A celebrated artist – Dieter Meier
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Dieter Meier embodies his roles as artist, gourmet, golfer, producer and SEO with absolute ease.
I met Dieter first in Zurich in the 80s. I was recording the album DIRTY MONEY and engineer Hairi( who christened the group name Yello) suggested asking Dieter for assistance to help produce it. I arrived at his elegant mansion on the famous hill above the Zurich lake – an artist out of the usual. He was charming, generous and, unlike many an artist, listened with an attentive ear.
He refused the production costs but did buy 25 albums to send around to his contacts in Germany. WOW, I thought that is cool. He doesnt even know me but he is willing to put his name on the line with his friends and take a risk with his reputation as an artist.
Then he decided to cast me in his film the LIGHTMAKER to be shot in Poland. I waited two years for it cancelling work sometimes so to compensate this porr Scottish artist he paid me handsomely to perform in the YELLO video, Tied up. (see below).
Then we went to Poland to shoot the film – I remember Dieter was so upset at the quality of food in 1989 Wrocsalv that he decided to rent a LOT jet. So each weekend we would all pile in to his plane – (how many an artist can rent his own plane?) and fly to Zurich so he could buy pasta and good chianti. That was typically stylish of this eccentric artist but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for all the Polish colleagues who could only smell the wealth: they were so far from it, artist or not.
I later visited him in Los Angeles at a beautiful house he bought in old Hollywood. I put down my voice tracks in two days but he insisted on me staying there for ten days all at his expense. I even had to drive him home in his Rolls Royce after a party or two.
As for the house he left the design pretty much as it was from 1926 when Ramon Navarro a silent (and gay) film artist had it built. But in the cellar a state of the art studio was constructed with the best sound I think I ever heard. Even the best performing artist ever seen, Michael Jackson, was excited by it when he saw it.
This is quite indicative of our Western financial set up. That nothing can be for free, everything has its price. Dieter was trying to empower people as he does in his daily life.