The German rock band City first came together on the soviet side of the Iron Curtain in 1972. Guitarist Fritz Puppel and drummer Klaus Selmke started woodshedding like many other bands playing the rock songs of the day, and the rest of the band rotated before coalescing with the addition of singer Toni Krahl and bass player Georgi Gogow. It was, surprisingly, Gogow’s ability on the violin that led to their signature recording, “Am Fenster”. A folk song that sounded little like the straight ahead rock the band played, a four minute version of the song was recorded in the mid-1970s, but would not be released as a single until 1978 where it would become one of the few German pop songs of the era to have great success in both East and West Germany. Their 1978 debut album, First, contained an expanded, 17-minute version of “Am Fenster”, and would prove to be so gigantic a hit that the band never came close to equaling it. Their unusual success in West Germany led to the chance to record their songs with English lyrics, but the result, 1980’s Dreamer, failed to catch on. The band continued despite lineup changes that led to a new-wave, keyboard heavy sound in the eighties. By the 1990’s the classic line-up that recorded “Am Fenster” came together again, and they toured regularly throughout that decade. The enduring popularity of “Am Fenster” was on display in 2020 when the song was voted the greatest song in the history of German rock by the country’s DJs.
