Holger Czukay

It all comes down to the throb. At the heart of every indispensable experience: that insistence made manifest as periodicity, as repetition. It keeps coming back. It keeps coming back. It inveigles. It urges. It persists. Eventually, the distinction between it and whatever had previously been taken to be “normal,” or “permissible,” or “advisable,” fades away. Its intrusion becomes, at first, simply tolerable. But soon enough it vanishes, like the pendulum of the grandfather clock in my childhood home. Friends would say “how do you live here with that constant ticking?” And I would say, “what ticking?” completely incapable of hearing it. Finally, it becomes necessary. The throb;  the very movement of time, the exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide, the interstellar hum.

Holger Czukay conjured but one thing from his bass: that throb., Holger’s playing is the most primordial retort to the seismic shufflings of Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming. Together, they perform the dialectics of brass tacks and gilded roses. At one end of the tether, Jaki (who died inJanuary) unwinds the coil, spinning Mandelbrot sets of pulses, spaces, and emphases. At the other end, Holger winds it all back up, tightening the twine into an impossible concentration of matter and energy. Like no other rhythm section, the two of them invent the boundaries of a self-sufficient, and practically endless, musical universe. Anyone who loves Can, whether they know it or not, loves Holger and Jaki mostly. In their spars and scrimmages, entire languages emerge, expend their capacities, and die. They construct in time what Borges’ Library of Babel constructs in space.

What’s more, Can as we know them – and let’s not beat around the bush: they are without a doubt one of the six or seven most significant bands to ever make rock and roll – are largely a product of Holger’s structural vision and ability. He recorded their long sessions, listened to and indexed the fathoms of tape, and edited (by hand; pre-digital) the sessions into ur-compositions, throbbing (again) with the inevitability of being born or dying. He had been a student of Stockhausen and had taken the master’s tools and employed them as weapons against the dogmatic, hectoring didacticism of “serious” music. At roughly the same time that Teo Macero was cutting and splicing Miles Davis sessions in New York to create In A Silent Way, Czukay was chopping up Can sessions at their Inner Space studio in Cologne and assembling a new music that was composed after it was performed.

There is little else in the listenable world that survives repetition as Can does. Their own deeply hewn repetitiveness allows successive listens to act more on the music than the music does on the listening. Jaki and Holger did what rivers do, appearing to follow the contours of the land, when in fact the land is forever yielding to the river. Eventually, rivers either head underground or empty into the sea. In the first case, the river carves ever deeper, hollowing stone, blazing subterranean trails that only the river itself can follow. In the second case, the river disappears into something greater than itself; something more powerful, more extensive. I have no trouble believing that either of these cases (or both) describes where Jaki and Holger have gone.

Rock and Roll Eulogies:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jaki Liebezeit (May 26, 1938 – January 22, 2017) and 
Clyde Stubblefield (April 18, 1943 – February 18, 2017)

I was young once. And prone, as youth is, to surfaces and misconceptions, I once labored under the erroneous opinion that the drummer doesn't matter much. Imagine! Such insouciance! I took it for granted that a beat – any beat – would suffice, so long as the song was good, the singer was expressive, and the guitars were inventive.

Somewhere along the way, I came to my wits. It might have been upon hearing Jaki Liebezeit of Can (probably not the first time I heard Can – I’m not that quick a study – I’m sure it took a number of listens), on Tago Mago, I imagine. “Mushroom” is practically all drums. Just a little repetitive chanting from Damo and the extreme economy of Holger Czukay’s bass. There’s already something going on when the song starts in the middle, unpacking itself like a defiant bloom on a cactus. We hear the sound of the end of something that just happened, something we don't have access to and never will. There’s a little keyboard whine, just a beep, like the tone your microwave makes when your burrito’s done. Then Jaki rolls a slender fill to usher us into the song (or vice versa). It’s all shuffling on top, a cascade of echoes lashing into and out of the caldera. Beneath, way down, the bass drum carves out its own geography. There is nothing to suggest that these two topographies are of the same world. But together they create a world as inevitable as the earth.

Jaki’s worlds are all commotion and tectonics: the shambolic intentionality of human activity scuffling assuredly across the heavings of a planet forever belching itself into shape. There is a naturalness to Liebezeit’s layers. Not in the sense of ease or rightness, but in the sense of nature, as imagined by Jaki’s countryman, Werner Herzog: persistent and punitive. Early, Jaki played with Mafred Schoof’s free jazz quintet. Later, he spoke of having an epiphany that directed him to play monotonously, and he joined Can.

All great music is monotonous. Even if that is not the music’s primary attribute, not the first adjective the critic would employ in its description, there must be a monotonous component to any music we would call great. Lester Bangs repeatedly (monotonously) intoned the necessity of monotony. It’s there in the Velvets and in the Stooges. But it’s also in Ornette and Ligeti and Dylan. It wouldn’t have been in Can had it not been for Jaki. True to the name he was born with, he forced the band and every one of its listeners to confront the step-by-step construction of time, which is also, of course, its deconstruction. We must embrace this time; reconcile ourselves to it. We must find a way to love (liebe) time (zeit) and be loved by it.

From 1965 until 1971, Clyde Stubblefield played drums in James Brown’s band, playing alongside John “Jabo” Starks. The two drummers provided the relentless motor for most of Brown’s best work. Jaki gets credit as a pioneer of the “motorik” rhythms of krautrock. But if you go back to Clyde’s work with James Brown, you will hear the origin and the distillation of the notion. Robert Palmer, to my knowledge, is the first critic to have noted that, starting in 1965 with “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag,” Brown’s bands began to treat every instrument as a drum. The drummers, Clyde and Jabo, are the foundation of this. But in order to function as both architecture and engine, they had to reimagine their role and their playing.

If every instrument is a drum, then how much territory and responsibility is left for the actual drums? And what if there are two drum kits? In response, Clyde and Jabo tap into the most fundamental understanding of rhythm – that it is a binary code: ones and zeroes, on and off, snap and silence. As much as they create music, they create space. Wicked absences at the upstroke. Targets for the other instruments to hit. Bait set in the bear trap. The band builds itself in these spaces, its form defined by what Clyde and Jabo allow. What made Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, JB’s two great band leaders, so intrinsic to James Brown’s sound, was their ability to tap into this particular evolutionary turn in Brown's music - the one that is the spawning of funk. Maceo and Wesley know what Brown means when he says "don't give me no trash, just give me some popcorn." No excess. Just the moment the kernel pops. Just the singularity of mutation: an impenetrable surface releasing and becoming energy. The Collins boys introduced something else to the mix, a little butter, a little salt. Their playing suggests a libidinal freedom that Brown never allows to surface. But at the core of all of James Brown’s best tracks from the late 60s (“Mother Popcorn,” “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and Stubblefield’s signature number, “Funky Drummer”) is Clyde’s stringency. His playing is an exercise in repression; as if something is always being held in reserve. This something never comes truly to fruition because what counts is tension, anticipation; not more, but the possibility of more. The repression is ultimately more powerful than its lifting could ever be. The power of the internal combustion engine is predicated on pressure and intermittent release. While the conditions for a climactic explosion are all present, the engine is designed to repress it. Clyde understood this and made of his drumming a motor.

It is cruel (amidst the cascade of current cruelties) that these two great forces should leave us within one month of each other. In the pits of our stomachs, in our asses, in our spatial and temporal imaginations, suddenly there is a lot less possibility of more.

Dylan's Nobel

It’s as if I’ve been dreading this moment.

Bob Dylan’s name has come up each fall for the last few years. Many of the people I love most dearly and admire most deeply have been rooting for this morning’s Nobel announcement. I haven’t been dwelling on it, or preparing for it. But I’ve had to reconcile myself to the looming obligation: should the announcement come, I will need to explain why I’m against it.

Ok, dread isn’t exactly the right word, or the right emotion. In fact, the announcement triggers mixed emotions. To my sensibilities, hewn in the mill of postwar political and aesthetic Modernism – buoyed by the expansion of civil rights and the interrogation of taken-for-granted values, but chastened by window-dressed American imperialism and the existential pessimism of Watergate – there is no greater art in any medium than the mid-60s daggers that Dylan steered to their deserving targets. Nothing else so thoroughly and simultaneously tests the emotions and the intellect, history and formal invention, the mapping of collective desire to individual expression.

My qualms, then, are not about merit. Nor are they about the specious category error of awards for artistic achievement. They are, in fact, about a different kind of category error. And what compels me to write about Dylan’s Nobel is the urge to distinguish the error that bothers me from one which doesn’t.

It doesn’t bother me that, in naming Dylan the laureate, the committee has taken an expanded view of the category of “literature.” As it happens, I am in the midst of writing a book that argues that the expansion of fields in various media that begins in the 60s and continues in strong form through the 70s (in weaker form to the present day) was initiated in part by the advent and acceptance of rock and roll as an art form worthy of careful consideration. No one forced this issue more than Dylan. Cinema expanded to include blank film and slowly morphing wall-hung emulsions. Sculpture expanded to include bulldozed earth and roomsfull of light. It makes sense that literature expanded too. In 1968, Aram Saroyan published an unopened ream of typing paper as a book.

It’s not that rock and roll constitutes a similar expansion of literature, taken into the body as a new manifestation of its medial concerns. Rather, rock and roll in the 60s forced, not just literature, but all traditional mediums to reconsider their relation to their contemporary cultural conditions. Sculpture in the 60s had to confront the increasingly sculptural environment of postwar commodity culture in which technology and the ubiquity of consumer goods situated the perceiving body in a fortress of three-dimensional objects designed to promulgate desire. Many of these objects were mobile, either portable or ambulatory, not sitting still for the contemplation of the perceiving body, but manically traversing its space and attention. Cars, moving pictures, conveyor belts, shelves of jars, radios, electric toys, neon signs, public address systems, elevators, escalators, lights across the night sky. Dylan assumed the form of this kinetic moment. He was wired and wiry, constantly moving in space and time, constantly forming/deforming/reforming; never the same figure twice. Constantly inconstant. Later, it was not his sound, his syntax, nor his semantics that would influence the trajectory of rock and roll, but this twitchy unwillingness to settle. They followed his lead: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols. The sacred, static, sculptural form was ill-suited to respond to this newly erratic world. But rock and roll made perfect sense. It was both the reflection of restless technological commodity culture, and a tool for subduing its most unnerving features. Minimalism and then Conceptual Art descended from the haute encampments of culture and academia to respond to the new realities of the American 60s. Similarly, but coming from a decidedly different direction, the groundwater of American subculture seeped into the cultural foment of the 60s in the form of rock and roll.

As different as their motivations and methods were, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and rock and roll (along with a host of other new and intermedial forms), destabilized the traditional moorings of the throne of aesthetic power. Similarly and simultaneously, social and political movements threatened (or promised) to deconstruct societal power structures and value systems. From the American war in Vietnam to the near collapse of France’s Fifth Republic, the inevitability of democratic capitalism seemed suddenly in doubt.

In objecting to Dylan’s Nobel, I am not trying to protect literature from infection. On the contrary, I am trying to protect Dylan’s work from the assumptions and impositions that append themselves once it is deemed “literature.” (And let’s face it, no such deeming could be more definitive than this one.) Here’s the rub: to call Dylan a literary artist is to homogenize him. But rock and roll has always been an intensely heterogeneous form. It is theatrical in the traditional sense and also in the way that Michael Fried’s used the term: to disparage Minimalist sculpture for anticipating and being activated by an audience. Rock and roll is a kind of performance art. It is a spectacle. It is graphic design: it’s impossible to imagine rock and roll without concert posters and album covers. It is also industrial design: it’s equally impossible to imagine rock and roll without Fender and Gibson guitars, without Marshall amps and Ludwig drums, without PA systems and lighting rigs. Rock and roll is a technological form, at both the site of production and the site of reception. Rock and roll was new media avant la lettre. And, yes, rock and roll is also literary, not just in its lyrics (which is, no doubt, what the Nobel Committee is rewarding here), but also in the various forms of discourse that rock and roll generates, from liner notes, to press releases, to interviews, to critical journalism. Shit, if it were up to me, Lester Bangs would have gotten the Nobel (but for the fact that his death disqualifies him – maybe Greil Marcus?)

Oh, and wait, rock and roll already functions under the umbrellic shelter of a long-recognized artistic medium. We call it music.

But I’m equally unperturbed by what will happen to music if we call Bob Dylan’s music literature. What I care about is what will happen to Bob Dylan’s music, or his literature, or his… Let’s agree, for the sake of this argument, to just call it his “work.” His work is what I’m worried about. Calling it literature reduces it. And Dylan’s work deserves to be defended from this reduction, even if that yoal has already left the quay. In the 60s he was already “the poet of his generation.” In a 2005 book, conservative literary theorist and Oxford don, Christopher Ricks, laid literary claim to Dylan’s words. And now the Nobel. Yes, that filly’s fled the grange.

Dylan’s voice, not the words it sings, is his most powerful weapon. When others sing his words they almost always lose their charge. The Byrds. Peter, Paul, and Mary. Sonny and Cher. Joan Baez. The Staple Singers. The list goes on. So many cover versions of Dylan songs stumble awkwardly into the ravine of righteous intentions. When these versions work, it is almost always due to something peculiar to the performance, something that sidesteps the burden of the words and the cultural specificity of Dylan’s original. When Dylan sings his own songs, he approaches the task with the insouciant disregard of a pipefitter working in the basement of a man he dislikes. He distorts the structures of the songs with contortionistic gusto, insuring that the material can indeed travel from point A to point B, but without instrumental concerns for efficiency or strain upon the system. His phrasing tortures individual syllables and sounds. 

Tellingly, when his voice is absent, he goes for the harmonica like a petty thug in an alley brawl retrieving the dagger from his ankle sheath. Allen Ginsberg (no Nobel) once described Dylan as a “column of air.” The harmonica is all breath, all air: exhale and inhale. It is the voice without language. Listen to the live ten minute and forty-four second versionof “Mr. Tambourine Man” on the Rites of Spring bootleg.  The harmonica reels out beyond the boundaries of the song, daring something else to land in the space the song has created, to colonize it, to recast it, to reengineer its innards such that its heart is routed directly to its lungs. The song breathes blood. The harmonica begins manically repeating a simple phrase, falling out of time and phasing against the strumming guitar, (beating Steve Reich to the punch by a matter of months), then after a long moaning howl which simultaneously conjures the two great beasts of the Western desolation of Dylan’s myth: the coyote and the locomotive, the harmonica escapes the tether of the chords into a territory that Ornette Coleman might have called harmolodic. At the end of the song, the harmonica and the guitar – without Dylan’s voice, without his words – tear at and torment the song, pulling its skin away from its bones. It sounds for all the world like a one-man-band version of the Velvets’ “Sister Ray.” Music trying to destroy the need for music.

If you call Bob Dylan’s work “literature” you deny it all that (and more besides). Not because literature couldn’t expand to include it, but because, as of the announcement of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, it hasn’t. I doubt that the Nobel Prize committee concerned itself with Dylan’s decision to “go electric,” with his choice of musicians over the years, with his harmonica, with his shifting look from vagabond Chaplin to itinerant farmhand to Carnaby Street dandy to mascara’d outlaw bohemian to mustachioed snake oil salesman. I doubt they watched Eat The Document.

We do ourselves and our cultural responses a disservice if we reduce Dylan to literature, just as we would cheat ourselves if we reduced Beckett to a mere comedian. Comedy may be essential to his art, but it's neither the whole nor the heart of it. And, Buster Keaton wasn't just an actor. I listened to a lot of Dylan today, much of the time focused on his rickety, cantilevered voice, much of the time not paying much attention to the words. 

This entry is dedicated to my friend, Steve Jungkeit, and to our time on the bus. 

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I plan to write more on this topic, dealing with the logic of something like a Nobel Prize for Literature and how that logic is at odds with Dylan’s relation to tradition. I’ll think about the many singers and songwriters with whom Dylan has collaborated, across time and the divide of death. A Nobel for Robert Johnson? For Woody Guthrie? For Bascom Lamar Lunsford? Or Dock Boggs? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Vega

This morning, while my wife and daughter attended a production of The Velveteen Rabbit in the suburbs, I prepared for a performance I'll present in Australia in August. The work is new and still being formed. It is called "Adorno At Altamont" and deals with rock and roll as a theoretical construct. Which is to say, that in the best rock and roll there is a theory that is both more indemnifying and more excoriating than what we find in its practice. The Velvet Underground for instance - "Sister Ray" - is a boiling kettle applied first to the flesh and then, once the flesh has retreated, to the skull, to the heart. But the theory of "Sister Ray" is altogether more catastrophic. What the Velvet Underground, at their best (i.e., their most theoretical) represent - such a weak word! - what they incise, is deeper than flesh, bone, and organ. It cuts to the quick; the quintessence. Rock and roll can be the art of life and death. Not life followed by death, but each held simultaneously in alternate hands, weighed and wagered, like tossed coins or hand grenades about to go off.

I'm trying to make theoretical rock, as close to a rock before or without practice as I can get. Adorno had to be there. So too Altamont and the Wagnerian symbolism of Meredith Hunter's murder at the hands of the Hell's Angels. The whole fucking mess renders hermeneutics moot. When Ralph Gleason wrote it up for Esquire, he (or some sensei editor) called it "Aquarius Wept."

Taking a break from my work, I put on the Gories' fantastic I Know You Fine, But How You Doin?, pinching inspirations from their paneled-basement-refrigerator-slapback. Then "Ghost Rider" came on. The Gories' cover of the Suicide classic is pure judo. Taking the slapback retro of Suicide's schtick (and make no mistake, it is schtick (of the highest order)) and slapping it back from whence it came, to the garage, to the long hallway that RCA used to emulate Sam Phillips' tape echo. Of course, this too is a slapping back of the slapback, emulating electronic emulations of acoustic phenomena with acoustic phenomena! The Gories take Suicide back to the source, making of "Ghost Rider" what it always pretended to be and not to be.

So I decided that "Ghost Rider" too had to be there. I spent the morning - this morning: July 16, 2016 - rehearsing it, focusing obsessively on the line, "America, America is killing its youth." This was rock and roll as theory: A band called Suicide, homeless at times during it's formative years, Martin Rev's cheap keyboard presets, and Alan Vega's voice, more slapback than signal, announcing that America and, by implication, the rock and roll, in which they lived and practiced was systematically eradicating its own audience, killing its youth. But there's the double entendre too, which applies equally again to America and rock and roll. The youth it is killing is its own: its vitality, its foolishness, its certainty, its naiveté. Suicide is the name of the band because, after all, what is being born, but the signing of a suicide pact? Beginning is the promise of ending.

This afternoon, I attended Dusty Groove's 20th anniversary block party. Among other records, I bought the recent reissue of the second Suicide record. I came home, put my daughter to bed and opened my laptop to learn that Alan Vega had died.

This morning - July 16, 2016 - while I engaged his work as a (re)producer and a consumer, Alan Vega ended. He left, not via the door opened by his band's name, but the old fashioned way, "peacefully in his sleep."

It's good to be a "recording artist." When you commit your beginnings to vinyl (or film or binary code) they can forever be begun again, not forestalling ending, but reestablishing the brief moments when ending is temporarily and artificially, strategically, denied. The present looks as if at a window and finds a mirror instead: no "out there," no "beyond," no "yet to come." Just THIS, again. In those moments, slapped back, and incessantly slapping back, Alan Vega's voice resounded. "Baby, baby, baby, he's screaming the truth."