| Back in the day, several hundred
years ago, long before the Skull Cave, the first show I did on RRR
was on 7 – 10 on a Wednesday night called From The Bunker.
I felt like I was hurling sonic grenades against the empire as I
unleashed an industrial psychedelic noise on the public airways.
I always favoured outsider bands like The Fall, Throbbing Gristle,
Pere Ubu, Chrome, Pop Group, 23 Skidoo, Captain Beefheart &
other bands whose sound seemed to occupy a self invented musical
universe, oblivious to whatever else was going on, least of all
airplay & chart success. This was long before the career category
of “ Alternative “ was even dreamt of. These guys did
it because they had to, no safety nets. The first special I ever
did was a Can retrospective with the help of fellow fan Robert Oertel
from PBS. Even before I crawled through the doors of RRR I already
owned a couple of thousand records & I realised then that I
owned just about more records by Can than just about any other band.
I wish I had taped it!
Even Can’s genesis was unusual, Holger Czukay ( bass ) &
Irmin Schmidt ( keyboards ) both studied under avant garde classical
composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Holger’s student Michael
Karoli ( guitar ) turned them onto Hendrix, Zappa & The Velvet
Underground, they recruited free jazz drummer Jaki Liebezeit &
Can was born in Germany in 1968. Most of them were already in their
30s, so a pop career was never on the cards, their freeform musical
pieces grew out of collective improvisation, they were learning
to play their chosen instruments at the same time as they were learning
to play together. It was music without frontiers or limits. As a
result they discovered a unique musical alchemy between them, a
desire to go beyond, to listen, as much as they played. Their first
singer Malcolm Mooney was a black singer who howled, screamed &
moaned and who helped make their debut album Monster Movie sound
like a more primal, more raw Velvet Underground.
After that they acquired a Japanese street busker
Damo Suzuki as their vocalist, whose improvised lyrics were delivered
in a delirium inspired series of whispers, screams & everything
in between. It was quite remarkable. They created 4 albums ( one
a double ) in 3 years that retain a timeless feel, a sound that
predated & predicted everyone from Brian Eno, PiL, The Orb,
Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Radiohead to Aphex Twin. Soundtracks, Tago
Mago, Ege Bamyasi, & Future Days stand as some of the most adventurous
abstracted & outside records ever made. After this moment of
musical immortality, Suzuki left & they continued to release
inconsistent but still interesting, occasionally inspired albums
that saw them experiment with lineups, but most interestingly courtesy
of Holger Czukay experiments with short wave radio & found sounds,
predating sampling & so called “World Music “ by
years, until their breakup in 1979. They’ve reformed briefly
since and although all of them continued solo, it was only the innovations
of Holger & Jaki’s early albums that continued the spirit
of the original band.
So it was with some surprise & curiosity that I acquired the
CAN DVD set just released to commemorate the 35th anniversary of
the band’s formation. The band never put their photo on the
front covers of their albums with good reason, they always looked
odd & not altogether photogenic, Holger looking like a grinning
Austrian older uncle, Irmin dark, thickset & vaguely sinister
while Jaki , Michael & Damo were obscured by hair. I’d
only seen a snippet of their TV appearance for their surprise latter
day UK hit “I Want More “, looking totally out of place
in front of an audience of young female pop- fans. It just looked
wrong! Equally their rare, slightly uncomfortable publicity shots
in places like NME. So it was with some trepidation that I slid
in the DVD.Was it going to erode rather enhance their mystique,
would they look like an embarrassing bunch of old hippies? Dagcity
here we come!
Well the double DVD is certainly comprehensive, assembling over
3 hours of documentary footage, a short Brian Eno film, gallery,
discography, history & biographies of the band & their collaborators
plus some new mixes of old tracks & 13 tracks of live &
studio solo recordings. Phew! But the real thrill for me was about
5 minutes into the footage of a free concert in front of 10,000
people from 1972, on a virtually bare stage with little or no light
effects, the band begin to play, and suddenly they lock into a groove
& metamorph into magicians rather than musicians, their crystalline
concentration & men on a mission
meditation combine into a trance out that had my pineal gland flexing
to the spectacle. It’s THAT good!
The other 2 docos are interesting insights into
their inter personal world, while the musical tracks are admittedly
ordinary compared to their peak output, but still better than most.
If you are a Can fan you owe it to yourself to at least see the
live footage once, while novices will no doubt marvel at one of
the best kept secrets of modern music then & now. Damo Suzuki
is out here for BDO & may be doing some other shows & here
is the perfect primer to prepare yourself for the experience.
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It’s hard to be an Iggy Pop fan, after all
his much touted Stooges reunion was the disappointment of the year,
I ‘ve found it hard to find even an airplay worthy track from
his last 3 or 4 albums, and it’s not the first time that the
record rot has set in. After his late 60s work with the Stooges
he virtually sat out sanity, sobriety & just about everything
else for most of the 70s before releasing Lust For Life & The
Idiot in 1977. It was somehow worth the wait.
But in the early 80s he followed that with a string
of absolute dogs, Party, Zombie BirdHouse & Soldier that surely
must have embarrassed even him. But no one could begrudge his surprise
brush with chart success or Rage royalty cheques with “The
Wild One”, but who could forgive him the execrable duet with
B52 Kate Pearson on “Candy “ ?
Iggy then hung out with Duff & Slash, made
a couple of discs with Steve Jones, the 2nd one so bad it actually
got a Best Heavy Disc Grammy nomination! Since then, aside from
a brief burst of the old fire with the “American Caesar “
album 10 years, it’s been miss after miss. His best track
in recent years was on Death in Vegas ‘ 1999 album The Contino
Sessions, the incredible “ aisha”. Is it that Iggy’s
occasional peaks are so high that they erase the many lows? Or is
it that for the past 30 years or so, regardless of record sales,
personal demons & self disintergration Iggy has kept on the
road, year after year? That he set the bar so high with his early
performances that he can never slow or tone down?
Shirt off, a rocking dervish surrendering to the
crowd, the band & himself, Iggy has really built his reputation
on his stage performance. Which makes it surprising that he has
only released 2 live albums, the most recent & excellent the
rough as guts TV Eye way back in 1978 with Bowie & Fred “Sonic
“ Smith of the MC 5 on guitar. Since then either to keep costs
down or keep the spotlight on him, Iggy has employed numerous young
anonymous band members who no doubt are in awe of him & work
cheap, leavened with the occasional session player or celebrity
guest.
So the newly released IGGY POP LIVE AT THE OLYMPIA
91 KISS MY BLOOD DVD is as good a slice of the man at one of his
peaks as any fan is going to get, excellently shot & featuring
a trio made up of 2 droogs that look like Iggy trawled them off
the Sunset Strip & Larry Mullins proving that his muscular drumming
style can kick even the Iggster’s ass. The man himself gives
an amazing 2 hour high energy performance, looking in peak physical
shape, his concentration & abandon stirring the audience &
the viewer with its intensity. The set list includes all the “hits”
from the Stooges to the 1990 Brick by Brick album plus some encore
covers of Louie Louie & Foxy Lady.
It is a shame that we’re unlikely to see
Iggy with a band of equals, the only problem being that he’s
done pretty much the same repertoire plus some new stuff that he
happens to be pushing at the time, with so many lineups that he’s
in danger of becoming his own covers band. But he’s put out
so much of himself for us, the least us fans can do is to keep the
faith.
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