Adventures in Cool Music: CAN & KRAUTROCK by J.A. Cervera

Welcome, musical iconoclasts ! .....    

This blog will generally avoid most pop, rock & jazz music. Instead, our focus will be upon seminal but little-heard music in all genres remaining in need of rediscovery. In essence, we'll become a compendium of records and artists with the mark of singular greatness but which somehow avoided public perception to land in commercial oblivion. But our musical excavation is not just about outing obscurities for the sake of their rarity. This music serves as a larger argument against the soul-sapping reductionism of a corporate industry that continues to stagnate around an ever-decreasing crop of "radio-friendly" artists. Predictably, many of  our musical pioneers languished in poverty and never achieved any real level of monetary success. But does that mean they were failures? Only if you measure achievement with a calculator. The joyous thrill of pure musical creativity lives on within these rare grooves.





KRAUTROCK AND CAN


It may be a stretch to think of uber-rigorous Germany being capable of producing explosive, outlandish rock music, but some of the most influential and phantasmagorical rock & roll ever made spilled out from that Teutonic land during the late 1960s and early 1970's.


Under the generic - some say disparaging - term "Krautrock," the lost children of Nazi Germany tried to shake loose the cultural wasteland inherited from their corrupt forefathers and managed to alchemize the era's revolutionary spirit into a totally new musical sound. The mix of noise, poetry, and lyricism heard in Krautrock was different than the get-down-party vibe of most Western hippie bands who - with some stray nods to political unrest - mostly encouraged guilt-free youthful indulgence. But after two devastating world wars, German youth culture was non-existent and many young Germans of the '60s still had relatives with Nazi ties; others had suffered under the Nazi regime. So it was these deeply scarred but yet somehow still idealistic German kids, the first generation born after WWII, that was driven to create their own unique identity amidst their nation's cultural rubble.


Consequently, the free-thinking iconoclasm of the era cut deep with the young German art-rock bands and provided them with a more esoteric mindset versus the simpler hedonistic ethos of the Haight-Ashbury scene, for example. So when 'art-terrorist' German bands like Faust took up Marshall-stack amplified road drills and attacked their instruments on-stage or when radicalized commune-based groups like Amon Duul synchronized drug-taking and compulsory sex with maximum heaviosity, or a band like Neu! applied reductivism theory to rock music and used the same quintessential beat on nearly every track (presumably it was THE perfect rock beat -- which it may likely well be!), their shared attitude had the same symbolic deconstruction that would fire up Punk Rock a decade later: "Tear down the walls. Cut out the cancer. Start anew."


But in the young Germans' world, the existential cancer in question was more than just a vague feeling of generational boredom. Like the extreme German performance artists of the period such as Otto Muehl who would climb inside freshly slaughtered animal carcasses and read Goethe aloud for 24 hrs or the damaged, allegedly self-mutilating Rudolph Schwarzkogler who faked bleeding to death after supposedly severing his own penis in an art gallery 'event,' the avant-garde German rock groups applied scary standards to their work. Indeed, art and rock music were not just simple diversions for these bands - it was really a brave, desperate attempt to find a brand-new route to the future by completely exorcising the past.

Perhaps the most famous and accessible of all the German bands of the era is Kraftwerk who developed a synthesizer-based electronic sound that was to become the sonic bedrock, oddly enough, of Hip-Hop, Rap and EDM dance music 20 years later. Their robotically funky creations like "Autobahn," "Numbers," "Trans-Europe Express," "Showroom Dummies," and "Pocket Calculator" presaged the 100% computerized technology that would come to embody modern music production in the waning days of the 20th century.

KRAFTWERK - 1975


When the Brooklyn Hip-Hop innovator Afrika Bambaataa first sampled Kraftwerk extensively for the smash "Planet Rock" single in 1981, he set in motion a movement that was effectively the birth of  Hip-Hop's instrumental palette: huge, booming electro-drum sounds mingled with eerie synthesizer landscapes over which MCs laid down their gruff proto-vocals. In Detroit, young hip Black kids like Derrick May and Juan Atkins took Kraftwerk’s hypnotic, meticulous computerized rhythms and developed what would eventually be known as techno music. Meanwhile, late-1970's industrialists on both sides of the Atlantic like Cabaret Voltaire, New Order, The Human League, Suicide, Tangerine Dream and many others built upon Kraftwerk’s breakthroughs by taking the sequenced, stacked synth sound to the furthest reaches of both pop music and rock’s avant-garde scenes. Now universally hailed as one of the most influential bands of all time, Kraftwerk continues to tour and release records sporadically. Amazingly, their sound remains as fresh and vital today as that of any up and coming new act, a testament to the sheer innovative power of their original vision.

But it is perhaps the obscure and stunning German group Can that best captures the revelatory power and visceral transfiguration that makes rock music among the greatest modern art forms. As a collective, Can always added up to more than the sum of their parts. When the group recorded their first LP, the seminal Monster Movie album in 1968, three of its members were already well into their 30's and had trained under classical avant-garde composers Gyorgy Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen as well as playing free jazz with the internationally renown Manfred Schoof Quintet.


But there was an unseen third force at work with the band: the band members claimed a kind of extrasensory assistance was responsible for the precisely ordered and perfectly sculpted nature of their 100% completely improvised music. Keyboardist Irwin Schmidt once claimed that "Nothing is planned, either on-stage or in the studio because everyone in this group is a telepath. There is nothing mysterious about telepathy, really anyone can do it. Like anything else it requires training, but you get to a certain level of telepathy and it works like a crisis point, which is the very basis of creativity, it is always crisis!... When I play, I wait until a certain machine tells me it needs to be turned on, and then I put it on. It is very easy to get power over machines once you realize that a machine is also alive and what God is to us, we are to the machines."

                                          CAN - 1972


Listening back to the very best early 1970's Can records – Tago Mago, Future Days, and Ege Bamyasi – it is indeed difficult to dismiss these spectral notions. It sounds like music forged directly from dreams and the subconscious, capable of both unearthly ferocity and extreme dynamics within the space of a few bars. Their prodigious intake of brain-frying psychoactives certainly played a goodly role but yet, somehow, Can’s improvisations retain a sharp focus and clear restraint far beyond the self-indulgent dull noodling of other similarly "trippy" groups.


In fact, Can never called what they were doing 'improvising' at all. In their collection of accidentally apocryphal anthropological recordings of non-existent cultures termed the Ethnological Forgery Series, they claimed to be involved in "instant composition" of "improvised forms" in which there exist references from one part to another, but which are completely created on the spot. Their secret weapon was bassist/tape manipulator Holger Czukay who produced many of their recordings and once said that Can's strength was simply "Listening to one another, instead of just playing...We have created a spiritual universe between us that allows for this kind of organic give-and-take music. If you take a mistake as a mistake, you don’t get very far with this so-called improvisation. But if you take a mistake as music as well, you can actually get your ideas from the mistake, then you have something far bigger and much more pure. That is the simple essence of Can music." The 18-minute track "Aumgn" on Tago Mago from 1971 may be the single most disorienting and frightening piece of music recorded by any rock band in the past 40 years. By turn, the lengthy title track of 1973's Future Days LP works as an intricate balm, it’s genteel evolution and enmeshed nature sounds soothing the savage musical beast that lurks just under the virtuoso production.

Along with a tangential indebtedness to The Velvet Underground and Minimalist classical composer John Cage’s electronically treated soundscapes, Can’s mantra-like music also has a very strong connection with African tribal rhythms due to genius drummer Jaki Liebezeit. His insistent, cyclical drumming anchored the group’s wildest ebbs & flows with metronomic, repetitive drum figures full of mystical power and nuance. Liebezeit's driving, backbeat-heavy "motorik" beats have been sampled countless times for modern dance music by creative producers seeking an unstoppable rhythm track. On some Can tracks, the volume can even be very low and still retain a deep groove thanks to his drumming style which eschewed fancy cymbal work in favor of symbiotic bass drum / snare interplay. At several Can concerts, it is lore that the manic regularity of Liebezeit’s snare hits triggered mysterious hallucinatory trances in sober attendees including the British actor David Niven, who after attending a Can performance replete with on-stage magicians, dancers and circus midgets, famously stated that he had no idea what he'd just seen, but they were certainly the greatest band he’d ever witnessed (!).

Can’s various singers were also to become legendary. First, the black American ex-patriate Malcolm Mooney who despite -- or perhaps because -- of his underlying mental illness, became Can’s initial lead singer. At their inaugural concert, Mooney sang only the phrase "upstairs, downstairs" into the microphone for three solid hours even after the band had stopped playing. At a subsequent show held at a museum, Mooney began auctioning art masterworks off the gallery walls for mere pennies. As concert-goers quickly fled the premises with their priceless artifacts in tow, the distraught curator finally appeared with the police but it was too late.


Mooney soon left Germany in a hurry and was replaced by Japanese hippie wanderer Damo Suzuki who had been encountered on a Munich street literally staring at the sun and was immediately asked to become Can’s new lead singer without discussion. Suzuki’s highly enigmatic and oblique tones ranged from a gentle, meditative samurai to an enraged fighting sumo beast and were generally lyrically undecipherable except for an odd phrase here or there. Suzuki grew into a extraordinary frontman with a spooky, highly musical intonation that meshed perfectly with Can’s exploratory aesthetic until he finally returned to Japan attracted by the burgeoning Jehovah’s Witness religion in his homeland. All of Can’s classic early 70's efforts named above include Damo as the singer.

Can continued well into the late 1970's without any official singer, sharing limited vocal duties among themselves and expanding their instrumental sound into more pop-oriented areas, including a hit UK dance song, "I Want More," in 1977. Soon after, the band brought in African musicians and adopted a slightly dubious neo-Dub Reggae approach that was too far from their wild beginnings and they finally disbanded in 1980, just as Punk culture began to hail them and their Krautrock peers as pioneering influences. Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten claimed Can as his only favorite band and the basis of his subsequent group Public Image Ltd’s sound. David Bowie has called Can the single most important rock band of all time and avant-rockers like Brian Eno, The Fall, Wire, Iggy Pop, Julian Cope & Teardrop Explodes, The Orb, Sonic Youth, Aphex Twin, The Pink Fairies, Gary Numan, The Buzzcocks, Sparks and many more have borrowed liberally from Can’s sonic bag of tricks, if not their freewheeling, take-no-prisoners style. The critically-lauded alternative rock band The Mooney Suzuki even take their name from the two Can singers!

Can’s unprecedented resurgence culminated in re-releases of their highly collectible and pricey original LP albums on CD as well as a lavish box-set of unreleased material including an excellent DVD of recent interviews along with rare live footage taken from the band’s heyday. The 1997 double-CD set "Sacrilege" features electronica re-mixes of Can classics as done by the genres' standout talents. Sadly, the long-awaited Can re-union never took place and will now never occur given the untimely death of guitarist Michael Karoli in 2004. As he himself said in 1997, "We simply can not play again ever... In the old days, we spent 18 hours a day together, playing, rehearsing, recording, eating, arguing. We only went home to sleep with our wives. We played everyday hours and hours and hours for years and years. It was really very, very serious. The private universe we created that allowed us to communicate as Can cannot be re-visited in a simple re-union. It is now gone forever." Luckily for us musically-curious earthly denizens, the philosophical, political, and artistic statement that was Can lives on in 12 astonishing albums of soaring, unfettered musical creativity......Get The Can!

J. A. Cervera has been a professional musician for over
30 years and an obsessive record collector since age 12.
He has tens of thousands of LPs and deals vinyl online
all over the world from his home in Livingston, Montana.