CAN - Tago Mago

Submitted by Megadan Nightengale (of Tomcat Combat)

Every decade has its band of art school kids turned musicians that were innovative and changed the way people thought of music. The 60's had The Velvet Underground, the 80's had Devo, and the 70's had CAN.

Some art school students spend their time behaving in a way they think artists should, they adopt certain eccentricities (you know, because artists are supposed to have them), they socialize with other artists like them, regaling each other in what projects they are working on, bands they are in. and they love talking about all of the interesting things going on in their super interesting unique artist life that will be made into a documentary someday, then finally people will understand them. They spend so much time talking about everything they are doing that they don't actually do that much.

CAN were'nt like that. CAN were the real fucking deal. Ahead of their time is an understatement, CAN were ahead of my time too. And yours.

It would be impossible to have a blog centered on neglected, underrated drummers and not have Jaki Liebezeit. It was almost impossible for me to pick what album should go on here. They are all amazing and important in their own way. Jaki was a human metronome, he could play the most complicated rhythms and never lose his place in time, and he could keep it steady for hours.

I forgot to mention that CAN recorded their albums in a different way than most bands at the time. They would record long improvisational pieces, sometimes lasting for hours, and then their bass player would find the best parts and edit them into a seamless chopped up song. So Liebezeit had to keep his tempo steady for extremely long periods of time, if not, then once the song gets edited down, the tempos would be all over the place and the song would be unuseable. This is something only highly skilled musicians could pull off, and CAN pulled it off constantly.

Tago Mago was the first record with their new vocalist, Damo Suzuki. Their old vocalist Malcolm Mooney suffered a nervous breakdown after their first record and was replaced. While Mooney's vocal improvisations were good, I feel that Suzuki mixes better with Liebezeit and they play off of each others intensity a lot. Songs like Mushroom and Halleluwah have a lot of give and take between the drums and vocals. It gives the record more momentum than the others.

CAN were also known for extremely long winded performances (some lasting between 4-6 hours). Even if Liebezeit wasn't a machine programmed to play drums, he should get credit for endurance (and withholding pee breaks for a seriously long time).

Audio/Video Evidence : Halleluhwah, Mushroom