I have never written a biography about myself. I guess I never applied for a job anywhere, so let's see how this goes. First, the unavoidable facts: Born Dec.10th, 1959, in Mainz, Germany. We moved to Wuppertal, Germany when I was 6 years old, where I spent the next 15 years or so.

I would say that I had a pretty safe and normal upbringing; nothing unusual or spectacular to report here. In fact you could say it was maybe a bit too normal for me, but more about that later. I went to 'Grundschule'  (the first 4 grades), and then on to what in Germany is called a 'gymnasium' for the next 9 years. (I know it sounds weird, but it is not a 'gym.'  It is a school comparable to high school. You graduate from it when you are eighteen with 'Abitur', before you can go on to university). My father was a professor of chemistry who worked for the Bayer Company in Wuppertal while my mother took care of the kids (I have one sister who is a year older than me) and the house.  So I guess that would make her a 'hausfrau'.

Now, my father is not like the mad professor in the movies, with his own laboratory in the basement, working on a secret invention so he can take over the world. But his life was and is about science, books and teaching rather than fishing, hunting or baseball. He didn't have a four wheel drive truck either, if you know what I mean (not that anybody else in Germany had one in those days).

I grew up in an 'academic' kind of surrounding, getting a good, if not the best education. And I was expected to go to the university and become a divorce lawyer, engineer or maybe a physicist. So what happened? I didn't grow up in an orphanage or with foster parents that I hated. I am not from a working class neighborhood and still I ended up playing Rock 'n Roll or even worse, HEAVY METAL! There wasn't even the "day-I-saw-the-Beatles-on-the-Ed-Sullivan-Show-I-knew-what-I-wanted -to-be" experience!

Actually, it started one day when a friend of mine began playing guitar and came over to show me a few chords. Not that I was immediately hooked, but I thought it was pretty cool and I wanted to have my own guitar. Of course I had to have lessons and learn to play it 'properly' or else I wouldn't get one. So I went, as I promised, with my new acoustic guitar (electric was considered improper and out of the question) to a school where some stone old guy (he was probably 40) taught kids like me the basics of guitar playing. I can still see him tapping his pencil on the desk, like a conductor to give us the beat as we all had to pluck one string at a time while saying out loud: 'this is an E-string, this is an A-string…"

So I spent about a year or so with that acoustic guitar. I was perhaps fourteen then. I learned traditional German songs like 'Im Maerzen der Bauer' and 'Auf Du Junger Wandersmann.' Then, finally, my first electric guitar. Wow! Big change. Everything is so much easier at first - all kinds of cool sounds came out of that thing! 

My first electric guitar, (I think I paid about $ 20 for it), had 4 (!) pickups and was made out of plywood covered with textured vinyl - almost like the stuff that is on Marshall amps. It had 4 sliding on/off switches, one for each pickup. Unfortunately, somebody before me had painted the whole guitar green - and I mean the WHOLE guitar including switches, electronics, everything. So moving the pickup switches into another position took a hammer and a screwdriver. But hey, it was an ELECTRIC guitar!

My sister didn't know that you also needed an amplifier. She thought you could plug the guitar straight into a wall outlet, hence the name 'electric' guitar (actually, she had a point, maybe it should have been called 'electronic' guitar). Speaking of amps,the first 'amps' I used were not really amps at all. They were actually radios. These were the old tube radios made by 'Grundig' and 'Loewe Opta'. Every family seemed to have one sitting around in the attic or the basement.  Nobody was really using these monsters anymore, most people had now transistor radios, so we could find them really cheap and they sounded great. For a while, at least. Trouble was, they weren't made to be used as guitar amps and they usually lasted only a few hours. The speakers went first and then the rest blew up, especially the smaller radios. But they also made the refrigerator-sized ones called  'Musiktruhe' which seemed to last somewhat longer so we preferred them. Once I put an ad in the local paper that read: "poor student looking for old radio" and I got a fresh supply of free old radios!

I remember talking my dad into helping me pick up a gigantic 'Musiktruhe' with our car, a Volkswagen Beetle, from an old lady somewhere in Wuppertal. I was well below the legal driving limit of eighteen and none of my friends were old enough to drive or had a car, so I had to ask him. Of course she lived on the third floor. And, of course, there was no elevator. And, of course, the old lady was worried about the nice radio getting scratched. And, of course, it didn't fit in the car once we finally wrestled the behemoth down to the street. Somehow, though, we took the seat out of the car and managed to get the thing home. All in all, not a great day for my dad, I think.

By this point, I was maybe fifteen or sixteen, still going to gymnasium and playing guitar every day after school with my friends - hanging out and having fun. There was the occasional band would usually last only a few rehearsals, which is the typical thing when you start out. And nobody took it really seriously. We tried hard, but it was mostly about having fun. The one thing I always liked about music and being in a band is the fact that it is so easy to connect with other people. You get to know a lot of people you would normally never meet. You see a lot of places that you wouldn't get to see otherwise. I still feel that way today and I loved it then. It allowed me to break out of the well-controlled environment I grew up in and see exciting new places. A sort of rebellion perhaps, but certainly not in the typical way.

Then, one day in a local music store, somebody I knew told me that there was a band called ACCEPT in Solingen, (a town just 15 minutes away), looking for a new guitar player. He described them in these words: "The music is kind of strange, it is hard rock, but they have their own P.A. and their own rehearsal room."  That meant a lot in those days because most efforts in getting a band started were spent on finding a room and putting together a P.A. The 'P.A.' was mostly just an amp to sing through and some home made particle board boxes painted black (they had to be black, because all P.A.'s were black, and they had to have the band name stenciled on it) with one huge, cheap speaker in each. As soon as you had everything together, the band usually broke up and the whole thing started all over again. 

A lot of times, whoever owned a P.A., was automatically the singer by default. So here I had a chance to hook up with a 'real' band that had it all; a P.A., a regular rehearsal room and, on top of that, they even met regularly (four times a week at that point I think). WOW! And, believe it or not, I got the gig even though I was only sixteen - the youngest of them all.
That was around the end of 1975. I turned seventeen a few days or weeks later. The line up at that point was: Udo Dierkschneider voc., Gerhard Wahl guit., Frank Friedrich, Dieter Rubach bass drums and me . Since I was still not old enough to drive, some body had to pick me up to go to rehearsals and then bring me back home. Usually that would be Wahl or, when he got his dad's old BMW, Udo.

Everything was different in ACCEPT than it had been in other bands. In other bands members would show up for rehearsals when they felt like it; sometimes all of them, sometimes just a few of them. In ACCEPT there was a strict protocol about rehearsals - everybody came or else! Even being late was not cool.

Other bands jammed. ACCEPT did not jam. They had songs and they needed to be rehearsed. And ACCEPT had a P.A. Actually, Udo owned it. He was the only one who had a job at the time and was making some money. Of course it was black. It had huge, home made cabinets that only fit through the door of the tiny rehearsal room if one guy was in the room sticking a shovel head under the cabinet and the other guys were pushing from the outside. They had some sort of a light show, home made smoke machines, and a back line - everything! They even had, most importantly, gigs in and around Solingen. It was a big deal for me needless to say.

I think I'll stop right here. Everything up to this point I would call the pre-ACCEPT part of my life. There is more, of course, but this should be enough for now. The rest from here on I will describe in the ACCEPT Remembered section of the Wolf Hoffman site.