Overhead flat lay of a vinyl record in a blank sleeve, a tambourine, a candle stub and a coiled cable on a worn rug

Two Bands Turned Up With the Same Name

September 4, 2026

Amon Düül started in Munich in 1967 as a radical political art commune, and the rule on music was that enthusiasm and attitude counted for more than ability. If you lived in the house, you were in the band. Children played on some of the recordings.

That is a coherent political position and an almost impossible basis for making records. It works right up until somebody in the house starts caring whether the music is any good.

Two houses in one

The commune sat close to the West German extra-parliamentary opposition and to Kommune 1 in West Berlin, and the people passing through it included Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier. Music was not the point of the project. It was one of the things a communal life produced, alongside the politics, and it belonged to everybody equally.

The faction that wanted to be more ambitious and more structured included Chris Karrer, John Weinzierl, Falk Rogner, Renate Knaup and Peter Leopold. They became Amon Düül II. The others, among them Ulrich Leopold and Rainer Bauer, stayed with the original.

Both positions are defensible and they cannot coexist. The whole idea was that the music belonged to the house and not to the people who happened to be able to play, and the people who could play left.

What the split was about

Weinzierl put his side of it bluntly years later. They were nonpolitical, he said, global and psychedelic and not interested in politics, and politics was just a lot of black magic.

That is one participant's account of a disagreement the other half would describe differently, and it is worth reading as a position rather than a verdict. What is not in dispute is that neither group gave up the name. Amon Düül II released Phallus Dei in 1969. The other kept releasing records too, and the two spent decades being mistaken for each other in shops.

Both are often said to have appeared at the International Essen Song Days in September 1968, Germany's first underground festival, as two separate groups. The surviving billing shows only one name on the programme. The split was happening around that weekend rather than being announced at it.

A word they did not choose

The music got called krautrock, a term coined by the British music press in the early 1970s and taken by the bands as roughly as patronizing as it sounds. There is a persistent story that it came from a track on the first Amon Düül record with Sauerkrautband in the title, which is a good story that nobody has pinned to a first printed use.

The ambition was explicitly not to imitate British and American rock, which is what most German groups of the moment were doing. Then the British press named the result after a cabbage.

Nobody knows how many records either band sold. No contemporary figures survive.

The name, decades later

The argument about who owned the name eventually reached a court. By the band's own account a line-up around Knaup, Karrer, Weinzierl, Rogner, Leopold and Meid won the case and carried on as Amon Düül II.

A commune founded on the principle that nobody owns this ended, thirty years on, with a judge deciding who did.

Knaup, asked about those years much later, said that if she had the money she would find a house where all of them could live again, with a huge rehearsal room, and that she would love that.

Why they end up on a shirt

The Amon Düül II tee is a cosmic all-seeing eye over a mountain peak, radiating, surrounded by scattered stars. It belongs to the era and the music rather than to any one record sleeve.