Four Decades, One Chain – A Note on Reinhard Holstein

A few days ago, Reinhard Holstein sat down in front of his camera and spoke for twenty minutes about the festival. About Ben de la Cour, who plays Friday. About Jesper Lindell, who closes Friday night and, as Reinhard was keen to point out, is playing nowhere else in Germany this year. It is a warm and generous piece, spoken directly and without polish, the way friends talk to each other about music they love.

Reinhard Holstein on Static Roots 2026 · Twenty minutes, straight to camera

For anyone who has followed European Americana over the last four decades, Reinhard's name will already carry a particular weight. Glitterhouse Records, which he co-founded in 1985 in Beverungen, was one of the two independent German labels that carried Americana across the continent for three decades. Today he runs JukeJoint500, a vinyl-focused label that is also the home of The Southern Fold, whose new album we will celebrate at the Welcome Night in Essen-Werden on 9 July.

That is who Reinhard is to the world.

To me, he is something more personal.

In the early 1980s, before Glitterhouse Records existed, there was the Glitterhouse Fanzine. A small, hand-produced magazine that told a young German boy about music he had never heard, from places he had never been. I was that boy. And in the pages of that fanzine, I first read about a band called The Dream Syndicate.

That reading led to listening. Listening led to loving. Loving that band led me, eventually, to a songwriter named Steve Wynn. Steve Wynn's 2006 concert in Mülheim opened a door I had not known was there. Behind it was 13 years of small, intimate concerts at Raumfahrtzentrum Saarner Kuppe. Those concerts, dozens of them, formed the community and the confidence that made Static Roots Festival possible when we opened the doors in Oberhausen for the first time in 2016.

If you draw the line back through this festival, it runs through the Zentrum Altenberg stage in Oberhausen, through the Static Roots Presents shows across the Ruhrgebiet, through a hundred living rooms in Mülheim, through Steve Wynn's guitar, through The Dream Syndicate's records, and all the way to a hand-stapled fanzine that a young man opened somewhere in the early 1980s.

Reinhard Holstein started that chain.

Forty years later, he sits down in front of his camera and says, quite simply, that he will be there on Friday. He recommends the music. He recommends the room. He recommends the town.

A few years ago I might have believed I built this festival with my own hands. I know better now. This festival was built with many hands, some of them mine, some of them belonging to artists and volunteers and friends and family. But the first hands, the ones that lit the fire that all of us have been tending ever since, belonged to Reinhard.

We do not always get to thank the people who quietly shaped who we became. Usually the moment passes and the person moves on and only years later do we recognise what happened.

This time the moment has not passed. The person has not moved on. He will be in Oberhausen on Friday.

Thank you, Reinhard. For the fanzine. For the label. For everything you gave to the music before I even knew what to call it. And thank you for coming to see the festival that would not exist without you.

We will save you a seat.