My music listening life can be split into three phases that probably resemble roughly the experience of many. My earliest phase when I heard whatever records my parents happened to play and I eventually discovered Top 40 and the radio. My second phase, which I’m going to call my rock snob phase, takes off somewhere between 1977 and 1979, when I discover a music press, go to college, move into the city, and begin to fancy myself a learned student of rock and pop music and its history. This phase lasted until the early ‘90s for me when I got married and started school teaching, launching a phase when music became, again, primarily a background listening experience for me. I remember a student once commenting that all their social studies teachers had a thing for African music, like me. I balked at the stereotype then but think now it does get at something essential about the liberal internationalist character of the last Dad Rock phase in my music listening. Retiring might mark another new phase in my music listening but I don’t have enough perspective yet to tell for sure.
As I mentioned in my blurb about Chapter 1, Stubbs frames krautrock as born out of 1968 student protest movements. But Can, like Amon Duul, weren’t hanging out with the Red Army Faction. They were a more a middle-class cultural response to the spirit of ’68, maybe akin to the drop out hippie movement in the states. Can originally setup their recording studio in a retreat-like castle outside Cologne, like Faust in an old and abandoned schoolhouse in a rural setting or Cluster in their converted German farmhouse. Amon Duul, both versions, grew out of a hippie commune.
Foremost, though, the US model for Can were Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Their name is a play on Warhol’s 1962 painting exhibition of 32 Campbell Soup Can flavors. Irmin Schmidt, co-founding member, visited NYC in the mid-‘60s, hanging out around La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate and with the Velvet’s John Cale and others. And the group’s first band name and name for all their subsequent recording studios, in another nod to their affiliation with hippie psychedelia, was Inner Space. The two sides of Can from the start are Pop art pretensions and classic hippie era, 1968-1972, psychedelia.
What the original German musical acts we’re calling krautrockers (this is contested too, of course, and probably something I’ll take up at some point) called their own music was “Kosmische Musik,” or ‘cosmic music’ or psychedelic music.
Stubb’s celebrates Can’s remarkable collective achievement and then their mushrooming influence since their heyday (1968 to 1973, or 1975, or 1979, YMMV).
In the beginning the four or five principles get together, hang out in their Inner Space studio for long hours, days on end, jamming and improvising with studio electronics and tape editing effects. No one came to the studio with finished songs; they improvised their songs together in the studio. Schmidt brags that everyone in Can got credit for song compositions and attributes the decline of Can recordings in the mid-‘70s to this collective bond in the band cracking and beginning to break down.
And then understandably Stubb’s marvels even more at the mushrooming influence and legacy of Can since the 1970s, spreading from Joy Division/New Order to the Eurhythmics to The Orb to Radiohead to Stereolab to LCD Soundsystem to Pavement and Tame Impala and on and on. Can have evolved into a pioneering prototype of a post-punk musical intersection combining DIY rock band collaboration with electronics and ambient music and an infatuation with global beats. Again, a rock snob and dad rock Valhalla in one band, or in my mind anyway.
Seems relevant to note from the outset three of four of the Fab Four band members in Can were pushing or already 30 in 1968.
Schmidt, keyboards, and founding musical direction guy in the band, with no shortage of opinions, was already doing successful musical production soundtrack work for TV and movies when Can formed. His professional experience is also why Can’s first two albums are titled Monster Movies and Soundtracks. Both came out in 1969. A lot of their earliest recordings were originally produced for TV and movie soundtracks. For this reason, some discographies won’t include Soundtracks with Can’s other proper albums. One of Can’s earliest mission statements, articulated by Schmidt, is a sneering disdain and opposition to schlager music, with which I am no expert but understand is sentimental and sweet pop hits widely popular in Germany and Scandinavian countries at the time. I imagine Abba as an uber-ultra model of schlager music but I’m not really sure? I’ve never followed the Eurovision song contest and only know the Will Ferrell comedy. Anyway, Schmidt avowedly formed Can in opposition to schlager-ish commercial pop music, whatever exactly that was in 1968 Germany. And he also had a thing about not wanting Can associated with the British progressive groups, repeatedly emphasizing Can’s more important affinities with minimalism and James Brown and the Velvets and Andy Warhol.
It’s not clear how much Schmidt’s vision for Can reflects that of the other guys in the band but it brings out the art rock foundations of Can’s formation. Schmidt and co-founder, bassist and master sound experimentation and tape editor, Holger Czukay, both studied together with electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early 1960s. Stockhausen means musically, in short: musique concrete or taped found sounds or already existing passages of music chopped up, looped, and manipulated electronically. Miles Davis and an astonishing number of prog rockers cite Stockhausen’s influence on their music in the early ‘70s. Maybe above all others, a Stockhausen recording put out in 1959 called “Gesang Der Junglinge” or “Song of the Youths” was very influential. Schmidt insists that Can has nothing to do with British prog rock but Can shares Stockhausen’s and prog rock’s penchant for drones and minimalist repetition and soundtrack ambience and an epic and/or hypnotically indulging, shall we say, approach to song length. Again, like the Velvets, Can’s “Yoo Doo Right,” 1969, on their debut, Monster Movies, lasts over 20 minutes, surpassing “Sister Ray” at 17 and a half minutes in 1968, although both will soon enough be crushed by prog rock monster track monoliths like Jethro Tull’s 43-44 minute long “Thick as a Brick” or Michael Oldfield’s 60 minutes long “Amorak.” Apparently, Stockhausen has a piece of music that lasts for almost 29 hours. Anyway, by the late ‘70s Brit prog rockers are playing on Can’s last albums, guys who formerly played with Brit prog rockers Traffic.
The guitarist, Michael Karoli, the youngster in the core quartet, and the only member of the quartet that fits the rock star model, reportedly introduced Czukay to the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus,” which opened Czukay up to the avant-garde collage and studio manipulation possibilities in pop music. Eventually, Karoli travels in North Africa, especially Morocco, sharpening Can’s interest in non-Western rhythms, hypnotic trance and modal repetition. His guitar style, echoed later by post-punkers like PIL's Keith Levine or Amerindie groups like the Feelies and Vampire Weekend, shares an affinity with the bright, trilling, trebly guitar sounds of North/West Africa.
Finally, driving the core quartet of Can musicians, is drummer Jaki Liebezeit. I’m fully behind Stubbs and Schmidt’s arguments that the key to Can’s musical achievements were the collaborative and improvisatory group setup. Can is a sum greater than its parts, this is born out in how none of the band members solo work I’ve heard compares with Can’s classics or even their post-Mooney-Suzuki records. Like the Beatles, like the Velvet Underground, like many of the greatest bands, the sum was greater than its individual parts with Can. But if I had to identify only one musician in that core Can quartet of musicians as MVP, the guy who raised their sound above just another early ‘70s jazz rock fusion band, of which there were many in that day mind you, it’s Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming.
His beats are always center, simple, metronomic, but tricky. Leading the way, Liebezeit pushes the tempo in Can music and creates this center around which the other guy’s riff and improv. He manages to simultaneously evoke traditional drumbeats and global rhythms with a signature clipped machine-like precision and relentlessness. Although that’s not quite it either. Liebezeit is frequently credited, along with Kraftwerk and Neu’s drummer Klaus Dinger, and I’d throw in there as well Faust’s drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, with inspiring the trademark Motorik, relentless, machine-like drumming style associated with the emergence of krautrock. Liebezeit is more than the motorik sound, though. The popular model of the motorik sound, Kraftwerk’s 1974 track, “Autobahn,” is literally an electronic transcription of Dinger’s exuberant drumming style, according to co-founder Ralf Hutter. Liebezeit’s signature drum sound is really a combo of that relentless tribal trance-inducing trademark machine-like motorik sound, that he shares with Dinger and Zappi and probably others, and in Liebezeit it is combined with a big bag of global funky-jazz drummer chops.
Liebezeit began on the drums as a jazzer, subbed once for Art Blakey when his Jazz Messengers played in Cologne in the early 1960s. He modeled his simple drum set after jazz great Kenny Clarke and admired the drumming of Elvin Jones. But he has some falling out with the free jazz mindset before he joins Can; “there were too many rules in free jazz,” he concludes. Foremost, it appears he burnt out on free jazz’s aversion to repetition and groove. He expresses a preference for the syncopated sounds of flamenco and afro-Cuban jazz music. This reminds me of some remarks in Miles Davis’s autobiography. In the middle of the free jazz craze Miles boasts that he tries to never repeat himself but then admits elsewhere to preferring drummers who keep strong, steady time he can play off. Liebezeit wanted to be Mile’s drummer but insisted that his strong and steady tempos or grooves would lead the way; forcing the tempo, connecting his drumming style to punk and post-punk. Liebezeit’s drumming drives Can’s sound. Like in funk and groove music styles, his drumming is almost always the center of the group’s sound.
I’m no expert on any musicianship, I caution the reader. The most formal music education I got was actually playing drums in my 5th and 6th grade band but quit with a buddy who played the snare drum next to me because our band instructor was, ironically in a story about krautrock, a complete Nazi figure to us, actually German, and very strict and impatient, which very well could have been because we weren’t very good. Anyway, I’ve never played a drum set and cannot read a musical score. So, like I said, I’m no expert on great drumming. But I’ve always loved beats and rhythms and funky syncopating grooves and it’s hard for me to think of a more original and signature drumming style than Can’s Jaki Liebezeit. He shares the krautrock trademark motorik drum sound with Dinger and Zappi but he brings to it a virtuosic global funky groove traditionalism that is all his own. There are times when he sounds like a machine sample of Clyde Stubblefield 10 or 15 years before this sound would become a staple of hiphop music. Lots of tricky funky beats relentlessly and hypnotically stretched into marathon monster jams. His 23-minute long tour de force in "Chain Reaction" (opening the live set below) displays Liebezeit's classic rock era godhead chops. He was a brilliant drummer. His bandmates were known to describe his drum sound as “half man, half machine.”
For Liebezeit alone I find nearly all Can’s albums listenable. No doubt they lose some of their signature weirdness when Czukay leaves the band for 1978’s Out of Reach and 1979’s Inner Space. And there is definitely an dramatic edge to their sound that is lost without Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki. All their best albums, solid 'A' albums, Monster Movie (’69), Soundtracks (’70), Tago Mago (’71), Ege Bamyasi (’72), and Future Days (’73), feature one or both of them. But for me the four principles jamming together are always a superlative jazz-funk rock instrumental fusion band, German psychedelia’s Booker T & The MGs, but led by the drummer. Soon Over Babaluma (’74), still arguably an 'A' album in my book, and Landed (’75), Flow Motion (’76), Saw Delight (’77), Out of Reach (’78), and Can (’79), all arguably 'B+' albums with each including some strong band Can moments. No doubt the vocals pale in comparison with Mooney and Suzuki albums. There's more schlager in the later stuff and they do sound at times like they are trying hard to sell out but the band always remains tight and jam band good. Or perhaps up until their 1989 comeback album, Rite Time, by which time it does sound like they’re all just phoning it in. The collaborative energy in Can all gone.
The Mooney and Suzuki stories do really take the Can thing to another level in vanguard rock music lore, though. Neither was a very good singer. They both appeared as though hired hands, although the core quartet talks about the collaborative energy between Mooney and Liebezeit and they are a feature of nearly all Can’s best songs: “Yoo Doo Right,” “Mother Sky,” “She Brings the Rain,” “Halleluwah,” “Paperhouse,” “Vitamin C,” “Spoon,” etc. It was as if Can were the Velvets led by John Cale. None of the core quartet were lead singer types, so to fulfill that role they bring in these outsider art guys off the street.
Mooney was artist and graduate student, an American, and a globetrotting counterculture hippie. If ever there was the case for John Ford’s quip about “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” here it was. Mooney’s vocal style was garage rock gruff. He’d obsessively repeat phrases, “Waiting for the Streetcar,” “Yoo Doo Right,” “Outside My Door,” interspersed with yelps and whoops, as sharp rhythmic counterpoints to Liebezeit. The effect was catchy but also edgy and obsessive. In band lore Mooney finally suffers some sort of nervous collapse after performing “The Empress and the Ukraine King” one night, repeating the phrase “Upstairs, downstairs” for hours, long after the rest of the band and crowd had given up and gone home. Shortly thereafter he is counseled to leave Can and he moves back to the states where he went on to become a visual artist and college professor. After those remarkably productive three years with Can, 1968 to 1970, he never plays with the band again until ‘89’s Rite Time. Mooney later says the “Upstairs/downstairs” story was made up but still remarkable how fitting it was to the obsessive repetition in Mooney’s best songs with Can. Mooney was an add on but essential to giving early Can songs a dramatic rock punch that grabbed the listener's attention.
Damo Suzuki was an immigrant from Japan who, after Mooney had left the band, they ran into actually performing on the street, busking, in Munich in 1970. So, again, the lead singer is a hired hand, an immigrant, and sings in English, not German. In early live performances of the band you can find on youtube it appears as though audience members have no idea what to make of Suzuki. His vocal performances appear to be intense exorcisms, like Mooney, based on a lot of repetition and rhythmic tension and build-up, but are often totally indecipherable beyond the occasional hook phrase chanted repeatedly.
For the longest time I heard the lyrics to “Vitamin C” as “Hey you,” a classic song opening lyric nearly a decade before Pink Floyd, “you’re losing your,” all correct so far, but then I heard maybe ‘privacy,’ or ‘your sanity,’ anything but “Vitamin C”?! I still can’t hear “Vitamin C”? Or for another example, his crucial "da da das" or “yeah, yeah, yeahs” at the end of “Halleluwah,” where he is according to lyric sheets really singing “Halleluwah”?! No way I hear that but whatever he’s saying the way he says it is indeed exhilaratingly “Halleluwah” stuff. Suzuki’s incantatory chanting make the words, beyond a hook phrase like “Mother Sky” feel less important than the trance-like force of the repetition and Suzuki’s speaking in tongue-like cathartic gesticulations.
The story of Suzuki’s breakup with the band in ’73, after recording Future Days, is almost as strange as the Mooney story. The usual story is he left the band to get married and join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then the story goes he got very sick, broke up with his wife, and became a successful middle level management guy in some industry. Then he later returned to music by creating Damo Suzuki’s Network, where he’d tour without a band and do collaborative one-off concerts with local musicians around the world. In later interviews he suggests he never felt like a fully integrated member of Can in the ordinary “band family” sense. But he sure did collaborate with them to make a few great Can albums there between 1970 and 1973.
Two excellent retrospective Can compilations, under Schmidt’s impressive curation, came out in the 2010s, and I’m assuming have something to do with Can's growing rock snob legacy.
A 3 hour/3-CD collection of outtakes and live performances known as The Lost Tapes came out in 2012. It’s notable, for such a studio-centric band by reputation, how many great live recordings of early Can exist. In their takeoff as a band, 1968 to 1973, Liebezeit seemingly always charging ahead, the band are scorching hot together, goading Mooney and Suzuki on. The recordings on TLT are a little crude and rough but remarkably effective for outtakes and make the case for what monsters of experimental rock and psychedelia Can were in those first five years of their existence.
And then there is The Singles a 2017 album compiling 23 Can singles and B-sides originally released between 1969 and 1979, and adds on a 1989 remix of “Hoolah Hoolah.” This is the case for Can as a pop band. It feels a little far-fetched of a claim, Can as a pop band, but still remarkable how many of Can’s singles on this compilation hold up as pop songs. “Spoon” reaches number 6 on the pop charts in Germany in 1972 (and then a semi-popular Amerindie band from Texas name their band after the song in the 1990s). Can even tried disco like everybody else at the time and produced their only chart hit, “I Want More,” in the UK, peaking at 26 in 1976. They’re so into it they then spin that song into a couple more extended play disco funk jams. Foremost, this audacious collection proves two things: 1) Can were not above the occasional schlager music (“Silent Night," "Cascade Waltz," etc), and 2) Can were remarkably deft at making pop songs (“Turtles Have Short Legs,” “She Brings the Rain,” “I’m So Green,” “Mushroom,” “Moonshake,” etc) for such an anti-schlager experimental rock band. The model might be Abbey Road era Beatles studio experimentation but it’s Can's take; improvising German jam band, immigrant Mooney or Suzuki doing their performance art vocal things, and Liebezeit’s proto-worldmusic Motorik funk.
Anyway, Can are now on a very short list of my favorite experimental rock bands of all time, up there with the Velvets, various Eno collaborations, Captain Beefheart, and Sonic Youth. I think in the same way some critic might dismiss Hawkwind as a grandiose rehash of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” some critic might dismiss Can as a German jazz-funk rehash of the Velvet’s “Sister Ray" or "I Heard Her Call My Name." I recognize the associations, both cop to them outright, but I think both Hawkwind and Can transcend those formulations with their records. Don’t sleep on Can, seminal krautrockers, if you like any of the above experimental rock greats. What I’ve learned recently with Can is that it goes beyond their classic albums, they’re a great live band, way more outtakes of great long experimental stuff out there than I knew, and more would-be wannabe pop hits. Can peaked when they added Mooney and Suzuki but they were always a great band.
Back in the day Xgau compares Can unfavorably with electric Miles Davis. What strikes me today about that comparison is not how much more I like Miles electric albums but what an apt comparison and then why the either/or? Instead, I imagine what a great double-bill live show would Can and Miles have made circa 1972-1973. Or why not a monster triple bill of Hawkwind opening, Can, and Miles headlining, of course. Three signature variations on classic psychedelic era grooves.
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