Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (28 page)

NEU!

Tim Gane, Stereolab:

I think Neu! has been the main proto-influence on Stereolab because it was completely primitive and simplistic on the surface. I loved the way the drumming would stay the same 4/4 for 20 minutes. That was really powerful, and I thought we could do something with it. The more simple and unchanging you make the music the more possibilities there are for melody and things on top.

As early as 1971, Neu! (pronounced “noy” and translated into English as “New!”) provided the prototype for the avant-garde minimalist pop sounds of ‘90s post-rock bands. With their distinctive motorik beat and gently coerced guitar effects, Neu! offered a comforting glimpse into a future ambient bubblegum sound that was so inspiring to David Bowie he came to Germany in the late ‘70s and made three Neu!-influenced albums that stand among his finest recordings. Neu! also impacted, perhaps indirectly, the first generation of British punk, and continued to impact Bowie clones and post-punk bands up through Ultravox, Sonic Youth (who titled a song “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!”), and Buffalo Daughter.

David Bowie:

I thought the first Neu! album, in particular, was just gigantically wonderful. Looking at that against punk, I had absolutely no doubt where the future of music was going, and for me it was out of Germany at that time. [from Mojo magazine]

Neu! began in 1971 as part of the band
Kraftwerk
. Guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger had briefly joined that group, and even made an appearance on German television as two-thirds of the band, until
Kraftwerk
’s leaders – Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider – decided to go it alone as a duo. Rother and Dinger also decided to carry on as a twosome, and Neu! was born. Making the most of the tools they had on hand, Neu! created entire soundscapes using little more than a drum set and an effects-heavy guitar.

Within a year, they recorded a debut album – the critically acclaimed
Neu!
– with well-known krautrock producer Conrad Plank. The sparsely designed cover art – ”NEU!” brush-stroked in bold red against a solid white background – perfectly captured the minimalism of the music. Opening with the 10-minute voyage of
Hallogallo
, the duo virtually perfected the steady driving, metronomic motorik beat that would later be associated with
Kraftwerk
’s most successful music.
Hallogallo
, and other, less rhythmically propulsive tracks like
Lieber Honig
and
Weissensee
, cast an irresistible spell, while slipping in enough traces of melody to move the mostly instrumental music along.
Negativland
, with its wall of industrial noise deflecting a funk-dub guitar line, prefigured post-punk – and provided the name for San Francisco’s culture-jamming group.

After some time spent touring with members of Guru Guru, Neu! started work on its second record,
Neu! 2
, which would feature virtually the same album cover as the debut, but with a large “2” now spray-painted on top. The 11-minute
Für immer
opened the record by recapturing
Hallogallo
’s incessantly hypnotic forward motion, and added churning guitars to make it even more dramatic. The misleadingly titled
Lila Engel
(Lilac Angel) closed the first half of the record with a savage tribal punk assault, complete with Dinger’s grunted vocals. At this point in the making of the album, Dinger and Rother’s recording budget ran out and the two were forced to use prerecorded material to fill side two. Making the best of a bad situation, they offered sped-up, slowed-down, and switched-around versions of their earlier non-album single
Neuschnee ‘V’ Super
. Fortunately for the group’s reputation, the two terrifically aggressive and modern rock cuts were among their best work.

Mark Hosier, Negativland:

In the late 70’s, I was 17 and totally thrilled to discover this world of unusual, independent music from Germany, it was so exotic and wild. Among them was Neu!. You put on
Neu! 2
and you hear the sound of someone putting on a record. It just blew my mind, it was so weird beyond weird. It wasn’t even breaking any rules, it was as if the rules didn’t even exist. Back then, it was like hearing some music that was from another planet.

Embittered by their experience recording
Neu! 2
, the duo split up after the album’s release. Rother started a band called Harmonia with yet another German musical duo, Cluster’s Dieter Moebius and Hans Joachim Roedelius. Dinger formed his own band, La Düsseldorf, a more aggressive proto-punk trio that included his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe. Before they could release an album, though, Rother approached Dinger with a desire to make one last Neu! record to end the group on a more positive note. Along with Thomas Dinger and Lampe, Rother and Dinger produced
Neu! ‘75
, which overwhelmingly achieved its goal. The first side, dominated by Rother and clearly informed by his work with Harmonia, featured a more ethereal take on Neu!’s signature sound. The Dinger-controlled second side was a blueprint for La Düsseldorf’s soon-to-be revealed style. Klaus’s ferociously whining vocals on
Hero
and
After Eight
would have an influence on Johnny Rotten’s singing style in the Sex Pistols.

Julian Cope:

You know, I can say this over and over till I’m a boring old git but Side 2 [of
Neu! ‘75
] is punk as fuck and two years ahead. Not the
Stooges
, not the Dolls, not American at all. You hear
Hero
and
After Eight
and British punk suddenly makes sense. For a few beautiful months before old-prick Johnny Thunders brought heroin-injecting into the punk scene, it was really the Neu!-driven sound of the Sex Pistols that turned on the young punks. And it was Klaus Dinger & Michael Rotter who deserved the credit and never got it. [from Cope’s book Krautrock Sampler]

Having brought Neu! to respectable closure, Dinger continued with La Düsseldorf (who in 1979 David Bowie called “the soundtrack of the ‘80s”) and had success expanding on
Neu! ‘75
’s breakthroughs. Rother made another Harmonia record, and produced a record for his Harmonia-mates in Cluster (another, previously unreleased, collaboration between Harmonia and
Brian Eno
was recently released as well). Aside from a brief reunion in the ‘80s, Rother and Dinger have pursued solo careers ever since.

DISCOGRAPHY

Neu!
(Brain / United Artists, 1972; Germanophon [CD reissue])
; the mesmerizing debut.

Neu! 2
(Brain / United Artists, 1973; Germanophon [CD reissue])
; one-half of a terrific follow-up, though marred by a hastily thrown together second side.

Neu! ‘75
(Brain / United Artists, 1975; Germanophon [CD reissue])
; a final album that highlighted the distinct personalities of the duo.

Neu! 4
(Captain Trip [Japan], 1995)
; material recorded by Dinger and Rother, along with other musicians, in 1985 and ‘86.

Neu! ‘72 Live
(Captain Trip [Japan], 1996)
; not a concert, but rather a recording of an early rehearsal / jam session by the group.

SOUND SCULPTORS

From the time recording studios first appeared earlier this century, the conventional approach to recording music has been to create the truest possible reproduction of the sounds made by the musicians. While this kind of sound engineering can require a great deal of skill and technical knowledge, for the most part it exists not as an art in itself but rather as a means of conveying the art of the performer.

As the technological capabilities of the recording studio advanced, the room for creativity in recording increased. Sound engineers, record producers, and the artists themselves began to conceive of ways to express themselves in the areas of sound treatments, tape editing, and the mixing of multitrack recordings. The studio moved from being a mere device for documentation to becoming a tool for creation.

The very idea that a producer can be an artist – and a recording studio can be an instrument – represents a significant conceptual leap in music. Precedents go back to the development of
musique concrète
in the ‘40s, when experimental composers such as Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer began manipulating prerecorded sounds to create new compositions. It wasn’t until the ‘60s that these ideas were applied to popular music, and they did not trickle down from the high art concept of
musique concrète
. Instead, this most revolutionary aesthetic development in late 20
^th
-century popular music came from Jamaica, a relatively poor country whose recording facilities were quite primitive at the time.

In search of new ways to thrill their listeners with limited material, Jamaican producers such as King Tubby and Lee “Scratch’’ Perry began to rework previously recorded music in ways that made the songs sound fresh – or even like entirely new pieces of music. Dub, as this studio-based derivation of popular rock steady and reggae styles was called, caught on in Jamaican dance halls. For the first time in popular music, producers who did not necessarily sing, play an instrument, or write songs – who simply reshaped the sounds of songs – could be recognized as the primary artist in a piece of music.

Now, all varieties of music can be manipulated by “remixers” who reimagine the work of others – often to make it more danceable – and who are given as much credit as the original artist. In hip-hop and techno, nonmusician DJs have become recognized artists for merely playing records in new and unusual ways, such as scratching and elongating breakbeats. Digital sampling technology has made it easier than ever to create new music from previously recorded sounds, to a point where a significant number of today’s recording artists – particularly in electronic music, but in rock as well – are not musicians at all, but essentially producers.

While more mainstream rock has maintained the primacy of the performer and songwriter in the creative process, it too has been deeply affected by the emergence of the producer as artist. In the ‘60s, producers such as Phil Spector (with his many “girl groups”) and George Martin (with the Beatles) established a tradition of the producer as a vital force in the creation of sophisticated pop music. In the ‘70s, Brian Eno emerged (as had Martin) from an art music tradition familiar with the ideas of
musique concrète
. Though Eno was not primarily a producer at the start of his career, his ability to integrate all types of recording and compositional techniques – as well as his stylistic innovations and high-profile production work – have made him a model for the new type of recording artist who uses all available tools, from acoustic instruments to digital effects, in music.

Like Eno, Adrian Sherwood is a white British producer, though Sherwood emerged a generation later, in the punk era of the late ‘70s. Early on, English punk bands were attracted to reggae’s political content and expressed solidarity with the Jamaican immigrant underclass. As post-punk artists stretched out and began to incorporate nonrock styles, they discovered a natural affinity with the more adventurous reggae sounds found in dub music. Sherwood, who’d been a reggae fan for years, found himself at a crossroads between post-punk and dub, and merged the two in his work as producer and ringleader for an entire collective of like-minded musicians. The precedents he set for applying dub studio techniques to post-punk styles have become part of the vocabulary in genres such as techno, industrial, and post-rock.

KING TUBBY

DJ Spooky (Paul Miller):

Tubby had a much broader impact than all of [the dub producers]. He was able to really do version, taking one song and creating a different or ideal version while keeping the song structure in back. It’s really monumental stuff – like generative or process music – but going on in an implicit social situation in Jamaica. Where you can have Warhol making multiple prints of the Mona Lisa, you can have King Tubby making multiple prints of a song.

Though King Tubby didn’t play an instrument or write songs, the Jamaican producer has nevertheless exerted a tremendous influence on popular music. While his use of certain effects and his mixing style are often adopted in bass-heavy dance music such as trip-hop and drum ‘n’ bass, Tubby’s larger contribution has been conceptual. In developing the system of in-studio musical manipulation that came to be known as “dub,” Tubby moved the creative focus from musician (who creates the musical components of songs) to producer (who augments and arranges or rearranges musical components in distinct and artful ways). As such, dub paved the way for the common practice of remixing in dance music, and for the collage constructions in hip-hop and electronica. More recently, these ideas have become increasingly important to rock-oriented, or post-rock, bands.

Johnny Temple, Girls against Boys: