The first 'space rock' on TV was Pink Floyd on Belgian TV in 1968 playing "Astronomy Domine," says Google (see/hear below). So if Pink Floyd were the sonic Big Bang of space rock in pop music history then David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in 1969 (still, basically, David Jones in this awards show appearance; also below) is the Epic of Gilgamesh of space rock.
Ground control to a guy in space, Major Tom, alienated and lonely in space, lamenting and/or enjoying the alienated distance, it's not clear, helplessly trusting the spaceship knows where to go, enjoying the ride in a pleasantly numb sort of way. Space is a virtual tabula rasa of alienation for freaks and geeks and outsiders and Bowie's their young clown prince stepping forward, their space rock blues singer, not even yet in space alien drag.
His eventual space alien personas arguably peak in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1976. The plot is a broad farce of corporate rule and big moneyed corruption. Many scenes feel like inscrutable improvs and never add up to much. But Bowie the space alien has this thing for TVs, as many TVs as possible, and somehow manages to exude so much space alien weirdness, while at the same time this sympathetic ET-phone-home (six years before that movie) universal humanity. In the world of TMWFTE we're likely to find as much if not more humanity in space alien weirdos like Bowie. It's not the best anything but it is one of the better '70s doomsday and/or post-apocalyptic movies.
And "Space Oddity," 1969, as pop songs go, was on the one hand just another desperate stab at the charts timed around the Apollo moon landing, peaking at number 5 on the UK pop charts that year, but then eventually hit number 1 in 1975, and then number 1 in France and number 4 in the US in 2016, the year of Bowie's death. "Space Oddity" was also from the start so much more than just another pop hit. For one, it was this perfect songwriting distillation of psychedelia's fascination with space, space traveling, launching "Rocket Man," space aliens as a metaphor for freaks and social outcasts, launching 'space rock' poetics (arguably never equaled), and inspiring so many space rock creatives in various musical directions; his folkie space alien balladry, "Starman," Ziggy Stardust, crackerjack models of space alien glam rock (inspiring bands all the way up to Hedwig), krautrock experiments in Berlin, the post-punk Godfather's "Ashes to Ashes," confessing in the end Major Tom was a junkie ("junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low") all along. The number of versions of "Space Oddity," by Bowie alone, could fill out a double album. Bowie's song grew out of the baroque psych pop folktale stylings of the Bee Gees and Beatles, projecting that style into outer space. Inspiring Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" and The Who and Elton John and Queen and the Pet Shop Boys and D'Angelo, etc. But no one takes the lyrical possibilities of space rock further than Bowie, turning it into a language of teenage/artist alienation and freak solidarity.
Here's a super early live version, at an awards event, still in his standard-issue hippie David Jones style. The mild mannered audacity of the performance is impressive. He doesn't have another hit for three years, until he returns to the 'space rock' theme in "Starman."
Here's the full 'space rock' treatment from '72, the first version with Tony Visconti doing the production,
And another from '74 on Midnight Special in one of his several space alien getups and a glam rock peak,
I really completely lost touch after Let's Dance, 1983, I dunno, something about its inescapable commercial clout rubbed me the wrong way. Anyway, that was an unbelievably long time ago and I didn't go back to Bowie until Next Day (2013). The buzz from somewhere was enough to pique my curiosity. The punchy postpunk writing and the gritty band sound got me right away. I was so wowed at first that I began sampling those lost 30 years of albums, thinking there must be a bunch more good stuff in there I missed, but if there was I couldn't find much of it. Nevertheless, Next Day is a totally worthy 21st century successor to Low ('77) or Station to Station ('76). I was a little slower on the uptake with Blackstar (2016), the sound more amorphous, dark lounge jazzy things. But in the wake of his death, the songs grew on me and won out. "Blackstar" is his last nod to his space rock mythos. The dramatic agony of "Lazarus" evokes a kind of end-of-life purgatory. The sweet gratitude of "Girl Loves Me." Something about the essential mystery of Bowie's stardom in "I Can't Give Everything Away." What a swan song of a farewell album.
In his last nod to the 'space rock' subgenre, he insists he's not a gangster, not a film star, not a pop star, he's a Blackstar, he doesn't know why. He just is,
And here is Pink Floyd's possibly first space rock performance on TV,
The inspiration for these remarks on "Space Oddity" and Bowie come from my recent reading of Rob Sheffield's On Bowie, a gushing 200 page personal tribute to Bowie written shortly after his passing. I'm not even close to the maximalist on Bowie's music Sheffield is but the depth of his enthusiasm, like with Dreaming the Beatles, is winning. I especially liked that this gigantic icon of freak solidarity and liberation, Bowie, ended up happily married to the Black African model Iman, and how for all the wild drug adventures and artistic pretensions when you got down to it Bowie was always still David Jones, a mimic, a Cracked Actor, a Blackstar, et al, with a self-deprecating and humble sense of humor. And a space rock pioneer, Goth rock crooner, postpunk Godfather, and one of Brit psychedelia's greatest creations.
from Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs
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. 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.
At any rate, Chapter 2 in David Stubbs’ Future Days profiles Krautrock flag bearers Can. Can was a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968. They improvise a blend of psychedelia, progressive jazz-rock, funk, studio electronics and tape editing into these long and drawn-out and slightly robotic proto-worldmusic grooves. I don’t keep up with the rock snob press very well anymore but I gather Can’s stock has risen considerably in the 21st century and they also happen to fit perfectly several of my ‘dad rock’ music listening inclinations. Making this a great time to linger over some Can records again.
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, which included 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, in other words, psychedelic music.
Stubbs 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.
When "Mother Sky" is all you need. Can, 1970.
And then understandably Stubbs marvels even more at the mushrooming influence and legacy of Can since the 1970s, spreading from Joy Division/New Order to The Fall's Mark E. Smith 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 marriage made in heaven, 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, when they first started playing together.
Schmidt, keyboards, and founding musical direction guy in the band, with no shortage of strong 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 (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.
Significantly, 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,” on their '69 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 and funky. Leading the way, Liebezeit pushes the tempo in Can music and creates the center of the band's sound 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 doesn't quite tell the whole story 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 sound: a relentless, machine-like drumming style associated with the emergence of Krautrock. But Liebezeit is more than the motorik sound. 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, combined in Liebezeit with a big bag of global funky-jazz drummer chops.
Indeed, 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 a strong steady time he can play off. Liebezeit wanted to be Mile’s steady drummer but insisted that his relentless 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 with a thick accent, 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.”
The impression I'm left with now is that I've only touched the surface with live Can stuff but, wow, there is some good stuff out there. This is from 1975, so late by most evaluations of Can, but it absolutely cooks with this minimalist banging energy. Not to be missed.
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 in 1977. And there is definitely a dramatic edge to their sound that is lost without vocalists Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki. All their best albums, solid 'A' albums in my book, 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, the Fab Four, jamming together are always a superlative jazz-funk rock instrumental outfit. German psychedelia’s Booker T & The MGs, only in Can's case led by the drummer. Soon Over Babaluma (’74), still arguably an 'A' album, 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 collaborative Can moments. No doubt the vocals pale in comparison with the Mooney and Suzuki albums. And there's more schlager in the later stuff. After Soon Over Babaluma they do sound at times like they are trying hard to sell out but the band always remains tight and good together. Or perhaps up until their 1989 comeback album, Rite Time, when it does sound like they’re all just phoning it in. The collaborative energy in Can all gone.
But it is the Mooney and Suzuki stories that do really take the Can thing to another level in vanguard rock music lore. Neither was a very good singer. They both appeared with Can as though hired hands, although the core quartet talks about the collaborative energy between Mooney and Liebezeit and, as I've alluded, Mooney-Suzuki 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 without a lead singer. 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 for his health 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, even though Suzuki was Japanese. 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 (Swamp Dogg, Pink Floyd, etc), “you’re losing your,” all consistent with a lyric sheet, 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. Supposedly 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. Be that as it may he sure did collaborate with them to make some great Can albums between 1970 and 1973.
Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki pictured together in the late 1990s or 2000s.
The core band family of Can musicians are Schmidt, Czukay, Karoli, and Liebezeit, but they never sound better than they do when they play with Mooney and/or Suzuki. They’re always predominantly an instrumental proposition, with minimalist lyrics, but their playing and songs are never as intense or dramatically rock as when they play with Mooney and Suzuki.
Two excellent retrospective Can compilations, under Schmidt’s impressive curation, came out in the 2010s, and I’m assuming have a lot 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. Foremost, 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 is always charging ahead, the band hot on his heels, 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 then the set 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. Ultimately, this audacious collection proves two things: 1) Can were not above the occasional schlager music (“Silent Night," "Cascade Waltz," etc), contrary to Schmidt's original convictions, and 2) Can were remarkably deft at making pop or semi-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 all Can: 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 band's cop to them outright, but I think both Hawkwind and Can transcend those formulations with their records. Anyway, don’t sleep on Can if you like any of the above experimental rock greats. Seminal krautrockers. What I’ve learned most getting into some Can again is that their appeal goes beyond their classic albums. They were a great live band, with way more outtakes of great long experimental stuff out there than I knew. And with more remarkably catchy would-be wannabe pop hits than I realized. It's still true Can peaked when they featured Mooney and Suzuki but they were always a great band and reward greater attention to their expansive catalog of recordings.
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-- long groove heavy psychedelic jams with rock and funk moves-- 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. Three signature variations on classic psychedelic era deep grooves.
Reading David Stubb’s Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2017). He’s a British music journalist that goes back to the 1980s; Melody Maker, good buddy of music writer Simon Reynolds. I read Stubb's electronics book, Mars by 1980 (2018), a few years back and learned a lot from it.
Especially appreciated the pre-1980 stuff, a history of electronic music in the 20th century. Stockhausen, etc. I knew virtually nothing outside the pop/rock electronic music that I heard on the radio in the 1970s; Kraftwerk and Moroder/Donna Summer, basically. I didn’t always entirely agree with Stubbs on the later stuff I already knew, Aphex Twin, ambient EDM, but I learned so much about the early history of electronic music in the 20th century from his book that I thought it was time to get his take on Krautrock. Or what the Germans originally called Kosmiche Musik, or "Cosmic Music," a German musical style of psychedelia, or progressive rock, that thrived for about a decade beginning in 1968.
I'm a late-adopter to Krautrock, let it be known, and so in that sense my new found interest I must confess is at least in part an extension of my advancing geezerdom. I knew a little bit, the aforementioned ‘70s pop stuff, and I owned a few cherished Can, Faust, and Neu albums, but never started listening to a lot of Krautrock before this century. Reflecting on that now, like several other semi-recent music listening enthusiasms (minimalism, spiritual jazz, and various ambient and EDM sounds), an undoubtably big draw for me with Krautrock is that it is predominantly instrumental music. I used to listen to a lot of pop or rock music, with their wordy lead singers, singer-songwriter music, while reading magazines or whatever, but anymore my preferred music programming when I’m reading is predominantly instrumental music. Words, English words (languages I don’t understand aren’t a problem; love French rap in the background, for instance), but I find English words too distracting. But I really enjoy listening to a lot of Krautrock while I'm reading.
Amon Duul aren't in heavy rotation in my reading listening sessions, however. Too many vocals; not enough droney Motorik tempos. But they are undeniably giants of the genre and their first album, Phallus Dei (1969), 'Erection God,' basically, and their song, "Archangels Thunderbird," hold firm positions, ahem, in my growing Krautrock pantheon.
At any rate, the first chapter in Future Days is devoted to Amon Duul. Amon refers to the “sun” god in ancient Egypt and Duul is either a nonsense word or a derivation of a Turkish word that means “moon.” An early theme in the book is that Krautrock is a cultural outgrowth of 1968 political protests in Germany, so why not start with the Krautrock band most associated with the counter-cultural hippie communes in this period? As the story goes Amon Duul were members of a commune in Berlin in the late ‘60s (with little to no contact with the Red Army Faction or any other violent terrorist groups often associated with those communes, I'll hasten to add). A large, revolving, group of members of the commune, hippies, derided by most everybody outside their commune, get together and do these psychedelically charged drum circles and improv musical jams. Very DIY and very loose and unorganized. Amon Duul ii were a small group of the better musicians in the original AD commune who felt held back by the drum circle ethos and wanted to do something more ambitious. Make high-octane psychedelic riff-rock jams into hit records or at least this was the plan anyway. The rule of thumb I learned was that Amon Duul ii were good, sometimes great, and the original AD were always bad, and in my early samplings of the two this rule seemed to moreorless hold true. And this take is also moreorless reinforced here by Stubbs.
But I’ve learned semi-recently that Julian Cope, singer in post-punk band Teardrop Explodes, and gonzo Krautrock expert in his own right, swears by this third original Amon Duul album called Paradieswarts Duul (1970), or ‘towards paradise’ Duul. I was hoping Stubbs might weigh in on this heretofore unknown to me original AD album but not a word.
Pardieswarts scales down the commune drum circle of the first couple of AD albums to seven musicians, including two couples, and adds back on AD ii guitarist John Weinzierl and percussionist Chris “Shrat” Thiele.
Krautrock toggles between an art rock formalism (minimalism, electronics) and a pastoral psychedelic ideal (ambient serenity, musique concrete). Think of Can or Faust holing up in some rural makeshift DIY studio outpost, incorporating the ambient pastoral sounds and/or tempos of nature into their electronic experimentation and cut-ups. Think of Popol Vuh’s spooky pastoralism or the spacious serenity of the album Eno makes with Cluster shacked up together somewhere in rural Germany. If I were to hazard a guess as to why Stubbs overlooks Paradieswarts I’d guess it is because it is a hippie folkie pastoral with very little artistic pretensions. No electronics. Stubbs exults about AD ii’s very Stockhausen, 18-minute-long “The Marilyn Monroe Memorial Church,” the third side of their 1971 double-album Tanz der Lemminge (English: Dance of the Lemmings). Not much Stockhausen in Pardieswarts. It is a very traditional sounding album, actually. Stubbs might just find Paradieswarts musically conservative and a little too hippy-dippy sloppy. The vocals are definitely a weakness but even they have grown on me with repeated plays.
Anyway, Paradieswarts is definitely on the acoustic and traditional instruments side of the Krautrock spectrum; no tape-splicing, just roll the tape and some jamming hippies trying to come together right now. Or right then. Exquisite filigrees of guitars, piano, flute, harp, and bongos, slow building, noodling, interweaving individual players and a rough chorus of singers into these beautiful sad crests of communal hippy love. Works for me, and right at home with pastoral psychedelic greats like early Pink Floyd or Neil Young.
The one song for us all? Rolling Stone had this at 145 on their list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004; up to 109 on the 2021 list. That's the right direction but when I saw Sly deliver this at the end of Questlove's Summer of Soul in 2021 I cried. I am sure it meant a lot in 1968 and 1969. It's regarded as one of the most popular songs of the 1960s. Now it feels like manna from heaven, "We got to live together." Shaking his afro, rocking his freak flag, Sly: "Iiiiiiiii am Everyday People." Yes you are! And you and you too!
Just watched Todd Haynes' documentary The Velvet Underground (2021). As hagiography it's very satisfying, so if you're a fan at all and haven't seen it yet you'll want to. Andy Warhol's 1960s pop art Exploding Plastic Inevitable in all its infamous demimonde glory. The origins of heroin chic and the greatest drug song in rock & roll history. The misty story of Moe Tucker's vocal on "After Hours." John Cale explains the early allure of the Velvets' sound as a combination of R&B and Wagner. Jonathan Richman, maybe their biggest fan, gushes with mysterious awe about various strange essences in the Velvet's music. And the doc is packed with images, found film footage, that many will have never seen before.
Haynes' does have his own take, though. And I find it persuasive but not entirely convincing.
In his story the Velvets were a Warhol art project, part of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Andy brought all the improbable parts together, Cale, Lou, and Nico. Set them up with his avant-garde pop art light show and took them on their first tour of the West Coast. Under Warhol's creative curation they produced a singular masterpiece, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). And then a proto-punk rock reaction to the Flower Power and hostility they encountered on their West Coast tour, White Light/White Heat (1968).
Bill Graham, the big West Coast producer, hated The Velvet Underground, the doc shares. Tucker attributes this to Andy's superior light show. And clad in black the Velvets couldn't relate much to the colorful sunshine hippies of the West Coast. In this way, White Light/White Heat presages the Sex Pistols crash and burn spectacle in sonic dissolution and mayhem; making a noise fetish into an art move. It doesn't have the "songs" of their other albums but could be their most influential album sound-wise.
But then that was it, the highly flammable ingredients of The Velvet Undergound explode apart. Or, actually, Nico drifts away. And, basically, Lou drives everyone else away. He breaks with Andy. And shortly thereafter he gives the rest of the band an ultimatum as to whether Cale or he stays. Cale leaves and so the story of the original Velvet Underground is more or less over, in Haynes' account.
The third album, The Velvet Underground (1969), the soft one without Cale or Nico, is glossed over. Loaded (1970) is barely mentioned, other than to point out Lou cut Moe out of that one too. A sort of addendum to the Lou broke up the band story. And VU, the lost album that ought to have come out between those two (but wasn't released until 1985) gets no mention at all, or none I can remember now. Not taking anything away from the first two albums, both classic albums, but there is a case to be made that the last three Velvets studio albums, without Nico and Cale, and in one instance even without Tucker, are as good or even better than the first two, or at least not dismissible as such.
Not to Haynes's story, though. The more puzzling question for me is why Lou was never able to match in his solo career the greatness of even the last three Lou-centric Velvets' albums? And which maybe shows that the greatness of the Velvets five studio albums goes beyond Andy, Cale, Nico, Tucker, or even Lou. Something else that Richman and 1000s of bands since have tried to tap into and reproduce.
Anyway, seeing the doc reminded me how important White Heat/White Light was to punk rock class of '77 and subsequent noise rock. The Velvets patent a version of art punk based on bleak beauty, violent negation, and rock & roll dissipation; a perfect mean of amateurish racket and avant-garde noise.
"I Heard Her Call My Name" (1968)
"Sister Ray" (1968)
"Guess I'm Falling In Love (Instrumental Version)" (1968)
Frequently cited as possibly the first charting rap record. Certainly it's on a short list. Markam goes way back. Although you won't find him on the irrepressibly stellar collection, The Roots of Rap, Classic Recordings from the 1920's and '30's, Yazoo Records. Instead, Markam rose to fame touring with Bessie Smith, performed stand-up comedy in blackface, sparked dance crazes and played in the movies before making this record of his signature routine in his later years. He's a cultural bridge between 19th century minstrel music hokum and Hiphop.
