In 1967 Danzer had started to write and play music after he returned from a longer hitchhiking tour of Crete, Hamburg, and Sweden. The next year he released his first single, "Vera", and appeared on Austrian broadcast, but did not get a contract. Hitradio Ö3 editor "Eva-Maria Kaiser" took notice of him in 1970, and suggested that he could make a living by writing lyrics for "almost everybody in Vienna". During the next three years he wrote texts for Marianne Mendt, Margot Werner, Erika Pluhar, André Heller, Wolfgang Ambros and the singer Wilfried. With Heller, Mendt and other young musicians, „Schurli" often met in Gerhard Bronner's "Cabaret Fledermaus". They invented Austrian pop music for the following decades.