Fritz Egner is a radio legend. He also enjoyed great success on television with shows such as “Dingsda”. He turns 75 on Saturday.
He had them all, almost all of them. The superstars of pop and rock’n’roll passed through his studio door handle. For 50 years – and there is no end in sight. On August 3, Fritz Egner, the most famous DJ on German-speaking radio, will be 75 years old.
He was and is always there
Actually, a birthday like that in retirement is an anachronism, because decades are certainly not the right unit of measurement for popularity in the seemingly eternally young music business. But he was and still is there, with his pleasant, normal voice, only slightly colored by Bavarian melodies, with a gently rolling R. It sounds so beautifully timeless when he talks about music, since 1979, when he started at Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR).
The fact that he turned his completely unglamorous first name Fritz into an unmistakable international brand – “Fritz & Hits” – speaks for his keen intelligence. His radio shows attracted attention not only in Bavaria and Germany, for example when a world-class pop star greeted listeners with a raspy voice: “Hi, I’m Rod Stewart and you’re listening to ‘Fritz & Hits’, ’cause Fritz has the hits!”
How it all began
At the beginning of this unique career there was a not particularly good joke. Fritz Egner from Munich, the son of a Federal Railway official, did an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer after graduating from high school, but he dropped out of his studies to become a high-voltage engineer.
The young man was passionate about music and helped set up the Musicland studio of the well-known South Tyrolean music producer Giorgio Moroder (84). And because he, like many of his peers, listened to the American army radio station AFN Munich with the best music every day, he heard that the US station was urgently looking for a studio technician in 1974.
Fritz Egner applied – and was accepted. He later said: “I now found myself in a cosmos that meant the world to me. For me, a dream had come true.”
He was given a US Army ID card (Installation Pass) and was not only responsible for the functioning of the technology. He was soon allowed to go on air with traffic reports because he could pronounce “Mittlerer Ring” and “Donnersberger Brücke” correctly. His English was now so good that he read out the weather report – and the Munich AFN boss Neil Fontaine promised him that if a presenter ever overslept in the morning, he, Fritz, could take over the microphone for the broadcast.
The “Guy with the nice German accent”
On Easter Monday 1977, morning host Ron Todd actually overslept his turn, and the only person left in the studio was technician Fritz Egner, who spontaneously and unpreparedly took over the moderation at 6 a.m. Fritz had been on the air for over 90 minutes when Todd finally arrived. Annoyed, Fontaine asked the German: “Did you go on air?” When Fritz replied that he had suggested it to him himself, Fontaine said that it was “just a joke!”
After all, the wife of the US base commander had heard the show with Fritz Egner and was very amused by the young man. She thought that we should hear this guy with the nice German accent more often. Despite a bad joke, his career took off.
From then on, Egner hosted “Discosoul” every Thursday at 9 p.m. on the European AFN program and became a sidekick presenter as “Fritz, the tap-dancing engineer” on the shows of AFN DJ Rick Demarest. “The time at AFN was an invaluable apprenticeship in modern music radio,” he later said in .
This could have continued forever, because Fritz felt he was in good hands at what he thought was the best radio station in Europe. But then in 1979, a young Thomas Gottschalk (74) called and asked Fritz Egner whether he would like to do unconventional radio at Bayerischer Rundfunk.
Legendary era at Bayern 3
Fritz had. Thus began the legendary era of the young wild ones at Bayern 3 with Thomas Gottschalk, Günther Jauch, Fred Kogel, Jürgen Hermann, Jim Sampson, who also came to BR from AFN, and Fritz Egner.
At the same time, in the early 1980s, he accepted an offer from Warner Brothers. He worked for five years in Los Angeles, New York and Munich for lawyers and managers in the music business. “I was able to look behind the scenes and see who was controlling the stars.” This gave him an insight into the workings of the music business, another invaluable experience.
“His word carried weight,” judged “Radioszene,” the magazine for radio producers. Fritz Egner was “a ‘hit nose’ who, with his comprehensive knowledge of the music scene, was always discovering new stars and bands of tomorrow.”
In his calm way, he has had perhaps the most impressive music career on the radio, because in a friendly and obliging way he has always remained the Fritz Egner who started at AFN in 1974. His success as a TV presenter has not changed that.
Television history with “Dingsda”
From 1985 to 1994 he presented the ARD quiz show “Dingsda”, and from 1990 the show “Showfritz” (about TV entertainment in other countries). From 1994 he presented “Entweder oder” and “Glücksspirale” on ZDF, and from 1995 to 2003 he presented “Versteckte Kamera”. From 1996 to 2005 he worked for Sat.1 (“WWW – The funniest commercials in the world” and “World history of animal films”).
His great passion, however, remains radio. For over 35 years, until 2015, he entertained his audience with songs and interviews with the artists on Bayern 3. Since January 1, 2016, every Friday evening from 8 p.m. on Bayern 1 for three hours, he has been broadcasting “Fritz & Hits – the greatest artists in music history.” He says: “I have a wide range. The range extends from country to jazz, from pop to rock to funk and soul, as well as anecdotes, historical contexts and interview excerpts.”
The modest Fritz Egner, who lives near Munich with his wife Katrin, a now grown-up daughter and an underage son, has met and spoken to over 500 stars over the course of his career and passed on his impressions to his listeners. Among them were Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, James Brown, Madonna, Sting, Phil Collins, Tina Turner, ABBA, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Ringo Starr, Lionel Richie, Bruce Springsteen and many others. Only a few are missing, such as John Lennon, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.
A private archive full of treasures
In his private archive, there are 25,000 LPs and 20,000 CDs as well as recordings of around 500 interviews, most of which have been archived, digitized and saved on hard drives, all in English and internationally usable. This year, this resulted in the game app “Quiz mit Fritz”, which contains Egner’s personal archive of the last 50 years, with 2,200 questions on everything from James Brown and the Beatles to Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber.
He has been friends with heroes from the old days of radio, such as Thomas Gottschalk, for decades, about which he once said: “Anyone who has Thomas Gottschalk as a friend can save themselves the trouble of going to the psychiatrist.”
Source: Stern
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
