Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (26 page)

In the late ‘60s, Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt worked in the world of modern classical music; between them they’d studied and performed with
John Cage
and
LaMonte Young
and were classmates together under Karlheinz Stockhausen. Though already in their thirties, by 1968 they’d become interested in the artistic possibilities of popular music. When Michael Karoli, one of Czukay’s students, played him the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” Czukay was inspired to form a band. Inner Space, as they were called, included Karoli on guitar and Schmidt on keyboards, along with a jazz drummer named Jaki Liebzeit. Schmidt’s wife, who became the group’s manager, brought in an African-American painter living in Germany named Malcolm Mooney to sing. Because it was the only rock instrument not taken, Czukay took up playing bass, though his primary role in the group was as recording engineer, conceptualist, and tape editor.

By year’s end, the group changed their name to Can and moved into a castle near Cologne, where they immediately began recording their improvisations. This early material – later released on both the
Delay 1968
album and on parts of
Unlimited Edition
– included Velvet Underground-style minimalist rock and “samples” of recent student protests. Also captured were the first installments of the group’s
Ethnological Forgery Series
, which appropriated bits of world music, as Western artists like Peter Gabriel and David Byrne would do decades later.

Karl Wallintfer, World Party:

They’ve definitely influenced me in the sense that, though they wanted to make it, there was a lot more of “We really want to make this music.” They had weird, great rhythms.

The band’s first true release was 1969’s
Monster Movie
, which they recorded live in their castle/studio. By then the band’s vision and delivery had been substantially refined. Songs like the insistent opener
Father Cannot Yell
sustain linear tension, with bass throbbing steadily, and sharp – almost mathematical – drumming. Most impressive, though, is the 20-minute finale,
Yoo Doo Right
, a classic example of what the band called “instant composition,” a process where they sculpted and edited an extended improvisation into a cohesive (though expansive and free-flowing) song. A tight, minimal funk groove beats out hypnotically and steers
Yoo Doo Right
on its course, while Mooney’s vocals explore rhythmic and melodic possibilities.

Scott Kannberg, Pavement:

I think I read some interview with
Public Image
where they said Can was their favorite band and so I went and checked them out. First I thought it was just hippie dribble, but as I listened to it more and more I thought it was amazing. On Wowee Zowee, “Half a Canyon,” that kind of has a Can-like groove on the second part of the song.

After the interim release of
Soundtracks
, a collection of the group’s contributions to low-budget and soft-core porn movies, the band returned in 1971 with
Tago Mago
. By then, Mooney had returned to the United States to work out emotional problems and pursue his original path as a painter. After months without a lead singer, Czukay approached Damo Suzuki, an adequately eccentric Japanese street musician he saw in Munich, and invited him to join the band for that night’s sold-out concert. Having no plans for the evening, Suzuki accepted. And though he managed to clear out the audience with his spastic samurai-scatting, Damo remained Can’s new lead singer. Unlike Mooney’s more disciplined vocals, Suzuki’s style – later copped by singers such as the
Fall
’s Mark E. Smith (who wrote a song called “I Am Damo Suzuki”) – blended into the instrumental mix and allowed the others more opportunity to explore.

Tago Mago
, Can’s first album with Suzuki, was not surprisingly the group’s most extreme in sound and structure. At over 70 minutes (it was originally a double album), the record charts a descent into madness. After a relatively conventional and melodic first side, the 18-minute
Halleluhwah
and 17-minute
Aumgn
(named after an Aleister Crowley magic spell) fill sides two and three with a trancelike rhythm that degenerates into dissonance.
Aumgn
and
Peking O
, which feature Czukay’s tape and radio experiments (a trick he’d learned from Stockhausen and
Cage
), bring the group as close as it ever got to avant-garde noise music.

Surprisingly, 1972’s
Ege Bamyasi
headed in the opposite direction. Can’s first album recorded at their new Inner Space studio (and first released in the U.S.), it plunged the band into much more accessible territory. When
Spoon
was used on a popular German television show, it even yielded the group’s first European hit. With its cover art – a can of okra – and songs like
Vitamin C
,
Soup
, and
I’m so Green
,
Ege Bamyasi
is Can’s most literally unified and consciously organic work. Having discovered their sound, the members of Can settled back into a comfortable blend of surreal sound sketches and disciplined funk rhythms.

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

I found
Ege Bamyasi
in the 49-cent bin at Woolworth’s. I didn’t see anything written about Can, I didn’t know anything about them except this okra can on the cover, which teemed completely bizarre. I finally picked that record up, and I completely wore it out. It was so alluring. Something about it made Can seem to be playing outside of rock ‘n’ roll. It was unlike anything else I was hearing at the time.

With 1973’s
Future Days
, Can delved into atmospherics as never before, with the gentle synth pulsations, gull chirps, and watery rushes of songs like
Spray
and
Moonshake
(a name later adopted by a British post-rock group). The 20-minute
Bel Air
radiates the kind of space-age ether/undersea solemnity that still sounds ultra-modern in the hands of a band like Stereolab today. After
Future Days
, Suzuki left the group, and was not replaced. Karoli and Schmidt split what little vocal work appears on the mostly instrumental, and even more ambient,
Soon Over Babaluma
.

Though Can would produce six more albums during the ‘70s, by 1975 their strongest work was behind them. After
Landed
(which featured
Hunters and Collectors
, another song that later became a band name), the group branched out into reggae, country, and other styles with 1976’s
Flow Motion
and had a British hit with the disco funk of
I Want More
. For
Saw Delight
, Can added two former members of the band Traffic – percussionist Reebop Kwaku Baah and bassist Rosko Gee – who were no doubt meant to steer the group toward more mainstream success. But as Gee freed Czukay from his bass responsibilities, he began to focus more on tape and radio experiments that were not compatible with the group’s increasingly commercial approach. It was a contradiction that was never resolved, and after a self-titled album in 1979, the members of Can went their separate ways.

Can reunited in the late ‘80s with original singer Malcolm Mooney to record the surprisingly good
Rite Time
, but the reunion was short-lived. Though each member has remained active on his own, Czukay’s post-Can career is most distinctive. In his collaborations with the Eurythmics,
PIL
’s Jah Wobble, U2’s Edge, and Japan’s David Sylvian during the ‘80s, Czukay transmitted Can’s legacy onto a new generation of progressive rockers who would in turn define the styles we hear today. This, along with extensive reissues of Can albums and a record of electronic remixes, has considerably raised the band’s profile in the ‘90s and moved them closer to receiving their due credit as one of rock’s most distinctive and visionary bands.

DISCOGRAPHY

Monster Movie
(United Artists, 1969; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; the debut, featuring original singer Malcolm Mooney and their classic
Yoo Doo Right
.

Soundtracks
(United Artists, 1970; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; a collection of tracks recorded for various movies.

Tago Mago
(United Artists, 1971; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; a double album, Can’s most experimental record.

Ege Bamyasi
(United Artists, 1972; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; their most accessible album which, not surprisingly, was something of a commercial breakthrough.

Future Days
(United Artists, 1973; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
.

Soon over Babaluma
(United Artists, 1974; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; a more ambient effort, their first without a lead singer.

Landed
(Virgin, 1975; Spoon/Mute, 1989)
.

Unlimited Edition
(Caroline, 1976; Spoon/Mute, 1991)
; an expanded version of
Limited Edition
, collecting previously unreleased material spanning their entire career up to that point.

Flow Motion
(Virgin, 1976; Spoon/Mute, 1989)
; the band ventures into styles such as disco and reggae, to varying results.

Saw Delight
(Harvest, 1977; Spoon/Mute, 1989)
; the addition of two ex-Traffic members makes the sound slicker and fuller.

Out of Reach
(Peters Intl., 1978)
; a hard-to-find album generally regarded poorly.

Cannibalism 1
(United Artists, 1978; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; a compilation of songs culled from the first six albums.

Can
(Laser, 1979; Spoon/Mute, 1991)
; the final studio album.

Can Delay 1968
(Spoon, 1981; Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; featuring original singer Mooney, this contains never before released recordings that predate the first record.

Rite Time
(Spoon, 1989; Spoon/Mute, 1994)
; a short-lived reunion in the late ‘80s yielded this album.

Cannibalism 2
(Spoon/Mute, 1992)
; a second compilation covering the later albums.

Anthology: 25 years
(Spoon/Mute, 1994)
.

Cannibalism 3: Solo Edition
(Spoon/Mute, 1995)
; a compilation of Can members’ solo work between 1979 and 1991.

TRIBUTE:
Sacrilege: The Can Remix Album
(Mute, 1997)
; Sonic Youth, the Orb,
Brian Eno
, members of
Wire
and the
Buzzcocks
, and others reconceive Can originals – sometimes changing them beyond recognition.

FAUST

Jean-Herve Peron, Faust [N.M.E., March 1973]:

What is this avant-garde? We’re not avant-garde. We’re not trying to be ahead, to be beyond our time. We’re just trying to be here now.

Though Faust was the most radically experimental of the krautrockers, their modern compositional approach left enough room to incorporate acid rock, funk grooves, and Beach Boys pop with the required dose of Stockhausen. By applying the techniques of
musique concrète
as a central element of their work, Faust laid the groundwork for later rock collage artists in the industrial and post-punk worlds. And through their influence on bands like
Throbbing Gristle
, word of the dark and mysterious band Faust has spread, where it now informs the music of groups from Pavement to Stereolab to Gastr del Sol.

Tim Gane, Stereolab:

The first German band I got into was Faust, because I was really into Cabaret Voltaire and
Throbbing Gristle
and I saw a review of some Faust reissues that said, “if you like those bands, these are their forefathers, and this is far wilder.” I was really into music where I couldn’t understand where the person’s brain was at when they were doing it. And Faust were the epitome of mysterious creative nutcases. They were so brilliant and so advanced. When I heard their record it was everything I’d imagined I wanted to do in music, already done.

Strange as it seems, those krautrock experimentalists were as prefabricated as the Monkees. But where the Monkees were designed to look good on TV, the members of Faust were picked to be musical revolutionaries, rewriting the rules of rock. The producer behind the group was journalist Uwe Nettlebeck, who in 1970 formed Faust with backing from a German record label. Nettlebeck recruited musicians he knew from Hamburg bands, and named the group after the legendary German doctor and literary character (the word also means “fist” in German). Using the record company’s money, he converted an old schoolhouse in the nearby town of Wumme into a studio, and the eight or so members of Faust set on their way toward creating music like none before.

Though Nettlebeck remained the group’s producer, manager, and spokesman throughout, Faust were quick to establish themselves as a viable band. Some members even designed their own instruments. Within a year, Faust had produced their first album, which came in a striking package: clear vinyl inside a transparent lyric sheet, inside a clear record jacket that had an x-ray image of a fist on it. The music was no less unusual. Though it contained just three songs that averaged over 10 minutes each, the tracks compiled many, often unrelated, fragments and cut them together on the editing table.
Why Don’t You Eat Carrots
, for instance, jumped from radio static and snippets of the Beatles, to strange low-fi acid rock clearly influenced by Frank Zappa, to classical piano lines, to marching-band horns, to singing passages of melodic absurdities, to sound bites of random conversations. Though it had more in common with Stockhausen than anything going on in pop music, the album had a modest success in the U.K.

The second album, 1972’s
So Far
, was designed as the debut’s polar opposite. Packaged in black, except for illustrations that corresponded to the songs, this album offered something more recognizable as rock. The opening track,
It’s a Rainy Day (Sunshine Girl)
, had a strong Velvet Underground feel to it, while
On the Way to Abamae
was a sprightly acoustic guitar piece. In other places, the band slipped into a dance beat or jazz progression. Though the lyrics were just as nonsensical as those on the debut (example: “Daddy, take the banana, tomorrow is Sunday!”),
So Far
was neither as fractured nor as difficult as that album.

Following the release of
So Far
, Nettlebeck arranged for the group’s core members – Werner Diermaier, Jean-Herve Peron, and Rudolf Sosna – to record with
Tony Conrad
, a minimalist composer/filmmaker who had played an important role in the formation of the Velvet Underground. Their collaboration,
Outside the Dream Syndicate
, was something of an attempt to place the “dream music”
Conrad
had created with
LaMonte Young
in the early ‘60s in a more rock environment. Featuring
Conrad
’s sustained violin tones with Faust’s bass and percussion, the music pursued a trancelike drone for more than 70 minutes. In the end, it expressed more of
Conrad
’s artistic vision than their own. (And it was this record, rather than the
Conrad
/
Young
group, from which the ‘80s rock band Dream Syndicate took its name.)

Shortly after, the group produced
The Faust Tapes
, an apparent effort to amalgamate the editing efforts of the first record with the eclectic art rock of the second. Offering over 20 song fragments but no title listing, the album was one long mix tape of material taken from the group’s large library of unreleased recordings. Combining noise effects with guitar jams and conventional songs,
The Faust Tapes
attempted to use creative editing to mold disparate elements into a fluid whole.