The beginning

By the end of the 70th a group of young people with common interest in music and just being together was formed in Fulda. They started the first Johannesberg Festival in 1978 - a live music open air event. With the profits they rented an old empty farm close to the city - the Lanneshof. Here they spent their time beside school and work in a free space where they actually could do what they wanted: being together, having fun and dreaming.

Nobody was living at the Lanneshof, but there was always somebody there. They shared a garage for maintaining motorcycles, a little library, a sleeping room where they could crash on the weekends, a practicing room for music, a room for working with art, a kitchen and a living room to hang out. 

They weren’t officially an organization and decided everything in the plenum. The rent was paid in cash to the nearby living owner. It was cheap.

Some of them got together and started making music...

The Rainbow Bridge

One Day Geigi came to the Lanneshof and told the story of Udo, the artist. Udo had that dream of walking through the rainbow. He started painting an arch-bridge crossing the railroad in Fulda into a rainbow. He never had an official permission, though every approach was ended by the police and finally he was handed over to psychiatry for observation for three days. 

The group was outraged and decided to do something about it. They organized a performance of painting the bridge to fullfil Udo’s dream and invited the press to cover it. Just the lack of painting set a stopp to paint the entire bridge before finally the police came. The action became public. Udo was charged for vandalism and finally had to repaint the bridge in gray again, but by that time the bridge was known in public as the Rainbow Bridge.

And for the group it was the beginning of a journey...

Johannesberg Festival

The musicians started practicing more seriously. Inspired by Irish folk music they started playing all kind of different folk music. They called themselves DRAUSSEN REGNET'S (It’s raining outside).

The Zwiebel prepared their third open air festival in 1980. Bine and Jutta came back from an adventurous trip to Greece and joined the group with pantomime sketches and called themselves HERE COME THE SUN.

After the festival someone came up up with that idea to pack the instruments and travel around. During the following year things started rushing up. They found an old Mercedes bus, figured out how to make some money and bought it. The plan was to fix the bus for at least 8 people to live in and after the next festival in 1981 they wanted to leave Germany and travel as a street performance group. 

The preparation time was filled with work to make money, moving together as a collective close to Fulda, having several performances, practicing music and pantomime and developing a street program. 

Departure

After the festival in 1981 things were set. The bus was nearly fixed, just some small things were to do. 8 people were ready to go: Seppel, Manfred, Katharina, Geigi, Jutta, Gogo, Bine and Hermann. Biggi decided to stay behind because of here exames. Ali had moved to Berlin. 

One day Geigi brought August from Berlin. He was a theatre actor and trained the group with some techniques. He wanted to continue later in France.

August 13th 1981 the group gathered some close friends in Malkes for a short farewell. Finally in the evening everybody was sitting in the bus and it began to roll...