[3][4] Fesl grew up in the town of his birth, Grafenau in the Bavarian Forest and then moved with his parents to Greding in Middle Franconia.

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.

[6] Fesl was, in both 1966 and 1967 the Upper Bavarian Junior Champion Weightlifter for the club ESV[note 1] München Ost,[7] to which he had belonged since 1962.

[7] 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.

[6] One of Fesl's trademarks in his live appearances was the detailed speeches that he gave[10] before each number, which by his own admission were sometimes longer than the songs themselves.

In 2008, there was a civil court case arising from the mention of Jürgen Klinsmann in one advertisement, which the brewer, Kaiser Bräu, lost.

"[14][15] 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.

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.

Auf dem Sektor „Was der Mensch ganz dringend überhaupt nicht braucht“ dagegen hat man noch Chancen!

Fesl never made public the exact nature of his marital woes, saying that the "yellow press" would be hounding him at once should he ever yield up the "fodder" that they sought.

[1] Fesl lived with his second wife Monika (née Fritzsche[1]) in Häuslaign,[18][19] an outlying centre of the Upper Bavarian municipality of Pleiskirchen[20] consisting of only one homestead (called an Einöde in southern Germany).