(A RANDOM SAMPLING OF) CAN
Sometimes I say that my favorite band is Can, if people ask me who my favorite band is, and I feel like answering that impossible question. I also sometimes say they’re my favorite “classic rock” band, just edging out the Beatles, the Stones, and Neil Young. Either way, here I am, hanging out, just listening to “Irmin and the boys” on shuffle (that’s how magazines refer to classic rock bands, cf. “Mick and the boys”), vibing and taking notes for the third installment of this newish Blastitude series called “(A RANDOM SAMPLING OF)…”
Note one: Can’s music is a very heady music. They are unequivocally a jam band, but one of the best jam bands that have ever existed, and as a jam band more in the tradition of James Brown’s J.B.’s, or Miles Davis’s electric period, than they are the Grateful Dead. And yet they do still remind me a lot of the Grateful Dead, particularly the way Irmin Schmidt’s keyboard lines waft their way through extended and oft-delicate groove-jamming. They’re the only two traditional rock lineups I can think of that consistently get those ethereal featherweight textures. But yes, it’s music that makes you think, especially when you’re already thinking of ideas like “communism, anarchism, nihilism,” which is what drummer Jaki Liebezeit once said in an interview when the band was asked what the name Can meant. It would seem he might’ve made up his answer on the spot. (I think original vocalist Malcolm Mooney being the one who named the group is more accurate, as told by Mooney to interviewer Ron Garmon in the Spring 2016 issue of L.A. Record: “The story goes you named the group.” “I named it Can because I can do it! I’m in Cologne and the band is starting to play every day. I can stand at this mic and I can make up lyrics—I can do this.”)
And speaking of good statements in Can interviews, there’s one that guitarist Michael Karoli makes in Can: The Documentary (1999, d. Rudi Dolezal, Hannes Rossacher) that I think about all the time, and sprinkle throughout articles I write, in part for its universal post-Cageian wisdom and applicability, but also just for safekeeping, so I know I can pull the quote up later: “The music was good as soon as every single sound, or noise — a hooting car for example — was fully integrated into the music, automatically. Then, we knew that we were playing well. If noise was disturbing, then we knew that it was the music that was wrong, and not the noise. I think this is important." On that note, let’s dive in:
“Thief” from Delay 1968 (Spoon, 1981) Random sampling aside, it is appropriate to start with a track from what would’ve/should’ve/could’ve been their first album, and featuring their original vocalist Malcolm Mooney. Just imagine if this album had been released in 1969 with some super-vibey cover and/or title (coulda been the self-titled debut they never had) instead of this (albeit fine) 1980s title and cover design. And imagine Monster Movie as a second-album follow-up, damn. Oh wait, breaking news: the Delay 1968 sessions were intended as a debut album, and they even had a title for it which was Prepared to Meet Thy Pnoom. No record labels were interested, and maybe I’m glad about that, after all. Delay 1968 might be a better title and Monster Movie a better debut. But we’re really here to talk about “Thief,” and Malcolm Mooney’s lead vocal performance therein. His approach of ‘voice constantly fully breaking’ may seem like a put-on — I mean, it is — but the raw emotion bleeds through anyway. Kinda like how the Melvins make fun of heavy metal while being heavier than heavy metal. It’s also another example of Malcolm’s intense ability to commit to the bit. (See “Waiting for the Streetcar” on The Lost Tapes, and, to troubling extremes, the unrecorded and possibly apocryphal “upstairs/downstairs” bit that marked his departure from the group.) I’ve also always loved the way Mooney’s “Why must I be the thief?” riffs on Dylan’s “Why must I always be the thief?” from “Tears of Rage.” As best as I can tell from Rob Young’s essential Can bio All Gates Open, which I’ll be referring to frequently, “Thief” was recorded in the summer of 1969 during a band residency in Zurich, and the first official release of “Tears of Rage” had been a year earlier on the massively influential Music from Big Pink.
“Sing Swan Song” from Ege Bamyasi (United Artists, 1972). I remember Thurston Moore raving about this album in an interview once upon a time, specifically referring to this track and how magical it was to hear untreated water sounds used interstitially on a rock record (I think he had picked up Ege Bamyasi as a teenager in a cheapo 1970s cut-out bin). That simple water sound is magical indeed, as is this whole song with all its mysteries. Is Damo singing something about “she” being in a “birthday suit”? Are those guitars or violins wailing in the background, or both? Can we pause and give a shout-out to the light and ethereal keyboard hooks Irmin Schmidt is dropping and dripping throughout? And is that a vibraslap? And wait, who in god’s name is singing the even more ethereal (female?) background vocals on the second verse? Is it the same person doing the distant “aaaaahh”s at the very end? Because that person is also magical. Is it even Damo?
“Spoon” from The Singles (Spoon/Mute, 2017). Can’s biggest hit (forget “I Want More” for a sec), their through-line, their placeholder, their unofficial theme song, their lifeboat. Three minutes and four seconds. (“Spoon” was #6 on the German charts, definitely their biggest hit in Germany, and “I Want More” was #26 on the UK charts, so you’d have to do some internationally-adjusted economic cross-metrics to figure out which was technically the biggest hit.)
“Stuttgart ‘75 Eins - Live” from Live in Stuttgart 1975 (Spoon/Mute, 2021). An improvisational jam with the band in full J.B.’s lock-groove monster-funk mode, hitting one really nice spot in particular right after the six-minute mark that includes some funky water-drum approximation from what I think are Irmin Schmidt’s keyboards, another example of his unassuming musical brilliance. His talent for deceptively adept playing that is precisely and subtlely interwoven within a multi-voiced musical ensemble reaches almost Bob Weir levels of inscrutable excellence (if I may invoke the Grateful Dead once again). This live recording is of the quartet period, the time after vocalist Damo Suzuki left the band in 1973 and before they were joined by bassist Rosko Gee in 1976, with just Schmidt on keyboards, Karoli on guitar, Holger Czukay on bass, and Liebezeit on drums.
“Spoon” from Tago Mago (40th Anniversary Edition (Spoon/Mute/The Grey Area, 2011). Just hearing the first 30 seconds of this monster 30-minute live version of “Spoon” on headphones immediately conjures visions in my head of Damo Suzuki dancing in an extremely tight open-chest red-velvet jumpsuit next to besuited jugglers and butlers. If it doesn’t for you too, well then you’re just not a true Can fan. (Just kidding, you can still be a true Can fan!) What I’m referring to, of course, is the source of this audio: the legendary Free Concert film capturing a rather anarchic 1972 Can concert at the Sporthalle of Cologne, as excerpted in the essential Can: the Documentary (1999, d. Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher), and now available in full on YouTube.
“Cascade Waltz” from Flow Motion (Virgin, 1976). Worlds go here. I meant to type placeholder text that said “words go here,” but mistakenly typed “worlds go here” instead, and left it in because it’s a true statement describing basically all Can music and all great music and for that matter all great art. But it’s a pretty heavy statement to consider in a capsule review of “Cascade Waltz,” which is a relative trifle in the Can catalog, and one which original Inner Space devotees might deride as a too-perfect example of Can’s (d)evolution from the raw early 2-track tape machine years to a more decadent globe-trotting touristic 16-track tape machine vibe. That Can would even play a waltz, let alone spell it out in the title, on anything other than a one-minute Ethnic Forgery Series trifle, could only occur post-Landed. All that said, I’ve learned to love the starting-with-Landed run of Can albums in their own way. Not as much as the pre-Landed run, but each one of these later albums is worthwhile, with something legitimate and beautiful about their increasingly international melting-pot sound. Is it cultural tourism? Yes. Is it still authentic music? Yes. “Cascade Waltz” is also notable for having another vampire-chic Michael Karoli lead vocal. Talk about decadence! His mid-period vocals always conjure up this Venn-diagram sweet spot between 1970s foreign film and 1970s proto-punk music.
“Dizzy Dizzy” live on Musik Extra in 1977 (YouTube). Speaking of Can: the Documentary, when I caught a very pre-YouTube public screening of it at the 1999 South by Southwest festival, the large audience broke into applause after this “Dizzy Dizzy” footage was featured. I even had a hand-held cassette recorder on me, ostensibly to capture the my own band’s soundcheck jams and other tour shenanigans, but handy at the cinema to record a bunch of the Can doc’s audio from my seat for later reference, including this “Dizzy Dizzy.” Imagine a world with no YouTube! You just weren’t going to find nuggets like this otherwise. Well, now it’s 2024, and anytime you want you can hit up your modem and check out short-haired Jaki Leibezeit, open-shirt chest-haired Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt wearing what is easily the world’s sickest polyester jacket (shout out to Jack Kirby), and splendidly behatted Rosko Gee rocking on bass so that Holger Czukay can rip electronics and shortwave radio (absolutely love what Holger’s doing around 3:15-3:30). All Gates Open says of this performance: “Around the same time [late April 1977] they recorded a live set for WDR television’s Musik Extra in front of a respectfully seated audience.” And one more shoutout, this time to YouTube commenter @moreorless87 who over a decaded ago riffed humorously on this “respectfully seated” aspect, what we might call “the WDR effect”: “CAN achieve the impossible, getting a 70's German student to tap his foot slightly to music, surely a sign this is the funkiest thing known to man.”
“Halleluwah” by Halleluwah Orbus 2 (aka The Orb) from Sacrilege (Mute, 1997). Some may not rate Sacrilege as a true Can album, and therefore not eligible for this random sampling, but it was released under Can’s name after all, and certainly with their blessing. And, it’s really cool to hear this remix of “Halleluwah” by no less than The Orb themselves in the context of the random shuffle, coming on in the midst of a bunch of classic/organic Can jams. It really sounds just as organic, the way the electronics fold right into the proceedings, not unlike what we just saw with Rosko Gee taking over on bass so Holger could start jamming live electronics twenty years earlier in 1976.
“Cascade Waltz” from Can Live Music (Live 1971-1977) (Spoon/Mute, 1999). Getting shuffle paranoia again, with Shitify playing the studio version of one track (“Spoon”) and then almost immediately a live version of that same track, and then just a few songs later repeating the same pattern with a different track (“Cascade Waltz”). Is this sampling truly random?! Nonetheless, it is cool to hear how Can had certain themes/grooves/riffs/homebases to land on with their jamming, like “Spoon” or “Dizzy Dizzy” or this one. Even if the studio version had vocals/hooks/melodies, the live version often would not, as we’re seeing in all three of these examples. When you’re doing all of that psychonautical traveling you need home bases to land on, gravitational fields to get pulled into, places where refueling and reintegration can occur. Just look at the Grateful Dead and all the work “Playing in the Band” did for them in that regard. (Many similarities between the Dead and Can, and the work is really quite contemporaneous too, and yes Can is so much better and more palatable in so many ways, but one of the great things about the Dead is that you just can’t rank them objectively on any metric, because they’re both great and terrible at so many things, and it all needs a much longer and different essay than this one.)
“Below This Level (Patient’s Song)” from Rite Time (Mercury, 1989). Speaking of the Can documentary where I first saw the Damo red jumpsuit “Spoon” footage and “Dizzy Dizzy” with Rosko Gee, surely everyone else who watched it, especially those like me who hadn’t actually heard the Rite Time reunion LP before, immediately fell in love/hate with this goofy song. It was such a perfect return of Malcolm Mooney’s troll persona, and he also seemed quite healthy (not to mention nattily dressed) in the film’s reunion footage, so . . . good (goofy) vibes.
“Doko E (Aug. 73)” from Unlimited Edition (Harvest, 1976). Cool track in that it’s one of the few Can tracks released as a single that wasn’t also easily available as an album track. Kinda throwaway, but throwaway from peak Damo period, so you get the band doing a light J.B.’s shuffle, Jaki always a master extrapolater within tight constrictions, this time making his drum kit sound like hand drums, and Damo just going off with even more than his usual legendary Japenglish scat-singing.
“TV Spot (Apr 71)” from Unlimited Edition (Harvest, 1976). Funny, this is another track that I bootlegged from that same 1999 screening of Can: the Documentary, originally recorded for a TV spot on WDR, or part of some footage intended for some sort of TV documentary. I believe the footage was never aired, but the audio did make its way onto the 1974 Limited Edition LP and its expanded Unlimited Edition 2LP reissue from 1976. After the weird/scary Teiji Ito-esque opening fanfare it settles into a killer hand-drum and acoustic guitar groove within which, thanks to that Inner Space 2-track overdub magic, Damo call-and-responses with himself in a very charming way (we love you too, Damo).
“Half Past One” from Landed (Virgin, 1975). See, how can you not love post-Landed Can? I can understand how this might get written off on the surface with another campy/macabre Michael Karoli lead vocal, but what about the sheer lock-in of Jaki’s drum part, and how it allows the intense violin part and endless keyboard overdubs to not have to drive the song, but work as incredibly ornate decoration?
“Graublau” from The Lost Tapes (2012, Spoon/Mute). Good that this came up on shuffle because it’s an essential document of the band’s early collective jam style, and how they were already strategizing ways to take it further, catching their evolution from the brittle heavy minimalism of the Delay 1968 jams and into the incredibly assured and faster “Mother Sky” template. The other big evolution is that we’re already starting to hear the shortwave radio and electronics vibe that came in more explicitly when Holger moved off bass guitar in 1976. However, if I’m reading All Gates Open correctly, these sounds came from Irmin Schmidt making tape loops out of shortwave radio transmissions; if so, Holger was certainly no slouch in that department either. “Graublau” means “grey-blue,” and it’s essentially a rough-edit reference comp of the various musical themes they created from January to April of 1970 for the soundtrack to the German film Ein grosser graublauer Vogel (A Big Grey-Blue Bird).
“EFS No. 99 ‘Can Can’” from Can (Harvest/EMI Electrola, 1978). This is just terrible. Might be my single least favorite Can track. I’m already kinda not a fan of their Ethnic Forgery Series in general. I appreciate the transparency, that they’re admitting their colonial privilege and cultural tourism, etcetera . . . but they could also just keep on quietly incorporating international influence into their jams. This version of Jacques Offenbach’s “Infernal Galop,” from the 1858 opera Orpheus in the Underworld and popularly known as the theme for the “Cancan” dance craze, on the other hand, is just gross. This is like Mannheim Steamroller meets Saturday morning cartoons. When people hate on post-Landed 16-track era Can, maybe it’s just because they heard this song once. And yet, Rob Young in All Gates Open makes it sound genius: “With rasping electronic tones and a ska clatter, Can play the piece as good-time mayhem with an amphetamine aftertaste, a last Totentanz before the gravediggers move in.”
“Turtles Have Short Legs” from The Singles (Spoon/Mute, 2017). Interesting randomized follow-up to the “Can Can,” a Damo-era improv jam that made it out on 45 only as a 1971 single with a serious truncation of Tago Mago’s “Halleluwah” on the B-side. It has more of that German bierhalle cheekiness with Irmin’s piano part, but Jaki’s drums, Czukay’s bass, and Karoli’s funk guitar are classic tuff-as-nails Can and take over the proceedings. Damo’s vocal sits in the middle, one of the poppiest he ever did, and this is a pretty fun song overall.
“Moonshake” by Can from Future Days (United Artists, 1973). Speaking of “singles,” this is another one of the perfect ones. Three minutes and three seconds of hooky groovy goodness, a brief stop at the nightclub during the extended inner-space coral-reef-hugging submersible journey that is Future Days. But lest things get too ‘normal,’ there’s still room for that crazy analog electronics solo starting around the 1:06 mark, Schmidt or Czukay basically inventing R2D2’s android vocabulary, four years before Star Wars (1977, d. George Lucas). There also seems to be an R&B saxophone grooving along in there, and when you listen on headphones to the ride-out, here come more of those incredible distant falsetto background vocals, just like on “Sing Swan Song” above, doubling Damo’s lead vocals on the “let me free no more” fade-out chant.
“…And More” from Flow Motion (Virgin, 1976). This interlude callback to album-opening hit single “I Want More” ended side two of the Flow Motion album and is actually a monster jam, the way it replaces the bass line with just a big fat single low E dropped every four bars, allowing Liebezeit’s drums and hand percussion and Karoli’s acid-J.B’s guitar to run the show.
“Colchester Finale” from Can Live Music (Live 1971-1977) (Spoon/Mute, 1999). Seems like a good of a place as any to bring this random sampling to a close, a 37-minute monster-jam with “Finale” in the title. This was part of Can’s first tour outside of Germany, in the spring of 1972, when they played shows in England that leaned heavily on “university dates” like this one at the University of Essex (Colchester). Apparently this is how they closed the show, a lo-fi recording that exemplifies the band’s ability to improvise heavy unrelenting scorched-earth groovescapes that take no prisoners, which is what happens here for over 20 minutes straight until they land on a loose rendition of “Halleluwah.” And what’s more (and more) (and more) (and more) (and more), if I’m reading All Gates Open correctly, this performance occurred right after a comedy set by none other than Cheech & Chong. Communism anarchism nihilism forever!
I was one of those people who got Can s/t and hated Can Can so I basically blew off post Damo era, but one time I was hanging with Owen from Horse Lords and he was like "what are you talking about, that song is genius" and I listened again with fresh ears and came around on it!