I had heard the story of the Fleetwood Mac “Munich Incident” of 1970, when the band attended a party at a castle in the forest owned by mysterious “rich hippies” who gave the band large quantities of LSD, which allegedly psychologically “destroyed” guitarists Peter Green and Danny Kirwan. I was wondering who these “Munich Jet Set hippie brats” (as Mick Fleetwood called them) were. It was these two.
Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier came to Munich’s Highfish Kommune from Berlin’s Kommune 1, where Langhans participated in provocations such as the planned “pudding assassination” of visiting U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Ursula “Uschi” Obermaier was a successful model and actress who was originally involved with the Munich art-and-music commune Amon Düül, and later involved with Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger. While living at Kommune 1, the press called them “the most beautiful couple of the APO”—the German extra-parliamentary opposition.
After Kommune 1 disintegrated in 1969, the couple joined Munich’s Highfish Kommune and quickly became its public face. Obermaier’s modeling income became the commune’s principal source of funds. Langhans was a strategist and “practical media theorist” who envisioned Highfish as a pop-media factory, producing photography, fashion, posters, video, underground film and major concerts.
The “Munich Incident” for Fleetwood Mac actually took place over a few days in March 1970 and involved a lot of basement jamming with members of the Amon Düül circle at Kronwinkl Castle. Fleetwood Mac’s surviving members remembered it as the night Green was “taken away” from them. Green remembered it as a voluntary, musically liberating experience that enabled him to break through the blues language he had been playing for years. He also connected the trip with a vision of an angel holding a starving Biafran child, which he interpreted it as an instruction to help others, reinforcing his already growing desire to give money away.
After the incident, Green came back to London and released his solo album ‘The End of the Game,’ which many critics disparaged as “directionless jamming” but which sounds pretty great if you’re into Krautrock.
