It blew my mind a while ago when Hayley declared that she was “too cool for Can”, and I’m still working out what she meant, in the context of our ongoing debate over music. Clearly, she means that her curated cultural taste, particularly what she calls “cool”, has always been an individual project not beholden to canons or peer pressure. And, by extension, that I cannot fairly accuse her of being part of the cultural hegemony of “cool” and acting as a member of an ideological oppressor class when she disses something I like. And, need it be said, that, as a woman, she has no real interest in, indeed a mild distaste for, all forms of music curation that resemble train-spotting. Not the biggest Fall fan either, then.
But she does admit to liking two Can songs, the single “Vitamin C” (which has a chorus of sorts) and its flipside “I’m So Green” (which has a nifty cycle-of-fifths chord change).
These are the most song-like tracks on Ege Bamyasi, which I consider the quintessential Can album, so we listened to it together on a drive out to the op shops in Manakau. She didn’t hate it; “It’s too drummy” was her main objection, which was in line with the thoughts I was having about Can – the drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, is the serious musician here, how could he not be, his father was banned from teaching music and died mysteriously under the Nazis, he starved as a child and fled from the Russians, later becoming a jazz drummer who backed the likes of Chet Baker and Don Cherry, then studied at the Cologne Musikhochschule, and recorded with Manfred Schoof’s free jazz ensemble, which played in the first production of Die Soldaten, an opera of barracks life by Bernd Alois Zimmerman (1918-1970) so grim that it makes Wozzeck look like The Merry Widow.
"Die Soldaten was somehow great as a large scale event. But musically it was very peculiar. With a classical conductor! I absolutely could not play at all with conductors. It was only five minutes, somehow incorporated into the opera as a scene with 'abnormal free jazz.' I think it was pointless."
It's Liebezeit’s big, funky drumming – there’s a profound James Brown influence, mixed with Afro-Cuban and Eastern ideas - that provides the structure on Ege Bamyasi, and allows the other musicians a peculiar freedom – the freedom to think, or feel, like savants, to play like outsider musicians, to act as poltergeists in Jaki’s big house of rhythm – to tentatively form their ideas, evolve their riffs, free from their musical superegos, then drop them into the flow, where they fit unexpectedly well. Their contributions often amount to rhythmic chops (which it’s not always exactly clear are coming from what instrument) or modulating drones; Michael Karoli’s sustained guitar, faintly, modestly reminiscent of Jorma Kaukonen’s playing with the Jefferson Airplane, Irmin Schmidt’s keyboards, subtly pushing what keys could do, with drops like the electronic equivalent of a prepared piano, and Holger Czukay’s bass, subversively light and non-repetitive until he hits the pocket.1 And over and within this mix, Damo Suzuki’s free-associating anti-rock vocal, chasing sounds all round his subconscious; ranting nonsense syllables like an angry Kurt Schwitters in “Soup”, exploring the Japaneseness of his vocal inflections in a proto-J-pop way in “One More Saturday Night”, gently, impressionistically teasing out the beauty of “Sing Swan Song” in 6/8 time.2
Ege Bamyasi was the first Can album I heard, courtesy of Lindsay Maitland, the first I owned, and the first I played to new people as a touchstone of my oddness. When I moved from Invercargill to Dunedin at the start of 1977 I was in for a shock. Instead of Can, the Velvets3, Syd Barret and Soft Machine, what students considered “cool” seemed to be the Dead’s Mars Hotel, the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, J.J. Cale’s Troubador, and anything by Little Feat, who had won the hearts of alternative Kiwis on tour here in 1976. Bowie’s Station To Station seemed to be the most futuristic thing anyone would tolerate. Punk would change all that, and when I returned in 1982 “What Goes On” was playing from every flat in Castle Street, and I was sick of it, but back then Dunedin was a suburb of some unproblematic Californian vision of Dixieland.
But the acid was good. I remember tripping out at Second Beach with the roar of the sea transformed into a very clear memory of “Interstellar Overdrive”, looping through my head in its entirety, early in 1977, and I recall taking Ege Bamyasi with me when my flatmates and I visited some student friends a bit later. They didn’t get it, and I had to take it off the turntable. But later that day, some mysterious figure anonymously dropped off an A4 sheet of blotter acid they’d just made in the university lab, and we all had a few squares. That night I played them Ege Bamyasi again, and it got a respectful and interested hearing. Until we hit “Soup”.
This experiment in hands-on modulation, Dadaist sound poetry and fuck knows what else was the craziest thing my new friends had ever heard, and they loved it; those shifts in pitch and tempo caused the room we were in, perched high above their garden, to bend and sway precariously. When I left that flat in the morning, I left Ege Bamyasi behind. They still had a lot of acid to give away, to people I wouldn’t know, and I felt like the good missionary.
Ege Bamyasi marked a transitional phase between the psych rock of early Can, which peaked on Tago Mago, and the motoric trance groove of Future Days and the albums that followed Damo Suzuki’s departure. With Damo gone, Can tried a few other vocalists, including, on a 1975 tour of the UK, the US singer-songwriter Tim Hardin, who performed his “The Lady Came From Baltimore” with them at two live gigs. What a Can version of this song could have sounded like in 1975 stretches the imagination far too far; there are things only AI would dare to show us. Here’s Hardin’s 1976 version, true to the 1967 original, except that it’s twice as long (the original times in at 1:47).
Wikipedia adds that “a huge argument between Hardin and Can occurred after the London concert, during which Hardin threw a television set through a car's windshield”.
Too cool for Can though she may be, Hayley did recently discover, and convert me to Holger Czukay’s first solo album Movies. It’s not the first time I’ve heard Holger – after hearing “Persian Love” again a few years ago I streamed all his albums on YouTube. But I was also streaming Alfredo Casella’s symphonies more quietly in a different window and assumed they were part of the mix.4 When I discovered my mistake, hours later, it was too late to start again. It sounded good, though. Movies (1979) in particular is a masterpiece of musical collage, which if it weren’t for the steady Can-like grooves (Liebezeit is the drummer) could be called proto-hyperpop, so determined is Holger, as producer, to let you never have a dull moment. This sort of arch and flippant funky rock is near-impossible to pull off – I cannot stand The Talking Heads, for instance – but Holger does it somehow, you can feel the gravitas behind the set-up of a shaggy dog story like the cinema-quote collage “Hollywood Symphony”, within which Holger’s multi-tracked multi-instrumental improvisations are free to wander where they will, and notice the tragic intent behind a construction like “Persian Love”, which is about using distance and difference as metaphors for loss and longing; some samples used on this track, recorded from shortwave radio broadcasts, have still not been identified. To be amused by a serious person is to be treated like royalty.
Hayley may be too cool for Can, but she’s not too cool for J.J. Cale’s 1976 album Troubadour, a favourite of those who turned their faces against the European future in the 70’s. And by golly, this classic album sounds a lot like Can, whether it’s the streamlined Can of Future Days on “Travellin’ Light” – the autobahn became Route 66 while you were napping – or the soft-shoe jazz vamp Can of “She Brings The Rain” from Soundtracks on “Hold On”.
There’s still something distinctly American about the guitar - isn’t that solo on “Cocaine”5 perfect, why did Eric Clapton bother it - and the subject matter, J.J.’s foxy sexuality and relaxed approach to futurity, is an ocean away from the European art dream, but if Jaki, Irmin, Holger and Michael had auditioned J.J. instead of poor troubled Tim back in 1975 they might well have found their man.
Algorithmischer Vorschlag - Amon Düül II - Tanz Der Lemminge
Schmidt and Czukay both studied (at much the same time as NZ composer Jenny McLeod did) under Karlheinz Stockhausen, the most extreme of the post-war German composers and theoreticians. Michael Karoli was the only member of Can to have had no tertiary education in music – he was a law student who played in jazz bands, and who fortuitously took guitar lessons with Holger Czukay in 1966 (Can was formed, and soon joined by first vocalist Malcolm Mooney, in 1968). Karoli’s sister Constanze and then-girlfriend Eveline Grunwald are the models on the cover of Roxy Music’s 1974 album Country Life, photographed by Eric Boman after being scouted by Bryan Ferry; they also contributed a German verse translation to “Bitter Sweet”.
Nein, das ist nicht
Das ende der welt
Gestrandet an leben und kunst
Und das spiel geht weiter
Wie man Weiss
Noch viele schönste, wiedershen
European composers inspired by African-American art have had a habit of repaying the debt; Debussy and the impressionist composers, inspired by touring ragtime musicians and early jazz, in turn inspired modern jazz; Can, inspired by free jazz and James Brown, gave Kanye West the “Sing Swan Song” sample he turned into “Drunk and Hot Girls”.
The Velvet Underground were surely the most Europe-facing of American bands, with Welsh and German members and a songwriter who’d go on to compose Berlin.
You killed your European son
You spit on those under twenty-one
But now your blue car's gone
You better say so long
Hey hey, bye bye bye
You made your wallpapers green
You want to make love to the scene
Your European son is gone
You'd better say so long
Your clown's bid you goodbye
Alfredo Cassella, 1883-1947, was an Italian composer who wrote some interesting 20th Century symphonies – the 2nd is proto-metal, with its somber bells and forceful boogie rhythms. Cassella’s early work was influenced by Strauss and Mahler but, working in France, he rejected German influence at the outbreak of the First World War, during which (1915) Italy took the Allied side against its Austro-Hungarian neighbour. Later he identified with Mussolini’s Fascist movement – until Italy aligned with Hitler’s Germany and turned antisemitic, threatening his Jewish-French wife and daughter (echoing Strauss’s dilemma in Nazi Germany). Casella’s great-granddaughter is the actress and director Asia Argento. The recent Hollywood movie She Said, a very mediocre telling of a great story, would have been a better film if Argento’s contribution to the events it covered had been included.
J.J. Cale’s version of “Cocaine” was, of course, a number 1 hit in only one country, New Zealand, one of the few countries in the world where you couldn’t try cocaine unless you were an ENT specialist. Are we seeing a pattern yet?
it is not actually all that hip to be square
god knows i've tried