The Beat Patrol

An NME article from Nov. 9, 1974 about Krautrock legends Can…

One night in November 1969 the phone rang in Irmin Schmidt’s Cologne home. Schmidt got out of bed to answer it and found himself talking to a guard on the Swiss-German frontier at Basle.

“We have a crazy black guy in our cells here,” said the policeman. “He tried to crash through our checkpoint and then started a fist-fight. We’ve had him here four hours and he won’t talk. Just sits there crying. We found a scrap of paper on him with your number, and we were hoping you’d come down and take him off our hands…”

Schmidt got dressed and drove the three hundred miles round-trip without a murmur He was used to it.

The “crazy black guy” was Malcolm “Desse” Mooney, the singer with his band, The Can – and “Desse” you made allowances for.

It was the weekend and “Desse’s” girlfriend had gone down to Zurich to visit some people. A couple of hours after she’d gone, he’d decided that he had to see her at once – so he’d grabbed the group’s ancient V.W. (no number plates, no road test) and headed off down the autobahn (no licence, no passport) in hot pursuit.

“When he ran into trouble at the border,” explains Schmidt, “he behaved exactly like a child. When he couldn’t get his way, he got violent – and, when that didn’t work, he just curled up and burst into tears. Like a child…

“Desse is unique. We all loved him. We still do.”

Malcolm “Desse” Mooney left the group in December and returned to his native America. He’d spent just over a year with Can and, in that time, played a major part in laying the foundations for the extraordinary – and unparalleled – music they play today.

But the real history of Can starts in 1965 in Darmstadt where Irmin Schmidt met Holger Czukay while they were both studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen, erstwhile enfant terrible of the the mid-Sixties classical mainstream.

Schmidt, then 25, was an intellectual wild man. He was into Fluxus, Cage, Lamonte Young (all of whom Stockhausen detested) and was well-set on course towards becoming a legitimate conductor, leading large conventional orchestras through a wide range of scores from Mozart to Hindemith – with a personal speciality in the music of Busotti, Cage, and the relatively obscure Polish composer Gorecki.

Czukay, on the other hand, found Stockhausen’s then-rigid serial theories fascinating and studied the master very seriously, writing pieces in his style and teaching small classes of his own.

When, in mid ‘68, Schmidt teamed up with American flautist and avant-garde composer David Johnson – “to do something new, we didn’t know what” – it seemed only natural to drop Holger Czukay a line and ask if he’d like to join in.

The three talked it over and decided that they wanted to get into a cross between New Thing jazz and “beat-music” – the same principles upon which The Soft Machine had been founded, quite coincidentally, a couple of years earlier. This, in turn, reminded Czukay of a young law-student to whom he’d taught some guitar in 1966 – one Michael Karoli, who was now living in Lausanne on the shore of Lake Geneva, playing bass in a pop group which worked the Swiss disco circuit.

Holger phoned him, Karoli arrived the next day.

Now all they needed was a drummer.

Schmidt vaguely knew a guy who played with the currently eminent Manfred Schoof Group. His name was Jaki Liebezeit and he was into free-form jazz, so he was out of the running – but maybe he knew somebody who’d dig getting into something weird?

“Yeah,” said Liebezeit, on the phone from Hamburg. “I know somebody.”

“Who is it?”

Thoughtful pause. “I know somebody. He’ll be round tomorrow.”

The next day, the group were testing their equipment at the rehearsal room in Cologne when Liebezeit walked in and began setting up his kit They tuned up, got a sound-balance, and looked at each other, dubiously.

“What we gonna do?” Liebezeit enquired.

“Play,” suggested Schmidt.

The only track issued from this period (so far) is ‘E.F.S.7′. It isn’t jazz, and it certainly isn’t rock.

It took Malcolm Mooney to get the group into rock and, by the time that had happened, David Johnson had left. He doesn’t appear on any of Can’s records. In the light of what followed, it’s not difficult to see why.

Schloss Norvenich is a castle in Cologne which, until it was bought by a local art-dealer and gallery-owner, had acted as a cinema; Its cine-projection facilities remain, but in July 1968, the owner rented it out permanently to Irmin Schmidt and company to turn it into a recording studio for the film soundtracks they wished to create.

As Inner Space Productions (no J. G. Ballard allusion intended), the original five-piece settled down to “play themselves in” and experiment with such recording equipment as they could purchase or build themselves.

Czukay was the technical whizz and in October ‘68, while the studio was temporarily out of commission to facilitate his improvement work, Schmidt slipped off to Paris to visit Serge Tcherepnin, son of the Soviet composer (and now working with Stevie Wonder’s producer on electronic devices in California).

They’d run into each other at Darmstadt and were going over old times when in dropped Malcolm Mooney, an artist friend of Tcherepnin, on his way back from a pilgrimage to India. Schmidt was struck by Mooney’s humour, bulging imagination, and extravagant verbal capacity and invited him to come back to Cologne to try out singing with his band.

Though he’d never sung a note in his life, Mooney agreed at once and, arriving at Schloss Norvenich, strode into the studio, grabbed a mike, and led the band into their first real performance. Everyone knew immediately that this was the clincher.

They did a second take. The number was ‘Father Cannot Yell’ and this version is the one that kicks off Can’s debut album Monster Movie.

There can be few bands so magically attuned that the first thing they ever play can go straight onto an album. ‘Father Cannot Yell’ is simply one of the most urgent, explosive, and majestic ad-libs a rock group has ever laid down.

Karoli, who until then had been Inner Space’s singer, gladly relinquished the mike. Mooney announced that the group’s new name was to be The Can – the artifact, not the verb – and they began to play as a band, instead of a bunch of soundtrack-makers. (They’d done two films already.)

Johnson left at Christmas and, in January 1969, The Can recorded ‘Mother Upduff’ and ‘The Empress And The Ukraine King’, plus two other tracks so far unreleased.

Previously the group had been slightly divided as to what direction to take. Schmidt and Karoli liked The Velvet Underground and wanted to get into rock; Liebezeit hated the Velvets; Czukay couldn’t make up his mind.

Mooney tipped the balance and the group’s uniquely ferocious sound of the time evolved very quickly.

By July they had enough for an album, but the record companies thought the tapes a little too freaky for comfort. Can pressed 500 of their own copies, sold them in a fortnight, and United Artists gravely signed them up.

The album was recorded primitively. Equipment consisted of the band’s instruments, a two-track tape-machine with a pair of mikes, two small J. B. Lansing speakers, and a couple of malfunctioning Pioneer amps, one of which blew up during the session for the twenty-minute ‘You Doo Right’, which takes up all of Side Two.

Mostly, the formats were simple – a riff or a sequence, lyrics straight off the top of “Desse’”s head (different in every performance), and: BANG! – straight into it. The only exception was ‘Outside My Door’, featuring the Lennonesque harmonica of Karoli, which took some working out – and which the utterly spontaneous Mooney hated bothering with.

Mooney’s whole personality was orientated to the instantaneous and the never-to-be repeated – although sometimes he would seize on something and reiterate it over and over for hours, like a human tape-loop.

On one occasion, Can were giving a private performance for the art community of the city in Schloss Norvenich – the group in the enormous main studio, sound-proofed with thousands of army-surplus mattresses, and the audience outside on the stairs, listening through the open door.

Mooney arrived late, walked to the mike, took one look at the listeners jammed in rows on the ascending steps, and began to sing “upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs” in a bizarre incantation. After an hour, the rest of the group took a ten-minute break. Mooney remained at the mike, still screaming “upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs!”

Following a further two hours, he finally collapsed exhausted and frothing at the mouth, still muttering “upstairs, downstairs” under his breath. The event achieved legendary status.

But his piece-de-resistance occurred in November ‘69 at a local exhibition of the French sculptor Armand.

During a staid and business like reception on the opening night, Mooney took it into his head to shake things up a little and, clambering onto a stack of expensive “multiples”, began loudly to auction the items off at 50 marks each.

In the consequent chaos dealers, critics, and sundry socialites ran amok, throwing Mooney the few coins he was asking and trying to get out of the building with their prizes. The sculptor watched open-mouthed, before breaking down completely.

As the police began to arrive, Hildegaard, Schmidt’s wife, hustled Mooney (who, by now, had his pockets full of loose change) out of a side-entrance and got him away in her husband’s car.

The next day the scandal had made the pages of Der Spiegel.

Mooney subsequently sent the gallery’s proprietor a telegram of apology, returning the money, and thanking him for the opportunity to perform in his hall.

But the good times were rapidly drawing to a close.

Mooney was cracking up under the strain of his own extraordinary personality. His telepathic streak, always prominent, began to get truly frightening, with him replying verbally to complicated thoughts other people imagined were safe inside their heads.

The next step was acute paranoia.

In December, a year after David Johnson had quit, a psychiatrist advised Irmin Schmidt to send Mooney back to New York before his mind disintegrated completely.

He now teaches art to children in Harlem, but is under the care of a local shrink.

“He has the impracticality of a child,” says Schmidt. “He needs a mother around constantly to make sure he doesn’t land in prison.”

Definitely a kind of genius in the Syd Barrett genre, Mooney seemed irreplaceable when he left. U.A. released a single of his last tracks with the group (the agonised ‘Soul Desert’, for Roger Fritz’s movie Madchen mit Gewalt, coupled with ‘She Brings The Rain’, from the soundtrack of Thomas Schamoni’s Bottom) – and Can sat back to rethink.

A solution seemed to be to get out and play some concerts, and it was while they were playing a four-night engagement as interlude musicians for a play in Munich that Liebezeit and Czukay, sitting outside a sidewalk cafe, heard someone singing lustily just around the corner.

Presently, a diminutive Japanese with a mass of straggling hair came into view – and was immediately enrolled in the band. A hitch-hiking street-musician, his name was Kenji “Damo” Suzuki; he’d been all over the world, and hardly spoke a word of German.

He turned up at the concert that evening and was an instant hit with the audience. It took him rather longer to become convinced that Can were any good.

Back in the studio at Cologne (since Mooney’s exit, they’d done little except ‘Musette’, qv. Limited Edition), the project was a theme-song for a film by Leonidas Capitanos called Cream – an enterprise which started out with high intentions, but pretty soon degenerated into a straightforward skin-flick.

The song was ‘Don’t Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone’ and Damo let it be known that he was distinctly pissed off at having to submit to the discipline the recording involved.

However, the next operation was cutting the epic ‘Mother Sky’ for Jerzy Skolimovsky’s Deep End, during which Damo quietened down and became relatively interested – and, by the time the group were into the material for Roland Klick’s Deadlock, Damo was fully committed (as can be heard in his performance on ‘Tango Whiskyman’ from those sessions).

Towards the autumn of 1970 the band began sessions for their second album proper. Named after a rock Jaki Liebezeit had seen while on holiday in Ibiza, Tago Mago was worked on spasmodically through the winter – the group playing the odd concert here and there – until the communal feeling was that they’d got what they were after.

It was a long, introverted process and the result was Can’s most distant recording. Times were dark and oppressive – fall of what Irmin Schmidt in a rare, but evocative, disconnection with the English language, describes as “witchy surprisings” – the air thick with ESP and what Can like to call “magic”.

The storm-centre of this mood is the long, free-form excursion ‘Aumgn’, recorded while Schmidt was tripping. As music, it’s rather too personal to mean very much to the detached listener outside a kind of doom-laden re-run of ‘Return of the Son of Monster Magnet’ – but, as a structure, it discloses much about the way Can like to work.

Based on a “ground-tape” recorded by Schmidt and Liebezeit, the “event” which ‘Aumgn’ really is consists of overlayed tapes from other numbers the band had been playing about with – the combination being mixed down and then edited into final form.

At one point Schmidt is heard hammering a wooden chair to pieces with a pair of heavy-gauge drum sticks; at another the little boy from upstairs comes in and shouts along, thinking it’s a party; at yet another – referred to by the group as “The Appearance of the Black Dog” – a canine musician enters, freaks out, and starts howling and barking.

In the ensuing chaos, Czukay runs hither and thither righting fallen mike-stands and adjusting the levels to accommodate Schmidt’s basso-profundo chants of the track’s title (later slowed down to make them all the more frightening).

It takes a strong nerve to listen to the results alone in the dark.

But ‘Aumgn’ is an exception to the Can sound and, if you flip on the other record in this double-set and listen to the atomic Ragarock that is ‘Oh Yeah’, you’ll be in the presence of the quintessential Can sound: organ chords creeping ever-upward to the accompaniment of cranking, blinding guitar, the whole thing pitched over a bass/drum pattern so imperturbably, effortlessly menacing that, if it weren’t for the occasional grim caesura, the tension set up would surely snap the record in half.

Can originally intended to release only the first disc of the Tago Mago set, but Hildegaard Schmidt persuaded them to collate a sample of the freakier stuff – including ‘Aumgn’ – to go out as a second album.

It was this move – and possibly the resounding lack of commercial potential inherent in the set as a whole – that led to Hildegaard’s takeover of the managership of the band from Abi Ofarim, who had picked them up after hearing ‘Monster Movie’ (and if you can get your head next to that, you’re a better man than me, son).

Ofarim immediately invoked court-proceedings and began to lay injunctions on anything coming out of Inner Space Studios. Despite this – and the equipment van burning down one night – Can bore up and played their first British tour under Hildegaarde’s guidance.

This was a healthy financial change since, previously, they’d been forced to play single gigs for sums around 1,000 marks in the face of expenses averaging 800 marks a night. And, in December, they got an even bigger break.

They were selected to do the theme music for a Francis Durbridge thriller to be screened on German national TV. Now Durbridge may not mean that much over here anymore, but in Germany he’s a cult, gets forty-million-plus viewing figures, and totally clears the streets during the three successive evenings on which one of his serials runs.

‘Spoon’, the number Can came up with for the occasion, became the unlikeliest No. 1 you could hope to find and sold 50,000. Suddenly the band were a national name.

They followed up by playing a free concert at the vast Cologne Sportshalle in February 1972, drawing 10,000 and filming the proceedings.

Then they nipped into the studio, cut ‘I’m Too Leise’, ‘LH702′, ‘I’m So Green’, and ‘Vitamin C’ (the last for another TV play directed by Samuel Fuller of Shock Corridor), and re-toured the U.K.

Now it was time for another album and – bearing in mind Can’s creative susceptibility to the prevailing climatic conditions – all at a rather unpropitious juncture.

The summer of ‘72 in Germany was rainy, dreary, and depressing. U.A. gave the band a deadline and, one day before its expiry, they’d only manged to finish three tracks – ‘Pinch’, ‘Sing Swan Song’, and ‘One More Night’. Not much of what they had lying around – including ‘TV Spot’ from the Tago Mago out-takes – seemed really to fit, so they tried for one track (intended to run through Side Two) on the evening before they were due to turn the tapes in.

This was ‘Soup’ – and it wasn’t long enough. Glumly, they fished out the tapes of ‘Vitamin C’, ‘I’m So Green’, and ‘Spoon’ and handed the lot over to the A&R men. Their doubt about the album’s worth doesn’t stop Ege Bamyasi being a fine achievement; even if everything else’d been rubbish, the record would have been justified by the marvellous suspended waltz ‘Sing Swan Song’, one of the subtlest performances in the rock idiom.

But the rest was pretty good, too. And Abi Ofarim was hot to see that it didn’t trot.

His inevitable injunction delayed the release of the album for three months in Germany and ruined its sales promotion schedule. Irmin Schmidt, in a mood of cold anger, began to study publishing law in order to fight Ofarim and – although the court-battle continues even now – it looks like his trouble paid off. Can are winning.

Ege Bamyasi, for the curious, is a brand of Turkish vegetable marketed by an Istanbul company called Can…in a can. If this wasn’t enough of a click, “can” in Turkish also means “life”.

The lucky coincidence didn’t carry over into the band’s affairs, however. Immediately after recording ‘Soup’, Michael Karoli suffered a perforated ulcer which nearly killed him and put the group out of action for six months.

During this time, Czukay and Liebezeit devoted themselves to producing a singer called Alex for the Ariola label, Schmidt studied for eight hours a day, and Czukay put the final touches to a private project, the montage album Cannexis 5, which he’d started in the group’s formative months.

Finally, Michael recovered in the spring of ‘73. The group wavering between uncertainty, determination, and bankruptcy, it was Hildegaard to the rescue. With judicious bank-loans, she re-kitted them with equipment and sent them off on a 60-concert tour of Britain, France, and Germany – a tour which turned out to be their most successful yet, and which pulled Karoli back into the band.

Holiday-time arrived in the summer and Damo pulled the double weirdity of marrying the daughter of a couple of Jehovah’s witnesses and deciding it was time to revisit the Land of the Rising Sun just before the sessions for Future Days. However, it turned out to be a profitable refreshment for him and, in light, mild, and airy weather, the band got down to it in good spirits.

Future Days took two months to make and is Can’s most approachable album.

Bearing the hexagram ‘Ting: The Cauldron’ on its sleeve, it’s probably got more positive energy to the square centimetre than three barrels of brown rice, and Schmidt’s discovery of a peculiar “string tone” on one of his keyboards gives it a particularly transcendental ambiance.

There were no sound-tracks on it this time (even though Irmin, a great De Mille fan and cineast in general, devoted his part of the extended suite ‘Bel Air’ to Hedy Lamarr), and the effect was of complete purity of vision. A remarkable album, in other words.

Touring immediately recommenced in France – but, by now, the strain was beginning to tell on the Bible-bashing Damo, whose vocals and all-round appearance became increasingly ragged.

In December (it always happens in December with this band) there was a confrontation during sessions for another TV soundtrack – at the height of which Damo snatched up a mike and a pre amp shouting “That’s mine!” and rushed out. He gave them back the next day, but never rejoined and nowadays works in a hotel, engrossed in religion and family life.

The day after Damo left, Malcolm Mooney, telepathic as ever, sent Irmin Schmidt a letter broaching the subject of getting back into music again. Schmidt wrote back three times before he got a reply – but it was a weird one, seemingly dictated by somebody else. Nothing has been heard from Mooney since.

In the last year Can have done another TV soundtrack (for Gomorrha, an avant-garde sci-fi excursion) and released Limited Edition – a collection of past out-takes some of which are mentioned above – and a new, very oddly-produced, but nonetheless exhilirating return to Tago Mago territory called Soon Over Babbaluma.

Fairly soon they’re due to tour the States.

The first gig will be New York and one can’t help but wonder – as the band obviously do themselves – whether a certain “crazy Black guy” might not leap up out of the audience, grab the mike, and begin singing the first things that come into his very strange mind.

Hm…

“Upstairs downstairs upstairs downstairs upstairs downstairs…”

Ian MacDonald

Spin magazine article from July 20, 1998…

Even before Kraftwerk’s great mid-’70s cars, trains, and airwaves trilogy, Krautrock was largely about getting away – especially from Germany itself. The band Can in particular fused cut-and-paste wanderlust with a transgeneric rhythmic paganism guaranteed to transport musicians and listeners alike out of their skulls back into their dancing butts. More ethereal, Ash Ra Tempel sought utopia through psychedelic guitarist Manuel Göttsching’s long and winding solos.

Can conceptualist Holger Czukay pioneered what I call “short-wave rock”, a subgenre in which the exotic sound of the other disrupts implacable beats. Czukay had studied with avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose seminal 1966 work Telemusik combines electronic music and international short-wave radio transmissions into the eeriest Martian mix tape you’ll ever hear. Shortly after joining Can, Czukay attempted to emulate Stockhausen with Canaxis, a dry sandwich of choral loops and Asian samples.

A decade later, however, Czukay announced his departure from Can with Movies, a gloriously giddy traipse through ethnodelic soundscapes, and a much more successful fourth-world montage than Canaxis. Two years in the making, Movies develops the slicker, funkier side of the multi-flavoured Can. If film is the locus of imaginary worlds, as Czukay believed, Movies is a virtual Imax experience. It kicks off with a refreshing blast of hot summer funk (‘Cool in the Pool’) before venturing into woozy sampled Arabia (‘Persian Love’) and extended cinematic reveries (‘Hollywood Symphony’), all intercut with bits and pieces of found dialogue and sound effects. Czukay cutting-room flair for unlikely juxtapositions is almost as evident on his 1981 follow-up, On the Way to the Peak of Normal, whose slippy, opiated grooves float on Pink Floyd carrier waves and a Zappa-esque sense of the cosmic absurd. The key tracks here are ‘Ode to Perfume’ and ‘Fragrance’, which Baudelaire fans will recognize as the poet’s royal road to ecstatic elsewhereness.

After Can, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt – another former Stockhausen student – drifted toward (relatively) traditional song structures. On 1987’s Musk at Dusk and 1991’s Impossible Holidays (a double bill reissued on a single Spoon/Mute disc), Schmidt leads a musical tour through swoony vacation scenarios exuding the dreamlike allure and romantic artifice of movie sets. Schmidt is literally all over the place on these records. The rhythm section lays down fat, funky Carribean beats underneath Paris accordions, breathy chanson lyrics brimful of mock (“The women have no pity / The men are sometimes shitty”) melodrama, and more ennui than Roxy Music.

Drummer Jackie Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli were Can’s real groove shamans. Deluge – Karoli’s newly unabridged 1984 solo album – is a sweetly flowing tube ride of a record buoyed along by Polly Eltes’s repetitive sing-song chants. It’s a reggae album, really, a dubbed-up tribal trip through hippie truisms (“sooner or later something will come along”). Sadly, only the first three tracks feature Liebezeit’s amazing man-machine drumming – as though Eltes’s patchouli-scented meditations had forced him to bail out prematurely and thus miss the cleansing rainstorm – ‘Deluge (The River)’ – that washes everything away

If Krautrock is defined largely by droning, rhythmic minimalism, Ash Ra Tempel could be the rule-proving exception. Manuel Göttsching finds his bliss in seemingly endless jams edited down to album-side portions. The ecstatically spacey ‘Freak ‘n’ Roll’, which kicks off the Purple Pyramid reissue of 1973’s Join Inn, contains nearly twenty minutes of top-shelf improvisation. Sounding uncannily similar to Anthem of the Sun-era Jerry Garcia, Göttsching is kicked further into the stratosphere by prog/psych-keyboardist (and former Ash Ra member) Klaus Schulze’s squealing oscillations. The following year’s Starring Rosi (on the same disc) highlights vocalist Rosi Mueller, whose gypsy-queen-in-rainbow-land lyrics can unfortunately drag even Göttsching’s otherworldly flights back down to German soil. And who wants to go there? 

Richard Gehr