Krautrock # 2

Hi everybody! The technical break lasted longer than expected, but at least my PC works much faster now and I haven't lost any of the files in my archive.
I like to come back to this blog with two of my favourite videos, from the musical scene that maybe is most fascinating to me. Here we have a couple of amazing german bands from the german TV program we've all learned to love: The Beat Club.
The Can well represents the meeting of pop music with the contemporary avant-garde. At the end of the sixties two Stockhausen's students, Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, realized that the rock scene offered the only chance to create something really innovative in music. So they joined a young rock guitar player, the Czukay's student Michael Caroli, a talented jazz drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, and the wild american singer Malcolm Mooney, soon replaced excellently by the japanese busker Damo Suzuki. Taking inspiration from the Velvet Underground, acid rock, funky and ethnic music...and much more, they created an unique style, sophisticated and raw at the same time, so innovative to anticipate somehow the most creative side of new wave. The song Paperhouse is the opening track of their double album Tago Mago, considered by many as their masterpiece.
Kraftwerk appeared at the Beat Club with a very particular line up. As Julian Cope tells in his essential book Krautrocksampler (which has finally been translated into italian too!) this perfomance could have been the death of Kraftwerk, but it wasn't, fortunately. In fact this clip documents the birth of a new memorable band: Neu!
In the summer of '71 the two Kraftwerk's former members Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider were joined by another couple of musicians from Dusseldorf, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, right before this appearance. They gave a totally new direction to the sound...Hutter became so nervous about it that he left the band to perform as a trio. This is the reason why Truckstop Gondolero is an anticipation of the typical sound of Neu!, the band that Rother and Dinger formed a few time later. The "motorik beat" of this long and mesmerizing track easily reminds of some of the best Neu!'s songs, like Hallogallo, on their first self-titled LP.
Kraftwerk soon reformed as a duet too for their album Ralf & Florian, that continued on the path that lead them to become the most influencial electronic band ever.

Can - Paperhouse (1971)
Kraftwerk - Truckstop Gondolero (1971)

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Mirco