Eva Ries actually wanted to manage rock bands, but then she ended up managing the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan from New York City. In the OMR podcast, she talks about the challenges she faced working with the band, how she experienced the hip-hop scene between drugs, excesses and fights, and which encounters with other music legends like Kurt Cobain remain in her memory.
Actually, it all started with Udo Lindenberg. During her training as a photographer, the young Eva Ries was given a task. She was in West Berlin at the time and was supposed to make a portrait of a famous person. Udo Lindenberg was still living in the Intercontinental Hotel at the time, and Eva Ries simply dropped by, chatted up a hotel employee, who gave her a sign when Lindenberg’s manager came into the lobby. She managed to convince first the manager and then the musician to give her a chance. Udo Lindenberg was already a big name at the time. But he posed for the photography student in an unusually chic outfit that she had chosen from his closet, so Eva Ries tells us. And finally he even used the portrait as the cover of his book “Highlige Schriften.”
Way through the back door USA
Apart from this success as a young photographer, Eva Ries took something away from the encounter that would influence her entire career: she liked this job as Lindenberg manager. It inspired her to become a music manager herself. Eva Ries went to the USA to make this dream come true. In Germany, she is convinced, she would not have been given the chance at first without the right degree: “Here I only found closed doors and then I said: Now I have to find some way to make it through the back door, so to speak.”
Today, the Mannheim native can look back on more than 20 years in the international music business. She looked after bands like Nirvana and Guns’n’Roses when they were still at the very beginning of their careers. Rock music is her thing, and she likes it. But then a former boss had other plans for her: Ries took over the management of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan and was not at all enthusiastic at first.
The Wu-Tang Clan consisted of nine members at the time. The street gang came from the New York district of Staten Island and made dark hip hop. When Eva Ries heard their debut album “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)”, she found the hard rap lyrics repulsive. She could hardly imagine working with people who wrote such things. Nevertheless, she accepted the challenge. It took time to earn the band’s trust and loyalty, Eva Ries tells the OMR podcast. At the beginning, the Wu-Tang Clan repeatedly tested her loyalty. But then she went from being an outsider to being a member of the family. “That’s what they kept saying: You are family.”
Gangfights, excesses, court cases
Eva Ries has written a book about everything she experienced in the hip-hop cosmos of the 1990s. Her story is currently being made into a documentary. Because few people were as close to it as she was at the time – to the excesses, the gang fights at concerts, arguments in court or in the hotel on a European tour, when the clan’s phone bill suddenly cost a fortune: “Back then we were dependent on the landline and the landline in the hotel. And if ten people call America all night, then you can imagine that the next morning it’s 35,000 dollars.”
She remembers constantly having to put out fires and limit the damage. As a marketing manager, she sees one advantage in the band’s wild lifestyle: “The good thing was that you didn’t have to build up an image. The image was there, it was God-given.” The gangster image didn’t have to be planned or exaggerated. “They were what they were. They were a street gang from Staten Island that accidentally got into the music business. They were a group of criminals. That’s it.”
In the OMR podcast, Eva Ries talked about which band members she still has a close relationship with today, why the band once threw a tour manager out of the tour bus despite the pouring rain because of her, and how she reacted when Ol’ Dirty Bastard asked her if she could spontaneously accompany him to the Grammys while six months pregnant.
