Krautrock, Punk Rock, and the Weight of History

Thoughts on a new book and two old ones

Three books I read recently

Leo Records update! The first batch of Leo Records titles are now available on Bandcamp. I’ve decided to write a little bit about one that I think is particularly worthy of your attention.

Selected Works 1983-1986 is a two-disc set by pianist Marilyn Crispell, originally released on the Leo sub-label Golden Years Of New Jazz. It compiles three of her early albums: 1983’s solo disc Rhythms Hung in Undrawn Sky; the 1985 duo release with drummer Doug James, And Your Ivory Voice Sings; and Quartet Improvisations — Paris 1986, originally released in 1987. Crispell, who is being honored as an NEA Jazz Master in 2025, was strongly influenced by Cecil Taylor, and the piece “And Your Ivory Voice Sings”, linked above, is dedicated to him, but she absolutely has her own style, which is vivid and present across this roughly two-hour set. Check it out.

---

Book update! This past week, the Guelph Jazz Festival was held in Canada. Along with the musical performances, the organization put together the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, a three-day program of papers and a live onstage interview between saxophonist/composer Darius Jones and critic Harmony Holiday. I was invited to present a paper — “Technique Is Weapon To Do Whatever Must Be Done: Cecil Taylor’s Use Of Poetry As Liner Notes,” but I couldn’t travel to the event in person, so I made a video version instead. And now that the event is over, you can watch it below.

Note: I have been told that In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor has already sold more than half of its initial print run, so you should grab a copy if you’re interested. It’s available from Amazon and directly from the publisher.

---

Burning Ambulance Music update! We’ve got two new releases coming out October 4.

Polarity 3 is the latest disc by saxophonist Ivo Perelman and trumpeter Nate Wooley; like their previous efforts, it’s a collection of intimate and beautiful duo pieces.

Irrational Thinking of the Subject, by Ukrainian artist Sergey Senchuk, aka Tungu, is a set of 15 collaborations with avant-gardists and improvisers from around the globe, adding up to a uniquely fascinating work of unclassifiable electroacoustic music.

All three Polarity CDs are available for a special price of just $35 plus shipping. And all of our previous releases are name-your-price for the digital versions, though CDs are still available and recommended (they all come in beautiful gatefold mini-LP sleeves). Buy now!

I bought Christoph Dallach’s Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock despite not being a particularly obsessive fan of the music filed under that heading. I love Tangerine Dream’s early ’70s albums, especially 1972’s Zeit, and Can’s albums with vocalist Damo Suzuki (Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days), and Klaus Schulze’s 1970s work. I like Kraftwerk. I like the first Neu! album. I know I’ve heard Amon Düül II’s Yeti, and have listened to a surprising number of Faust albums, though the only ones I really like are Outside the Dream Syndicate, their collaboration with violinist Tony Conrad, and 1994’s Rien, which some say was as much a Jim O’Rourke creation as a Faust album. (I saw Faust live sometime in the late ’90s. I don’t remember anything about the music, only that one of the members set off a road flare, filling the entire club with smoke as thick as dryer lint.) But I wouldn’t call myself well versed in Krautrock. (Do Kraftwerk even count, honestly?)

Still, the book proved to be very interesting. And that’s at least in part because it seemed to align with something I think too many music writers ignore, namely the connections between seemingly discrete events and actors in a particular cultural environment at a given time. A “scene” typically exists not just in conversation with itself, but with all the other “scenes” bubbling up at the same time. One of the best books to really grapple with this is Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, which explores the music being made in NYC between 1973 and 1977 in as much detail as possible, from salsa and hip-hop uptown to punk rock, minimalist composition, and loft jazz downtown. It’s panoramic and kaleidoscopic at once, and it’ll upend almost any preconception you might have had about that decade and that artistic milieu.

Neu Klang does something similar, perhaps even larger, by placing Krautrock (a term created by a Virgin Records marketing executive and quickly picked up by journalists) into the context of postwar German society. The majority of the musicians interviewed were children in the 1950s, and they talk about growing up in a country that…well, as Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit (born in 1938) puts it, “Most of the teachers in my schooldays had a Nazi past…By 1968 the war was only twenty years ago, and plenty of Third Reich mud had stuck. What we did then with Can had a lot to do with clearing away that past.”

Beyond the issue of de-Nazification, which seems to have been half-hearted at best, the overwhelming sense the reader gets is of extreme poverty. Peter Baumann, an early member of Tangerine Dream, recalls, “My first memories of Berlin start around ten years after the war. What’s stuck with me is that there wasn’t any fruit. When things were going well, my parents would get us an orange once a week, which we shared between the four of us.”

When the discussion moves to music, Dallach’s approach shows that “Krautrock” was in fact part of a broad movement in late ’60s German culture that encompassed all the arts, as well as left-wing politics, sexual experimentation, and more. He doesn’t just interview the members of notable bands like Can, Faust, Amon Düül II and others; he also talks to free jazz players Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Peter Brötzmann, who knew the rock artists and collaborated with them (Jaki Liebezeit was a free jazz player before joining Can) and were also part of the larger scene. Musicians talk about attending demonstrations, and — more chillingly — encounters with members of early ’70s radical terrorist group the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Gang.

The book isn’t perfect by any means. It’s an oral history, so the only people quoted are those who were still alive when it was being written and those who would talk to the author (Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk are notably absent), and it presupposes a lot of knowledge on the reader’s part — the “Biographical Notes” section, in which everyone’s identity is explained and key recordings are listed, is at the very back of the book, rather than up front, which would have been much more helpful to me, anyway. Still, it’s very interesting, and I would recommend reading it alongside Rob Young’s All Gates Open: The Story of Can and Edgar Froese’s Tangerine Dream Force Majeure: The Autobiography, and maybe even Harald Kisiedu’s European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany 1950-1975. Get it from Amazon.

While I was reading Neu Klang, I was also re-reading Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming and Tony Judt’s Postwar, both of which turned out to be excellent companion pieces. Postwar is exactly what its title implies: a history of Europe from 1945 to roughly 2005 (when it was published). It’s detailed and comprehensive, covering almost every country, if not always equally, and its analysis of various issues — including the aforementioned de-Nazification of Germany, French contrarianism throughout the decades, all the ways the Soviet Union fucked up the economies of the various countries they took over, and British hubris — seem pretty clear-eyed to me, though it becomes clear as the book goes on that Judt is a small-c conservative, and he eventually reveals a somewhat distressing, if tempered, admiration for Margaret Thatcher. But he’s ready and willing to point out many of the things the UK fucked up, so the book never becomes a polemic. And if, like me, you don’t know very much about 20th century European history, this is an excellent starting point.

England’s Dreaming is the story of the Sex Pistols, and the British punk scene of 1976-78 generally. I have never liked the Sex Pistols’ music, and I find the book’s arguments for them as an artistic force unconvincing. But Savage is very good at untangling the complicated knot of personal and business relationships within and around the group, their creator/manager Malcolm McLaren, and his then-partner Vivienne Westwood. He also does a very good job of explaining the social, political, and particularly economic circumstances of late ’70s England, and the cultural myopia of the time. The UK was a small, poor island that believed itself to be — or at any rate insisted on portraying itself as — a grand empire.

This is something that comes up repeatedly in Postwar as well, and it’s kind of queasily fascinating to contemplate how much England has punched above its weight culturally while being just grindingly poor by almost any other measurement. Some of the statistics on English child poverty in Postwar are fucking grim. And when the Sex Pistols arrive in the US for an abortive tour that ultimately leads to their onstage breakup in San Francisco, Savage portrays them as what they were — provincial kids who’d barely been anywhere. It reminded me of the old joke, “A European thinks a hundred miles is a long distance; an American thinks a hundred years is a long time.”

But what really stuck out for me, re-reading England’s Dreaming, was how much McLaren’s “management” of the band kept them from being a real part of the scene with which they’re identified. Yes, they toured with some other punk bands here and there, but his idea to create media controversy around them actually isolated them, because in a country as conservative as England, they just got banned from venues up and down the country. Other groups were able to build organic fan bases and collaborate with peers; the Sex Pistols were frozen in place by tabloid headlines and moral panic and before they even broke up, they were already a symbol, not a band. Everyone else — the Clash, the Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Buzzcocks — were able to have relatively “normal” careers, some lasting decades, because the Sex Pistols took all the incoming cultural fire. They were doomed from the start.

There was no single, polarizing act like that within Krautrock, probably because the music was never marketed as explicit rebellion against stultifying German society, even if that was how the musicians themselves saw it. Its politics were subtle, even hidden; you have to listen carefully to realize how grim and stark some of Kraftwerk’s songs were, and they and other groups were more interested in musical invention — exploring new technology and new methods of music-making — than aligning themselves with the often violent radicalism of the early ’70s. They were mostly hippies, interested in cosmic transcendence and achieving bliss, and that’s why the best of their music holds up and even becomes more appealing as you get older, when moments of happiness and relaxation are harder to come by and more valuable than the tantrums of punk.

That’s it for now. See you next week!