It’s The Band That Makes the Band
Befitting so legendary a band, every member of Can has their own origin story. But drummer Jaki Liebezeit got the best. An acclaimed free jazz musician, after one gig he was being congratulated for his paradiddling when a grizzled freak marched up and spat at him “why do you play that shit? You must play monotonously!”
At least that’s the way Julian Cope told it in ’Krautrocksampler’, the first book on the scene I (and probably most people) read. Liebezeit has confirmed something like that happened. But he was already a devotee of what we’d now call ’world music’ (with the band named after the Turkish for ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’), so it perhaps wasn’t quite the “moment of life-changing clarity” Cope claimed.
Anyway, it wasn’t just that he took the advice, it’s that he converted the rest of us. Can became like the Zen master in old films, who can accomplish things us humdrum folk can’t but chooses to fill his days with simple tasks. Bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt had been pupils of Stockhausen at the Darmstadt, and taught the ‘New Music’. But they turned their back on it all to play some of the most pared-down, groove-based metronomic trance-outs ever accomplished. You don’t need lots of notes, you just need to know the right ones. Guitarist Michael Karoli recalled “We weren’t into impressing people, just caressing them.”
Which made the band unit the thing. Jamming was scarcely uncommon in this era, and most of it now sounds no less self-indulgent than the drum solos. Whereas Can always jammed with focus, as a collective effort. Irmin Schmidt said “Although we created a sense of freedom, there was intense concentration and discipline.” The band even disliked the term, with its noodling connotations, preferring ‘spontaneous compositions’.
Robert Fripp famously said: “You hear what everyone else is doing; you do whatever is necessary, which is usually as little as possible. It has nothing to do with self-expression, it has to do with a group mind.“ Which may fit Can more than King Crimson themselves. Bassist Holger Czukay later commented “a group is like a living organism. A band should be like a gang”.
Which is why I prefer what’s now the less-known cover to ’Tago Mago’, the original UK release. Not because it (uniquely) features the group, but because it shows them not just playing live but from behind - facelessly collectivised. “No Fuhrers” was one of Liebezeit’s dictums.
And their recording methods perfectly matched this intent. Their first release came with the rather cryptic by-line “made in a castle with better equipment”. Which referred to the Schloss Norvenich, near their home base of Cologne. Owned (yes really!) by a friend with plans to transform it into an arts centre, they were able to rehearse there as they chose. Liebezeit recalled: “every day, midday to midnight, we improvised and recorded in our studio”. It was significant enough to them that the name they gave it, Inner Space, originally doubled as the name of the band. (Not to mention becoming another lyrical madness mantras, on the early track ’19th Century Man'.)
And he means recorded. When Czukay swapped his savings for a basic two-track recorder, their rehearsal space essentially doubled as their home studio. They’d jam along a groove, often for hours at a time. He’d record it all, then judiciously edit it down. And knowing just what to take out was always central to Can.
…and all this was essential to their sound. In those days studio time was sparse, precious and above all costly. So standard behaviour became for bands to learn their set, drill themselves into such proficiency that little of the booked time would be wasted. But this turned music-making into a work task, to be accomplished as quickly and efficiently as possible. Rhythms became regularised factory rhythms, for factory workers to step out to in their few hours off. By escaping that process, Can’s music retained its organic feel, it’s spontaneity. And with Liebezeit’s drumming, it had a heart where its clock should be.
Let’s try to prove that… The standard explanation for their decline is the departure of second vocalist Damo Suzuki. Yet ‘Soon Over Babaluma’ was made after he’d gone. Which Schmidt rightly called “the last of the good Can records”.
While in ‘Future Days; Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany’ (Faber & Faber) David Stubbs, more convincingly pins the ultimate dissolution of the band on… better equipment! They took to proper recording methods, with each player laying down their track separately.
Czukay himself conceded: “In the beginning we were a real group… Then when we became successful we were able to afford a multi-track machine. From this moment on, you could say it was the beginning of the end for Can. It was: ‘I want to hear guitar’, or ‘I want to hear the bass’. Everyone was criticising each other about what he’s doing wrong and so on.” In short, when Can stoped recording like Can they stopped sounding like Can. The next album was even called ’Landed’, a sign there’d be no more astral flights.
In the early days the Velvet Underground were a strong influence. And in their spirit early Can was hot, rough, abrasive and tense. But as they went on, like a stone bounding downstream, they became smooth, serene, cool and languid. Which explains something of their enduring appeal. Everyone from out-and-out punkers to art rockers to ambient artists have been caught in Can’s influence, but by fixing their sights on different periods. Just like the Velvets, later bands have based their whole careers on what to Can was one passing phase.
But more important is that trajectory makes for compelling listening. You not only have to hear their initial six-album run, from ’Delay’ (recorded 1968) to ‘Soon Over Babaluma’, (1974) you need to hear it as one piece of meta-music. In fact, if you haven’t heard it I don’t think you can say you’ve heard music. An early track, ’Uphill’, confirms they were ascending a curve, then later diving into free fall.
All of which is true, except that here you have to pick one…
The Monster of the Movie…
’Delay’ had been intended as the first album, but none at the time were bold enough to release it. Which in the long-term proven a boon. The Velvets influence was then still worn on their sleeve, while later releases developed more of their unique sound.
The highpoint definitely comes in the run of ‘Monster Movie’, (1969), ‘Tago Mago’ (1971) and ‘Ege Bamyasi’ (1972) - between hot and cool, when their porridge was just right. From them, most go for ‘Tago Mago’. But, while they’re clearly both such stellar albums, I have three… count’ em three reasons for picking ’Monster Movie’.
It comes down to the singer. And it’s true the two vocalists varied greatly in style, so each had their distinct role. Suzuki was like a shaman conducting a ritual. Semi-fluent in several languages he’d swap between tongues, or go into a kind of scatting, babbling ur-language. As religious ecstatics talk in tongues, he’d sing in them. And arguably his less upfront singing suited the band philosophy of no musical hierarchies.
But first singer Malcolm Mooney was a Dada poet, on a one-man mission to eradicate all meaning. He’d pick up on banal phrases he saw or overheard, or just concoct nonsense expressions such as “the direction of coat hangers is upside down”, like Schwitters collaging letters from newspapers and magazines. He’d then intone them until they had even less meaning than they started out with. Mooney and Suzuki were such opposites they became complementary, like contrasting colours.
Suzuki sings as though he’s possessed of meaning which currently lies just outside your reach; Mooney as though nothing he says means anything, and the same goes for everything else you ever heard. Which I love just that little bit more.
Alternately, it’s about the song. Can’s finest moment is a three-way tie between ’Mushroom’, ‘Mother Sky’ and - as you may have guessed - a track from ’Monster Movie’. We’ll get to it…
But most important is approach. Though recorded in the same castle ’Tago Mago’ used it’s four sides to expand on the tape collage elements, and was effectively a studio album even if there never really was a studio. While ’Monster Movie’ has more of the as-live sound. Which makes it the most Can of the Can albums, the point they were doing their thing the most they ever did it.
For which they found a handy phrase. After the non-appearance of ’Delay’ the band has a second chance to record a first album, and hence make a mission statement. As Julian Cope has said ‘Outside My Door’, with it’s self-referential lyrics and the repeated refrain “any colour is bad”, is their credo condensed into four words. A newbie’s introduction to Can is right there, provided they’re willing to dive in at the deep end.
And from there those deep waters just get deeper. ‘You Doo Right’ is clearly the monster of ’Monster Movie’, arriving fittingly at the midway mark, and taking up the whole of the album’s second side. Yet there’s no musical indication that it will be a long piece, no symphonic-style intro like there would be with prog. It doesn’t even really start, it’s more like it was there all along and a door opened onto it.
Neither does it have any kind of finale. It just kind of is, finding ceaseless variations within its basic structure. Which become more captivating than any dynamics. Other tracks on the album offer some semblance of song structure, if to varying degrees. Not here. Rather than develop or run through sections it rides waves, building up and subsiding. If anything it de-develops, becomes sonically more reductive as it goes on, at points dropping down to voice and drums.
Given their methods it’s likely it only took that size in the unfolding. Accounts vary as to how long the monster originally was, before Czukay’s pruning scalpel. Cope claims “about an hour and a half”, Wikipedia says six, and Mooney has claimed it was twelve hours straight. He recalls breaking for lunch, leaving the others to carry on, then getting back and joining straight in again.
But there is something just right about it’s ultimate side-long length. When the band got to pick the tracks for the compilation ’Cannibalism’ they found themselves having to edit down longer tracks to fit on everything they wanted. But ’You Doo Right’ was left untouched.
”When they ask what’s wrong…”
Yet if it’s Can at their most Can-like there’s also something unique about it. Contrary to their era lyrics weren’t ‘meaningful’, to be consulted on sleeves and diligently interpreted. But this time…
Mooney had come to Germany to dodge the draft, his girlfriend remaining in America. He didn’t exactly settle, a poor speaker of the language, and a black man who found the place riddled with racism. (Which, if it was anything like contemporary Britain, it was.) Under these pressures his behaviour more and more erratic. On stage this often worked for a band who didn’t do regular anyway. Off-stage was another story. So the words to ‘You Doo Right’, which might initially sound like bland love song professions deliberately decontextualised, actually made for a rare moment of confessional songwriting…
”When they ask "what's wrong?" I say I’m OK
”I'm in love with my girl, she's away
”I drum beat twenty-one hours a day”
And so it was to prove both the band’s high water mark (they’d come close but never really top it) and the undoing of Mooney’s tenure. On medical advice, not long after this he’d left both the band and the country, not returning to music till ’89.
So ’You Doo Right’ is an accomplishment, visionary and masterful players knowing just what sounds they must make and doing it. It exults in the repetition, the sheer joy of surrendering to the beat. Describing Krautrock music in general, Stubbs notes “it’s pure, almost infantile pleasure, but it also hints at an underlying Sisyphean futility. There is a stasis, a fixation about it - we are travelling but ‘going’ nowhere at once. Endless, beginning, endless, beginning.” ’You Doo Right’ exemplifies this par excellence.
But it’s simultaneously a record of a breakdown happening in real time. It dramatises trauma, that thought that snags in your brain and sticks there, that thing you can’t move on from. Something coming together and something fracturing, as though they’re the same thing. That’s where it gets its edge.
And with the equally repeated line “once I was blind, now I can see” it marks a kind of dark enlightenment. And if we go back to those two other contenders for the band’s finest moment we find much the same. ’Mushroom’ was a kind of yang to Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ - “When I saw a mushroom head/ I was born and I was dead”. While Wikipedia describes ’Mother Sky’ as "Damo Suzuki mulls the relative merits of madness and ‘Mother Sky’.”
In the famous quote about Picasso, he was at the roots of art. Can, similarly, were at the roots of music. They condensed it down to its very essence, and played it with absolute focus and complete lack of ego.
See it this way. If Can were like Zen masters in old films, what role does that character get in those films? Of course the hero, adrift in the world, goes back to the master for some re-righting. And with their twelve-hour jamming stints inside the castle, five people moving as one with no thought of anything outside, ’Monster Movie’ is your wisdom-giving guru.
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