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Any music without energy I throw to my tape
machine’s starving eraser heads.
—Holger Czukay, The Can Book
When they came together in Cologne in 1968,
the members of Can had little experience with rock ’n’ roll. Czukay played
the French horn and studied composition under Stockhausen. His goal in
forming a band was to merge free jazz, contemporary classical music, and
“ethnic music”/worldbeat. His first recruit, Irmin Schmidt, studied
classical piano and composition, and Jaki Liebezeit was an accomplished jazz
drummer. Only Czukay’s student, guitarist Michael Karoli, was a full-blown
rock fan. It was Karoli who suggested that the Beatles were more interesting
than Stockhausen. “I Am the Walrus” indicated that he might be right, but
the Velvets proved even more inspirational.
The musicians jammed in a castle called
Schloss Norvenich, and improvisation was key from the beginning. “We began
without any concept,” Schmidt said in Pascal Bussy and Andy Hall’s The
Can Book. “Our only idea was to find a concept in making music all
together spontaneously, in a collective way without any leader.” Can’s
method of reworking songs at each performance came to be called “instant
composition,” and the group’s fans frequently used the word “telepathic” to
characterize the members’ playing. What set Can’s improvisations apart from
free jazz, the space jams of the Grateful Dead, or the virtuosic meanderings
of Cream was a devotion to rock simplicity. Czukay was the master of one-
and two-note bass lines. Karoli played in what’s been described as a
spidery, chip-chop style, and Schmidt attacked his keyboards with rapid-fire
karate chops. “Inability is often the mother of restriction, and restriction
is the great mother of inventive performance,” Czukay told Bussy and Hall.
As for Liebezeit, even when he played in unusual time signatures, he had a
way of locking into a powerful and hypnotic pulse. It was rumored that he
learned several “forbidden rhythms” from a Cuban musician who practiced
Santeria. Supposedly, the Cuban was executed onstage because he had dared to
play the rhythms outside sacred ceremonies. “It is something that I heard, I
did not witness the actual execution,” is all Liebezeit would say.
Two months after their initial jams, the
members of Can were joined by vocalist Malcolm Mooney, an eccentric
African-American sculptor from New York who was bumming around Europe.
Mooney had never played music, but he was a jazz and blues fan who dreamed
of being a singer. The Germans were drawn to his manic energy, and he was
soon improvising rhythmic torrents of words over the band’s churning music.
The rehearsal room at Schloss Norvenich was converted into a studio with the
addition of a two-track recorder and some old U.S. Army mattresses, and
there Can recorded its first album. Monster Movie was initially
released in a batch of five hundred copies on a small Munich label, but
United Artists signed the band and re-released the album in August 1969. The
disc was credited to “the Can,” but the article was dropped a short time
later. In the spirit of 1968, Schmidt told journalists that the letters
stood for “Communism, Anarchism, and Nihilism,” and the original liner notes
introduced the musicians as “talented young people who want to stay in line
but can’t.”
As the title indicates, Monster Movie
is a cinematic album whose ominous tones summon images of lurking predators.
It opens with “Father Cannot Yell,” recorded in the second take of Mooney’s
first session with the band. The keyboard, the bass, the frantic rhythm, and
the insistent guitar combine to create a feeling of panic as Mooney
free-associates in a desperate rap, but the album’s most impressive track
takes up all of side two. “Yoo Doo Right” is some three minutes longer than
the Velvets’ “Sister Ray,” which was clearly its inspiration. Recorded live
during a concert at the castle, one of the band’s two amps blew up in the
middle of the piece, but the group kept right on playing. Over a primal drum
beat, Mooney rants about a love letter from a girlfriend in America. The
tension builds throughout the song and it is never resolved, leaving the
listener wondering exactly what action the letter prompted.
Even before the release of Monster Movie,
Mooney’s position in the band was undermined by growing psychological
problems. During one concert at the castle, he had an episode similar to one
of Syd Barrett’s onstage freakouts when he fixated on audience members
moving between Can’s show and an art exhibit upstairs. He screamed,
“Upstairs, downstairs!” for two hours until he finally collapsed. “Malcolm
lost his head, which happened sometimes,” Karoli explained in The Can
Book. When a mystic friend told Mooney he was taking the wrong path in
life, he began to grow paranoid. On the advice of a psychiatrist, he quit
the band in late 1969 and went back to America.
Can spent some time recording soundtracks for
art films and porno movies (music that was compiled on the album
Soundtracks) before releasing its second proper effort in 1971. Tago
Mago introduced a new vocalist, Damo Suzuki, a twenty-one-year-old
Japanese singer whom Liebezeit and Czukay saw busking outside a cafe in
Munich. “I saw Damo from far away, and he was screaming and sort of adoring
the sun,” Czukay told Bussy and Hall. “I said to Jaki, ‘Here comes our
vocalist!’ and Jaki said, ‘No, no, it can’t be true!’” Suzuki was invited to
that night’s performance. He began screaming at the audience and cleared the
room in record time, thereby assuring his position in the band.
The group called Tago Mago its “magic
record.” Named after a site that figures in the legend of sorcerer Aleister
Crowley, the standout tracks have an air of mystery and forbidden secrets.
“Aumgn” features Schmidt chanting ritualistically over a creepy Eastern
instrumental, and Suzuki’s ranting on the tom-heavy “Hallelujah” is even
weirder than Mooney’s on “Yoo Doo Right.” The trance-inducing “Mushroom” is
an obvious tribute to those of the psychedelic variety, and the memorable
line, “When I saw mushroom head / I was born and I was dead” neatly
encapsulate a psychedelic experience.
In late 1971, Can moved out of Schloss
Norvenich and into an old cinema outside Cologne. The new studio was called
Inner Space, and it became the band’s permanent home. The group was still
recording with a simple two-track tape machine, but its live performances
were becoming more elaborate. Concerts often featured a juggler and a fire
eater as added attractions while the group played for up to four hours in
front of as many as ten thousand German fans. Can’s third album, Ege
Bamyasi, took its name and cover art from a can of vegetables found in a
Turkish restaurant. The music offers more of the same dark grooves, but it
doesn’t improve on the first two albums. Future Days is another
story, expanding the band’s sound in an almost symphonic style. “Moonshake”
is meant to evoke tugboats chugging down the Rhine, and the side-long “Bel
Air” uses echoes and tape loops to create an impressionistic portrait of the
wind-swept cliffs on the coast of Portuguese coast.
Suzuki left the group in September 1973 after
marrying a German girl and becoming a Jehovah’s Witnesses. This time, Can
abandoned the idea of an outside singer, and Karoli and Schmidt divided the
vocals. Subsequent albums suffer from this decision, but they have their
moments. “Dizzy Dizzy” from 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma incorporates a
reggae beat, and “Chain Reaction” is flavored with African percussion. In
1975 Can signed with Virgin Records, and its albums for that label mix
pieces from the “ethnological forgery” series with warped pop tunes such as
“Hunters and Collectors” from 1975’s Landed and “I Want More” from
1976’s Flow Motion. In 1977 Czukay quit after first retiring to a
behind-the-scenes role of mixing and “playing” shortwave radio and
telephone. By that time the band included two veterans of Traffic, bassist
Rosko Gee and percussionist Reebop Kwaku Baah. The early experimentation was
replaced by rote European dance sounds, and the group offered up a lame
disco version of the “Can-Can.” A short time later, the band wisely called
it a day.
Can reunited once in 1986. Mooney, now a
remedial reading teacher in New York, flew in to sing, but the resulting
album, Rite Time, was anti-climactic. The musicians had grown too
much during their solo projects, their egos had gotten too big to accept
musical accidents, and the lure of fancy technology had become irresistible.
It disbanded again and the members went their separate ways. Liebezeit is an
in-demand session drummer; Schmidt composes music on his own, and Czukay
sometimes tours as a techno DJ. Can’s original psychedelic spirit lived on
longest in Karoli and Suzuki, who sometimes toured together, continuing to
improvise most of what they played on the spot, until Karoli died from
cancer in 2000. “He was special,” Suzuki said of
Karoli when we spoke in 2001. “We were not really best of friends, but we
played music much more together. He had really special taste, and he played
music in a way you could not really compare to anybody else. He had a really
good instinct with my voice, and we played so well together. I don’t really
know anybody else like him.”
Can remains an inspiration to other
musicians—in 1997, artists like the Orb, Sonic Youth, and Bruce Gilbert of
Wire for an album called Sacrilege: The Remixes, and the New
York garage band Mooney Suzuki took its name from Can’s two vocalists—and
Suzuki in particular is a hero (the Fall wrote a song in homage entitled “I
Am Damo Suzuki”), largely because of the completely free and daring way that
he approaches making music. “Comfortable things
are the enemy of creative things,” he told me. In 2002 he toured with the
“intuitive music” band Cul de Sac, but refused to meet them before they got
together for the first time on stage. “Damo has three rules: ‘No
improvisation. No rehearsal. No prepared songs,’” guitarist Glenn Jones told
said before the start of the tour. Added Suzuki: “We are just going to meet
and make music, because that’s the way I like to do it. It’s much better for
me, because you can enjoy the music of the moment. I think it’s the best way
to make my feelings instinctive. For twenty years, I only make music this
way.”
This, I noted, is
what makes him a hero. “Not hero,” he said. “I’m much more a shaman or
something like this.”
Click here for
more information about Turn on Your Mind by Jim DeRogatis
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