“I didn’t know him or trust him. But I gave him all of that money in the hope he would bring me a Strat. I had no idea if I’d see him again”: Rammstein’s Richard ZK on the coffee shop rendezvous in East Germany that got him his first Fender

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Rammstein riff machine Richard ZK has offered a fascinating insight into the divided Germany he grew up in, revealing the lengths it took to get his hands on one of his first proper electric guitars – and it reads like something out of a spy film.

The West was the richer of the two sides, with the communist East often struggling economically. The Berlin Wall cut through the country’s capital, and while people could largely travel between the two countries, the process was slow and involved rigorous inspections.

To get hold of his much-craved six-string in the East, he’d have to put his trust – and a considerable financial outlay – on the line.

“I was selling jewelry in the markets at the time and ended up exchanging 12,000 East Marks into 1,200 West Marks,” he remembers. “I met a guy in a coffee shop who traveled between the East and West. I didn’t know him or trust him. But I gave him all of that money in the hope he would bring me a Strat next time he was over. I had no idea if I would ever see him again.”

His contact left, and Richard ZK was left playing the waiting game.

“Three months went by and there was nothing. I was thinking I’d been really stupid, of course, he was going to take the money for himself,” he recalls. “Then just before Christmas, there was a guitar bag in front of my door with a black Stratocaster inside.”

Yet, tragically, his relationship with the guitar didn’t blossom into the love affair that he’d dreamed of for so long.

“My expectations of the Fender were so high because it was a serious guitar with proper pickups,” he says. “I thought it would help me play all the things I wanted to play… which led to frustration. I was used to playing humbuckers on that crappy Diamant guitar. The single-coils didn’t sound right, I was wondering what the fuck they were. I learned from that lesson and later sold the guitar.”

Richard ZK has been using ESP guitars since 1996, three years into life in Rammstein. He’s also since been playing higher quality humbuckers – his new signature guitar features a pair of Fishman Fluence pickups.

A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He’s also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.