CAN
In 1969, the mighty Krautrockers came together and improvised their startling debut album, Monster Movie. In an Eyewitness report, they reflect on how the impossible was achieved.
Irmin Schmidt: “I was in my late twenties and I had conducted at recitals, won prizes, and I am pretty sure I would have gone on to be a successful conductor. To give up a conductor’s career and found a group with crazy people was typical for ’68. Ireally wanted some kind of powerful rock or jazz grooves, myself [doing] all the classical up to contemporary, with a rock guitarist who maybe can only play four chords but who is just as inventive. I asked [former fellow Stockhausen pupil] Holger because he was crazy enough to join in with the idea, he was a very passionate musician and he did have a great deal of technical knowledge. Holger asked me if he could bring a very talented guitar player [Michael Karoli], who had been his pupil, and would love to join us if his parents didn’t mind, because he was just starting to study law. David Johnson [flute] was also a student of Stockhausen and lived in my place, he was really into electronic music. I said to Jaki [Liebezeit, drums], Well, I would love to have someone able to play polyrhythms like Max Roach, with the elegance of Elvin Jones, having the power of Art Blakey. He said, ‘Yeah I’ll look,’ but he ended up playing himself. We decided to meet the very first time without instruments, and there was an immediate sympathy. Also I had this friend who owned this castle [Schloss Nörvenich], whom I knew because I was very much in the art scene – he said, ‘You can come and play here.’ It had such an incredible reverb, the sound you hear on the very early Can recordings, Little Star Of Bethlehem for example, are in fact the hallway of this castle. So even if I sort of founded the group, the others founded it too – Can is what happened to us. The first time we played, well, it wasn’t good at all, it was total chaos. We knew we would have to go through a period starting from scratch. So violence happened. Jaki starting playing a groove, and Michael started playing some real rock guitar over it and I was lost, I didn’t know what I had to play. So there was a lot of fighting and, well, giving birth is quite a dirty thing, there is lots of blood and screaming. We gave birth to a new idea of music for us all, so it was full of trauma, until it became music. When Malcolm [Mooney, New York artist] showed up [via Schmidt’s wife Hildegard, who met him in Paris], it gave a sort of ignition to the rock side of the sound with his incredible rhythmic singing, linked with Jaki. The two of them became a sort of rhythm group. The very first pieces we considered to be us, you can hear them on the Delay 1968 record [1981 album recorded around the time of Monster Movie]. Father Cannot Yell was the very first piece where we all decided, that’s where we want to go. It has a fantastic groove, it has its very own sound world and it has this Holger style of bass playing which you would never hear from any other bass player, that comes from a classical education, like a chromatic left hand on the piano. It was right at the time when Malcolm joined – he came into the studio when we were playing this piece and he joined in and it became Father Cannot Yell.”
Holger Czukay: “When we recorded Father Cannot Yell we didn’t have enough microphones. To the left side was a guitar speaker, on the right side was the organ speaker, all together recorded through an ordinary ambient microwas phone. I editing it afterwards, and I said, Holger, would you have ever expected that you would play something like that? I was surprised by myself, I couldn’t believe it. First of all I only was playing bass because I wanted to hide myself, because my opinion was, Nobody is listening to bass! I thought we make a group like Stockhausen. And then Malcolm Mooney came in and we think, Why not Stockhausen with a hell of a drive? I think Monster Movie, the very beginning, was one of the best periods for Can. You are young only once, when you start you follow your nose. That’s what we did.”