Interview:

It may disappoint you, but today I do not believe in a personal God, or in any intelligent “spirit” who designed the universe. From my point of view, all religion, philosophy, and “spirits” are wishful thinking, and only man-made because we are scared to die. There is no evidence of parallel universes, spirits, or a “life after life”. “Experiences” on the subject are always told by humans. I was a “spiritual seeker” for a long time in life, practicing Yoga and meditation for more than a decade. In the end there was only me, my thoughts, believes, and feelings left. I feel I have been enlightened, freed from centuries of “strange” ideas of how things have to be. Freed from religion, and with enough freedom to be happy most of the time. Enough, keeping a deep respect and curiosity for nature, which I experience and believe is eternal variety, exclude nothing, and is a process of constant change. I believe that certain musicians think and feel that “spirits” or “gods” are leading their action.

We all know that thinking vitally influences our actions and feelings in reality. However, thoughts are what they are: just ideas and pictures, self-made, or taken from others. My “inspiration” is sitting down, doing what my mind, and my environment is offering with my kids, my wife, and my friends. Everybody is free to call it spiritual, or like me, calling it enjoying what I am doing. In the beginning of the Seventies, a few musicians from Berlin and other cities created an album called “Tarot”. A friendly Swiss gypsy painter, named Walter Wegmüller, who had painted a complete series of the Tarot Card assembly, was the one who explained in case of questions, and later recorded spoken words on top of our music pieces. I had not heard of Tarot when invited to join this project. During the studio sessions in Cologne we dropped very good quality LSD. It came directly and definitely highly illegal, out of the laboratories of Hoffmann–La Roche, via the connection of Tomothy Leary, who then lived in Basel, Switzerland. Our producers, a young couple from Cologne, had personal contact with the American LSD guru, a former professor of psychology at the Harvard University, that was hunted by the CIA, because they thought he was endangering U.S. society by his, then quite popular, political and philosophical statements. Leary had published several books worldwide that sold very successfully in the Hippie society of the late Sixties and early Seventies. The producers had the idea to create twenty-one pieces of music, according to the twenty-one basic Tarot Cards of Aleister Crowley. When the LSD started its impact to my nervous system, I took a look at those Tarot Cards and was strongly overwhelmed by their obvious wisdom. Immediately, most of us had an intense feeling of deep understanding of their sensual matter. We then sat down and improvised on what had just “inspired” us. In the end, there was a double LP, the first one worldwide that treated the theme. It sold very well in Europe and is still considered a cult album, now available on CD.

“From my point of view, all religion, philosophy, and “spirits” are wishful thinking, and only man-made because we are scared to die.”
– Harald Grosskopf, drummer