 Some skeezix
from one of the local dailies was up here the other day to do a "human interest"
story on the phenomenon you're holding in your hands, and naturally our
beneficent publisher hauled me into his office to answer this fish's edition
of the perennial: "Where is rock going?" |
| "It's
being taken over by the Germans and the machines," I unhesitatingly answered.
And this I believe to my funky soul. Everybody has been hearing about "krautrock",
and the stupnagling success of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" is more than just
the latest evidence in support of the case for Teutonic raillery, more than
just a record, it is an indictment. An indictment of all those who would
resist the bloodless iron will and order of the ineluctable dawn of the
Machine Age. |
| Just
consider: They used to call Chuck Berry a "guitar mechanic". Why? Because
any idiot could play his lines. Which, as we have all known since the pre-history
of punk rock, is the very beauty of them. But think: if any idiot can play
them, why not eliminate such genetic mistakes altogether, punch "Johnny
B. Goode" into a computer printout and let the machines do it in total passive
acquiescence to the Cybernetic Inevitable? A quantum leap towards this noble
goal was accomplished with the advent of a crude sonic model-t called Alvin
Lee, who could not only reproduce Berry licks by the bushel, but play them
at 78 rpm as well. As is well known, it was the Germans who invented methamphetamine,
which of all accessible tools has brought human beings within the closest
twitch of machinehood, and without methamphetamine we would never had such
high plasma marks of the counter culture as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Lou
Reed and the Velvet Underground, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg's
"Howl!", Blue Cheer, Cream and Creem, as well as all of the fine performances
in Andy Warhol movies not inspired with heroin. So it can easily be seen
that it was in reality the Germans who were responsible for "Blonde On Blonde"
and "On The Road" as well; it just reincarnated in American archetypes ground
out by holloweyed jerkyfingered manikins locked into their typewriters and
guitars like rhinoceroses copulating. Of course, just as very few speed-freaks
will cop to their vice, so it took a while before due credit was rendered
to the factor of machinehood as a source of our finest cultural artefacts.
Nowadays, of course, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. People used
to complain about groups like The Monkees and The Archies like voters complained
about "political machines", and just recently a friend of mine recoiled
in revulsion at his first exposure to Kiss, whom he termed "everything that
has left me disgusted with rock 'n' roll nowadays - they're automatons!"
What he failed to suss was that sometimes automatons deliver the very finest
specimens of a mass-produced, disposable commodity like rock. |
| But
history will have its way, and it was only inevitable that groups like Blue
Oyster Cult would come along, singing in jive chic about dehumanization
while unconsciously fulfilling their own prophecy albeit muddled by performing
as nothing more than robots whose buttons were pushed by their producers.
By now the machines had clattered VU meter first out of the closet for good,
and we have most recently been treated to the spectacle of such fine harbingers
of the larger revolution to come as Magma's "Ork Alarm" ("The people are
made of indescribable matter which to the machines is what the machines
are to man...") and of course Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, a quick-buck
exploitation number assessed elsewhere in this issue. But there is more
to the Cybernetic Inevitable than this sort of methanasia. There are, in
the words of the poet, "machines of loving grace." There is, hovering clean
far from the burnt metal reek of exploded stars, the intricate balm of Kraftwerk. |
| Perhaps
you are wondering how I can connect the amped-up hysteria of compulsive
pathogens such as Bruce, Dylan and Reed with the clean, cool lines of Kraftwerk.
This is simple. The Germans invented "speed" for the Americans (and the
English leave us not forget Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake & Palmer) to
destroy themselves with, thus leaving the world of pop music open for ultimate
conquest. A friend once asked me how I could bear to listen to Love Sculpture's
version of "Sabre Dance" knowing that the producers had sped up the tap,;
I replied: "Anything a hand can do a machine can do better". An addendum
would seem to be that anything a hand can do nervously, a machine can do
effortlessly. When was the last time you heard a German band go galloping
off at 965 mph hot on the heels of oblivion?" No, they realize that the
ultimate power is exercised calmly, whether it's Can with their endless
rotary connections, Tangerine Dream plumbing the sargassan depths, or Kraftwerk
sailing airlocked down the Autobahn. |
| In
the beginning there was feedback: the machines speaking on their own, answering
their supposed masters with shrieks of misalliance. Gradually the humans
learned to control the feedback, or thought they did, and the next step
was the introduction of more highly refined forms of distortion and artificial
sound, in the form of the synthesizer, which the human beings sought also
to control. In the music of Kraftwerk, and bands like them present and to
come, we see at last the fitting culmination of this revolution, as the
machines not merely overpower and play the human beings but absorb them,
until the scientist and his technology, having developed a higher consciousness
of its own, are one and the same. |
| Kraftwerk,
whose name means "power plant," have a word for this ecstatic congress:
Menschmaschine, which translates as "man-machine." I am conversing with
Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, co-leaders of Kraftwerk, which they
insist is not a band but a you-guessed-it. We have just returned to their
hotel from a concert, where Kraftwerk executed their Top Ten hit, "Autobahn"
as well as other galactic standards such as "Kometenmelodie" (Comet Melody),
"Mitternacht" (Midnight), "Morgenspaziergang" (Morning Walk - complete with
chirping birds on tape), and the perfect synthesized imitation of a choo-choo
train which must certainly be the programmatic follow-up to "Autobahn,"
to a small but rapt audience mesmerized unto somnolence. |
| Now
the tapes have stopped rolling and the computers have been packed up until
the next gig, and the Kraftwerk's two percussionists, Wolfgang Flür
and Karl Bartos, who play wired pads about the size of Ouija boards instead
of standard acoustic drums, have been dispatched to their respective rooms,
barred from the interview because their english is not so hot. (I have heard
of members of bands playing on the same bills as Kraftwerk approaching these
gentlemen with the words "So ya liked blowin' all our roadies...." The Germans
smiled and clapped them on the shoulders: "Ja, ja..."). Now Ralf and Florian
are facing me, very sober in their black suits, narrow ties and close-cropped
hair, quietly explaining behavior modification through technology. |
| "I
think the synthesizer is very responsive to a person",
says Ralf, whose boyish visage is somewhat less severe than that of Florian,
who looks, as a friend put it, "like he could build
a computer or push a button and blow up half the world with the same amount
of emotion". "It's referred to as cold machinery",
Ralf continues, "but as soon as you put a different
person in the synthesizer, it's very responsive to the different vibration.
I think it's much more sensitive than a traditional instrument like a guitar". |
| This
may be why, just before their first American tour, Kraftwerk purged themselves
of guitarist/violinist Klaus Roeder, inserting Bartos in his slot. One must,
at any rate, mind one's P's and Q's - I asked Hutter if a synthesizer could
tell what kind of person you are and he replied: "Yes.
It's like an acoustic mirror", I remarked that the next logical step
would be for the machines to play you. He nodded: "Yes.
We do this. It's like no longer you and I, it's It. Not all machines have
this consciousness, however. Some machines are just limited to one piece
of work, but complex machines..." |
| "The
whole complex we use",
continues Florian, referring to their equipment and headquarters in their
native Düsseldorf, "can be regarded as one machine,
even though it is divided into different pieces". Including, of course,
the human beings within. "The Menschmaschine is our
acoustic concept, and Kraftwerk is power plant - if you plug in the electricity,
then it starts to work. It's feedback. You can jam with an automatic machine,
sometimes just you and it alone in the studio". |
| They
also referred to their studio as their "laboratory" and I wondered aloud
if they didn't encounter certain dangers in their experiments. What to stop
the machines, I asked, from eventually taking over, or at least putting
them out of work? "It's like a car", explained
Florian. "You have the control, but it's your decision
how much you want to control it. If you let the wheel go, the car will drive
somewhere, maybe off the road. We have done electronic accidents. And it
is also possible to damage your mind. But this is the risk one takes. We
have power. It just depends on what you do with it". |
| I
wondered if they could see some ramifications for what they could do with
it. "Yes", said Ralf, "it's
our music, we are manipulating the audience. That's what it's all about.
When you play electronic music, you have the control of the imagination
of the people in the room, and it can get to an extent where it's almost
physical". |
| I
mentioned the theories of William Burroughs, who says that you can start
a riot with two tape recorders, and asked them if they could create a sound
which would cause a riot, wreck the hall, would they like to do it? "I
agree with Burroughs", said Ralf. "We would
not like to do that, but we are aware of it". |
| "It
would be very dangerous",
cautioned Florian. "It could be like a boomerang". |
| "It
would be great publicity", I nudged. |
| "It
could be the end",
said Florian, calm, unblinking. "A person doing experimental
music must be responsible for the results of the experiments. They could
be very dangerous emotionally". |
| I
told them that I considered their music rather anti-emotional, and Florian
quietly and patiently explained that "emotion is a
strange word. There is a cold emotion and other emotion, both equally valid.
It's not body emotion, it's mental emotion. We like to ignore the audience
while we play, and take all our concentration into the music. We are very
much interested in origin of music, the source of music. The pure sound
is something we would very much like to achieve". |
| They
have been chasing the p.s.'s tail for quite a while. Setting out to be electronic
classical composers in the Stockhausen tradition, they grew up listening
on the one hand to late-night broadcasts of electronic music, on the other
to the American pop music imported via radio and TV - especially the Beach
Boys, who were a heavy influence, as is obvious from "Autobahn," although
"we are not aiming so much for the music, it's the psychological structure
of someone like the Beach Boys". They met at a musical academy, began
in 1970 to set up their own studio, "and started working
on the music, building equipment", for the eventual rearmament of
their fatherland. |
| "After
the war", explains
Ralf, "German entertainment was destroyed. The German
people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think
we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know
where to feel American music and where to feel ourselves. We are the first
German group to record in our own language, use our electronic background,
and create a Central European identity for ourselves. So you see another
group like Tangerine Dream, although they are German they have an English
name, so they create on stage an Anglo-American identity, which we completely
deny. We want the whole world to know our background. We cannot deny we
are from Germany, because the German mentality, which is more advanced,
will always be part of our behavior. We create out of the German language,
the mother language, which is very mechanical, we use as the basic structure
of our music. Also the machines, from the industries of Germany". |
| As
for the machines taking over, all the better. "We
use tapes, prerecorded, and we play tapes, also in our performance. When
we recorded on TV we were not allowed to play the tape as part of the performance,
because the musicians' union felt that they would be put out of work. But
I think just the opposite: with better machines, you will be able to do
better work, and you will be able to spend your time and energies on a higher
level". |
| "We
don't need a choir",
adds Florian. "We just turn this key, and there's
the choir". |
| I
wondered aloud if they would like to see it get to the point of electrodes
in the brain so that whatever they though would come through a loudspeaker.
"Yes", enthused Ralf, "this
would be fantastic". |
| The
final solution to the music problem, I suggested. |
| "No,
not the solution. The next step". |
| They
then confided that they were going to spend all of the money from this tour
on bigger and better equipment, that they work in their lab/studio for recreation,
and that their Wernher von Braun sartorial aspect was "part
of the German scientific approach". |
| "When
the rocket was going to the moon",
said Ralf, "I was so emotionally excited.... When
I saw this on television, I thought it was one of the best performances
I had ever seen". |
| Speaking
of performances, and bearing their general appearance and demeanor in mind,
I asked them what sort of groupies they got. "None",
snapped Florian. "There is no such thing. This is
totally and invention of the media". |
| All
right then, what's your opinion of American or British bands utilizing either
synthesizers or Germanic overtones? Do you feel a debt to Pink Floyd?
"No. It's vice versa. They draw from French classicism and German electronic
music. As such performance as Rick Wakeman has nothing to do with our music",
stressed Ralf. "He is something else...distraction.
It's not electronic music, it's circus tricks on the synthesizer. I think
it is paranoid. I don't want to put anybody down, but I cannot listen to
it. I get nervous. It is traditional". |
| Not
surprisingly, their taste in American acts runs to those seduced (an enervated)
by adrenaline: "The MC5, and the heavy metal music
of Detroit. I think Iggy and the Stooges are concerned with energy, and
the Velvet Underground had a heavy Germanic influence —Nico was from Cologne,
close to where we live. They have this German dada influence from the twenties
and thirties. I very much like "European Son". Nico and John Cale
had this Teutonic attitude about their music which I very much like. I think
Lou Reed in his Berlin is projecting the situation of a spy film, the spy
standing in the fog smoking a cigarette. I have also been told of the program
"Hogan's Heroes", though I have not seen it. We think that no
matter what happens Americans cannot relate it. It's still American popcorn
chewing gum. It's part of history. I think the Blue Oyster Cult is funny". |
| They
did not, however, think it was funny when I wound up the interview asking
them if they would pose for pix the next morning by the Detroit freeway.
"No", said Ralf, emphatically.
"We do not pose. We have our own pictures". |
| Why?
"Because", flatly, "we are paranoid". |
| He
was just beginning to explain the ramifications of German paranoia when
Florian abruptly stood up, opened the window to let the smoke out, then
walked to the door and opened it, explaining with curious polite curtness
that "we had also an interview with Rolling Stone,
but it was not so long as this one. Now it is time to retire. You must excuse
us". |
| He
ushered us into the hall, quietly swung the door shut with a muffled click,
and we blinked at each other in mild shock. Still, it was somehow comforting
to know that they did, apparently, sleep. |
|
| Interview to Lester Bangs |
|
