country – they were really good,” recalls the 56-year-old. “A friend of mine was absolutely mad about them, and whenever the band played anywhere nearby, he was there.”
Emely wasn’t quite that big a fan, but that evening in the Schützenhalle, she was captivated by one of the band’s songs. She was desperate to know what it was called. So she asked politely, and was told: “It’s ‘Baby Jane’ by Rod Stewart”. She made a mental note of it and, the very next day, she drove into town and went into the only local electronics shop that also sold a few records. “I asked the shop assistant about the song and he started rummaging through his entire stock of records. Eventually, he pulled a red-and-black record out of the shelf and held it out to me. ‘That’s the last one we’ve got,’ he said. ‘It’s the Rod Stewart album that includes “Baby Jane”.’ I’d actually only wanted the single, but I went ahead and bought it anyway, just in case the last LP went too.”
And so Emely headed home with her purchase. The attentive reader will, of course, have long since realised that this was Rod’s album “Body Wishes”.
“When I listened to the record at home, at first it was just ‘Baby Jane’, over and over again,” Emely explained. “It wasn’t until later that I listened to the other tracks as well.”
Whether it was just ‘Baby Jane’ or another track, Emely thought the album was brilliant and managed to get a few friends excited about it too when she played the songs for them.
A few years later, she went to a concert in Frankfurt with a friend. “We’d entered a competition in a newspaper where you could win tickets for the concert at the Festhalle. We hadn’t really expected to win, but about a week before the show we suddenly got a phone call. We couldn’t believe it.” And so they were suddenly faced with a problem: how were they going to get to Frankfurt?
From our little village, it wasn’t at all easy to just pop over to the metropolis on the Main. The journey by train took nearly four hours and involved changing trains four times.
“The journey was a bit of a pain, but we were absolutely buzzing about the concert. My friend had brought a Walkman along, so we listened to Rod’s music the whole way there. The concert was brilliant, and Baby Jane was there too. Back then, I really did believe he’d played it just for me,” laughs Emely.
“But the songs were all brilliant; he really blew me away even more live than he had on record.”
To this day, however, that concert has remained the only one Emely has ever seen by Rod. “We just live in the middle of nowhere, so we don’t really hear much about these things,” she laughs. “By the time we hear there are concerts somewhere, they’re usually already sold out.” That said, Emely really hopes that Rod will come back to Germany again. “I’d love to see him again; unfortunately, the opportunity hasn’t arisen yet. But from what you see on YouTube, he’s still in great shape and seems to be having a lot of fun at his gigs,” she says hopefully. And until then, good old ‘Baby Jane’ will surely be heard a time or two near Winterberg, blaring from the speakers of Emely’s hi-fi system, which has been standing in her living room for almost 20 years. “I still love listening to that song just as much as I used to, and whenever it’s playing somewhere, I turn the volume right up – so my neighbours have to listen in, whether they like it or not.”
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