Trivia

According to Fesl himself, his career as a musician began when he found that he could get into small theatres ("Kleinkunstbühnen") in Munich free if he showed up with a guitar and told the staff that he was one of the musicians who were to appear. One evening, when the actual artistes failed to show up, Fesl was asked to get up on the stage himself and perform. With his funny, chatty manner, he quickly won the audience's favour.

Beginning in 1997, Fesl found that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease and thus in late 2006, he had to cut his well attended farewell tour short.

Fesl did an apprenticeship as an artist blacksmith.

He was sometimes called "Bajubarde" ("Bayou Bard") or "Bayerns bester Barde" ("Bavaria's Best Bard").

Fesl called his works "Bavarian and melancomical songs" (the subtitle to his fourth album), which are sung in Lower Bavarian dialect, often have their roots in folk music and do not seldom contain puns. Fesl played guitar, tuba, trumpet, alto horn and piano.

After Fesl had tried his hand at various occupations (by his own word, he worked as a furrier, a film set builder, an extra, a locksmith, a fashion jewelry seller, a bulky-waste collector, an antique dealer and a beer lorry driver), he wanted to establish himself as an artist blacksmith, setting himself up a workshop in Freising.

Outside his musical and humorous work, Fesl also owned an excavator. This was publicly known because Ottfried Fischer mentioned it in several episodes of his programme Ottis Schlachthof. He reportedly bought it for work on his estate. Fesl himself mentioned using it to dig ponds.

He learnt to play guitar while he was in the Bundeswehr, where he also became the joker in the background in his outfit, the Gebirgsjägertruppe ("Mountain Infantry"), which somewhat irked his superiors.

In 1977, Fesl played a singer in the film Die Jugendstreiche des Knaben Karl (about the younger Karl Valentin) and sang in a beergarden from his Bibel-Gstanzl'n (Amen).

After finishing at the Volksschule, he passed the intake examination for the Oberrealschule in Ingolstadt (now called the Christoph-Scheiner-Gymnasium), where he lived at boarding school. Further academic endeavours, though, were somewhat more successful.

In 2009, to alleviate his Parkinson's symptoms, he had a "brain pacemaker" surgically implanted. His life with this illness was documented within the framework of the ZDF series 37°.

One of Fesl's trademarks in his live appearances was the detailed speeches that he gave before each number, which by his own admission were sometimes longer than the songs themselves.

In 2015, his autobiography "Ohne Gaudi is ois nix" came out. The book contained memories from Fesl himself, along with some from companions such as Zither-Manä, Mike Krüger, Konstantin Wecker, Hans Well, Willy Astor and Martina Schwarzmann.

For a few years, Fesl could regularly be heard in radio advertisements for the beer brand Veldensteiner. In 2008, there was a civil court case arising from the mention of Jürgen Klinsmann in one advertisement, which the brewer, Kaiser Bräu, lost. Klinsmann's actual complaint was that the Denglisch word "clean" was being used in the advertisement to refer to the first syllable in his last name. The presiding judge in the case stressed that it was "certainly not the worst case of violating personal rights, but name rights have been fundamentally violated." The offending beer commercial was banned, as well. Fesl had this to say about the proceedings: "There are worse things, mushy Semmelknödel for instance.

He ended his concerts by doing a handstand on the chair on which he had been sitting and playing his songs.

Fesl was, in both 1966 and 1967 the Upper Bavarian Junior Champion Weightlifter for the club ESV München Ost, to which he had belonged since 1962.

In 1976, at the Theater im Fraunhofer in Munich, he made his first record, entitled simply Fredl Fesl. After its release, he got his own television programme, Fredl und seine Gäste ("Fredl and his Guests").

Fesl was often associated with the song "Der Königsjodler" ("The King's Yodeller"), which he had earlier regularly performed.

In his childhood, Fesl was, according to the story, once expelled from a school for replying to a box on the ear from a teacher by boxing the teacher's ear back.

Fredl Fesl was a Lower Bavarian musician and singer who was said to be the one who invented Bavarian musical Kabarett.

For the made-for-television film Wunderland (1983), the song "Ich bin der Räuber Hotzenplotz" was written by him.

The documentary from the series Lebenslinien entitled Fredl Fesl: I bin wia i bin (2003) shows the artist's life by using many interviews and clips of his appearances.

In 1995 Fesl was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which led to his retirement as a musician in 2006.

From 1997 to 1998, Fesl worked together with others in 10 episodes of the Austrian Kabarett series Tohuwabohu.

In 1989, Fesl made a guest appearance in the children's series Meister Eder und sein Pumuckl in the episode Pumuckl und die Musik.