The first time I was made aware of the existence of Armin Hofmann was from an email that said “a guy in Germany bought every copy of your album from Dischord and now he wants the rest of your copies”. Of course, at the time I was amazed but I didn’t know his name or what the deal was. I would soon find out much more.
Armin really enjoyed and appreciated Buck Gooter. He did so much for us. We released our next album through X-Mist & Beau Travail. Somewhere in the emails I asked Armin if he knew how we could set up a tour in Europe to promote the record. He knew – he would put the word out to his newsletter and get some gigs together and drive us around. Simple as that!
In April 2013, Terry and I flew to Frankfurt and met Armin at the airport. I can still see him standing there, with a sly grin on his face waving us over and our subsequent slog to the car with all of our ridiculous bags. The memories from that tour are incredibly vivid to me and there’s a lot of memories… Watching Armin speed up a mountain trail as Terry and I lagged far behind. Our visit to the Teufelstisch and the joy on the faces of my traveling buddies as they took a trip down the slide. Camping out for a few days at a house that was older than America and half of it was blocked off because it was overrun with weasels. Telling us about his time touring the USA in 1984 and seeing the Dead Kennedys in LA at Olympic Stadium. We get to the place we’re staying that night and dude has a poster from that show. Punk Magic. Heading into Polska and Czechia with a road atlas that ended at the German border and our dear driver that hadn’t crossed into these countries since before the Wall fell. No cell service or GPS but we made it everywhere we needed to go on time or EARLY.
In every town that we played we were visiting Armin’s friends and longtime customers, many of whom had never met the legendary X-Mist guru in person. Their admiration was obvious and Armin was a natural charmer. He didn’t even have to do anything and he was automatically the boss in the room and everyone deferred to him and wanted to hear what he had to say. Neither of us had ever spent so much time with someone from another country IN another country, so the cultural differences and eccentricities of us and our iconoclastic host made for a wild ride. We had a blast with the truest punk.
I kept in touch with Armin after the tour over the years as X-MIST always stocked whatever new Buck Gooter album came out. In 2018 we had the good fortune to return to Europe for another tour and Ute and Armin were generous enough to put us up for a night at their home in Nagold. We had a lot of fun running around town the next day with our intrepid host. He warned us of the dangers of traveling over the border to Norway and told us to just skip the gig – we wouldn’t make it. We didn’t even touch the brakes and barely noticed the “Welcome To Norway” sign when we got there but I like to think that Armin’s warning was more like a spell that put the border guards to sleep. They had to defer to the real boss around here. I was happy I got to hang with him again.
In my last email to Armin back in April 2023, I included the photo below from our final show of the 2013 tour. He thanked me for the Easter present and said that he loved it.
The care, kindness, and memories of Armin Hofmann will live in my heart forever. I count myself as extremely lucky for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I got to spend so much rockin’ time with Armin. I told him this many times but would like to thank him again for believing in us and for being a true friend.
- Billy Brett, Buck Gooter -
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