Glam Can

Can were one of Germany's most revolutionary, stimulating, and undeniably exciting bands. Albeit one of the most eccentric and challenging to achieve wide spread international success. They were one of the first acts to explore experimental electronic music and their impact is still reverberating today. When they formed in 1968 they developed a new archetype in rock - it was a collective rather a band, at least three of members were into their mid-30s and they weren't afraid to cross classical, rock, jazz, and pop with modern electronica and ethnic sounds. The first four LPs - Monster Movie, Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days - are generally regarded as the highwater mark. 1978 saw them disband, they reformed briefly in 1989 and most recently released a DVD box set (Can DVD) comprising of two discs featuring hours of vintage footage (including Can-Free-Concert, Can Notes and Can Documentary) plus a CD featuring solo performances (Can Solo, nice pun) from the band's core members keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, bassist Holger Czukay and guitarist Michael Karoli (who passed away in 2001 after a battle with cancer).

Irmin, let me start by asking - does your mouth say 'ja' but your heart scream 'yeah'?
Ja, ja. (laughs) Maybe the other way round.

Do you see Can as an athletic band?
I finished being an athletic sportsman when I was about 20, 22. I founded Can when I was 32. What do you mean by that?

Listening to the band can be a test of both discipline and endurance.
I wouldn't say athletic but you definitely need a sense of adventure. I mean Can were a very disciplined band.

What is your favourite performance that's captured on the DVD?
My favourite would be the Can-Free-Concert (a film by Peter Przygodda at the Cologne Sporthalle, 1972). We had a number 1 in Germany at that time and Cologne was our hometown and because so many people had bought our record we decided to do a free concert. We just played and at that time nobody had enough money to make it a big show with the lights and stage sets and all that so we just engaged and employed artists - the juggler, the guy with the singing saw and others. We just said, 'come on stage and do what you want'. So that was a very funny evening and we played about five hours.

Five hours?!
That happened quite often. The longest concert we ever did was at Berlin University at a time when Berlin was a very rough town with the riots and all that. We played and outside were a couple of hundred policeman who were patrolling but weren't allowed to come in. We played six and a half hours - we played all night until the last policeman had left because outside it was minus 15 degrees. It was really cold, Berlin can sometimes be very grim, not only temperature-wise. Berlin is a grim town and at that time it was extremely grim. So we played until the policeman went away because it was 3am in the morning and became so cold that they had to leave. That was the longest one, nearly seven hours.

And you say you weren't an athletic band?! That's a marathon.
Well, if you call that athletic it is athletic. We never played under three hours. We always played two sets and sometimes second set lasted two and a half hours. It didn't seem a marathon, it seemed to me quite natural. Mostly we insisted on not having the warming up group before us so we had all evening starting at 8pm and finishing, well, after midnight.

It's interesting with those epic efforts in mind to see Can featured on 70s TV pop shows like Top of the Pops, the Old Grey Whistle Test and other unlikely shows on the DVD documentary.
It's very funny seeing us on these shows where the set-up, ambience and environment is a little dubious. Nevertheless, it was us and we did it so there's nothing wrong with it. The Free Concert I like very much because it gives a real picture to how we were on stage and in the documentary it's mainly television footage. But I also like Can Notes very much because it's so personal and so funny. It's very intimate and really captures how we always is, or was, with each other.

There's an incredibly beautiful version of 'Sunday Morning' by Holger on the audio disc. How important was the influence of the Velvet Underground when you first started out?
There was some influence, of course. They were one of the groups that were surprising, new and had some influence on me. But it was not the most important. I mean at that time Jimi Hendrix and things like Sly Stone had much more influence. Also Frank Zappa.

Did you start out playing anyone else's songs or was it only ever originals?
No. I was a classical composer and I never would've thought to cover any other songs. From the very first day we started to invent our own music. We never played, at anytime in our Can life, a piece by anybody else. Never ever. We did one cover which was a funny thing but that was done very recently, about five years ago. We did the theme song from the Orson Welles' film 'The Third Man'.

The Many Moods of Irmin Schmidt

Obviously that's not how most rock groups start.
When we started we didn't start as a rock group. That happened to us. When I founded the group I was a classical composer and conductor and pianist making piano recitals, playing a lot of contemporary music but also Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven and everything. And when we got together I wanted to do something in which all contemporary music becomes one thing. Contemporary music in Europe especially, the new music was classical music was Boulez, Stockhausen and all that. I studied all that, I studied Stockhausen but nobody talked about rock music like Sly Stone, James Brown or the Velvet Underground as being contemporary music. Then there was jazz and all these elements were our contemporary music, it was new. It was, in a way, much newer than the new classical music which claimed to be 'the new music'. But I thought the real, new thing in the 20th Century, which had no European tradition like contemporary music coming from Wagner, Mahler or whatever, was jazz and rock. That was something that came out of a totally new feeling and I wanted to combine them all and, well, I did. Jaki was a jazz drummer, Mickey was a beat guitarist and Holger had also played jazz and studied classical music and I was a highly, professionally trained conductor and composer who had no idea how to play jazz, well I had an idea but I was much more classical. But I wanted to bring these elements all together and out came Can that made avant garde, progressive rock.

When you formed three key members were already in their 30s … again, it goes against the archetype (ie. the Beatles) of a rock band.
Can is against any archetype of a rock band because Can is not a real rock band. It's a kind of contemporary and one of the most contemporary, 'new music' ensembles there is. It's a rock group, a chamber orchestra, it's a lot of things. In a way it might be a new archetype for a band.

Is there inspiration in the Can story for other 'late developers'. That it doesn't matter how old you are you can still make a difference?
Well, I don't see myself as an inspiration - it's the people who get inspired must see me as an inspiration. There are witnesses - lots of groups - which have said they've been inspired a lot by Can. That's very satisfying because it proves what you did makes sense. The best for a musician is to make sense other musicians.

Julian Cope comments that he wrote his book KrautRock Sampler because of the prejudice and the glibness of the UK music press towards artists like Can, Neu! and others.
Well, actually there was no prejudice. We were very successful in Britain. We toured in the 70s, every year in Britain and played thirty or forty concerts so we were very successful and very influencing. Julian's book is wonderful but there was never a prejudice against us. There was a prejudice against a lot of other groups but from '72 on when we started touring England we had a lot of success, people like us and we had a very warm and enthusiastic reception. We also had enormous press, wonderful press. Every year they wrote the most wonderful things about us. No, I can't say there was any prejudice - maybe just because we were so different than the English groups. What the English didn't like that much was those German groups that tried to sound like English ones.

Did the fact that you had English speaking vocalists (Malcolm Mooney, Damo Suzuki) make the crossover to the English-speaking world a lot easier?
Maybe. We never had a German speaking singer. Our first singer was a black American (Mooney) and our second one was Japanese (Suzuki) who invented a kind of Dada text lyrics you can't understand anyway. They both played with word associations rather than straight storytelling but Damo, especially, has his own kind of strange personal Dada language. We always pointed out that the singer's voice was used as another instrument and not to tell you a story and get a message to the people via lyrics. This we never had, in this sense we were very now, like contemporary. We were an instrumental group in a way so there was no language barrier at all.

Only if you didn't understand Dada.
Well, everybody doesn't and everybody does.

I suppose from that point of view Can always had a sense of the exotic - even to German fans having Afro-American and Japanese singers.
Yes, for Germans we were even more exotic than for the English. But, I think, for Germans we were alien. Or to say it less strong we were as strange for Germans as we were for the English. Sometimes I had the feeling that Germans thought the only authentic pop music is English. When we started to do something totally different they thought that we couldn't play it. So we were much stranger, much more alien in Germany than we were in England because in England they realised that we didn't just want to imitate English or American music and try to play as if we were born in Liverpool or if we were born in Nashville. We played our music with all the consciousness and all the memory and all the knowledge that we were born in a country like Germany where the whole cultural development had been cut with the Nazi time and the whole tradition had been destroyed, like the towns, culture was destroyed and you had to start with something totally different. We did not try to hide that. We didn't imitate the English and say, 'oh, shit, we are wonderfully hip and pop'. We weren't. We were German where there was no pop tradition. No jazz tradition. No tradition which led to something like pop music because the last one was Beggar's Opera from Kurt Weill or something. And then they were all killed or emigrated. So, no tradition. So we had to start from somewhere else so our music was maybe the first German music which truly referred to our situation - born in a field of ruins. That sounds very serious and not at all rock 'n' roll and I mean it to be. Nevertheless, it turned out that the real contemporary music that we did had a very strong rock 'n' roll element. And it turned out to be a rock band.

How do you feel that Can's sense of humour comes through in the music?
Yes, it does. Everyone in the group has that and we found it very, very necessary with the mixture like what we did - with all these elements of contemporary art, jazz and rock 'n' roll and our German background - if this becomes too serious, it's awful. So it needs a whole lot of irony to make it work. They say that we were one of the first to do all this ethnic stuff in our music but if you don't do it with any irony it's a lie. Again, we are not born in the jungle of Borneo and we are not born somewhere in Asia or in Africa. We are German. And we try to make clear that using ethnic music we are not bringing it home like a tourist. We just make clear that we use it but with a distance and the irony because it's irreproachable - we don't lie, we don't steal. We just use it with a great respect and the respect means to respect the distance you have to it.

If someone had never listened to Can where would you suggest they start?
I would say either Tago Mago or Ege Bamyasior Monster Movie. I would suggest one of the first three or four records. And Future Days too because that did very well for us.

So, if I was to put on Tago Mago's 'Augmn', preferably in a very dark room, to a first time listener how do you think they'd react?
I don't know. I met a Canadian guy who totally freaked out - it was the first piece he heard and ever since he thinks it was the greatest music ever and it influenced his whole life as a musician. (laughs) So it might not be the wrongest thing. Maybe there's someone who turns it on and says 'oh, shit' and puts it away. We did so many different things just because we sometimes are in the field of new experimental electronic music doesn't mean we can't do a rock song or a more jazzy one. Normally you hear one piece of the group and the rest of the album sounds more or less the same and that's not the case with Can. You can't start a Can album and think the rest of it will be like this - it's not. I mean if someone starts with 'Peking O' (off Tago Mago) and think that's the style of the group - (laughs) sorry for him.

Do you call your music Kraut Rock? What does that label mean to you?
I don't call it Kraut Rock - that's an invention of English journalists. I live with it - I don't care. I don't feel it means anything. It just means as much as Brit-Rock. It means its rock coming from Germany and already the difficulties with Can start. We're not just a rock band - we are more than that. Also we've always had one member in the group who's not German.

People like Brian Eno and Julian Cope have been tireless supporters - championing the band in the English-speaking world. Does the admiration go both ways - are you a fan of Julian's music?
Yeah, I quite like him, yeah. And Eno, of course. I respect him a lot. I mean I know him very well. He's a very important figure in music. Again, he is somebody that you can't label. He's ambient but he's so much more than that. He's created so many different things. Any label you put on him would be wrong. Two or three years ago I listened to a concert at the Sonar festival in Barcelona which is very big European festival for electronic music, especially, and Sonic Youth played. They've always said that we influenced them - they re-mixed one of our tracks ('Spoon') on the Sacrilege album and we respect each other very, very much. Anyway, they played this concert and it was stunningly beautiful but what they played in the first half was John Cage pieces which is the most new music. So that's what I mean with labels. Sonic Youth playing Cage - you can not say anymore that it's a rock group. They are just musicians, they are a group.

What do you feel is the biggest influence that Can has had on contemporary music?
That's very hard to say because, actually, this is a question for musicians and musicologists because you, yourself, never know it exactly. But, I think the most important thing that Can did was bring together in a very, very personal way all the aspects of 20th Century music - jazz, rock, pop and classical European aspect. To melt these three, basic new musics into one thing. It's interesting now that the other label that we get - 20 years after the fact - is post-modern. Post modern before post modern was invented.

The official line is that Can will never split up and never re-form … where does that conundrum leave us?
Which is totally right except we lost Michael Karoli and that's like splitting up. After he left the world everything is different. But it's also true that we refuse nostalgic re-unions because people would expect us to play like we played thirty years ago and I find that utterly ridiculous, disgusting even. So we've done the Can Solo projects which you can find on the audio cd in the DVD set. We did an evening when all four of us played one after the other in one concert. We performed together without playing together.

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©2004 Christopher Hollow