Zicke zacke, zicke zacke, hoi hoi hoi!
Hofbrau Band, K-W Oktoberfest’s original band, gained fame after poster flap in festival’s second year
KITCHENER— In the beginning, there was gravel.
“You didn’t wear good shoes to the tent,” said John Emrich, recalling the bumpy footing beneath his tune-tapping toes on the first blustery night of the first Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest in 1969. “Not dress shoes.”
Emrich, now 70, still plays trombone for the Transylvania Club’s Hofbrau Band like he did five decades ago on that second Tuesday in October, beneath a glorified tarp behind the Concordia Club off Ottawa Street.
The inaugural Bavarian festival big top was a tad tenuous.
“Just the roof was there,” said 84-yearold Steve Schatz, the German club band’s former leader and flugelhorn player. “And the posts to hold the roof up. It was open and the wind was blowing.”
A couple of brave couples, maybe more, did the polka until everyone moved inside to the main club, where 400 danced to the Concordia Club band.
It was bitterly cold and rainy, a dramatically damp and chilly opener for all opening nights to come.
“It was just miserable,” Emrich said. At least there was no fire. That was to come in 1971, when Concordia Club burned to the ground. It was rebuilt and reopened a year later.
The first official Oktoberfest tent hum-
bly rose in 1969 with the Hofbrau Band barely a step above the audience on a modest podium.
“That first couple years, they didn’t even have a stage,” said 66-year-old alto horn player Reinhold Fritsch, still a member of the Hofbrau Band he joined at 16. “You had to watch out for people. If they tripped, they fell on you.”
The early risers were a lowlight for a 16-member Hofbrau band, which had been a brassy musical bonanza for the Transylvania Club since 1951. In 1970, the Hofbrau crew became the official band of the “officially banned.”
A thousand official Oktoberfest posters promoting “Canada’s Great Beer Festival” were ordered out of sight by the province’s liquor control board, barely nine days before the festival’s second edition arrived.
Showing the word “beer” in a poster was a no-no. And picturing six mugs of real beer, happily held by drndl-wearing Hamilton model Yvonne Thomas, was also deemed against advertising rules.
But look past Thomas’s toothy grin and braided blond pigtails. Behind them, at least three blurry members of the Hofbrau Band are visible.
The trio — horn-tooting Schatz and accordion-squeezing Mathias Wolf to the left, the late John Werner on baritone to the right of the photo — were hustled up the highway to a Hamilton tavern one September day to fill in the background of the promotional poster.
Wolf, 85, recalls being picked up after his shift at a local tire plant to be taken to the poster shoot. Accordion player Tony Shaman couldn’t make it.
So the photographer had Wolf, more comfortable gripping baritone brass, grab the accordion and pose. Weeks later, papers across the province, even Time Magazine, spilled barrels of ink about the beer poster ban.
Wolf, a Hofbrau Band member for 65 years until 2016, said he and his bandmates never got to drink the beers Thomas was serving.
But they still got to be part of the poster flap, a pivotal promotional coup for the fledgling festival.
“At the time, you didn’t think that,” Wolf said. “Now, it’s history.”
It was a crucial, collectible moment in festival history — and band history too. Werner had given Hofbrau brass its “courtbrewery” German name.
Wolf used to hang a copy of the poster, signed by Thomas, in his home.
He’s not sure where it went. But his son Karl, a Hofbrau member himself on fluegel horn, remembers the missing poster well.
“I’ve grown up with this my whole life,” Karl said on Tuesday night as Hofbrau members past and present gathered before a practice session at the Alpine Club in Kitchener.
“Even though I wasn’t there, I feel like I’m a part of it. As a kid growing up, I always loved looking at that poster, thinking someday I would have some fame like that too.”
But fame, like a lost poster, can easily disappear.
The Hofbrau Band played at club Oktoberfests as early as 1964. It played at the first official K-W festival. Then, the 25th and the 40th. But for the 50th edition the current 28-member unit is tagged only for a Tuesday performance at Kitchener City Hall for German Pioneers Day.
That smarts for Wolf, Schatz, Emrich and Fritsch.
The Transylvania Club sold off its own building eight years ago. Its members are social nomads, using festhall space at the new Lot 42 facility and tuning up at Alpine. To them, it feels like festival organizers have forsaken an original opening night act.
“I don’t understand that” Fritsch said. “How can they sit there and say ‘OK, we’re going to make a big celebration for 50 years of Oktoberfest.’ And the original band that was there at the beginning — we’re not asked to play, not even for an hour.”
But the Hofbrau Band might still find a festival place. Festival organizers don’t mean to snub them.
“That’s not the intent,” executive director Alfred Lowrick, a former Transylvania Club president, said in an email to The Record on Wednesday.
“The Hofbrau Band has been around our festival from the beginning. Our opening ceremonies were already very full. I’ll discuss this with the team to see where they might best fit in.”