What will the revolution be made of? What will it look like? How will it sound? In the wake of two significant deaths inside a week, I’m left to wonder. First, Wayne Kramer, guitar player with the MC5, house band of Detroit’s White Panther Party. And today, Damo Suzuki, singer for Köln’s CAN from 1970 to 1973. The MC5 played standard chord-progression rock and roll, albeit loudly and with a will to ferocity that was not the standard at the time. Their most lasting claims to fame are uttering the word “motherfuckers” in their ambiguous “kick out the jams” (just as applicable to a football game as a revolution), and being the other band signed to Elektra the same weekend that Danny Fields (nee Feinberg) also signed The Stooges. The MC5 were managed by Detroit’s resident rabble rouser, pot-promoter, and poet, John Sinclair. He’d founded the White Panther Party as a complement to the Black Panthers – a collective of White kids prepared to support the Black revolution. Sinclair imagined rock and roll as the perfect vehicle to inject radical politics into the veins of White hippie culture and he tapped The MC5 as his Detroit-assembly-line-coupe replete with American flags and rifles slung alongside guitars across the paisleypunk hoods of his shiny new roadsters.
Wayne Kramer (photo: Leni Sinclair)
The MC5 provided the perfect image of rock and roll revolution. But the image was as far as it went. Lester Bangs reviewed their debut, Kick Out The Jams, for Rolling Stone in April, 1969, two months after its release. He could hear little difference between the MC5 and bands like the Seeds, Blue Cheer, the Kingsmen, and Question Mark and the Mysterians. What difference he could discern was in the style, not the substance: “The difference here, the difference which will sell several hundred thousand copies of this album, is in the hype, the thick overlay of teenage-revolution and total-energy-thing.” Despite Sinclair’s best intentions and efforts, Bangs could see through the scrim. The guns and bandoliers are costumes, like Alice Cooper’s b-stock Dracula or Kiss’s greasepaint and platform heels.
When Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, and Jaki Liebezeit formed CAN, the revolution they had in mind was the product of a cultural destabilization shuddering through Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It was felt on university campuses, at lunch counters, in the streets, in the halls of government, and in skepticism towards the accepted values of Enlightenment modernism. Suddenly the pictorial sensibilities of art history were undermined by conceptual concerns. Hans Haacke held a referendum on Nelson Rockefeller in the foyer of MoMA. The inviolable moral obligations of democracy and capitalism now appeared to be little more than ring-fenced fields of wealth and power. And Germany’s history faced not just criticism, but outright repudiation, announced by the mores and values of the postwar generation.
African American sculptor, Malcolm
Mooney, joined CAN for their first proper release, Monster Movie, in
1968. Mooney’s vocal approach is more rhythmic than melodic. His lyrics and
delivery are repetitive and he seems to have nudged the band away from traditional
song structures and toward slowly mutating repetitions gathered around an
insistent cyclicality provided by Liebezeit’s (“monotonous” – his word) drumming
and Czukay’s lock-groove bass lines. When Mooney was forced to leave the band for
health reasons in 1969, Damo took over vocal duties. Legend has it that the
rhythm section discovered Suzuki busking on the streets of Munich while they
killed time at a café prior to an evening performance. Apparently, they invited
Suzuki to join them on stage that same night.
There is no evidence of a learning curve. Damo somehow embodied CAN from the first documents of his tenure. He adopts Mooney’s rhythmic, repetitive approach and the band becomes a kind of Rube Goldberg machine that produces the beginnings of its own processes. Woven between the slanting shunts of Schmidt’s keyboards and the Epicurean clinamen of Liebezeit and Czukay as they swerve to create the universe, Damo creeps like a vine. In the folds of the rotting undersides of fallen trees, mushroom heads, camphor fumes misting the surfaces of stones. On “Abra Cada Braxas” from The Lost Tapes, Damo’s voice is a kind of gelatin, forming itself around the contours of the pulses of the band. I cannot tell if what he is singing is English, Japanese, German, or no language at all. In its responsiveness, its plaintiveness, its pleading, it suggests something every bit as human as whichever bare lightbulb folksinger seems to sing your life to you. But then, around the eight minute mark – abracadabra! – he is Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, Jarry’s Pere Ubu, the circus barker in that dream in which the clown, the strong man, and the bearded lady suffocate you in the cotton candy machine. Don’t tell me you haven’t had that dream.
Damo appears on the consensus three best CAN albums: Tago Mago (1971), Ege Bamyasi (1972), and Future Days (1973). And then he disappears. Only to reappear about ten years later, emerging first in one city and then another, playing with local bands organized for the occasion in a flickering constellation he called the “Damo Suzuki Network.” If Can evinced an Epicurean world view, post-CAN, Damo lived a Heraclitian existence: never the same river twice. Never the same song twice. Never the same words twice. Never the same day twice. For some forty years, he bounced around the globe like a spring loaded jester, subverting whatever we thought a band was supposed to be, or a song.
I love the 1972 footage of CANfrom the German tv program, “Spotlight Music Show.” I love that Damo sits cross-legged at the side of the stage, eschewing the literal and the figurative spotlight. One member of the band, contributing one element among five.
And that allows us to return, after some delay, to the revolution. CAN, during the Damo Suzuki years, enacted something that strikes me as truly revolutionary. They dispensed with notions of progress, with part-by-part development over the course of a piece of music, a song. This pretense of progress is both (and uncoincidentally) a manifestation of Enlightenment thought, pushing through levels of understanding in an effort to arrive at a final, teleological answer, and it is the internal logic of capital: growth, expansion, maximization of profits, hyper-accumulation. CAN, emerging from the calamity of these logics, its German members born during or immediately after the War, denied the ideology and allure of these Western, modernist pretensions and chose, instead, to hang tight; to remain in place, cycling and cycling through the present moment. They went neither forward nor backward, neither up nor down. They stayed put with “all gates open,” as one of their songs would have it, absorbing the nuances and details that music misses when it feels compelled to progress. Listen to the three records with Damo, or maybe better, live recordings from those years. This performance from Rockpalast, 1970 is superb. The band really hit their stride about halfway through, near the 45 minute mark!
There’s an argument to be made that, in a proposition like CAN, the most difficult role is that of the vocalist. The instruments can find phrases, riffs, rhythms and grind on them. Granted, the 4 instrumentalists of Can did this with unique sensitivity and conviction. But Damo Suzuki faced restraints that the others didn’t. He couldn’t tell tales, what with their beginnings, middles, and ends. He had to steer clear of declamatory language. There could be no recourse to conflict and resolution. So Damo flowed between a choppy English and Japanese with long stretches of makeshift consonants and vowels such as what goes down in “Abra Cada Braxas.” Both Mooney and Suzuki displayed deep understanding for what CAN meant as a musical idea and as a kind of political theory in practice. The revolution can’t tell you what to think or do. Not even the revolutionary knows what the revolution looks like or how it sounds. You’ve got to keep your gates open and trust you’ll know it when it happens.
The MC5 were on the stage at the Festival of Life when the shit hit the fan in Chicago in 1968. What followed was described by the official Walker Report as “a police riot.” The truth was that the MC5 were not interested in manning the barricades. As Kramer himself testified, “the minute we stopped playing, we just threw our shit in the van and we drove right across the grass and over the median to get on the freeway to get our asses back to Detroit. That’s when the tear gas started flying.” All this not to suggest that the artist has to be the first one out of the trench. But there’s gotta be some revolution in the way the work is made, in how it’s constructed; not just in what it means, but in how it means. I’m flying under the banner here of Godard’s edict not to make political art, but to make art politically. Trotsky, in 1938, wrote the following to the editors of the Partisan Review: “Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians will themselves find their own approach and methods, if the struggle for freedom of oppressed classes and peoples scatters the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind.”
Clearly, we haven’t scattered those clouds yet. The horizon is shrouded in a thick pall of skepticism and pessimism. The revolutionary groundhog – let’s call him Petersburg Pete – is looking his long, dark shadow squarely in the eye. The forecast, I’m afraid, is for six more weeks, or years, or eons, of winter. But, in Damo’s voice, I can hear the faint echo of the revolution to come. It sounds like CAN.
