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, KRAFTWERK, AND CAN
It’s strange to think of uptight Germany producing explosive rock music but some of the most influential and outlandish rock'n'roll ever made spilled out from that Teutonic land during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Under the generic — some say disparaging — rubric of “Krautrock,” the wayward children of Nazi Germany tried to shake off the cultural wasteland inherited from their malevolent forefathers with their own spectral brand of avant-garde rock music. Seemingly against all odds, these new German kids managed to alchemize the era’s revolutionary spirit into some truly wild-ass rock'n'roll.
The darkly twisted, muddled mélange of music/art, noise, and poetic beauty in Krautrock was not in step with the party-down “Swingin’ 60s” vibe of most Western hippie bands whose big idea — despite a few undercurrents of political unrest — largely espoused free indulgence for the era’s youth.
But after two decimating world wars, German youth culture was non-existent and, in fact, many young Germans of the '60s had close relatives with Nazi ties; others had personally suffered under the Nazi regime. It was these deeply scarred but still somehow idealistic German kids — the first German generation after WWII — that needed to create their own identity amidst their cultural rubble.
Consequently, the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s sliced deep with the young German rock bands giving them a more artistic frame of mind versus the hedonistic ethos of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene. Krautrock groups wanted to speak directly to young German audiences seeking totally fresh concepts and brand-new ways of thinking.
So when ‘Art Terrorist’ German bands like Faust took up Marshall-stack amplified road drills and attacked their instruments onstage, or politically radicalized commune-based groups like Amon Duul synchronized LSD and group sex with maximum heaviosity, or a band like Neu! applied reductionist theory to rock music and used the same beat on nearly every track (presumably it was THE perfect rock beat — which it may well be!), their attitudes had the same sense of deconstruction and ‘Shock Of The New’ that would define Punk Rock ten years later: “smash it up, destroy the old, start anew.”
Except that in the young Germans’ existential situation, their psychic pain was more than just a vague feeling of generational teenage boredom or youthful ennui.
Like the extreme German performance artists of the era such as Otto Muehl who would drape himself in slaughtered animal carcasses and read Goethe aloud for 24 hrs or the drug-addled, supposedly self-mutilating Rudolf Schwarzkogler who faked bleeding to death after allegedly severing his own penis in an art gallery event, the new avant-garde German rock groups applied uncompromisingly fearsome standards to their art.
To them, rock music was not just a mindless diversion. It was a desperate attempt to hack a new route to the future by completely exorcising absolutely everything about the past.
Perhaps the most famous and accessible of all the German bands of the era is Kraftwerk who developed a synthesizer-based 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 - circa 1975
When the Brooklyn artist Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk 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. Over in Detroit, young hip Black kids like Derrick May and Juan Atkins reworked Kraftwerk’s hypnotic meticulous computerized rhythms and developed a sound that would eventually be known as Techno/EDM.
Meanwhile, 1970's industrialists on both sides of the Atlantic like Cabaret Voltaire, New Order, The Human League, Suicide, Tangerine Dream and others built upon Kraftwerk’s breakthroughs by taking their 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 vital today as that of any up and coming electronic act, a testament to the sheer innovative power of their original vision.
But it is perhaps the mesmerizing German group Can that best captures the revelatory power and visceral transfiguration that makes rock music among the greatest art forms of the 20th century. 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.
-CAN circa 1972
But there was also an unseen mysterious third force at work within the band: they 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 stated "nothing is planned ahead, 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 basis of creativity, it is always crisis!... Like 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 the machines once you realize that a machine is also alive, and what God is to us, we are to the machines."
Listening back to the very best early 1970's Can records – 'Tago Mago', 'Future Days', and 'Ege Bamyasi' – it is indeed difficult to dismiss the notion of ghostly spectres. 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 big role but yet, somehow, Can’s improvisations retain a sharp focus and clear restraint far beyond the self-indulgent 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 fly.
The 18-minute track "Aumgn" on Tago Mago from 1971 may be the single most disorienting and weirdly confusing piece of music recorded by any rock band in the past 50 years. By turn, the lengthy title track of 1973 Future Days LP works as a smoothly intricate balm, it’s genteel evolution and enmeshed nature sounds soothing the savage musical beast that lurks just under the virtuoso production.
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 allowing for this kind of organic give-and-take music. If you take a mistake as a mistake, you don’t get too far with 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."
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 ever (!).
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 first lead singer. At their inaugural concert, Mooney sang only the phrase "upstairs, downstairs" into the microphone for three solid hours while tripping balls, 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 pennies. As concert-goers quickly fled the premises with their cool artifacts in tow, the distraught curator finally appeared with the police but it was too late.
Mooney soon split Germany in a hurry and was replaced by Japanese hippie busker 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 debuting that night without discussion. Suzuki’s highly enigmatic and oblique tones ranged from a gentle, meditative samurai to an enraged fighting sumo beast and were 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 somewhat ponderous 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 PIL/Public Image Ltd 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 both Can singers.
Can’s unprecedented resurgence culminated in re-releases of their highly collectible and pricey original LP albums on CD and LP as well as lavish box-sets of unreleased material including an excellent DVD of 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 producers.
Sadly, the long-awaited Can re-union never took place and will now never occur given the untimely deaths of guitarist Michael Karoli in 2001, and Jaki Libiezeit and Holger Czukay in 2017. As Holger said in the 1990s, "We simply can not play again, really 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 space we created that allowed us to communicate as Can cannot be re-visited in just a re-union. It is now gone forever."
Luckily for us musical 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.
Labels: art rock, Can, Germany, krautrock, LPs, progressive music
