Alles Klar auf der Andrea Doria

by Frank EisenhuthUdo Lindenberg's third album, Alles Klar auf der Andrea Doria, was his breakthrough, and redefined German rock music. Its influence on the rock scene of Germany is comparable to the impact of such albums as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles and Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Moreover, this album was the starting point of a string of high-quality releases over an entire decade, something only artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan were able to do. For the recording of this album, Lindenberg assembled a brand-new band, the Panik-Orchester, which was ideally capable of transforming his new ideas into music. Together with Peter Herbolzheimer's jazz big band and Lindenberg's ability to write witty and sardonic German lyrics containing various word games and reflecting the zeitgeist of the young German generation of the '70s, the main ingredients for a masterpiece record were available. And a masterpiece it truly was: listen to the hilarious jazzy big band interjections in the title track, the way Lindenberg questioned the political division between the two German states through the eyes of a relationship between a West German boy and an East German girl on "Wir Wollen Doch Einfach Nur Zusammen Ssein (Mädchen Aus Ost-Berlin)," or the use of the "Cello" in the ballad of the same name. All the different styles, which on its predecessor, Daumen Im Wind, had just somehow co-existed, were now integrated into a singular new quality that made this record a classic of German rock. Legend has it that Lindenberg composed the classic title track within five minutes in his favorite Hamburg pub, Onkel Pö, and scribbled the lyrics on a few beer mats. So far-reaching was Alles Klar auf der Andrea Doria that it even had an impact on the German language: Germans often say this phrase nowadays when they mean "everything is hunky-dory," the title literally meaning "everything OK on the Andrea Doria," although it was adapted as No Panic on the Titanic on the English version of the album, released in 1975.