1970-1979 WTF - The Hard 'n' Heavy 'n' Loud + Krautrock, Arty, Noisy, Weird, Funky, Punky Shit - Albums Poll! - VOTING THREAD! Closes Mar 8th 11.59 PM UK Time - All ILXORS/LURKERS WELCOME

So here we go-
PLEASE READ ALL OF THE BELOW BEFORE VOTING

You can vote for a minimum of 20 and maximum of 100 albums, But you CANNOT VOTE FOR MORE THAN 3 ALBUMS BY THE ONE BAND

You can choose to submit a weighted, unweighted or split ballot. Points will be assigned as follows: Weighted: 1st choice (top of the ballot) 260 points, then 245, 235, 225, 220, 215, 210, 205, 200, 195, 190, 188, 186, 184 and so on down to 2 points for 100th place. Unweighted: Every choice gets 113 points. Split: The top portion is treated as a weighted ballot and the remaining potential points total is divided equally among the bottom portion.

But It would be good if those who don't want to rank a full ballot would still rank the top 10 or 20 then do a split unranked ballot rather than pure unweighted.
It's entirely up to you but It's helpful for avoiding ties and the top albums deserves the points. So please try and rank part of your ballot. You know it looks better when albums have a #1.

Some may want to just vote for the heaviest or 'rockingest' tracks. They may wish to vote in the style of the 80s poll. Or you may just simply want to vote for your favourite albums in the list. It's entirely up to you. Just vote please!

Please make sure you copy and paste your selections directly from the following spreadsheet: ALBUMS: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AumbddEHET5xdEZaQ0paMUZpNEdGeUdRSGRTY3BfV2c

Here is the voting form
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEN3MGdQQkdWWUtsM19SYlZ0UTdzQkE6MQ

There is also a Spotify Albums Playlist please subscribe to it. Not everything is on Spotify though.

Voting Closes Nov 8th 11.59 PM UK Time

Please use this thread to campaign for albums, particularly the lesser known ones. It will result in albums being checked out and probably voted for. Campaigning really works
Do not post youtubes in here. Please start a separate thread for that.

Now please campaign and vote and enjoy listening to a multitude of new albums! And feel free to discuss any bands or albums here or about music in the 70s. lets have lots of good discussion, everyone welcome to join in even those who don't want to vote.

Have fun!

ps bookmark the thread!

If you have any questions please ask.

And a big thanks to seandalai who has set up the voting form and will be doing all the work i.e. tabulating.
Much appreciated!

Do we need to have two threads? You vote for albums and tracks via the same form.

It helps with campaigning and they don't get mixed up

plus the tracks poll has different rules so no point in confusing anyone.

There are different rules for trax? Do I need to know this?

ps everybody vote for Satori

balls emailed about it!

aha

ps vote Mandrill Is and some Funkadelic and Ohio Players!

sorry I'm only voting for RAWK.

So you're voting funkadelic then!

these are in twice -

Crass - Feeding of the 5000
john Lee Hooker - Endless Boogie
King Crimson - Red
Michael Rother – Sterntaler
The Deviants - The Mona (The Carnivorous Circus) also down under Mick Farren
Visitors - s/t also down as The Visitors

first look and i've got it down to about 200.

fixed

you CANNOT VOTE FOR MORE THAN 3 ALBUMS BY THE ONE BAND

That's okay, I don't even like The One Band. Well, their early singles were okay...

I thought you preferred their demos

Takin' Care of Business: ILX 70s RAWK TRAX VOTING RULES AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD - VOTING THREAD!- Closes Nov 8th 11.59 PM UK Time - All ILXORS/LURKERS WELCOME

Spotify playlist for tracks on that thread

I hope you all dont cry too many tears cutting your shortlists this time to 100

bump

I'd like to remind people that voting has been extended in The Official ILM THE NEPTUNES Poll (#27 In Series) - Voting & Campaigning Thread (Voting Deadline - October 19th) so please go vote if its your thing.

submitted. that was so hard that i had to leave off a pile of records i nominated.

Do you wish I had allowed a ballot of 200?
I've not even looked at the noms yet to start on mine. Need a day or 2s break from the poll to think about it/

200 would have been great. i had to get mine done this afternoon as it's the only time i have free before the deadline.

yes, you'll be all polled out now.

Some of my favorites -- Funkadelic, Zappa, and Black Sabbath -- are pretty much guaranteed to be split votes due to the lack of hit albums. Should us fans of those acts just agree on which albums we're going to vote on? For Funkadelic, I'd say it's the eponymous album. Black Sabbath is really tough, just realized they punched out five great LPs in just four years, but I guess Paranoid could be considered their hit release. Zappa needs moar Joe's Garage, but Apostrophe is another strong contender.

Also, what's with the woeful Floyd deficit? Wish You Were Here isn't rock now?

Really liking Mandrill Is.

I'm not even really sold on the concept of 'vote splitting' when it comes to an album poll tbh. If Sister were not on the list for the 80s poll, do people think that its fans would have all voted for Daydream Nation instead just so they could vote for a Sonic Youth album? Seems questionable. I like Zappa's big band albums and there's no way I'm voting for the record with "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" on it to help Zappa place. (I was trying not to say anything but this three-album rule seems a bit draconian to me if we're voting for 100 albums tbh.)

Just vote for your favourites (no, the Funkadelic s/t isnt really anyones fave its usually maggot brain/standing/free your mind)
the list will be large so there's no reason why all the big albums wont be in the list plus some obscure faves.

oh and ilms fave sabbath albums in previous polls are Vol iv and master of reality.
led zep iii is ilms fave but questionable that it should be in this poll

Physical Graffiti won this poll, with III coming in fourth place.

III is def the least rawk so I'd be uncomfortable if it won then again i'd be lol ilm too. I don't see me voting for it. PG is my fave zep but I'll have to think how I'm gonna approach it.

btw thanks for voting stirmonster. Could everyone who votes post here please so i can check it went through.

So the top 50 weighted are always worth more than any unweighted vote right? And it wouldn't make sense to have anything over position 50 be unweighted or to rank anything below 50th place. Am I understanding it right?

I boobed on one of my noms cos I'm a stoop - the Far Out album (their only one iirc) actually has a name and it's called Nihonjin

okay, probably time to fire up the playlist and actually listen to some of these swaggering thundercocks

wk I don't know and will need to leave seandalai to answer that

Probably doesn't matter much but there are two Twink Think Pinks.

So the top 50 weighted are always worth more than any unweighted vote right? And it wouldn't make sense to have anything over position 50 be unweighted or to rank anything below 50th place. Am I understanding it right?

― wk, Saturday, October 20, 2012 9:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Long explanation that I hope answers the question:

If you have an unweighted ballot, everything gets 113 points. Doesn't matter how long the ballot is.

If you have a weighted ballot, the points scheme in the OP is applied: 260, 245, 235, 225, 220, 215, 210, 205, 200, 195, 190, 188, 186, 184 and so on until the end of the ballot. If your ballot is short (49 items or fewer I think), then every item gets more than 113 points so in this case there's no reason to submit an unweighted ballot.

If you have a split ballot then we start counting down 260,245,235,225,220,215,210,205,200,195,190,188,186,184,... as for a weighted ballot until we reach the split point (indicated by a blank line on your ballot). At that point we work out how many points remain from the total "budget" of 11300 and distribute that remainder equally among all items in the second part of the ballot (rounding fractional amounts down to the next integer). The points given to each item in the second part will be less than 113. The items in the top half of the second part will get fewer points than they would on a fully weighted ballot, while the items in the bottom half of the second part will get more points.

Thanks seandalai!

Swaggering Thundercocks!

quite.

ah. ok if i resubmit mine all weighted?

sure

its not really up to me but i know seandalai has allowed it before.

Yeah no problems, I'll delete the old ballot.

I'm sorry I know this might sound like a dumb question, but what is an unweighed ballot? Aren't all ballots going to be the top whatever number 50 or 100, going downwards until the #1?

its for those too lazy to rank the albums

There are three options for distributing votes across the items on your ballot. If you can't face the mental trauma of picking a favourite child album from your list, you can pick the unweighted option and every album will get the same number of points.

or you can rank a part of your ballot and leave the rest unweighted

Ok I didn't realize people wouldn't want to rate their ballot, thanks.

Most did a split ballot in the 80s poll.

I keep putting off voting because I keep finding remarkable new albums. Harlem River Drive tonight, that is definitely going in!

Wish I had that Harlem River Drive record!

Fuck me that Fire On The Bayou is going above Dr John. Sorry Mac!

'idle hands' off the harlem river drive is an eternal favourite.

seandalai, i'll send it over tomorrow. cheers.

ok cool

I've listened to the first three Mandrill albums a few times now, and while they're pretty good, none of them would get near my top 100, even if I thought they rocked enough. They have a lot in common with the early Chicago albums, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The latin-jazz fusion is pretty cool.

While it's nice to hear his guitar playing, the solo Eddie Hazel album in no way measures up to Cosmic Slop/Standing../Let's Take It... It might compare favorably to the overrated One Nation Under A Groove though.

Why not use the ilxor Soundrop room on Spotify to campaign for tracks/albums and add/listen to songs.
http://open.soundrop.fm/s/W16fTbbsgjzuGhsN

That Kanguru album Fastnbulbous mentioned on the other thread is worth a big mention. When I saw it had 4 tracks I expected 4 longish jams but it is more like at least 10 different tracks and it has most of the best elements of classic krautrock.

Fucking incredible album.

Just listened again and at one point it almost sounds like Damo on Oxymoron.

I have already submitted my album vote, but this should be a lot higher.

A lot of variety on this album as well its got everything: Noise rock terrorism, motorik beats, Damo like vocal gymnastics and the odd surprising bit of post punk pop sesnsibility.

Glad you like it! Hopefully others will check it out. Is it on Spotify? I never opened an account as I can't use it at work.

I don't know to be honest. I don't do spotify.

there are a bunch of guru guru albums on spotify but kanguru doesn't appear to be one of them

Voted.

cheers!

now is anybody gonna campaign or discuss anything? hellhouse?

I had completely forgotten about Twink's Think Pink album but I saw it on the nominations list and just listened to it again and that thing is kind of insane and brilliant. Some serious psychedelic shredding on there.

Twink - Tiptoe On The Highest Hill
http://youtu.be/ZIdsndUSEA4

Twink - Ten Thousand Words In A Cardboard Box
http://youtu.be/Q7yeuwQvc0g

now is anybody gonna campaign or discuss anything? hellhouse?

yeah, I rambled a bit about my obsession w/Red Transistor on the tracks thread, and why Not Bite may be the best track of the 70s, but it's p. quiet over there, so w/e. I'll prob. campaign f/more recs/tracks if I'm able to steal away some time f/listening (only 1,000 recs, should be able to knock that out no prob, ha).

on a related note, I see that other people have begun to add to the Spotify album playlist, which is collaborative this time around, so please add yr. fave nominated recs:

http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/1rFbtUwZlcYHBD6gcemMeK

also, if anyone has any recommendations f/nasty psych, I'd love to hear them (I was a little underwhelmed by Satori, mainly b/c I've been ruined by Skullflower and F/i, though I always enjoy Les Rallizes Denudes).

Necronomicon has some pretty nasty guitar sounds http://www.youtu.be/8MEdhY1uxRc Gets going at about the 2:00 mark.

Last night I finally got round to listening to Amon Duul II - Yeti (yeah yeah I know, I'm always the last to everything) and it was pretty much everything I was hoping for. Grade A heavy psych. Will give Flower Travellin' Band - Satori a try next.

^^^

thanks, will check out Necromicon and Amon Duul II (have heard some of their stuff, but not much).

Preparing my list now. Noticed a few duplicates in the nominations list. Mostly S/T albums where there's listings for the album as both S/T and the album/band title i.e Roxy Music and La Dusseldorf.

Anyway, my ballot is pretty kraut heavy looking at it initially.

there's no rush listen to lots of albums before voting. plenty of time to discover new stuff.

or you can discuss the music that influenced Sonic Youth if that will help stimulate some chat.

or you can discuss the music that influenced Sonic Youth if that will help stimulate some chat.

ha, I think we've more-or-less exhausted all the SY angles. as a voter w/v. limited time, however, I would love to hear from anyone planning on making some challopsy or merely offbeat choices f/their top ten or twenty and why they think these oddball recs are worth hearing. I'm on solid ground w/the classic rock and punk and no wave and krautrock, but a fair amount of the psych and funk and more obscure hard rock recs are alien to me, so any illumination into these dark corners will be appreciated (especially if the recommendations are weird, loud, compelling or in any way fucked up).

free your mind and your hellhouse will follow

so who is gonna campaign? What album should we all check out since everyones now checked out
http://www.octopussgarden.es/imagenes/shirts/01_08bd.jpg
and
http://www.classiclps.co.uk/images/shopcovers/P01648.jpg

putting the "The"s under "T" is disgustingly savage imo

damn google

I'm trying to narrow down my list, but it looks like my top spots are going to be heavy on obvious stuff like sabbath, misfits, stooges, ADII, etc. But some of the slightly less celebrated albums that I'll probably rank high are

Aphrodite's Child - 666
Captain Beyond
Groundhogs - Split
Pretty Things - Parachute
Modulo 1000

Aphrodite's Child - 666

Yesssssssssssss

I absolutely second that Captain Beyond album. It's one that seems to embody most of the rawkin' 70's traits without sounding too much like Sabbath or the Stooges or any of the No Wave bands. It was originally described to me as a more spacey Lynyrd Skynyrd which really didn't sound all that interesting (the description wasn't entirely off), but after hearing it it's an incredible progressive rock/southern rock album in the vein of Uriah Heep...but it improves on that style as well.

We've got the system to fuck the system!

I don't know how high I'll rank a Move album because they're kind of inconsistent, but people should really check them out if they haven't yet. You could make a killer double album out of Shazam, Looking On, and Message From the Country. Might as well add Wizzard into that playlist too.

Captain Beyond is like a progressive rock version of Blue Cheer to me. Or the logical progression of Iron Butterfly.

I think 666 may be the greatest progressive rock album. It's the only album I've found where the classical pretensions are fully successful.

Also I can't say enough great things about Wayne County and the Electric Chairs - Things Your Mother Never Told You. I had never heard of these guys prior to this poll but it is sitting very highly on my list. One of my favorite glammy punk albums.

Wall City Girl
http://youtu.be/nSjBrXnH4jM

Things Your Mother Never Told You
http://youtu.be/Hj5SzQrSoTk

Captain Beyond is like a progressive rock version of Blue Cheer to me. Or the logical progression of Iron Butterfly.

Yeah, this sounds a lot better than a progressive version of Lynyrd Skynryd. Let's go with that.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KcJj6wN1MA4/RsiFUVPbn6I/AAAAAAAAAsY/Fw6SuIJ8Nz4/s400/nov1.jpg

November – En Ny Tid är Här (Sonet Grammofon, 1970)
Lots of Swedish bands have named proto-metallers November as a big influence, like Witchcraft, Graveyard, Captain Crimson, probably Dead Man and Troubled Horse. I'm guessing their influence hasn't stopped spreading, as people beyond Sweden are still just starting to hear about them. It's hard not to be skeptical that this is just another lost 70s band that is overrated because of its previous obscurity, but I have been enjoying their first three albums immensely for a while now. I think they definitely measure up to other heavy blues Cream acolytes and proto-metal from the time like Mountain, Leaf Hound, Cactus, Deep Purple, Atomic Rooster, Jerusalem, Captain Beyond, Night Sun, even Led Zep! They evolved out of two Stockholm groups, Train and The Imps and toured with Fleetwood Mac in 1969 before recording their rocking debut(translates to "A New Time Is Here, which remains slightly more consistent than their second album, 2:a (1971), especially with the less bluesy hard rockers "En Annan Värld" and "Ta Ett Steg I Sagans Land”.

http://c3.cduniverse.ws/MuzeAudioArt/Large/71/570671.jpg

Pink Fairies – Kings Of Oblivion (Polydor, 1973)
London's Portobello Road must have been an interesting scene in the early 70s with The Edgar Broughton Band, Hawkwind, Deviants and Pink Fairies playing mostly free shows to hippies, anarchists and biker gangs. Pink Fairies were influenced by both post-beatnik jokesters The Fugs and the MC5. By their third album, Kings Of Oblivion, MC5 was more of a factor with the help of Larry Wallis. Wallis went on to create an early template for Motörhead based on the album, even re-cutting opener "City Kids" on his recordings with Lemmy. It was also considered a key pre-punk influence. One only has to up the tempo of "Raceway" slightly to be reminded of Buzzcocks' "Fast Cars." Or perhaps a slightly less cartoonish precursor to The Dictators Go Girl Crazy. Either way, it's damn fun.

"kings of oblivion" rules but i tried (in the main part) to limit myself to one album per artist so it didn't make my ballot. i should have nominated larry wallis's wondrous "police car" in the tracks poll though.

I'm re-listening to Wayne County & The Electric Chairs, as I always just considered it an interesting but second tier album, kind of like Streetwalkers - Red Card.

Im not sure i can do 1 album per band and choosing which pink fairies albums gonna be tricky

there were a handful i couldn't limit to one but i tried hard.

Aphrodite's Child - 666

I listened to this for the first time last night. It's really good! I was actually unaware that Vangelis used to be in a prog band.

(I don't personally agree that it's the greatest progressive rock album but I do like it.)

Do you know who the bassist/singer is?

Captain Beyond rules. As does kings of oblivion. As does split. Fucking awesome

I'm drunk

I don't think I know Demis Roussos's work outside of AC.

who is gonna make the obvious joke here?

I need to get into Pink Fairies. Their stuff was impossible to find in the late '90s when I was getting into Hawkwind, Deviants, etc. and then I always forget to check them out.

I'm not into solo Demis Roussos, but I love that song "Mehbooba Mehbooba" by RD Burman which is a ripoff/improvement of a Roussos song.

A Roussos and Animal Collective collab would be great

not that AC

Alice Coltrane collab would be cool too. And Alice Cooper. Alex Chilton even. I suspect you're talking about a.... different AC though. ;)

just imagine the song titles

poor roddy

Will be voting for solo Demis in the disco poll.

I've seen a lot of talk about Yeti (rightfully so) but I'm getting through Tanz Der Lemminge right now and that album is a beast.

^real talk, Tanz is probably my single favorite Krautrock album

Those that were liking the Things Your Mother Never Told You album might want to check out Blatantly Offensive under Jayne County and The Electric Chairs, its equally underrated imo.

i'm gonna campaign for MUSIC TO EAT by the hampton grease band. 1971. double album of goofy, sloppy punky jazz rock. this is buttrock. by frazzled nerd-weirdos. track times largely exceed 15 mins a piece. shouting. lyrics found in tourist brochures & on the sides of spray cans. monumentally WIGGY wigouts with out-of-nowhere asymmetrical unison heads a-rearin. how the flip they signalled these beyond me. cross-eyed-chicken-dance grooves. wilful stupidity. 5/7 gallops. BOOGIE. biting guitar tones. drum skins flap. fantastically indistinct 60's basstone insistently mangling the jazz-time. these guys were ITCHING. EPIC ephemera. commonly likened to capting beefart. i grew up w/ the captain, somehow i prefer this now.

I guess this is somewhat "canonical" for this poll/thread, but I just wanted to underline how SCORCHING the first Ash Ra Tempel album is. "Amboss" is 19 minutes of mindfuck, a brain slowly but violently turning itself inside-out. Schulze's drumming is incredibly powerful and propulsive, but unpredictable and intuitive; and Gottsching's guitar is all over the place. Just amazing stuff.

lol @ a world where ash ra tempel is canonical

he's talking ILM-World

I am too

they're no Taylor Swift, it's true.

BTW, I finally picked up Satori. Lord almighty that's a cool-ass record.

I'm putting my ballot together, and most of the stuff I'm excited about voting for doesn't really need campaigning for but I will through up a couple albums that might need help that absolutely rule:

http://www.echoes.dk/images/very.jpg

This was before they went full fantasy-nerd, it's just an amazingly classic hard rock album. I recommend highly you examine it before you write-off Uriah Heep completely...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518EY2TMGYL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

This Thin Lizzy album doesn't get alot of cred or mention, but it's among my favorite albums of all time. It's a very very loose "concept" album but it never really ties together. It's got hard rockin' tracks, and it also has a few really awesome and really depressing blues rock ballads... like Borderline and the absolute classic Fool's Gold

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Potlatch_%28album%29_cover.jpg

Redbone is an awesome rock band comprised of Native Americans. Their debut was a self-titled double LP that is awesome, but their second - Potlach - is probably their best album made in the 70s. It's very much a mix of funk and country rock that's got a lot of edginess. Ahead of the curve, they were writing songs about cocaine in 1970!

Ok, that's my campaigning so far. I might come up with others...
Oh yeah, laugh at me all you want but my favorite Who album is Quadrophrenia. It's going high on my ballot. If you've written it off without giving it a good listen I would recommend trying it again. It doesn't have the singles and hits of "Who's Next" but I think it stands the test of time very very well.

That's enough for now.

The only Heep I have is The Magician's Birthday, and I definitely need to remedy that; thanks for the reminder.

Quadrophenia sucks even more than Tommy

IMO it sucks a lot less than Tommy... But I do agree that Tommy sucks.

i'm gonna campaign for MUSIC TO EAT by the hampton grease band

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be on the spreadsheet... otherwise it would already be on my shortlist! Is the spreadsheet link on the OP still good or is there a newer updated one around? I think I remember the ol' HGB being nomminated...

nm I found it in the T's as they are a "The ..." band.

ok come join me in the ilxor soundrop room and listen to some of the nominations
http://open.soundrop.fm/s/W16fTbbsgjzuGhsN

to see the chat - just simply move your mouse to the right side of the screen and left click and that will bring up the chat box

6 people! but most havent signed into soundrop with their twitter or facebook log ins so cant chat/add/vote so please sign into soundrop!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5136o27zDcL._SS400_.jpg

Hawkwind – Hall Of the Mountain Grill (UA/One Way, 1974)
The double live album Space Ritual (1973) is certainly a great recap of Hawkwind's best up to that point. But it would be a huge mistake to ignore their next album, Hall Of The Mountain Grill, which finds them at their peak, balancing their guitar heavy space rock sound with futurist electronic keyboards and mellotrons. Their classic "Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke)" and "D-Rider" sandwich "Wind Of Change," a moody electronic piece augmented by strings. Side two the highlights "You'd Better Believe It" and Lemmy's biker anthem "Lost Johnny," and closes with the dizzying psych freakout "Paradox." Warrior On The Edge Of Time (1975) also has highlights in "Assault & Battery," "The Golden Void" and "Magnu," and is Lemmy's last album with the band. But to me Mountain Grill, complete with sleeve art of the crushed hull of a spaceship crashed onto an alien planet shrouded in poison gasses, is Hawkwind's iconic peak.

It's impossible for me to figure out which Hawkwind to vote for. I pretty much like the first 4 or 5 equally. Doremi Fasol Latido might have the edge though.

I can't help but pledge my unending allegiance to Space Ritual. It so perfectly encapsulates my favorite era of Hawkwind it almost veers towards cliche.

If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm simultaneously. Do not waste time blocking your ears. Do not waste time seeking a sound proof shelter.

That shit is hilarious...but yeah, Hall of The Mountain Grill is an awfully close runner up.

Space Ritual will always be their magnum opus for me (although i love absolutely everything up until around 1978) but have just never entirely got why Hawk fans love Hall Of The Mountain Grill quite so much. Don't get me wrong, I like it too but Warrior always eclipses it to my ears (despite the ill advised and almost comical Moorcock interludes). The ecstatic mellotron / violin that bridges Assault & Battery and Golden Void is one of my most loved moments in all music. Opa Loka gives the motorik of Neu! a run for their money and Kings Of Speed out Motorheads Lost johnny, while Magnu remains one of their best and most considered ever studio constructions.

Still, Hall of.. has the better Barney Bubbles sleeve and the live recording in Chicago of that tour is in the top 3 best Hawkwind live recordings I've heard. Doremi always loses out a bit by Space Ritual blowing it out of the water nut In Search of Space though is the one that needs more love.

Soundrop rooms still going if anyone wants to pop in

Hall of the Mountain Grill will DEFINITELY be on my ballot... Huge record.

I think im gonna listen to more music before making a ballot

Well shit, now I've heard Warrior On The Edge Of Time and In Search Of Space and I am completely bogged down in the Hawkwind discography. So many riches!!

and smoke?

the Robert Calvert album is also well worth a listen if you want more good 'Awkwind related doings

BTW how the heck did i manage to not nom Algarnas Tradgard? fuck fuck fuck with an extra serving of fuck on the side

Cool album not to be slept on: Randy Holden's Population II. Dude was in Blue Cheer for a while and had a whole side of the third album for himself; this album is an expansion of it and it is a behemoth. I'm not super keen on the first song but the rest is seismic riff action

a sample:

http://youtu.be/lnwVCDA9ZKQ

ok i guess its time to start on my ballot!

Just out of interest, did The Ex make the 80's poll?

i cant remember.

1936 Spanish Revolution made #365 on the albums poll.

ahh yes.

goddamn how fucking good is rocket from the tombs

one of my most treasured records is the life stinks bootleg, distinctly remember my astonishment at finding a sealed copy for $9.99 at my local store in '94 (only 600 were pressed). tho it was an unauthorized ripoff, for a loooong time it was the only way to hear rocket from the tombs stuff, such a crucial band for me at the time. I actually never got around to hearing the offical release, the day the earth met the rocket from the tombs... until today... buncha stuff on there that wasn't on life stinks!

so fkn gdamn good fuck

this shits all over the dead boys vers imo

http://youtu.be/WsCGTe38EEA

Never Gonna Kill Myself Again is one of my personal faves, it's an amazing collection.

Fucking amazing collection.

I know it's challopsy but RFTT > anything any of them did afterwards, doesn't help that dead boys/pere ubu's best songs were cribbed from them

RFTT are v. cool, but wtf were you maniacs thinking when you had a fucking meltdown cow over including this:

Steve Reich - Phase Patterns: http://youtu.be/BelPNaePHiU

Reich was feeding raw, aggro DNA to krautrock, no wave (and its rock descendants), industrial, Kraftwerk, etc. insistent, relentless and stripped, a psychedelia not from synesthesia but from extreme focus, the self imploded - machine thought. complete obliteration of the "I" in either case, but this particular psych legacy is still rolling out, ripping up inner space, and I think it's the paramount psych legacy of the 70s. you can grok this stamp across the board in contemporary music. Reich was building agitation made from thousand-yard-stares and the will to live, while Hawkwind were busy piloting the Goodyear Blimp into a mustache factory, thinking their spaceship had beamed into God's own asshole. and I really like Hawkwind.

Steve Reich - Piano Phase: http://youtu.be/

now I must prepare for this year's apocalypse in my flood-zone condo.

Albini built a goddamn cottage industry from this robo-pound impulse (did you think the cover of The Model was strictly for laffs?). after that, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Gore, Prong, Pantera, etc. all fell into line. Helmet were influenced by Big Black, but also by Hamilton's time w/Band of Susans and Chatham. multiple strands of minimalist echos/aesthetics floating around in rock circles. I'll vote f/Space Ritual, but I'm repping f/No New York in the blues-obliterated clamor category.

It's trippy and psychedelic, and is even more rock-influenced than most other Western art music, but I don't think it's crazy to say that Steve Reich isn't really hard-rocking, certainly not more so than early Pink Floyd or (especially) Dancing in Your Head-era Ornette. In fact, the overall effect is more meditative, intentionally so. I'm a fan btw: Reich probably means more to me than most of what's on this list but I wouldn't want to be ranking Steve Reich albums vs Cheap Trick albums in a hard 'n' heavy 'n' loud rock poll.

Branca and Chatham are another story.

Hawkwind's strain of psych really re-emerges in the 90s in free noise but also in power electronics, which aggressively overdrives machine-tech aesthetics into smoking, protean blare with a return-of-the-repressed obsession w/the corporeal (sex + death, really).

xxp

I wouldn't want to be ranking Steve Reich albums vs Cheap Trick albums in a hard 'n' heavy 'n' loud rock poll.

zero difference between this and comparing Bon Jovi and Keiji Haino is the 80s poll, and one of things that made that particular poll different from the bazillion other 80s polls. AG put his foot down f/that poll, but perhaps trolling fatigue got to him a bit by the time this one rolled around and he caved on this particular point. but there's a truck-sized hole in this poll w/minimalism's name on it, and excluding minimalism was a mistake IMO.

and Floyd is wet-noodle slobber compared to the links I posted above. to paraphrase our friend EIII, if you don't think Phase Patterns rocks, then I don't understand you.

furthermore, the fucking fuck subway is closing at 7. what would Zoogz do?

zero difference between this and comparing Bon Jovi and Keiji Haino

Well, that does seem different to me, although I don't know if I'll convince you. Keiji Haino is an electric guitarist coming from a rock background (which Reich most certainly did not). Fushitsusha is clearly a heavy rock band, albeit one that is more abstracted than Bon Jovi. Even Haino's noisy guitar improvisations still seem to be coming out of a post-Hendrix/Who rock-out aesthetic to me, which I never see in Reich.

AG put his foot down f/that poll, but perhaps trolling fatigue got to him a bit by the time this one rolled around and he caved on this particular point. but there's a truck-sized hole in this poll w/minimalism's name on it, and excluding minimalism was a mistake IMO.

This seems like an odd statement. Minimalism was not included in the 80s poll either. Some of Reich's best work is from the 80s but no one was clamouring for it to be included in the 80s rock poll.

"...most certainly was not (coming from a rock background)"

yeah there was no minimalism in the 80s poll iirc

and there was a LOT of complaints when some was included in this poll

early minimalism is v. clearly more abrasive and dissonant than the more florid later works. and w/the 80s, there was so much genre convergence, that minimalism was already in a sense included in the poll in a number of different guises that I've referenced above. look, what's done is done w/r/t the poll, but denying the connections between the obsessive psych Reich was pushing and later rock is madness.

I hope you guys aren't sleeping on the riffage, hard rock onslaught on these records!!!
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8186/8131243843_de6b10cee2.jpg
Sabbath will probably take this poll, but meanwhile Bang was feeding Christians to lions on their self titled Metal Monster!! Here's my favorite RYM review of Bang
“Bang” by Bang, from 1971, it’s a futile, stupid exercise on the Black Sabbath mimicry, a singer who sings like Ossie Osborne, a guitarist who guitars like Antonio Iommi, and a drummer who drums like William Ward.
Ack: throw me all the fucking shit you want: Bang, and their retarded synonymia bores the fucking Atlantic ocean out me: songs that want to emulate the menacing vibe of Balck Sabbath, meh and more meh.
How, for the life of me will you name “Bang” a band? And their first and eponymicist album is also called “Bang”??!!? Wot the chac?
There are in here attempts of a sensitive folk bullshit, namely “Last will”, which is deader than your GYBE! (get yer bollocks east) Or how the fuck is called.
I don’t get tired of repeating all these proto metal obscurities are a 87,6 percent crap, what’s the point, what’s THE GRACE in digging this? Who the fuck? These are the Black Sabbath roadies: I don’t want, give me the originals, or give me Soulja Boy, or Soja, or soy, but not these lousy impersonators.
In the tune “Come with me” there is “tapping”, fact that shows that Edward Van Hat did not invent this technique, technique that, on the other hand, is quite a twathead of a way to play guitar, if you ask me. “Our home” is, regardless, such a fine cunt-rock, barbaric admixture of Black Sabbath with The Beatels, with heavy-hippie chorus, and I bet that “Bang” barely used to take showers: did I guess right? On the other hand, “Future shock” is more kleptomania from...from who could be? YES: YOU GUESSED RIGHT
It’s from Black Sabbath...but then is not on the other hand: it’s on the same hand, heh *falls unconscious, stands up suddenly, keeps on typing* Someone told me that this kind of music is to listen to if you are stoned, but I think that if you listen to Bang being stoned, the hallucinations may turn into vivid nightmares, especially because Bang are horrible.
I recently knew that the guitarist composed the whole album in 2 hours, listening to “Paranoid” out loud with headphones, and drinking wino “pajarito”: at this stage of the game, the mimetism turns into unbearable for the listener to stand these souls with out a personality, playing the same caveman’s riffola which goes the fuck nowhere, I mean: yeah, “you imitate Sabbath: great, but hey: why the cocks don’t you do “the shift”, and cut the fucking crap once for all: cannot do something a bit different?”
No: Bang cannot do something else than this poor art, this beggars’ banquet: after a song that has an 1% of Uriah Heep influence, the blessed end to these 34 minutes comes, with “Redman”: more stolid riffa-raffa, cowbell, and overall, less grace than a shoe soup.
Unfortunately after the release, the bassist committed suicide while listened to this, but survived, because the bullet experienced a weird parabola into his skull, and the bullet still is there: into his skull today, 2009, the doctors say that if the bullet is extracted, this poor man would get suddenly dissolved in seconds, turning into a gluey dough like that Edgar Poe’s Mr. Valdemar, lol.
Possibly if Black Sabbath never existed Bang would have played skifle; or Paraguayan polka, tango nuevo, maybe Andean folklore, carnavalito perhaps? Don’t know, it’s hard to guess. Listen to Bang!!!

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8336/8131112722_14ec0fb864.jpg
Jeff Liberman channels Carlos Santana on his second record titled 'Solitude Within' and it is kind of a lonely record, when you can turn out solos like this!!! The record is spit between instrumentals and hammered vocals where he sings like he's trying to charm a lady out of her dress. This record shreds!!!!

Rise Above reissued the Bang albums.

yeah they're on spotify too, I'm checking them out for sure!

I dont think they're on spotify here

or they weren't a month ago when i checked. Just albums by someone else with the same name but it looks like some stuffs been added

Albini built a goddamn cottage industry from this robo-pound impulse (did you think the cover of The Model was strictly for laffs?). after that, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Gore, Prong, Pantera, etc. all fell into line.

and w/the 80s, there was so much genre convergence, that minimalism was already in a sense included in the poll in a number of different guises that I've referenced above.

Come on, saying that Ministry and Nine Inch Nails may have been influenced on some level by minimalism is not the same as saying that minimalism itself was thus included in the 80s poll. (Plenty of psychedelic rock has been influenced by Indian classical music but that does not mean that Hindustani music itself is part of the poll.) And thinking that Reich should be excluded from this poll is not the same as denying that there is any connection between his work and that of rock artists.

With any sort of genre distinction, there is some grey area. If you're mainly emphasizing abrasiveness and dissonance as the defining criteria, then perhaps you would include this stuff (although it would make even more sense to include Penderecki and Ligeti then, which you might also favour). I tend to place significant importance on timbre/instrumentation and beat/rhythmic patterns, to a lesser extent song forms, although not exclusively. Many of the bands in these lists played around with all of these elements but still seem to use them as a reference point. There is an obsessively repetitive and heavily emphasized rhythmic pulse in Reich but I don't see it as having much to do with a rock backbeat. (It has more to do with West African drumming patterns, if anything.)

In any case, I think it's going too far to say that people who would want to exclude Steve Reich, who is almost universally categorized as a classical composer, from a 70s heavy rock poll are trolling.

Come on, saying that Ministry and Nine Inch Nails may have been influenced on some level by minimalism is not the same as saying that minimalism itself was thus included in the 80s poll. (Plenty of psychedelic rock has been influenced by Indian classical music but that does not mean that Hindustani music itself is part of the poll.)

the key phrase I used was "in a sense". obv minimalism per se wasn't included in the 80s poll, but I think that a lot of its more aggro traits had by that time been absorbed by rock (and can even be said to have been transforming rock during that period). also, minimalism in the 80s (at least in its most commercial incarnations) had really evolved (or devolved, depending on your perspective) into a cloying sort of lite/NPR-approved art music that I think is fairly distant from rock (I think minimalism split itself in two at some point, perhaps towards the late middle of the 70s, with its more aggressive elements being absorbed and transformed by a number of other genres, while minimalism proper gradually grew more and more baroque and compromised). the really key early 70s works, though, obviously hadn't been absorbed until after their appearance, and for this reason I think the notion of their inclusion in this particular poll has merit (even though it's kind of ridiculous to argue about it at this point).

I threw out the terms "abrasive" and "dissonant" merely to emphasize the radical starkness of the v. early minimal works as compared to the later, more complex and more melodic pieces that most people actually associate w/minimalism. while I think that minimalism's radical simplicity was in and of itself hugely influential (especially in punk-related spheres), I agree that rhythm is really more of the defining characteristic. now, the issue of minimalism's inclusion doesn't pivot around Reich's intentionality in terms of whether or not he in any way saw himself and what he did as being related to rock, but rather the effect of his music on rock. also, while "West African drumming patterns" may be the academically correct way of referring to Reich's rhythms, I hear in his early works speed-freak tempos and a monomaniacal drive that easily transcends the realm of the metronomic and pushes clear into rock territory. also, any relation to West African drumming necessarily brings us in a roundabout way back to rock (or a "rock backbeat"). so, in a way I don't really care if Reich is "universally categorized as a classical composer", b/c that's a mere abstraction and I'm talking about v. specific and concrete traits regarding his early work that I think were hugely influential in rock.

now, generally speaking, I'm mainly referring to the earlier minimalist works, so perhaps our disagreement stems in part from a misunderstanding on that point. you may also be using Carducci's definition of rock and automatically excluding everything that doesn't refer to small-band music centered around guitar and live drums. the main problem w/sticking with this formula is that you end up green-lighting horseshit like Bon Jovi and excluding Keiji Haino. for me, music that can be described as rock (or rock-influenced, or rawk or rocking or w/e) generally has to have either a v. genuine sonic or conceptual aggression, and I hear both in Reich's music, and furthermore can very easily hear where this aggression later emerges in rock music. (I suppose using the general definition of this poll, Bon Jovi is rock but doesn't rawk, while Reich's early synth and piano works definitely rawk).

finally, the 80s poll was trolled incessantly by people up in arms about the criteria, and when this poll's inclusion of minimalism looked like it was going to ignite a similar amount of controversy, the plug was almost instantaneously pulled. now we have a v. nice, normal poll w/out any drama, but this has proved unexpectedly unfortunate.

it's an internet bulletin board poll.
get a grip !

^^^

c'mon man, this is the most action this poll has seen in two weeks!

and wtf, the very definition of internet bulletin board poll involves inane hair-splitting and ridiculous arguments.

ah, i see.
IMO the qualification criteria were wildly elastic and inconsistent, but it wasn't ever my poll, so fair do's.
back in the seventies rock was rock. reich was fringe academic classical. at that time very different spheres / audiences. rhythm pre-dates minimalism.
BTW i nearly nommed algarnas tradgard, but it didn't get over my own rock threshold despite guitars & drums.

Albini built a goddamn cottage industry from this robo-pound impulse
urgh i was sick in my mouth there for a second

IMO the qualification criteria were wildly elastic and inconsistent, but it wasn't ever my poll, so fair do's.
back in the seventies rock was rock. reich was fringe academic classical. at that time very different spheres / audiences. rhythm pre-dates minimalism.

tbf, no one could ever find any cluster of criteria that would satisfy everyone. I think the poll has been fairly consistent given the task at hand, but there have been times when my own picks were booted, so naturally I have gripes. really, my point here is more to boost Reich in the context of 70s psych than tear down the poll. in terms of "rock was rock", we ran into the same issue w/the 80s poll where REM were v. early on in their career lumped in by association w/punk, but in retrospect seem v. twee and not at all punk rock.

urgh i was sick in my mouth there for a second

ha! it does have a distinctly stomach-churning quality, for a variety of reasons.

oh yeah - nowt against AG or the poll. genres only exist by distinction & no two people distinguish the same so, there's always going to be friction. i'm still peeved that i didn't get my cecil taylors through, but it doesn't really matter.
the very thought of assigning any value to anything steve albini has ever done makes me queasy, though.

but he's #!

Ha, I think I'd sooner include Steve Reich than Cecil Taylor (whom I also like plenty).

Hm, Black Oak Arkansas are actually sounding pretty good.

BOA sound great! Very underrated band, IMO.

Have you guys been checking out Blue Mountain Eagle!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Otc_okvDfzU/TOn18hjdy1I/AAAAAAAAATE/nbCkLCjtA48/s1600/bluemountaineagle01jpg.jpg
Searing Heavy Heavy Psych with a hint of southern rawk , it's got melodies too!! Check out Feel Like a Bandit, Loveless Lives, and Trivial Sum.

checking it out now!!

also been going through things I kinda know about but not really... This has stood out as an easy ballot choice for me:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/519dR4rjVVL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

This is one "supergroup" that deserves the designation!

ok I finally finished my albums ballot... time to move on to tracks!

My (late as usual) verdict on Satori - good, but not quite as good as Yeti.

One thing I've discovered, 70s Boomtown Rats >>>> 80s Boomtown Rats.

Hoping that plenty of you will be joining me in giving a vote to the Runaways' self-titled album as one of the ultimate good-times albums. Teenpop-loving old men of ILM, time to do your duty. ;)

hey guys im gonna extend voting til basically after the EOY polls. It gives everyone more time to check out albums before voting. Dont worry its not cancelled it will resume january or feb at the latest when the big eoy poll is done. Anyone who voted; your ballot is safe. Anyone can still vote in the meantime and of course you can resend ballots later too if you wish to change.

Feel free to keep discussing albums here as i intend to do that.

Yeah, that sounds good. Made any good new discoveries?

Not as yet, but I will do hopefully as I have given us all time to do exactly that! Also afaik the tracks poll is going ahead so everyone can concentrate on it and worry about albums later. Its a lot of listening.

Oh God AG thank you!

Really liked Area - Crac! Ironically, I wasn't checking out that many tracks at all since I was trying to catch up on albums.

Campaigning for albums should still continue as it gives everyone time to check out albums. And if you want to vote go ahead! pollwill still happen dont worry.

OK in the spirit of keeping conversation going -
I'm still working my way through the albums that are sort of cult favorites on here & elsewhere but that I'd not heard previously. Yesterday I gave Sir Lord Baltimore - Kingdom Come a listen. First thoughts - love the guitar sound on it, not so mad about some of the actual songs and the singing style. That guitar sound though - scorching!

Also appreciate the general manic atmosphere that the album has.

There's still some doubles on spreadsheet (Ace Frehley s/t and Ace Frehley - Ace Frehely, I'm drinking cold gin with you) ... Should I be concerned? Filling out ballot today/tonight and gettin' to ya.

ok will sort it. Keep your ballots coming they will be safe til they get counted.

Ok, but delaying up to 3 months is quite a long time! From what I've seen, this will lose momentum/energy within a few weeks. Why not set the deadline for mid-December and roll it out then? EOY doesn't roll out until later in January at the latest, so it wouldn't interfere.

I'm continuing to check out stuff from the list, but nothing from the past few weeks so far that's going to impact my top 100. For example, I'm glad I was reminded to check out Beck, Bogert & Appice. It's cool to hear what happened when they finally together post-Cactus. Their musicianship is tip-top, but as much as I like it and Cactus, the songs are not quite up to the standards of anything in the top 100.

However, if your schedule simply got too busy to do this before next year, then by all means do what you gotta do. But I don't think the rest of us need more than another 30-40 days!

*later in January at the EARLIEST

Does this mean nominations open up again? Can't believe no 'Look At Yourself' by Uriah Heep (and many others, actually)...

Perhaps a clean up of 'The' and no 'The' for bands in the spreadsheet layout?

I'll have a look and see if i can edit it if not i'll ask seandalai

that's for removing "the" btw. Wont be reopening nominations

maybe a mod could change the title to voting still open but doesnt close til feb 2013?

That would be nice! Also, maybe less TEXT IN CAPS? It makes it very visible, but also harder to read, IMO.

Yeah it's pretty quiet. I still support just doing it in December, but up to AG.

http://lisathatcher.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/ns-1.jpg%3Fw%3D594%26h%3D509

Night Sun - Mournin' (Zebra/Second Battle, 1972)
Among previously overlooked cult albums by Jerusalem, Lucifer's Friend, Bang, Blues Creation and Blackwater Park, Night Sun's Mournin' stands out in the pack as an exceptional piece of German proto-metal with elements of spacy, jazzy prog, screamy Ian Gillian style vocals, and even some moments of doomy heaviness surpassed at the time only by Sabbath. Though it was produced by Conny Plank at windrose in Hamburg, Mournin' was not celebrated along with the likes of Plank-produced Kraftwerk, Faust and Ash Ra Tempel mainly because its proggy proto-metal was simply not fashionable, at least until recently. Many of the members have a background in 60s jazz band Take Five, and it shows in their chops. The keyboard-heavy grooves still have that satisfyingly lumbering stomp, but they can spin on a dime when they need to, like on the scorching "Nightmare." The instrumental "Got A Bone Of My Own," "Plastic Shotgun" and "Crazy Woman" are just as impressive and compare well against the best that Uriah Heep and Atomic Rooster have to offer from all their albums.

Night Sun is back in stock at Aquarius records and also available at Reckless Records in Chicago.

Full album: http://youtu.be/Iy6GbLoSxBg

So I can still vote in this? Cool. Deadline again?

february/march?

Sheeit. I just noticed there is no Kevin Coyne on here. Any chance for late nominations seeing as there is more time?

Decided to finally take the plunge with Hawkwind - after one listen through Space Ritual I can already see why some people get so heavily into these guys.

Whatever happened to this poll? Is it still going to happen?

Oh yeah! Is it? I sent in an albums ballot ages ago but still haven't finished my tracks one. This still gonna happen?

maybe a mod could change the title to voting still open but doesnt close til feb 2013?

― Algerian Goalkeeper, Thursday, November 8, 2012 10:37 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Delayed to create more room for the EOY poll.

xp

is it too late to submit a ballot?

xp I think it's going to happen some time after the main EOY poll finishes (btw: please vote in the EOY poll!). In the meantime, you can still submit ballots.

i was kinda done with polls but what with not doing metal poll anymore i guess im more up for finishing this one if blount is too

voting can still take place btw. Not sure of end date yet but get listening/voting etc

oh and campaigning too.

can a mod please remove the " Closes Nov 8th 11.59 PM UK Time" part please as it is probably stopping people from opening the thread and they wont realise its restarting.

There will be at least one month before voting closes .

End date 8th March ok with everybody or would you prefer longer? (everything depends on seandalai's availability)

All cast votes are safe but you can re-vote if you have changed your mind.

No Talking Heads in this?

Voted. That was fucking difficult.

n/m the above... just realized how this works with the nomination thread and stuff.

yeah we held that last year and started the voting but then postponed it for a few months. It gives everyone a chance to check out the nominations.
8th march is probably going to be the closing date but it can be extended if people ask.

If you've already voted aaaaaaaaages ago, do you need to vote again? That'd be a pain

no need to vote again, your ballot persists

cheers for thread title change jjj!

thanks for the new ballots unfortunately you dont get auto replies but if you post here that you voted then seandalai or i can confirm it!

the Takin' Care of Business: ILX 70s RAWK TRAX VOTING RULES AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD - VOTING THREAD!- Closes Nov 8th 11.59 PM UK Time - All ILXORS/LURKERS WELCOME has been taken over by viceroy as balls doesnt have the time. Remember to vote there!

btw it closes MARCH 8th too same as this poll

thanks to todays voters. they went through

another overnight, thanks!

i need to do mine. I forgot I hadnt voted

still need to do it

acid metrics or edward iii or stirmonster are you gonna campaign?

Wish sonic youth had a 70s album then we might get more chat on this thread!!

imago come talk prog!

Spotify albums playlist http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/1rFbtUwZlcYHBD6gcemMeK

was the 70s the first real decade of rock critics? Is that when they became a big deal?

heh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_journalism

Popular music

Music writers only started "treating pop and rock music seriously" in 1964 "after the breakthrough of the Beatles...".[3] One of the early music magazines in Britain, Melody Maker, complained in 1967 about how "newspapers and magazines are continually hammering [i.e., attacking] pop music".[4] Melody Maker magazine advocated the new forms of pop music of the late 1960s. "By 1999, the 'quality' press was regularly carrying reviews of popular music gigs and albums", which had a "key role in keeping pop" in the public eye. As more pop music critics began writing, this had the effect of "legitimating pop as an art form"; as a result, "newspaper coverage shifted towards pop as music rather than pop as social phenomenon".[5]

Steve Jones claims that both popular music articles and academic articles about pop music are usually written from "masculine subject positions". As more pop music critics began writing, this had the effect of "legitimating pop as an art form"; as a result, "newspaper coverage shifted towards pop as music rather than pop as social phenomenon";[6] as well, in the way that critics differentiate between pop music and rock, using terms like "trivial", "fluffy", or "formulaic" for pop (versus "serious", "raw", and "sincere" for rock), there is an implicit or even explicitly gendered dichotomy.[7] Simon Frith notes that pop and rock music are closely associated with gender; that is, with conventions of male and female behaviour.[8]

In the world of pop music criticism, there tends to be a quick turnover. The "pop music industry expects that any particular [music critic] star can disappear within five years; in contrast, the "stars" of rock criticism are more likely to have long careers with "book contracts, featured columns, and editorial and staff positions at magazines and newspapers. Critic Robert Christgau was the "originator of the 'consumer guide' approach to pop music reviews", an approach to writing pop recording reviews that was designed to help consumers to decide whether to buy a new album.[9]

In the realm of rock music (as indeed in that of classical music),[10] critics have not always been respected by their subjects. Frank Zappa declared that, "Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read." In the Guns N' Roses song "Get in the Ring", Axl Rose verbally attacked critics who gave the band negative reviews because of their actions on stage; such critics as Andy Secher, Mick Wall and Bob Guccione, Jr. were mentioned by name.
US music writer Robert Christgau was one of the first rock critics in the 1960s.

Carl Wilson describes "an upsurge in pro-pop sentiment among critics" during the early 2000s, a "new generation [of music critics] moved into positions of critical influence" and then "mounted a wholesale critique against the syndrome of measuring all popular music by the norms of rock culture."[11] In 2008, Ann Powers of the LA Times argued that "[p]op music critics have always been contrarians", because "pop music [criticism] rose up as a challenge to taste hierarchies, and has remained a pugilistic, exhibitionist business throughout pop's own evolution."[12]

Powers claims that "[i]nsults, rejections of others' authority, bratty assertions of superior knowledge and even threats of physical violence are the stuff of which pop criticism is made"; at the same time, the "best [pop criticism] also offers loving appreciation and profound insights about how music creates and collides with our everyday realities." She states that pop criticism developed as a "slap at the establishment, at publications such as the hippie homestead Rolling Stone and the rawker outpost Creem." She notes that the "1980s generation" of post-punk indie rockers "has lately [i.e., in the 2000s] been taken down by younger "poptimists," who argue that lovers of underground rock are elitists for not embracing the more multicultural mainstream". Powers claims that with the 2000s-era "poptimism" critical approach, debates about bands and styles are "like the scrum in rugby", because "[e]verybody pushes against everybody else, and we move forward in a huge blob of vehement opinion and mutual judgment".[12]

Slate magazine writer Jody Rosen discussed the 2000s-era trends in pop music criticism in the article "The Perils of Poptimism". Rosen notes that much of the debate is centred over the perception that that rock critics "...regard rock as "normative … the standard state of popular music … to which everything else is compared."[13] At a 2006 pop critic conference, attendees discussed their "...guilty pop pleasures, reconsidering musicians (Tiny Tim, Dan Fogelberg, Phil Collins) and genres (blue-eyed soul, Muzak)" which rock critics have long dismissed as lightweight, commercial music. Rosen states that "this new critical paradigm" is called "popism"—or, more evocatively (and goofily), "poptimism". The "poptimism" approach states that "Pop (and, especially, hip-hop) producers are as important as rock auteurs, Beyoncé is as worthy of serious consideration as Bruce Springsteen, and ascribing shame to pop pleasure is itself a shameful act".[14] In 2006, Martin Edlund from the New York Sun argued that music bloggers are to some degree displacing newspaper and magazine-based pop music critics. Edlund notes that while the "Internet has democratized music criticism, it seems it's also spread its penchant for uncritical hype".[15]

So it all started with the beatles then?

Powers claims that "[i]nsults, rejections of others' authority, bratty assertions of superior knowledge and even threats of physical violence are the stuff of which pop criticism is made"; at the same time, the "best [pop criticism] also offers loving appreciation and profound insights about how music creates and collides with our everyday realities." She states that pop criticism developed as a "slap at the establishment, at publications such as the hippie homestead Rolling Stone and the rawker outpost Creem." She notes that the "1980s generation" of post-punk indie rockers "has lately [i.e., in the 2000s] been taken down by younger "poptimists," who argue that lovers of underground rock are elitists for not embracing the more multicultural mainstream". Powers claims that with the 2000s-era "poptimism" critical approach, debates about bands and styles are "like the scrum in rugby", because "[e]verybody pushes against everybody else, and we move forward in a huge blob of vehement opinion and mutual judgment".[12]

how dare critics like 'rawk' eh? to me that signifies the exact sort of elitist bs that the pop critics complain about with rock crits.

The idea that you have to like one to the exclusion of the other seems awfully outdated. However it seems it was a big issue even in 1969.

Last week I was looking for Philip Cato's book Crash Course for the Ravers; a Glam Odyssey (1997), but it's out of print. Instead I bought Goodbye Mickey Finn for just $.99. Since it was so cheap, I thought it was just short-story length, but it's actually 446 pages! It's like a meta-autobiography where Cato writes as Finn writing a diary, starting in 1969 several months before he bumps into Marc Bolan at a pub and eventually becomes a member of T. Rex. It covers everything from mundane daily activities to what he reads in the newspaper and bands he sees live and his relationship with his live-in girlfriend, and eventually his own gigs and recording sessions, photo shoots and making a movie with Ringo. It seems all the shows, lineups and dates really happened, with Cato exhaustively researching on the level of George Gimarc's Punk Diaries. I thought it could be boring and it might be for some, but there's plenty of hilarious bits, drugs and groupie sex to spice it up. So one of the things that struck me was the distinctly vicious backlash Finn supposedly experienced before T. Rex were even successful, even when they were still Tyranosaurus Rex.

He spent a lot of time going to free festivals and shows in the Ladbroke Grove hippie scene with The Edgar Broughton Band, Pink Fairies and such, and Finn and Bolan were tagged as sellouts, selling out the hippie ideals. Partly because Bolan fired Steve Took who had a lot of friends in that scene, and Finn was perceived as "stealing" his gig even though he told Bolan no several times at first as he didn't even consider himself a musician. And the other issue was they had started recording "pop" songs like "Ride A White Swan" and "Hot Love" and performing on TV, and eventually incorporating *gasp* electric instruments. It sounds like a precursor to the indie vs. mainstream debates of the 80s, 90s and beyond. There's a long list of bands he references, many of which are in this poll. Well worth the dollar!

The idea that you have to like one to the exclusion of the other seems awfully outdated. However it seems it was a big issue even in 1969.

Still is, esp on ILM. Just look at eoy poll threads and the distaste for music that places.

Going to start on my ballot. Going to have to be strict and limit it to 1 album per band.

I'm insufficiently hardnheavynloud for this poll but I think I'll vote anyway. One thing: the spreadsheet has "Roxy Music - Roxy Music" and "Roxy Music - s/t" as separate entries

oh I should probably do this

yes you should. Lots of albums you need to check out. Especially things like Flower Travellin Band and Be Bop Deluxe. They are right up your alley.

man which Neu! to choose?

this is hard. Might have to do 2 Funkadelic and 2 King Crimson because there's 2 albums of each I cannot choose between. Managed to choose a pink fairies album cuz I think my fave album of theirs is a bit different to what others think.

ok now to cut the longlist down to 100. Then to decide whether to do weighted, split or unweighted.

this is tough. might rank top 50 then do rest unweighted

and I did so

Sunday would be a great day to start your ballot.

think we have 19 ballots for albums so please vote!

This poll (POLL 1971: Scaruffi's top 20 albums of that year) prompted me to take a look at Scaruffi's all-time rock list. A good proportion were 70s albums. Faust and Pere Ubu will probably do well in this poll too.

01. Robert Wyatt: Rock Bottom
02. Faust: Faust I
03. Popol Vuh: Hosianna Mantra
04. Pere Ubu: Modern Dance
05. John Fahey: Fare Forward Voyagers
06. Nico: Desert Shore
07. Tim Buckley: Lorca
08. Klaus Schulze: Irrlicht
09. Neu!: self-titled
10. Suicide: self-titled
11. Residents: Not Available
12. Pop Group: Y
13. Third Ear Band: self-titled
14. Soft Machine: 3
15. Gong: Flying Teapot

I was kind of annoyed the deadline for this was radically extended after I submitted a ballot, since it meant I could have held off and tried to list to more, but the truth is I haven't been much in the mood for this sort of music, so it doesn't really matter. (And I am talking about it why? Maybe because it's almost time to go to bed and catch up on sleep.)

It's still okay to resubmit my ballot if I voted during the first push for this poll, right?

Yeah, you can just submit a new one.

yeah what seandalai says

http://i.imgur.com/9Zpk09y.gif?1

seandalai how many album ballots do we have? (minus the 1st ballots of those resubmitting)

Fastnbulbous: lol I have always referred to you as the American Scaruffi, since you both have a tendency to make lengthy rankings based on year

Rudipherous: I'm not entirely sure if this is up your alley, but have you checked out the Las Grecas record I nominated? Awesome psych-salsa. I've been listening to their best of on Spotify for the last couple days, so rad.

Glad to finally get my ballot finished/sent, couldn't believe some of the great records I ended up having to leave off.

It was worse for the 80s poll as the ballot was only 50

thanks for voting btw!

I think we have 20 album ballots but not sure because of a few resubmitted ballots plus its kinda hard to work it out due to the way the s/sheet is formatted

Filling out my ballot for this poll got me to finally check out Slade and holy cow I think I'm in love.

is there a consensus on best Slade album?

xp I only wish I could be as prolific like Scaruffi who's published a shit-ton of books. I should read one someday.

Speaking of books, I came across this passage while on the train this morning, 83% into Goodbye Mickey Finn. He's on tour in Japan:

31st October 1973
...On the bed isa package courtesy of EMI Japan. There's a selection of our albums; top quality vinyl housed in shiny cardboard covers, Japanese script alongside the more familiar English words, which seems weird to me, as if somehow the songs are going to sound different. Also enclosed are a selection of LPs by Japanese rock bands with crazy names such as Flower Travelin' Band (the cover of which features the band stark bollock naked speeding down the highway on a set of choppers straight out of Easy Rider), Far Out and my personal favourite, Masahiko Satoh & New Herd Orchestra. I've no idea what this stuff sounds like although Takeshi, a security bloke who speaks a smattering of English, reckons some of it is as good, if not better, than English and American stuff. Apparently the bands can really play and the only thing that holds it back as far as Western ears are concerned is the incomprehensible language it's sung in. Still, you can't have everything.

Unfortunately it doesn't give an account of him actually listening to them and reactions. They should have given him Satori, which would have been more recent than Anywhere.

great to see Betty Davis's Nasty Gal on here. Anyone who hasn't heard it should def check it out. I'm out of my depth with this rawk stuff but I'd state categorically that this is "heavier" than all the other funk on this poll

xp I like Slayed? (1972)

So speaking of underrated glam...

Sweet - Sweet Fanny Adams (RCA, 1974)

http://fastnbulbous.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/sweet-sweet1.jpg

...Despite the fact that it melded the best of both the worlds of T. Rex and Queen, and influenced everyone from Kiss to Cheap Trick and Motley Crue, Sweet Fanny Adams wasn’t even released properly in the U.S. Only part of it was heard in a domestic reissue of Desolation Boulevard (1974), a minor classic in its own right. It was finally reissued by Sony BMG in 2005, remastered with copious bonus tracks. The album kicks off with proto-speedmetal, I kid you not. “Set Me Free” is fast and clean with a tight guitar solo that sticks in the brain, basically providing a template for later Judas Priest and NWOBHM, and eventually covered by Saxon among many others. It definitely shows Andy Scott is one of the undersung guitar heroes of the era. “No You Don’t” is a brooding, psych rocker with vocals that rival Ozzy Osbourne’s paranoia. The B-side “Burning” also pays tribute to Black Sabbath. “In To The Night,” has the coolest intro, building up from a simple drum pattern and riff, that probably made the likes of Alice Cooper and Ted Nugent green with envy, had they even heard it. “Peppermint Twist” and “AC-DC” break up the dark rockers with some pop. I believe the Australian AC/DC already existed by the time the latter came out. Sweet F.A., yeah!

Glad to see some campaigning for albums

oh good 3 more album ballots overnight but I do wish you all would post here just so the thread gets bumped and we can doublecheck it went through.

A repost of the spotify link http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/1rFbtUwZlcYHBD6gcemMeK

intending to do a ballot AG, just a matter of finding the time...

You still have 3 weeks but I know others like to do listening first so they should be doing that if they want to get a vote in on time.

btw I forgot to say but im dumping the you can only vote for 3 bands bit IF you fill out a full 100 ballot.

so if you do a ballot of 100 there is no limit. If you wanna vote all the funkadelic or miles davis or sabbath or priest etc then just make sure its a full ballot of 100.

Cool!

Though I dont see why anyone would want to do that as I had enough trouble cutting stuff.
Just dont stuff 5 led zep or funkadelic or whatever at the top!

And of course anybody can resubmit ballots if they wish.

Remember to vote in
Takin' Care of Business: ILX 70s RAWK TRAX VOTING RULES AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD - VOTING THREAD!- Closes Nov 8th 11.59 PM UK Time - All ILXORS/LURKERS WELCOME

I'm in the process of doing a re-vote after getting this extra time to listen to stuff but I really didn't anything I heard now had much of a chance to break into my top 50 but HOLY SHIT...this Sir Lord Baltimore Kingdom Come album is incredible! These songs (with the exception of the tame proggier track, which is fine too) sound like they are about to run off the rails at any moment. So so good. If there is more stuff like this lurking in the overwhelming album nominations I might need to reassess my entire ballot. So, is there more stuff like this?

oh probably.But you need to ask the others who are well versed in it. I know some like Man (ask vegemite grrrl) , Bang, Leaf Hound and Captain Beyond. And you are probably familiar with Flower Travellin Band and The Groundhogs.
Skot to thread I guess.

frijid pink, josefus, highway robbery, dust, buffalo

I guess death's ...for the whole world to see is eligible in this horse race too

Man rulez! Seek this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5wdyyjci0o

keep suggested listening suggestions coming guys!

If you want krautrocking heavy jams then do check out
Ash Ra Tempel
Guru Guru
Gila

Also seandalai I meant to ask. Should those resubmitting their ballots say soon their ballot somewhere just to make it a bit easier for you?

man did we really not put highway robbery on the nom list

http://youtu.be/FA5_pT6p4mI

Glad to see you back campaigning Edward! Where is acid metrics though?

Thanks! I am familiar with Flower Travellin' Band, Captain Beyond, Ash Ra and Guru Guru (all currently occupying premium real estate on my ballot) but I haven't heard any of those other ones.

If people keep recommending/campaigning for things we could get some really good less well known stuff into the ballot and that is what made the 80s poll so much fun. Plus with the funk and the kosmiche and the weird we could have some bizarro world results just like the 80s poll that made it so much fun!

acid metrics disappeared into a work-related hurricane sandy k-hole, perhaps he will reappear at some point

I do hope so! He will end up kicking himself if the stuff he really loves just misses out.

Got anything really weirdor esoteric you think everyone should check out?

While we are recommending stuff, I'm not sure if this is an obvious pick or not but Bobby Beausoleil's Lucifer Rising soundtrack is a killer. Pretty dark, eerie jams. Definitely one of my favorites from the era...and since it all the songs kinda bleed into each other I can't recommend an entry track but it's on Spotify so you should listen to the whole thing.

Gr8 poll, I am defo doing this.

seconded xp

but as usual I just wanna rep the stuff we didn't nom

I mean c'mon
http://youtu.be/LfD7ywsMqnY

we forgot this one too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeGYv6jXDNk

Anyone else wanting to declare theyre gonna vote? If so i wont hassle you!

xp

ha keith! well done

In addition to Edward III and Pfunk's suggestions for stuff like Sir Lord Baltimore, November, Cactus, Atomic Rooster, Jerusalem and to an extent, Night Sun. And of course Budgie! I posted something on my site to promote the poll too.

Still not done with ballot, looks like I need to revisit Gila and Frijid Pink!

While we are recommending stuff, I'm not sure if this is an obvious pick or not but Bobby Beausoleil's Lucifer Rising soundtrack is a killer. Pretty dark, eerie jams. Definitely one of my favorites from the era...and since it all the songs kinda bleed into each other I can't recommend an entry track but it's on Spotify so you should listen to the whole thing.

yeah thats great stuff. I wish i couldve afforded that box set that came out.

xp

I thought we got all the budgie albums. How did we miss that?

xxp

Gila are teh awesome

OK maybe a wee guide needed for people to check out the pfunk & related so try
http://people.duke.edu/~tmc/motherpage/discog-top.html the best site on the interwebs

Mr Copes top 50 Krautrock
http://www.midsuffolk.unisonplus.net/Top%2050.htm

Scroll down a bit here http://www.midsuffolk.unisonplus.net/ and you see additional stuff recommended (a bunch of it is nominated in this poll so please have a look)

I just kinda glanced at the budgie list when we were doing noms and thought "that looks like all of them" oops

if anybody wants to fall in riff canyon recommend you go spelunking in these threads

Heavy Riffage - s/d

Rolling Late-60's/Early-70's Thud-Rock Thread

highway robbery's for love or money will just have to be the unsung hero of this poll

hehe im still chuckling about the bizarro world results in The ILM 1980s Anti-Rolling Stone Canon (FREE PUSSY RIOT) Rock Poll Results - ALBUMS! Top 20! ends today

so if everyone campaigns for the lesser known stuff maybe we can at least try replicate that poll in spirit even if the results wont be quite the same style (though you just never know)

if anythings missing then add here http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/1rFbtUwZlcYHBD6gcemMeK

Did my votes get through?

more nom MIAs

iron claw
http://youtu.be/eSRZz13YiqI

zior
http://youtu.be/wqvYPY-E_pE

Yes Keith it did, thank you for voting!

So among these proto-metal/blues-psych bands, any particular album some of you would especially want to promote? I never got around to hearing The Groundhogs' Who Will Save The World (1972), which I'll try to fix this weekend. I've only heard the first Frijid Pink album. Is Defrosted worth hearing?

Didn't check but some of these probably aren't on the list, but just in summary: Atomic Rooster, Bang, Blackwater Park, Bloodrock, Blues Creation, Edgar Broughton Band, Budgie, Buffalo, Bullet, Captain Beyond, Cactus, Damnation, Dust, Frigid Pink, Groundhogs, Hard Stuff, Head Over Heels, Highway Robbery, Jerusalem, Josepfus, Leaf Hound, Lucifer's Friend, Necromandus, Night Sun, November, Orang-Utan, Pink Fairies, Poobah, Power Of Zeus, Sir Lord Baltimore, Speed, Glue & Shinki, Steel Mill, The Third Power, Uriah Heep, Warpig, Wishbone Ash...

man it's hard to make recommends cuz more than half that list is pretty solid, I'm just gonna stay on message and say highway robbery

you recommending those or asking for info?
xp

add iron claw if you wanna get doomy, high tide if you feel trippy

high tide are great, yeah. Pashmina is a big fan of em.

btw everyone you all need to watch this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmmzbVM5BMw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayhpzgUrPQM

oops i thought youtube didn't auto embed anymore

if you use the youtu.be format it doesn't embed, the old youtube.com/watch format still embeds. basically have to click "share" on the youtube page and copy that link.

at least we remembered toad
http://youtu.be/_zyWwGleUcU

but forgot time to suck which is pretty cool for an album of covers
http://youtu.be/KkGcABw8LHw

nice article btw fnb!

Also seandalai I meant to ask. Should those resubmitting their ballots say soon their ballot somewhere just to make it a bit easier for you?

If you use the same username on both ballots I should catch it anyway, but posting here to make sure is also a good idea.

ok cool, you heard the man, guys!

everyone should check out Stray

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKtM8mKKupA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coMlCLX4sP0

im drunk but i want to stand by my challop above. Apart from mayyyybe jb, no funker is heavier than betty davis.. Just the performance. So RAW. Def worth a listen or lots

I picked up the Repertoire reissue of Frijid Pink used for just $5 on the way home. I've heard it before, but not the bonus tracks. "End Of The Line" is rockin and "House Of The Rising Sun" is a nice version, but overall their sound is still anchored in 60s garage. It's good stuff that compares well to Mitch Ryder and Amboy Dukes.

The third self-titled Gila album is cool so far, though I interrupted it halfway to listen to the 20+ minute live version of Man's "Spunk Rock." Trying to dl their self-titled album, live one and Do You Like It Here... but it's taking forever.

Enjoying the Heavy Riffage - s/d thread. Who's Mr. Diamond these days?

this is a good one too

Rolling Late-60's/Early-70's Thud-Rock Thread

^all time ilm thread

so much great music discussed therein

Voting never ends for this poll.

but it does - March 8th

Apart from mayyyybe jb, no funker is heavier than betty davis.

because everyone knows its a challop. Betty Davis is not heavier than early funkadelic.

And the weekend is a fine time to work on ballots!

Yeah I'm using my own definition of heaviosity! Probably why I shouldn't vote in this thing. I love funkadelic don't get me wrong.

oh just vote. Anyway you like. Some are voting the heaviest some the most metal or krautrock or funk or weird and some just pick 20-100 albums they like on the list.
all of those ways are fine!

i'm trying to vote but I can't seem to copy and paste anything from the spreadsheet

really? its ok for me. Are you maybe on a mac?
But i find it easier in these polls to download the spreadsheet as excel and open it with my office program. It really is much easier.

thanks, that seems to work

I would like to thank this poll because scrolling through the nominations got me thinking about Mother's Finest, which got me Googling, and now I'm going to go see them play in May. Psyched. Maybe I'll submit a ballot in gratitude.

oh just vote. Anyway you like. Some are voting the heaviest some the most metal or krautrock or funk or weird and some just pick 20-100 albums they like on the list.
all of those ways are fine!

thanks man. tbph I have no memory of writing that post last night so I'm not gonna spend too much energy defending what was no doubt an overstatement designed to get ppl to listen to betty davis; still, the intensity of davis's performance makes it seem to fit this poll in a way that a lot of other stuff doesn't. like I love that 1st hot chocolate album & will vote for it but I really have no idea what it's doing in a "hard & heavy & loud" poll despite having some rock elements, but with nasty gal I'm like, ok that makes sense. But it's always worth bearing in mind that a large proportion of what I post will be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJgWq_kSR9w

my ballot as it stands is pretty ahem heavy on the art-rock and funk stuff, rock-rock is a blind spot for me. I don't want to submit it just yet because I want to catch up on the stuff that's more in the "spirit" of this poll. Like the other day I listened to an aerosmith album for the 1st time ever. (it was fantastic actually!)

Oh there's no shortage of Betty Davis fans on ILM, whether they vote or not in this poll remains to be seen. But if its nominated and on the sheet then anyone can vote for it whether they think its heavy or not. The "weirder" stuff is to give the poll results something a bit different like with the 80s equivalent we did. There will be no shortage of the heavier rock in the poll hehe.

ps do check out Flower Travellin' Band - Satori.

and lots of the other nominations too

Remember the new rules - if you vote for 100 albums then there is no artist limit.

and please subscribe to the SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

If anyone wants to check out a lost classic black acid rock album then do check out
http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0000/218/MI0000218646.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

African-American psychedelic groups, and rock bands from Trinidad, were both uncommon items around 1970. The Next Morning fit into both categories, making them an interesting curiosity regardless of their music. The music, however--average 1970 hard-rock with soul, hard rock, and psychedelic influences, particularly from Jimi Hendrix--is not as unusual as their origins. One would not suspect from listening that the group were largely from Trinidad, with the proliferation of heavy, bluesy guitar and organ riffs, and the strained soul-rock vocals of Lou Phillips. They recorded one album, released in 1971, that received little notice before their breakup.
The Next Morning formed in the late 1960s in New York, four of the five members having come to the city from Trinidad; Lou Phillips was from the Virgin Islands. Jimi Hendrix was a big influence on the band, as were some other hard rock acts of the period like the Who, and rock-soul hybrids like Sly Stone and the Chamber Brothers. The Next Morning were busy on the New York club circuit and attracted attention from Columbia Records, but ended up signing to the smaller Roulette label, whose Calla subsidiary issued their lone, self-titled LP in 1971. Although the jagged guitar sounds of Bert Bailey and some unexpected chord shifts made the album less pedestrian than some efforts in the style, the songs tended toward the long and meandering side, and the material was not as outstanding as their influences.

review
by Cub Koda

Take four musicians from the Caribbean, relocate them to New York and start filling their heads with the Who, Chambers Brothers, Sly and the Family Stone and Jimi Hendrix. After they become the tightest and most talked about rock band in the city, have them cut their debut album in something like three hours. This is the scenario of the Next Morning, a band of Caribbean immigrants who cut this amazing little piece of psychedelia around 1970 for Roulette's Calla subsidiary. Tunes like "Changes of the Mind," "A Jam of Love," "Life Is Love" and "Back to the Stone Age" literally drip with trippy, fuzzed over and phasey vibes. Another lost classic.

I've got a horrible feeling I forgot to vote for Family - Bandstand

I checked and I had *phew*

*phew*

The 1st 70s poll results (not the alternate poll jf did a couple of years ago)
100. VA - Nuggets
99. New York Dolls - s/t
98. David Bowie - Heroes
97. Kate Bush - The Kick Inside
96. Bruce Springsteen - Darkness On the Edge of Town
95. The Cure - Three Imaginary Boys
94. Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
93. Philip Glass - Einstein on the Beach
92. Sparks - Kimono My House
91. Cheap Trick - Live at Budokan
90. Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstacy
89. Sparks - No. 1 in Heaven
88. Can - Future Days
87. The B52s - The B52s
86. Parliament - Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome
85. Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate
84. Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power
83. The Slits - Cut
82. Nick Drake - Bryter Layter
81. The Beach Boys - Surf's Up
80. Neu! - Neu!
79. The Beatles - Let It Be
78. John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band
77. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
76. Big Star - Third
75. John Cale - Paris 1919
74. Donna Summer - On the Radio
73. Miles Davis - A Tribute to Jack Johnson
72. Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On
71. Parliament - The Mothership Connection
70. Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
69. VA - Saturday Night Fever
68. Wire - 154
67. Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy
66. Led Zeppelin - IV
65. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
64. Big Star - #1 Record
63. Black Sabbath - Paranoid
62. David Bowie - Station to Station
61. Neil Young - Rust Never Sleeps
60. Elvis Costello - My Aim Is True
59. Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
58. Bob Dylan - The Basement Tapes
57. The Congos - Heart of the Congos
56. Fleetwood Mac - Rumors
55. Ornette Coleman - Dancing in Your Head
54. Richard and Linda Thompson - I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight
53. David Bowie - Hunky Dory
52. The Fall - Dragnet
51. Neil Young - Tonight's the Night
50. Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic
49. Roxy Music - Roxy Music
48. Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
47. Stevie Wonder - Talking Book
46. Suicide - First Album
45. Miles Davis - On the Corner
44. Curtis Mayfield - Superfly
43. Steve Reich - Music For 18 Musicians
42. Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food
41. Neil Young - On the Beach
40. Gram Parsons - Grievous Angel
39. Wire - Chairs Missing
38. Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life
37. Can - Ege Bamyesi
36. Brian Eno - Another Green World
35. Serge Gainbourg - Histoire De Melody Nelson
34. Nick Drake - Pink Moon
33. Elvis Costello - This Year's Model
32. Neil Young - After the Goldrush
31. Big Star - Radio City
30. The Clash - The Clash
29. The Velvet Underground - Loaded
28. The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
27. Wire - Pink Flag
26. Can - Tago Mago
25. David Bowie - Low
24. Joni Mitchell - Blue
23. Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets
22. Ramones - Ramones
21. Al Green - Call Me
20. Kraftwerk - The Man Machine
19. The Stooges - Fun House
18. Michael Jackson - Off the Wall
17. VA - The Harder They Come
16. The Sex Pistols - Nevermind the Bollocks
15. The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers
14. David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
13. Gang of Four - Entertainment
12. Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
11. The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street
10. Marvin Gaye - What's Goin' On
9. Buzzcocks - Singles Going Steady
8. PiL - Metal Box
7. Blondie - Parallel Lines
6. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
5. Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express
4. Television - Marquee Moon
3. Bob Dylan - Blood On the Tracks
2. The Clash - London Calling
1. Sly & the Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On

And TURN THIS MUTHA OUT! It's the Alternate 1970s Albums Poll on ILX — Results Thread
100. Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges - Clube de Esquina (1972) [80 points, 7 votes, 1 first place vote]
99. Chic - C'est Chic (1978) [80 points, 14 votes]
98. John Lennon - Imagine (1971) [80 points, 15 votes]
97. Patti Smith - Horses (1975) [80 points, 17 votes]
96. Van Halen - Van Halen (1978) [81 points, 6 votes, 1 first place vote]
95. Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac (1975) [81 points, 8 votes]
94. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory (1970) [81 points, 11 votes]
93. Blondie - Eat to the Beat (1979) [82 points, 9 votes]
92. Miles Davis - Agharta (1976) [82 points, 10 votes]
91. Ian Dury - New Boots and Panties!! (1977) [83 points, 6 votes]
90. Neu! - Neu! 2 (1973) [83 points, 10 votes]
89. Tom Waits - Closing Time (1973) [84 points, 6 votes]
88. Black Sabbath - Vol. 4 (1972) [85 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote]
87. Hawkwind - Space Ritual (1973) [85 points, 11 votes]
86. Aerosmith - Rocks (1976) [86 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote]
85. Tubeway Army - Replicas (1979) [86 points, 9 votes]
84. Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak (1976) [86 points, 11 votes]
83. The Who - Live at Leeds (1970) [87 points, 6 votes]
82. Comus - First Utterance (1971) [87 points, 9 votes]
81. Van Morrison - Veedon Fleece (1974) [88 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote]
80. Electric Light Orchestra - Out of the Blue (1977) [90 points, 10 votes]
79. Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (1973) [92 points, 9 votes]
78. Flamin' Groovies - Shake Some Action (1976) [92 points, 10 votes]
77. Pere Ubu - Datapanik in the Year Zero EP (1978) [93 points, 6 votes]
76. ABBA - Arrival (1976) [93 points, 8 votes]
75. David Bowie - Lodger (1979) [93 points, 12 votes]
74. Cluster - Zuckerzeit (1974) [93 points, 14 votes]
73. Pere Ubu - Dub Housing (1978) [94 points, 12 votes]
72. The Rolling Stones - Some Girls (1978) [95 points, 13 votes]
71. Neil Young - Harvest (1972) [96 points, 9 votes]
70. Herbie Hancock - Sextant (1973) [96 points, 12 votes]
69. Stevie Wonder - Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974) [97 points, 10 votes]
68. Throbbing Gristle - 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979) [98 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
(Tie) 66. Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) [99 points, 9 votes]
(Tie) 66. Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark (1974) [99 points, 9 votes]
65. The Pop Group - Y (1979) [99 points, 10 votes]
64. Al Green - The Belle Album (1977) [100 points, 7 votes, 1 first place vote]
63. Steely Dan - Katy Lied (1975) [100 points, 9 votes]
62. Black Sabbath - Master of Reality (1971) [100 points, 11 votes]
61. Various Artists - No New York (1978) [101 points, 10 votes]
60. The Specials - The Specials (1979) [102 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
59. John Cale - Fear (1974) [104 points, 11 votes]
58. Harry Nilsson - Nilsson Schmilsson (1971) [106 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
57. King Crimson - Red (1974) [109 points, 12 votes]
56. Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) [110 points, 12 votes]
55. Funkadelic - One Nation Under a Groove (1978) [110 points, 13 votes]
54. Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) [111 points, 7 votes, 1 first place vote]
53. Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger (1975) [111 points, 12 votes]
52. Van Morrison - Moondance (1970) [111 points, 13 votes]
51. Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor (1979) [112 points, 6 votes, 2 first place votes]
(Tie) 49. The Who - Who's Next (1971) [112 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
(Tie) 49. Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Armed Forces (1979) [112 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
48. David Bowie - Aladdin Sane (1973) [113 points, 11 votes]
47. Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia (1974) [113 points, 13 votes]
46. Cheap Trick - Cheap Trick (1977) [116 points, 9 votes]
(Tie) 44. Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Zuma (1975) [116 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
(Tie) 44. James Brown - The Payback (1973) [116 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
43. Grateful Dead - American Beauty (1970) [119 points, 9 votes]
42. Amon Düül II - Yeti (1970) [120 points, 12 votes]
41. New York Dolls - Too Much Too Soon (1974) [121 points, 4 votes, 2 first place votes]
40. Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs (1970) [121 points, 9 votes]
39. Funkadelic - Free Your Mind... And Your Ass Will Follow (1970) [124 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
38. Miles Davis - Get Up With It (1974) [124 points, 12 votes]
37. This Heat - This Heat (1979) [125 points, 10 votes]
36. T.Rex - The Slider (1972) [127 points, 13 votes]
35. Tim Buckley - Starsailor (1970) [127 points, 13 votes, 1 first place vote]
34. Funkadelic - Standing on the Verge of Getting it On (1974) [128 points, 9 votes, 1 first place vote]
33. Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run (1975) [128 points, 11 votes, 1 first place vote]
32. Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) [128 points, 14 votes]
31. The Cars - The Cars (1978) [131 points, 13 votes]
30. Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells a Story (1971) [140 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
29. Fela Kuti & Afrika 70 - Zombie (1977) [141 points, 13 votes, 1 first place vote]
28. Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975) [146 points, 14 votes]
27. Talking Heads - 77 (1977) [147 points, 15 votes]
26. Led Zeppelin - III (1970) [149 points, 11 votes]
(Tie) 24. T.Rex - Electric Warrior (1971) [151 points, 17 votes]
(Tie) 24. Faust - IV (1973) [151 points, 17 votes]
23. Ramones - Rocket to Russia (1977) [152 points, 13 votes]
22. Can - Soon Over Babaluma (1974) [152 points, 16 votes]
21. Harmonia - Deluxe (1975) [155 points, 11 votes, 1 first place vote]
20. Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band - Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band (1976) [161 points, 10 votes]
19. Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, A True Star (1973) [162 points, 12 votes]
18. Lou Reed - Transformer (1972) [164 points, 16 votes]
17. Joni Mitchell - Hejira (1976) [165 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote]
16. The Raincoats - The Raincoats (1979) [168 points, 12 votes, 1 first place vote]
15. Steely Dan - The Royal Scam (1976) [176 points, 11 votes, 2 first place votes]
14. Steely Dan - Aja (1977) [177 points, 16 votes]
13. Neu! - Neu! 75 (1975) [187 points, 17 votes]
12. Brian Eno - Before and After Science (1977) [187 points, 18 votes]
11. XTC - Drums and Wires (1979) [188 points, 15 votes, 2 first place votes]
10. Yes - Close to the Edge (1972) [189 points, 11 votes, 1 first place vote]
9. Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance (1978) [205 points, 20 votes]
8. Kraftwerk - Autobahn (1974) [230 points, 25 votes]
7. Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda (1970) [248 points, 19 votes]
6. X Ray Spex - Germ Free Adolescents (1978) [263 points, 20 votes, 3 first place votes]
5. Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom (1974) [307 points, 19 votes, 5 first place votes]
4. Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo (1978) [310 points, 27 votes, 1 first place vote]
3. Curtis Mayfield - Curtis (1970) [310 points, 28 votes, 3 first place votes]
2. Talking Heads - Fear of Music (1979) [405 points, 28 votes]
1. Fleetwood Mac - Tusk (1979) [527 points, 30 votes, 4 first place votes]

That poll turned out to be a very fun poll and I hope johnny fever participates in this current poll.

Was about halfway putting together my ballots for this when voting got suspended and my attention drifted away - back on it now.
Got to thank all the people that have been campaigning for particular albums so far, it's been a nice way to dip into lots of music I wouldn't have heard otherwise. Giving Pink Fairies - Kings of Oblivion a go just now - Raceway is a killer tune. :)

You cant go wrong with any of their albums.

Do It is of course their best known tune.
But I recommend I Wish I Was A Girl. Which is nominated in the tracks poll. And Motorhead fans will know City Kids. (both of those are on Kings Of Oblivion)

^Yeah it's a cool album overall. I'm finding the whole early 70s Ladbroke Grove/hairy UK underground stuff quite intriguing at the moment 'cause on the one hand a lot of it can seem awkward and dated but on the other it's a little corner of rock history that still seems under-explored (with possible exception of Hawkwind I guess).

Also in the spirit of your recent youtubes, here's Mandrill rockin out on Soul Train:
http://youtu.be/bnwKaI1im4Q
(Track is from Composite Truth which is nommed iirc. Mandrill have been another nice find via the campaigning.)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41O+2GHxxtL._SS500_.jpg

Stray - Stray (Transatlantic/Castle, 1970)
Keyes is f'in' right on, Stray rules. I'd only had a crappy rip of their second album, Suicide (1971) and was not initially wowed, but prompted by Keyes I revisited and heard the remaster of their first album (the only one nominated here). It's amazing. They were actually signed to a contract way back in 1966 as young teenagers on the strength of precocious musical talent rivaling Free. Their early background in mod and psychedelia is there, along with heavy proto-metal, prog, even some jazz fusion and Hawkwind-like space rock. Some of their more driving moments even remind me of some early MC5, but more musically diverse and complex. Makes me want to hear more. The 2006 reissues of this and Saturday Morning Pictures (1972) are widely available, but for some reason Suicide is hard to find. The closing title-track is cool, with Del Bromham's guitar solos resembling Sir Lord Baltimore.

Aquarius on Stray:

Here's yet another one of those bands that we'd vaguely heard of (or perhaps not) but never really encountered actual records by, and now that we have we can't figure out why they weren't a bigger deal! I think I first became aware of 'em via the thanks/influences list on a Pentagram album. Kinda always assumed they were your basic British blues rock but on the evidence of this, their 1970 debut they were something a little different than the Cream/Zep sort of thing I'd imagined. They're rather more like a '60s psych-pop singles band, of the garagey/Nuggetsy variety, with the fuzz factor and sheer guitar heaviness cranked way up toward proto-metallic levels. More psych than prog, more pop than blues. Kinda punk too. Very kick ass and energetic, catchy and rockin', venturing from the paisley-painted pop melodicism of "Around The World In Eighty Days" to the slamming punkish "Only What You Make It" to a number of extended fuzz guitar workouts... but first and foremost it's good old-fashioned hard rock. Think Thin Lizzy. Or Dust, or Budgie. Or even early, early Rush (one song here always puts Byram in mind of "Working Man"). But as mentioned it's got a poppy '60s garage vibe unlike a lot of those acts... And there's enough proggier, psychier elements loaded in here to pique the interest of a wider audience than just the hard rock lovers among us. The guitar parts especially are full of odd harmonies and melodic richness that bring to mind Amon Duul II, if Amon Duul II could have managed to fit their open ended song structures into a tighter blues rock straight jacket. What makes Stray's music work so well is their attention to structure: keeping their compositions on a tight leash and avoiding the esoteric meanderings that can be a pitfall to many prog rockers. This and their sense of dynamics, knowing just how and when to throw the switch and rip the seat of your pants, is what must have made them a seriously kick ass live band (and apparently they were super popular as such in and around their London, England turf, but unfortunately never managed to cash in on the hard rock success like some of their contempories). They recorded numerous albums, of which this first one is likely their best (though their second LP Suicide is a good one too, and we're just not that familiar with the rest of their '70s output), but their biggest claim to fame might be that Iron Maiden covered one of their songs on a b-side ("All In Your Mind", the very first track on this disc). Stray's version was way better btw.

I checked out Man's Man (1970), Do You Like It Here, Are You Settling In? (1971) and Live At The Padget Rooms, Penarth (1972), and enjoyed 'em. Nice quirky prog, on "All Good Clean Fun" it sounds like they were an influence for Field Music. The live 24:49 version of "Spunk Rock" (a song originally released in '69) does indeed rock. The double live has the best chance of making my list.

I just heard Stomu Yamashta's Go (1976) for the first time, and it's awesome. Steve Winwood and Michael Shrieve (drummer for Santana) share top billing on the album cover, but also features Klaus Schulze! Far out jazz fusion space rock. This wasn't nominated, but Floating Music (1972) with Come To The Edge was, need more time to see how it compares. After that will check out Shrieve's Automatic Man (1976).

http://991.com/newGallery/Man-Rhinos-Winos--Lun-446251.jpg is the best one

Listened to the Stray album and it's really good.

I think i'll try out that Henri Texier album. It looks interesting.

I dont know who nominated it, but if they are reading this thread, got anything to say about it? http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1092/1598/1600/_texier_varech.jpg

as suspected its not very rock and we were, as known in the trade, stirmonstered :). It is very good and worth checking out though. Just dont expect Noxagt or anything.

for sick mouthy and other latecomers who find the nominations strange please read
1970-1979 WTF - The Hard 'n' Heavy 'n' Loud + Krautrock, Arty, Noisy, Weird, Funky, Punky Shit - Albums Poll! Nominations ! (ends Oct 17 you slack bastards - jjjusten edit)

and thanks to mr mouthy for his vote it went through ok

you know that point of the poll where everyone shouts too low! or complains they cant believe nobody voted for some album or they ask why the known fans of albums didn't vote? Well this is where you can rectify that by
A) Voting
B) Campaigning for albums
C) Getting others to vote

(this especially aimed at messrs perry & justen)

has anyone seen jacob sanders around?

Totally agree with the excitement over the Stray album. So fuzzy. So good.

I am beginning to wonder if it really was worth extending the voting to the 8th. Anyone against changing it to March 1st?

Just re-voted.

going to spend some serious time with a lot of these albums, weigh up my thoughts and vote v. v. soon

It's been mentioned upthread somewhere but this Iron Claw album is really good.

http://youtu.be/QccXPRTBMJg

Oh, Iron Claw wasn't nominated. I don't feel so bad about not voting for it then...it's still great though, and should have been nommed.

Iron Claw is good stuff. The reason I wish punk/post-punk was excluded is there's just so much ground to cover, making it hard to fit in interesting obscure stuff even on a 100 album ballot. I was unable to fit in albums by Heavy Metal Kids, Cockney Rebel, Radio Birdman, Suicide, Heldon, Captain Beyond, Jobriath, Dust, Uriah Heep, Bang, Hard Stuff, High Tide, Highway Robbery and The Groundhogs, all great stuff. I considered excluding punk related stuff from my ballot, but since it's in the poll and people are going to vote for them, I'd hate not to represent for some favorites.

One band that sometimes gets overlooked is Magazine. I'd think they have an ILM following but they didn't make the previous two 70s polls. I wrote this when the 2007 reissue came out.

http://aumusiclibrary.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/magazine-real-life-458222.jpg
Magazine, Real Life (Virgin/EMI, 1978)
Magazine, Secondhand Daylight (Virgin/EMI, 1979)
Magazine gets only a fraction of the acclaim and attention lavished on Joy Division not for lack of good music, but because rather than off himself, Howard Devoto worked in an office after the breakup of his band (when he wasn't working on underrated solo projects and spinoff bands). The truth is, their music is as powerful and groundbreaking as their more famous contemporaries. Just as their name can evoke the glamor of fashion rags or the menace of a weapon, the band walked the line between sophistication and violence. Devoto was a key player in the beginning of the punk movement, organizing two early Sex Pistols shows in Manchester and forming the Buzzcocks. Yet before more than a few hundred people even heard of punk, Devoto grew bored with its limitations and moved on. He found like-minded musicians in Scottish guitarist John McGeoch, keyboardist Dave Formula and future Bad Seed Barry Adamson on bass. He intended to expand on what Iggy Pop and Bowie did the previous year on The Idiot and Low. Real Life is one of the earliest and most riveting examples of post-punk, embodying perfectly the tension between Devoto's roots in punk and his desire to stretch out, particularly on "Shot By Both Sides," based on a riff written by his former Buzzcocks mate Pete Shelley. "Definitive Gaze" is a glistening sci-fi chase song that builds upon Eno and Bowie without soundling like copycats. Their definitive song is the glowering "The Light Pours Out Of Me." Bonus tracks include a rougher, original single version of "Shot By Both Sides," second single "Touch and Go" and the James Bond theme "Goldfinger." If Devoto was the emotionally distant outsider on Real Life, he was a glacier on Secondhand Daylight. While it has highlights such as "Rhythm of Cruelty" and "Permafrost," the album's main accomplishment is its consistently brittle sound and feel, that would influence The Comsat Angels, The Cure and many others.

More proto-metal!

http://fastnbulbous.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/buffalo-volcanic.jpg

Buffalo – Volcanic Rock (Vertigo/Repertoire, 1973)
When the first three Buffalo albums were reissued by Repertoire eight years ago they were considered a “lost” band, despite the fact that they were the first Australian band to be signed by Vertigo records, which did their best to stir up hype by claiming Dead Forever… (1972) was better than Sabbath’s Vol. 4. That’s not fair competition, but they were certainly as good as Budgie. Volcanic Rock was their peak, belatedly considered a proto-stoner rock classic. Only Want You For Your Body (1974) is worth checking out too for the diverse but tightly wound songs. They released two more albums that unfortunately devolved into ordinary boogie rock after firing guitarist John Baxter and losing bassist Pete Wells to Rose Tattoo.

http://fastnbulbous.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/budgie-never.jpg

Budgie – Never Turn Your Back On A Friend (MCA, 1973)
Considered second-tier among metal architects Sabbath, Purple and Heep, Budgie were underrated then and now though they were later acknowledged as huge influences by the likes of Judas Priest, who toured with them heavily in the early days, Iron Maiden and Metallica. All of their first five albums are excellent and worth hearing. Burke Shelley’s Geddy Lee-like high pitched vocals and their quirky sense of humor perhaps kept them from bigger success. Their third album brought things together with sharp production, scintillating Roger Dean artwork, the supercharged opener “Breadfan” and epic workouts like “In the Grip of a Tyrefitter’s Hand” and “Parents.”

http://fastnbulbous.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/lucifersfriend.jpg
Lucifer’s Friend – Lucifer’s Friend (Philips, 1970)
Lucifer’s Friend are a German band with Brit singer John Lawton, who’s impressive wail initially elevated them over fellow keyboard-heavy proto-metallers Atomic Rooster and Uriah Heep. The amazing “Ride The Sky” features an elephant-like french horn melody that controversially was compared to Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song.” However this was released first, so as usual Zep are most likely the plagiarists. Sabbath and Deep Purple are clear influences, but it could be argued that Lucifer’s Friend may have influenced Purple’s evolution on Machine Head. Vertigo signed the band on the strength of their debut, but their sound would evolve radically into more progressive and lush sounds on subsequent albums. The Groupies Killed The Blues (1972), I’m Just A Rock ‘n’ Roll Singer (1973) and Banquet (1974) are interesting in that they are as diverse and unpredictable as Man’s records from that same era.

Magazine didn't make the 2 other 70s polls? I'm surprised at that as I thought they were one of the beloved ILM bands. Well you all now have the chance to rectify that.
There's no Budgie on spotify so thats a shame.

Fastnbulbous please post as many of your reviews of nominated albums as you can. They're great!

Amazed there's been no music sounded better in the 70s as it was all on vinyl post yet.

hmmm the bbc reviewed an Ohio Players album? http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/wchf

Hi, I am reserving my right not to vote but will enjoy the roll-out.

Regards.,

I do hope it will be a good roll-out

Not even had a test run of the results so far so I really have no idea what the roll-out will look like.
Maybe we will have weird results like the 80s poll?

http://www.furious.com/perfect/atasteofkrautrock.html

http://www.furious.com/perfect/krautrock.html

And from the conversation I remember that the most impressive thing for the Englishmen was the ugly name the band had: Birth Control. I remember that a group called Eloy was only a running gag among the insiders and journalists in Gemany (poor man's Pink Floyd or was it poor man's Moody Blues?). I remember Faust, who never was popular or widely known in Germany because it was an invention of an outside journalist, a promotion product, but not a real 'living' group.

KRAUTROCKSAMPLER- Julian Cope
Cope is a lunatic, a crazy man (if I can trust the music lexicons). He was not present, he didn't ask the people who were present. He's just a fan with "a name". Yes, Cope is enthusiastic about his beloved exotic musical preferences. And if the media, the journalists and the people would take it just as that, great. Fine. Wonderful. But they BELIEVE it is the truth just because it's Julian Cope. Why do so many people always need "known names" to tell them what to believe? Can't they think for themselves? Can't they listen to the music, check a bit about the history, and make their own judgement. Is it really too much asked? Maybe. The other way it's easier.

Long ago, I read one (or two?) of Cope's articles in the English music magazine WIRE. It was about Can or Amon Duul or something like that. It was the very first time that an English magazine wrote a long positive article about a genuine German band and genuine German "rock" music. It was also clear to see that Cope was a "fan". I liked it as I liked other articles in that issue (especially the fact that MY beloved album "Out to Lunch" by Eric Dolphy was elected No. 1 in some of Wire's polls).

Many moons later, these enthusiastic articles by this fan were released in book form. Even later (1996), this book was also translated into German and released here. And then the trouble started. German journalists who seemed to know even less than Cope jumped on that book (Cope seems to be a singing rock star over here) and wrote articles. Old, long forgotten bands such as Amon Duul or Faust got together again and made a new album and did some concerts. The promotion machineries of the involved record companies seemed to work properly. As a result, we had even more articles about that old time and old bands with one worse than the other. All was mixed up. Simple German heavy rock groups that nobody cared about then are suddenly called "cosmic"; groups that everybody laughed about when they tried their kind of rock 20 years ago are suddenly "historically important". A man like Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh), who didn't touch electronic tools for the last 20 years, was called "electronic expert". And all writers refer to that Cope book.

First it was just funny to watch, but suddenly the few real inventors (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk) were lumped together with all the poor and long gone Krautrock. The characteristics of quality (if I may say so) were not valid anymore. Someone told me that Cope has a kind of TOP 50 Albums or so in his book and among it are most (if not all) of those terrible "Cosmic Jokers" albums. These albums get no better just because a crazy English singer loves them (and maybe just because out of non-musical reasons). Was he the only one in his adolescent years who owned these albums and therefore was proud of them? I know that syndrome from MY childhood- with me it was "jazz".

A few weeks ago, a radio man (who, by the way, was part of the German rock scene in the first five or so years in the seventies of this century) told Klaus Schulze and me on the air what Cope had written in his book about "Electronic Meditation" and we all had a good laugh still on the air. We all agreed that there ARE better and more important albums in the annals of rock music. There were many very good and essential and important rock records but not one from Germany (with rare exceptions, say, Kraftwerk). Anyway, on the radio we agreed also, that this book must be shit.

The trouble is - and this is not Cope's fault - that all the German journalists take Cope's private excitement as the given historic truth. They treat it as if it's a history book full of facts. No, it's just Cope's private opinion. In this domain, his book is certainly very good and exciting. But in its result to those stupid journalists and to some fans, it's awful.

Or, and this comes right now to my mind, could it be that all the non-musical people have - finally - their own bible? There is so much very good music available, from the past seven centuries up to today and the German rock scene in the 1970's is maybe worth a short visit, but... but.... A huge "but".

Well, it's called "Krautrocksampler" not "The Krautrock Antiquarium"

JCope has refused to reprint it, therefore the book is a 'collector's item'

Basically, if there is a need, other books need to fill it. There are more 'wide-ranging' books, right?

Also, Bands described as "good" do not suddenly become "bad" because they were laughed about 20 years ago, if anything the reverse (VU, Stooges, Etc)

the guy does sound very bitter for some reason

In a huge German magazine that is given out free in a large chain of record stores, a writer reported about the tour of the re-united Amon Duul (normal result of the record company's press activity). In this article, the whole Krautrock scene was also mentioned. Suddenly nearly everything and every musician was "electronics" then (which is just not true; besides Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and the Kraftwerk-clan it was close to nobody else). The most funny thing was that a man who is known for literally HATING electronics from about 1974 until recently, Florian Fricke (of "Popol Vuh"), was called THE EXPERT of electronic instrumentation in that magazine. Disgusting.

Bet that was the Tower Records Mag

History of Krautrock – Simon Reynolds

By Simon Reynolds
(first published in Melody Maker, July 1996)

The way out sounds of Krautrock are currently way "in". The evidence: a deluge of CD reissues, the publication of Julian Cope's enthralling pocket-size handbook "Krautrocksampler", a comeback LP by Faust, and a legion of contemporary bands, from Stereolab to Tortoise to Mouse On Mars, pledging fealty in word and deed. There's even a Krautrock club in London called Kosmische, which in turn inspired The Face to run a piece--complete with comically contrived and completely bogus photo-tableau of foxy young things grooving to Harmonia--on how the hippest thing in modern music was a bunch of aged German hippies.

So why Krautrock, and why now? Maybe it's simply because contemporary guitarpop on both sides of the Atlantic is unusually lame and conservative, and Krautrock beckons as a beacon indicating just how much can be done with the basic rock format of guitar, bass and drums. Seizing the possibilities of the recording studio, the German kosmische bands of the early '70s produced results as otherworldly and rhythmically sophisticated as today's "sampladelic" music (techno, drum & bass, hip hop, ambient etc). Today's Britpop and American corporate grunge'n' punk are overtly pre-psychedelic and anti-experimental, merging playsafe 1966-meets-1978 power-pop aesthetics with radio-friendly production. Krautrock--as the missing link between the tumult of the late '60s and the anti-rockist vanguard of 1979 (PiL etc)--is therefore a crucial resource for any contemporary band who resists the reductive notion that (pre-psych) Beatles + Buzzcocks = the Essence, the Way and the Truth, for Ever and Ever.

Immerse yourself in Krautrock--and this is the immersive, engulfing music par excellence--and you'll find a paradox at the music's heart: a combination of absolute freedom and absolute discipline. Krautrock is where the over-reaching ambition and untethered freakitude of late '60s acid rock is checked and galvanised by a proto-punk minimalism. Krautrock bands like Can, Neu! and Faust unleashed music of immense scale that miraculously avoided prog-rock's bombastics, its cult of virtuosity-for-virtuosity's-sake. Where progressive rock boasted "look at me, look how fast my fingers can go", Krautrock beseeched "look! look how VAST we can go'. Or as Can's Michael Karoli put it: "We weren't into impressing people, just caressing them'

Alongside Tim Buckley's "Starsailor", Miles Davis' circa"On The Corner", Yoko Ono circa "Fly", Krautrock was true fusion, merging psychedelic rock with funk groove, jazz improvisation, Stockhausen-style avant-electronics and ethnic flava in a way that avoided the self-congratulatory, dilettante eclecticism that marred even the best of the '70s jazz-rock bands, like Weather Report. Krautrock's primary inputs, and urgency, came from late '60s rock: Velvet Underground's mesmerising mantras, Hendrix's pyrotechnique, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd's chromatic chaos, plus dashes of West Coast folkadelic rock and the studio-centric experiments of Brian Wilson and the later Beatles. Equally significant is what they didn't draw on, namely the blues-bore purism sired by Cream and the Stones.

Tweaking this Anglo-American legacy, the German bands added a vital distance (coming to rock'n'roll as an alien import, they were able to make it even more alien), and they infused it with a German character that's instantly audible but hard to tag. A combination of Dada, LSD and Zen resulted in a dry absurdist humour that could range from zany tomfoolery to a sort of sublime nonchalance, a lightheaded but never lighthearted ease of spirit. Although they occasionally dipped their toes into psychedelia's darkside (the madness that claimed psychonauts such as Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson or Moby Grape's Skip Spence), what's striking about most Krautrock is how affirmative it is, even at its most demented. This peculiar serene joy and aura of pantheistic celebration is nowhere more evident than in the peak work of Can, Faust and Neu!
KRAUTROCK: THE CANON

If the triumvirate of Can/Faust/Neu! has gotten so cliched as a hip reference point, it's for a good reason. Despite being quite dissimilar and lacking any kind of fraternal, comradely feelings towards each other, Can, Faust and Neu! are the unassailable centre of Krautrock's pantheon-- its Dante/Shakespeare/Milton, or Beatles/Stones/Dylan, if you will.

CAN's core was a quartet of lapsed avant-garde and free jazz musicians (bassist Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and drummer Jaki Leibezeit) who--blown away by the VU and the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus"-- decided rock was where it was at. Can were the most funky and improvisational of the Krautrock bands. Recording in their own studio in a Cologne castle, they jammed all day, then edited the juiciest chunks of improv into coherent compositions. This was similar to the methodology used by Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero. As Can's band's resident Macero, Czukay deployed two-track recording and a handful of mikes to achieve wonders of proto-ambient spatiality, shaming today's lo-fi bands. Can's early sound--spartan, crisp-and-dry trance-rock, like the VU circa 'White Light' but with a smokin' rhythm section--peaked with the 15 minute mindquake of "Mother Sky". As the influence of James Brownian motion kicked in, Can began to fuse 'head' and 'booty', atmosphere and groove, like nobody else save Miles Davis. After the shamanic avant-funk of "Tago Mago" and the brittle angst-funk of "Ege Bamyasi", Can's music plunged into the sunshine with "Future Days", "Soon Over Babaluma" and "Landed", their mid-'70s 'Gaia trilogy'. A kind of mystic materialism quivers and pulses inside these ethnofunkadelic groovescapes and ambient oases, from the moon-serenade "Come Sta, La Luna" to the fractal funk and chaos theorems of "Chain Reaction/Quantum Physics". This is music that wordlessly but eloquently rejoices in Mother Nature's bounty and beauty.

Despite an almost utter absence of input from black music, NEU! were probably the closest to Can, in their sheer hypno-groove power and shared belief that "restriction is the mother of invention" (Holger Czukay's minimal-is-maximal credo). Devoid of funk or swing, Neu! is all about compulsive propulsion. Klaus Dinger was an astoundingly inventive, endlessly listenable drummer who worked magic within the confines of a rudimentary four-to-the-floor rock beat. Together with guitarist Michael Rother, he invented motorik, a metronomic, pulsating rhythm that instils a sublime sensation of restrained exhiliration, like gliding cruise-control down the freeway into a future dazzling with promise. That 'dazzle' comes from Rother's awesomely original guitarwork, all chiming radiance and long streaks'n' smears of tone-colour. Something like Germany's very own Television, Neu! bridged Byrdsy psychedelia and punk. They also did ambient texturescapes (e.g. the oceanside idyll "Leb' Wohl") and weird noise (after fucking up their recording budget, they filled the second side of 'Neu! 2" with sped-up and slowed-down versions of an earlier single!). But it's motorik excursions like "Hallogallo", ""Fur Immer" and "Isi" that constitute Neu's great legacy, one that's only now being fully exploited. FAUST similarly combined proto-punk mess-thetic with acid-rock's galactic grandeur. But instead of Neu! streamlined symettry, Faust oscillated wildly between filthy, fucked-up noise and gorgeous pastoral melody, between yowling antics and exquisitely-sculpted sonic objets d'art. Above all, Faust were maestros of incongruity; their albums are riddled with jarring juxtapositions and startling jumpcuts between styles. Heterogeneity was their anti-essence. This cut-up Dada side of Faust was explored to the hilt on 'The Faust Tapes', a collage album of some 26 segments, and it's a methodology revisited on their brand-new comeback LP album "Rien", which was assembled by producer Jim O'Rourke using live tapes of the band's recent reunion tour of America. But for all their avant-garde extremities, Faust were also great songwriters, scatttering amid the zany chaos such gems as the bittersweet psychedelic love-song "Jennifer" and the tres third Velvets Album acid blues of "It's A Bit Of A Pain".

Once you've immersed yourself in the best, what about the rest? ASH RA TEMPEL took The Stooges' downered wah-wah rock ("We Will Fall", "Ann', "Dirt") way way out into the mystic (but beware guitarist Manuel Gottsching's subsequent New Age dotage as Ash Ra). AMON DUUL II were the most baroque and bombastic of the krucial Kraut kontenders: imagine Led Zep produced by John Cale with Nico on vocals and a crate of magic mushrooms to hand. They had a fab line in lysergic song titles too: "Halluzination Guillotine", "Dehypnotised Toothpaste", "A Short Stop At The Transylvanian Brain Surgery". Their estranged sister-band AMON DUUL I pursued a similarly drug-burned rock, but were more primitivistic and sloppy. After Can/Faust/Neu!, CLUSTER were probably the most innovative and ahead-of-their time. After a spell as the purely avant-garde Kluster, the two-man soundlab of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius hit their stride with the mesmeric dronescapes of 'Cluster II' and "Cluster '71". Later, they traded in their armoury of FX-pedals and guitar-loops for synths, knocked out a bunch of bewitching albums with Brian Eno, and chalked up a mammoth oeuvre (as Cluster, but also solo and as Roedelius and Moebius) with the odd gem lurking amid much New Age mush. Hooking up with Neu!'s Michael Rother, the duo also recorded as HARMONIA, producing two albums worth of serene and soul-cleansing proto-electronica. Meanwhile Rother's estranged partner Dinger formed LA DUSSELDORF, peddling a pleasing punk-rock take on the Neu!-rush. POPOL VUH rival Cluster for creative incontinence; their vast, diverse discography ranges from meditational, Mediaevalist reveries to primordial, percussive freak-outs.

Although they were only "rock" for an instant, KRAFTWERK ought to be mentioned around about here. For three fascinating albums (and an interesting prequel as ORGANISATION), Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider jumbled the New York minimalist school (La Monte Young, John Cage, Steve Reich etc) with German avant-electronics (Stockhausen). Then they staked everything on the idea that the synthesiser was the future, and won, becoming godfathers of Eurodisco, New Romanticism, Electro and Techno-Rave, not to mention a big influence on Bowie's "Low" and Spacemen 3's "Playing With Fire". 'Kraftwerk: the most important band of the 1970s' -- Discuss. TANGERINE DREAM followed a similar trajectory, shifting from their early transcendental rock (which produced four terrific albums) to synth-based proto-trance tedium. Early T. Dream associate KLAUS SCHULTZE also did a few interesting albums of early electronica noir.

Featuring Schultze and Ash Ra's Gottsching, COSMIC JOKERS/COURIERS were something of a Krautrock supergroup; their six elpees of hallucinogen-addled studio-shenanigans range from Gong-style buffoonery to Hawkind-like hurtles into the remotest reaches of der kosmos. Also treading a tightrope between sublime and ridiculous were BRAINTICKET and GURU GURU; both erred on the side of prog but still afford a fair amount of amusement.
KRAUTROCK: THE LEGACY

In their own day, the German kosmische bands were hip but not especially influential. Oddballs in Britain and America took similar sources as their launch-pad, but generally ended up in less appealing places (e.g. Henry Cow and the Canterbury school of jerky jazz-influenced art-rock). In the early '70s, only the Eno-era Roxy Music, Stooges' offshoot Destroy All Monsters, and Robert Fripp/Brian Eno's guitar-loop albums ("No Pussyfooting" etc) really picked up on German ideas. But in the immediate aftermath of 1977-and-all-that, bands were looking for ways to expand on punk's sonic fundamentalism without bloating up into prog-rock indulgence, and Krautrock provided a host of pointers for the post-punk vanguard. Can especially offered a fertile source of rhythmic ideas, not just for avant-funkateers like PiL and Pop Group, but also The Fall. Their early anthem "Repetition" ("repetition in the music and we're never gonna lose it") expressed Holger Czukay's creed of 'self-restriction" in word and sound; Mark E. Smith would later pen "I Am Damo Suzuki" as a tribute to Can's second and most barmy vocalist.

The pan-global panoramic trance-dance of Talking Heads' "Remain In Light" owed a lot to "Soon Over Babaluma", and yet more sincere flattery came in the form of David Byrne and "Remain" producer Eno's "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts" (1981). Its use of ethnic vocal samples was unfavourably compared with Czukay's recent "Movies", whose "Persian Love" recontextualised an Iranian ballad; in actual fact, Holger had got there 12 years earlier with "Canaxis", which used Vietnamese boat-woman's song! Meanwhile, the then freshly reissued Faust were impacting the burgeoning "industrial" scene (Cabaret Voltaire, Zoviet France, This Heat, Nurse With Wound, etc), their collage aesthetic paralleling the in-vogue cut-up techniques of William Burroughs.

In the late '80s, Krautrock's influence shifted from rhythm & structure, towards texture & sonority. Loop covered "Mother Sky", then mutated into the"Cluster II" tribute band, Main. Spacemen 3 reached Kraftwerk-like Elysian fields on "Playing With Fire", while its sequel bands often have an uncanny resemblance to Neu! (Spiritualized) and Cluster (Spectrum, E.A.R.). A single Neu! track, "Negativland", prophesised Lee Ranaldo & Thurston Moore's "reinvention of the guitar" and harmonic dissonance on "Sister" and "Daydream Nation". Sonic Youth paid homage with the silly filler track "Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!' on their silly Ciccone Youth side-project.

In the '90s, Krautmania blew up big time. First, there was American lo-fi: Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union, Mercury Rev, F/i, Truman's Water (who covered not one but TWO Faust songs), Soul-Junk. Then came the international drone-rock network (Flying Saucer Attack, Labradford, the Dead C/Gate, Flies Inside The Sun, Third Eye Foundation), and the neo-Neu! motorik maniacs (Stereolab, Trans-Am, Quickspace Supersport), and the nouveau kosmonauts (Sabalon Glitz, Telstar Ponies, Cul De Sac) and the post-rock groove collectives (Laika, Tortoise, Pram, Moonshake, Rome), and even the odd art-tekno outfit (Mouse On Mars). Inevitably, the referencing is getter more arcane: Cluster & Eno with Labradford, Popol Vuh with Flying Saucer and Sabalon, Cosmic Jokers with Telstar....

Why is the Krautrock legacy being embraced so fervently, at this precise point in time? Firstly, Krautrock is one of the great eras of guitar-reinvention. Expanding on the innovations of Hendrix, Syd Barrett, the VU, etc, the Krautrock bands explored the electric guitar's potential as source of sound-in-itself. Fed through effects-pedals and the mixing desk, the guitar ceased to be a riff-machine and verged on an analog synthesiser, i.e. a generator of timbre and tone-colour. As such, the Krauts anticipated the soundpainting and texturology of today's post-rock, while still retaining the rhythmic thrust of rock'n'roll.

Second, Krautrock brought into focus an idea latent in rock, from Bo Diddley to the Stooges to the Modern Lovers: that the rhythmic essence of rock music, what made it different from jazz, was a kind of machinic compulsion. Pitched somewhere between Kraftwerk's man-machine rigour and James Brown's sex-machine sweat, bands like Can and Neu! created grooves that fused the luscious warmth of flesh-and-blood funk with the cold precision of techno. There was a spiritual aspect to all this, sort of Zen and the Art of Motorik Maintenance: the idea that true joy in life isn't liberation from work but exertion, fixation, a trance-like state of immersion in the process itself, regardless of outcome. Holger Czukay declared: "Repetition is like a machine... If you can get aware of the life of a machine then you are definitely a master ... [machines] have a heart and soul... they are living beings'." . Taking this idea of the 'soft machine' or 'desiring machine' even further, Neu! created a new kind of rhythm for rock, bridging the gap between rock'n'roll's syncopation and disco's four-to-the-floor metronomics. As Stereolab's Tim Gane says, "Neu!'s longer tracks are far closer to the nature of house and techno than guitar rock."

Beyond all this, Krautrock is simply fabulous music, a dizzy kaleidoscope of crazily mixed up and incompatible emotions and sensations (wonder, poignancy, nonchalance, tenderness, derangement), an awesome affirmation of possibility that inevitably appeals in an age when guitar-based music appears to be contracting on a weekly basis. Listeners are turning to it, not as a nostalgia-inducing memento of some wilder, more daring golden age they never lived through, but as a treasure trove of hints and clues as to what can be done right here, right now. Krautrock isn't history, but a living testament that there's still so far to go.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CAN - DISCOGRAPHY
by Holger Czukay (May 1997)

CAN's first recording ever was made in June 1968 during our first concert for a modern art exhibition at Schloss Nvrvenich near Cologne. It is called PREHISTORIC FUTURE and was released 1984 on the Tago Mago label in Paris as a limited number of mono-cassettes (2000 pressings). For the first time we recorded samples of the students' rebellion of 1968 in Paris and these became an important part of the concert. From there on we were lucky in obtaining the permission for building up our own studio in Schloss Nvrvenich. This studio consisted of 2 stereo tape-deck machines and about 4 microphones. A musician's amplifier was used as our 'recording mixer'. We immediately started recording film music for a young German film director and through this experience we decided to become a rhythmically orientated 'heavy weight' group in combination with ethnological influences- sometimes at least. And as we were trying to imitate 'primitive sounds' CAN ended up with its Ethnological Forgery Serie and did not even stop at imitating a Japanese No spectacle. Of course we regarded these attempts more from the humorous than from a perfect performance side.

The first regular CAN album was MONSTER MOVIE and the first piece we recorded was 'Father Cannot Yell.' We thought more of a collapsing building in slow motion pictures than becoming heroes on our instruments. Everything was spontaneously recorded by 'instant composition'. 'Yoo Doo Right' was an unusual long piece of music at that time with a rhythm which did not belong to the world of Rock 'n Roll. It seemed more to be played by an electric tribe band with adequate instruments of that time.

The album SOUNDTRACKS became more an in-between project,because it took CAN much more time in finishing the double album TAGO MAGO than we thought. Of course we could not live by our income from live gigs or record sales and so CAN was lucky in doing several film musics. The title tracks of the pictures were released as soundtracks on the SOUNDTRACK album. 'Don't Turn the Light on, Leave Me Alone' was Damo's first recording with CAN ever. This piece expresses Damo's mood at that time I think, after I found him singing or 'praying' loud in the streets of Munich. Jaki and me were sitting outside in a cafe when Damo came near. I said to Jaki: 'This will be our new singer.' Jaki: 'how can you say that, you don't even know him.' I got up from my seat, went to Damo and asked him if he is free for the evening. We were an experimental rock group and we were going to play a concert the night- sold out. Damo said he had nothing special to do, so why shouldn't he sing. The venue was packed that evening and Damo started murmuring like a meditating monk. All of a sudden he turned into a fighting samurai, the audience was shocked and almost everybody left the hall. About 30 Americans were left and got totally excited about what they heard. Among them was Hollywood actor David Niven who probably thought he was attending to some sort of nightmare happening.

TAGO MAGO was CAN's official second album and was an attempt in achieving a mystery musical world from light to darkness and return. The album consisted not only out of regularly recorded music, but for the first time we combined 'in-between-recordings', that means the musicians were secretly recorded in the pauses when a new microphone and recording set up was being established. In that time the rest of the group just played in order to make the time pass by instead of waiting till the technical problems were solved. And there was always one microphone and one recorder on standby position for such cases. Altogether certainly a psychedelic experience, and the studio itself even turned into something new e.g. by changing dramatically the whole illumination.

At the end of 1971 CAN moved into another village with their studio equipment where we rented an old cinema which wasn't any longer used as such.The walls were covered by new walls out of 1500 military matresses and the studio looked like an elephant from inside. We could achieve an excellent dry and ambient sound in there and the interior submitted a cozy landscape feeling with all possibilities of spontaneous recordings. EGE BAMYASI was the first album made in this new environment and reflects the group being in a lighter mood than it was in Schloss Nvrvenich. 'Vitamin C' became the title track of the Hollywood movie 'Dead Pigeon' by Samuel Fuller and 'Spoon' was another title track of a TV-gangster series. Everytime about 30 million people switched their TV on, they heard this and so it didn't surprise when 'Spoon' became a top ten hit in Germany. And 'Spoon' was one of the first pieces banded on tape in combination of an electric drum machine and a drummer who was himself an i n h u m a n machine.

As 'Spoon' was so successful CAN could afford having some summer holidays for the first time in its short history. And when everyone returned back to the Inner Space Studio, the music had this summer feeling too. A lot of editings and cuttings were involved during the production and for the first time I could concentrate myself only on bass playing and didn't function as CAN's recording engeneer at the same time. This became the job for our roadies now. Especially 'Bel Air' showed CAN in a state of being an electric symphony group performing a peaceful though sometimes dramatic landscape painting.

And it was the calm weather before the storm too. Damo got married to a German girl from the Jehovas' Witness religion and left CAN. For the rest of the group it was the feeling of a powerful fist strike into one's stomach. We tried out many other singers,but nobody suited to us anymore. So guitarist Michael Karoli and space organist Irmin Schmidt and sometimes me filled the gap. SOON OVER BABALUMA was the last album which was recorded straight onto stereo without a multi-tracking machine. An era came to an end. But it was also the birth of something new. 'Quantum Physics' became one of the first ambient music pieces with a sort of techno character thanks to Jaki's fabulous machine drumming and Irmin's prehistoric synthesizer 'alpha 77'.

In all these years from 1968 to 1974 a lot of unofficial in between recordings came to existence. This was somehow the other face of CAN. These recordings were first released as a LIMITED EDITION album and later got expanded to UNLIMITED EDITION. This double album witnesses the extraordinary mood of the Inner Space Studio and only in such a place these recordings had been possible. We have tested out other professional studios but none could equal our private home studio which put the musicians in such a special state of creativity.

In 1975, CAN obtained their first 16 track recorder and that gave a lot of change to the groups musical output. LANDED became the first CAN album which got a real mix- a professional mix so to speak. The ambient aspect had its successor in 'Unfinished' and for the first time a guest musician appeared on an CAN album: Olaf Kubler from Amon Duul played saxophone on 'Red Hot Indians'.

FLOW MOTION showed how CAN got influenced by reggae music, though no song of this album is actually reggae music. But I remember attending for the first time Bob Marley in concert and I was really impressed by the drums and bass and the reggae-designed guitar work. The very sinister 'Smoke' reminded me of CAN getting back into the sixties again and 'I Want More' took CAN into the U.K. charts, giving an impression of CAN's danceable power. One of my favourite pieces became 'Flow Motion' itself and this time it didn't matter that nobody was singing. It was the nucleus of the group performing this music as it had been from the very beginning since its existence.

The times were changing. During a TV-recording in England we met the musicians of TRAFFIC and two of them soon visited us at Inner Space. Rebop and Rosko Gee liked the way we were approaching music and so they got involved as the new temporary CAN members leading especially the rhythms into a fluent bombardment. It was the time when I invented a new instrumental scenario for myself which switched CAN to different medias like radio tuning, prepared samples of other ethno worlds, electronic treatments and a different instrumental line up as such. 'Animal Waves' of SAW DELIGHT became a journey into other countries and their musical cultures. All of this was synchronized by an activated morse key. Without our new members from TRAFFIC, this intensive musical flow would have never been established.

And as everything comes once to an end, the CAN album showed a last time the glance of a vanishing star. 'All Gates Open' is synonymous for it. And we could take that title straight. All gates really came open for each member of the band going their own musical way which everyone had dreamed of - until 1987, when our first singer Malcolm Mooney wrote us a letter from the United States asking if we couldn't come together again. Since his departure from the group he got named as an artist without having made an attempt as a singer again. He wanted to know how it feels again standing with the band behind a microphone, which had made him so sick when he had left. We all came together in the beautiful landscape of South France and a new spirit came up with the first recordings. In the meantime the group became slowly matured still remaining the original CAN of the old days with an uptodate musical output. RITE TIME was born and especially 'In the Distance lies the Future' became one of my favourite CAN pieces of all time.

With such an amount of musical material recorded in around 10 years it became obvious that new combinations and shorted versions were finding its way into CANIBALISM I to III. The listener who gets in contact with CAN's music for the first time will get a concentrated impression on certain essential aspects. 'Animal Waves' on CANIBALISM II was never cutted so effectively to the point as it is on this album. And this is only one example.

One thing shouldn't been forgotten: when our first album entitled PREPARED TO MEET THY PNOOM was finished no record company wanted to get hold of that kind of music. So we decided to go on recording and try it again. This was leading to MONSTER MOVIE and we made a private pressing out of it, before a record company wanted to sign us. These very first recordings were later released as DELAY 1968. When I did the mastering in the beginning of the eighties the enigmatic German producer Conny Planck listened to it and got excited saying: 'As long as CAN playes 'Soul' they are unbeatable.' 'Little Star of Bethlehem' is one of the first recordings with inserted overdub parts of the whole group.

1997 becomes the year where other musicians show the timeless aspect of CAN's music in the new remix album SACRILEGE. And this is the Sound of CAN in the nineties.

Yeah, I read that Mueller piece when it came out. What a dick. He didn't even read the book. I disagree with some of Cope's choices, but for a flaky acid-fried musician he's a decent writer, and he doesn't pretend to be the authoritah. He was just one of the first to be bothered to publish anything. Mueller doesn't provide any alternative recommendations to counterbalance Copey's little kosmische canon, just a bunch of whining. Cracks In The Cosmic Egg, however, is disappointing. I bought the DVD years ago and there's no personality or enthusiasm in the writing at all.

Nice piece by Reynolds. He's much better when he's enthusiastic about something rather than talking about why music is broken.

I enjoy cope's enthusiasm for the music he loves.

welcome to the machine
The Face, No. 98, November 1996

Julian Cope has championed it, new Nineties bands are ransacking it and the ageing German hippies that first created it are now packing in techno and indie converts. Word is out on Krautrock, the Seventies trance underground that was the best kept secret in music history - until now.
"I was definitely looking for something new. I'd started to get really fed up with garagey guitar bands. Then I came down to London to see Faust. The bass player was hitting his guitar so hard that his hands were covered in blood. They were playing this incredible pure noise for the first 20 minutes. You don't tend to get that at the average Sleeper gig."

Vicky Spilsted is 24. She used to listen to Sonic Youth, Ultra Vivid Scene and "loads of indie rock". Now she listens to Faust, Can and Cosmic Jokers. She makes the four-hour train journey from Edinburgh to London just to attend strange, one-off club nights going under names like "Kosmische" or to see rare performances by obscure Seventies groups like Amon Düül. Yes, some of the groups Vicky reveres still exist and have members that could probably take her age, double it, then add ten.

Vicky has discovered perhaps the best kept musical secret of the past 30 years. Consigned to the dustbin for wearing the wrong trousers, Krautrock demands your attention. It is the influential thread running through so much "new" Nineties music. And, as the pile-up of "new" bands stealing from a sound and an attitude can be traced back to experimental pop musicians working in early-Seventies Germany grows, Krautrock is screaming out to be explored. "I went to see Stereolab last year," adds Vicky. "It was packed and I looked around and thought, 'So how many people here have actually heard Neu!?'"

Similar sentiments are expressed by the colourful Kosmische crew, a London-based collective who have been pioneering Krautrock club nights in the capital over the last four months. "Listen to Stereolab and you can virtually hear whole Neu! records lifted and reworked a bit," says the club's co-promoter Flint. "I think it's important that people out there get to hear all the incredible, obscure records that have inspired bands like Stereolab."

"The interest is definitely there," says his club-running partner Leon. "We weren't sure at first, but when we put a few flyers around earlier this year we had at least a hundred people asking what was happening."

The first Kosmische club night featured a performance by the British psychedelic guru Brian Barritt, who, with the help of a bottle of 7-Up laced with industrial-strength LSD, once made a record with Timothy Leary and Krautrock supergroup Ash Ra Tempel. This record (for obvious reasons called "7-Up") is so far out there you need binoculars to find it. It also encompasses the kind of madcap spirit that Kosmische are now busy trying to incorporate into their exotic nights, employing huge backdrops and projection shows in an effort to create a uniquely Kraut environment.

"That first Kosmische night in July was like nothing I've been to in years," says 26-year-old Londoner and photographic assistant Mark Fay. "People were standing around dazed - not quite knowing how to react to this incredible old guy up at the front who was out-raving the lot of them. It was like: 'Is this a club or a gig or an art statement?' It'll be interesting to see where these sort of nights can go from here."

I decide to track down Brian Barritt to ask him much the same question. At the age of 61, he is obviously still running on some kind of five-star rock'n'roll petrol. "I want to see as much action as possible at this new club," he tells me. "I want to feel that old vibe all over again." Kosmische Leon is more immediately concerned with getting the right DJs for his events. "We've asked a lot of people we know would be great but they don't want to bring their ? albums out to a club and have some Krautrock virgin spill lager all over them. That's the danger, isn't it?"
Turn to page 74 for a fashion feature on the Krautrock look. A list of suppliers of army greatcoats and kaftans can now be found in the back of the magazine. Only joking. Or am I?

I've not asked my mother yet, but I'm sure if I did she would advise me never to trust a man in leggings. Certainly, she wouldn't invest her life savings with a man who looked anything like Julian Cope does these days - after all, he wears a pointed hat and tends to go on and on about great lumps of prehistoric concrete that get in the way of a good motorway. But by the close of the Nineties Julian Cope just might have been re-evaluated and become as hip as a Jeep-load of cussing MCs. Overdue for reappraisal or not, for my money Cope has more to say right now than any of the current crop of daft fuckers pretending to be The Small Faces.

According to these people, those "Noelrock" devotees with their earnest top 50s full of "Pet Sounds" and Neil Young's "Zuma", the only musical history we have is contained in the racks of any high street HMV. But with his passionate book, Krautrocksampler (first published at the start of this year and already on to its third reprint), and with his tireless free-press campaign on behalf of a lost nation of German hippies either chemically smashed beyond caring, dead or in steady teaching jobs, Cope has helped join the dots in a hidden history.

"The time is right for this music," he chatters excitedly over the phone. "Sure, some of it is over 25 years old now, but to a lot of people it hasn't made sense before. The world just needed to get weirder and catch up. I just wanted people to know that this is hard motherfucker of a music. It's not some wimpy hippy shit."

Definitions, then. Krautrock: the result of experimental minds on serious drugs trying to make inspired pop/rock music (and often failing miserably). Rock'n'roll innovation with a repetitious trance element to its groove. The great radical music of the Seventies.

The German groups of that time actually encouraged the Krautrock tag, titling albums things like "Mr Kraut's Jinx" and "Rastakrautpasta". But a news blackout inspired by punk made sure that much of this sort of thing passed by unheard. That blackout is over now. Time to make point that Can were at least as important as The Clash.

Some personal Kraut observations: there are no 20-minute drum solos, precious little "progressive" "axe" strangling going on, and this music has fuck all to do with Rick Wakeman or Gong. Some of those bands back then may well have looked like they'd been dragged through a hedge backwards, but - honest! - I don't hear anyone singing about gnomes and fairies on these records. Krautrock studio innovators such as Dieter Dirks and Conny Plank are matched only by other Seventies innovators such as Lee Perry and King Tubby in their breathtaking ability to make music fly, yet they remain largely unsung heroes.
But why do you need to know all this when all you want to do is sing in the middle of a football field singing old Slade songs? Because without Can's "Halleluhwah" there would be no loose-limbed cover version by Happy Mondays, and Black Grape would have far less of a sleazy swagger. Yes, Shaun Ryder and his mates have been digging and openly lifting Krautrock for years now. (Without mentioning Stone Roses, whose "Fool's Gold" was almost directly nicked from Can's "Vitamin C" -ER.) Without Neu!, David Bowie and Brian Eno would have been stuck for ideas during a good portion of the late Seventies.
Without Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa wouldn't have caught the Trance Disco Express called electro, and without that Juan Atkins wouldn't have laid the bare bones of techno for Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson to see. Without the more extreme experiments of Krautrock, The Aphex Twin would sound like Disco Tex and PIL's much-lauded "Metal Box" simply would not exist. And that twisted wail John Lydon uses on Leftfield's "Open Up"? That belongs to Renate Knaup, a woman in her forties who did a tour of Japan with Amon Düül II a few months ago and got mobbed by teenagers obsessed with records she helped make 25 years ago.
Oh, and check The Beastie Boys' listening recommendations in their own Grand Royal magazine. Yes, that's why those spaced-out jams on "Ill Communication" sound so engagingly raw and Can-like.

All just so you understand. When we talk about this music we are not just speaking about history. We are talking about the Tortoise record that is single of the week in the NME and has been remixed over at Mo'Wax. We are talking about that brilliant techno record that you bought yesterday that takes its cues and clips from Manuel Gottsching's "E2-E4".

It was almost a relief when easy listening became fashionable. The public had been happy to remain ignorant about Krautrock anyway, despite the name-dropping here and there of Cluster and Can. But Julian Cope's book has reinvigorated the Kraut groundswell, successfully tying all the bits and pieces together and helpfully informing that the phrases "Krautrock" and "progressive rock" are not one and the same. The book was by no means definitive - the anoraks, old Kraut heads and spotters are still moaning about it - but Cope had never meant it to be. He called it a "field guide" - in effect, a cool shopping list. "I don't want to put people off the music," he stresses. "I just want to infect people with a delirious desire to go out and buy loads of mad CDs."

Could the swelling success of a crop of British bands who openly admit a huge debt to Krautrock (notably Porcupine Tree and the superb Main) mean that the prospect of a Krautrock Oasis is now perilously close? You never know. Certainly, more and more people are now name-checking Porcupine Tree, a band who recently spawned a sideline project called The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck - an obvious tribute to the Kraut genre with four tracks ingeniously cloning the sounds of Neu!, Can, Cluster and Faust. "We were just having fun," says Porcupine Tree's singer Steve Wilson. "I'm fascinated with the simplicity and repetition in the music. It's like house and techno except it's more interesting because it changes in subtle ways. This music is the antithesis of progressive rock. Faust were far more radical than The Sex Pistols for me. While John Lydon was still picking his nose they really were smashing up pinball machines."

Vicky Spilsted isn't so sure about the new bands claiming Kraut allegiance. "We've got to make sure this doesn't become some sort of 'new wave of new wave' thing. It's like, if you're 14 years old and you heard a S*M*A*S*H record, you might think they were pretty amazing. But their music has none of the intensity punk originally had." Julian Cope, on the other hand, says he can't get upset by anyone who is getting inspired by the Krautrock groundswell. "If there were any imitation Krautrock bands out there I would definitely go and see them. I'd love to hear some young bands taking some chances, playing some 20-minute freakouts."

This is no mere London clubland infatuation. Piccadilly Records in Manchester has been selling "bucketloads" of reissue CDs since Krautrocksampler was published. Manager John confirms that techno and indie converts have been slipping Ash Ra Tempel LPs and CDs into their bags of Orbital and Money Mark. Paul at Greyhound, a company which distributes records nationally, points out that even shops which might have sold just house and techno a year or two back are now ordering records by Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream.

Manuel Gottsching's massively influential "E2-E4", meanwhile, which effectively got remade by Carl Craig as "Sueno Latino" a few years back (actually, "Sueno Latino" was by the Italians Persi, Collono and Gemolotto, as "Remake Uno & Duo" by Carl Craig's Paperclip People project approriated the "E2-E4" sample -ER), was recently reissued on vinyl and caused a real stir in Britain's dance record shops. Dedpite the fact that it is now freely available, some shops - aware of its previous rarity - were still charging up to ? a copy and getting it. DJing in Manchester recently, Richie Hawtin and John Aquaviva spotted it during a record-buying trip to Eastern Bloc and each bought four copies.

The Kraut originators aren't necessarily ageing gracefully; the members of Amon Düül II, for example are approaching 50 without due care and attention. The band's singer Renate Knaup - still the ultimate Krautrock siren - claims that during a recent mini-tour of Japan a young girl stood in front of her singing every word and mimicking her movements. "It was very strange. I just wasn't ready for that kind of reaction," she tells me.

Despite having no record to promote and zero coverage by the mainstream media, Amon Düül II sold out three big concerts in Japan, as well as two packed gigs at London's Astoria and Shepherd's Bush Empire. FACE contributor Cliff Jones was among those in attendance at the Astoria show: "I think that gig was the first moment of collective consciousness for Nineties Krautrock - a gathering of the tribes in the good old-fashioned sense," says Jones. "All these pockets of people, from teenagers to old muso-heads, were so overwhelmingly enthusiastic for this music."

After DJing in Nottingham recently I met 22-year old Paul Coulam, who mentioned that he's persuaded two of his mates to drive down to London for this same Amon Düül gig. "If you had walked in there off the street you wouldn't have made any sense of it. But to me they were fucking brilliant. It kind of filled in the gaps. I'm hanging around with people who think Underworld are experimental. This music reaches far beyond that."

But a nation of indie kids planning holidays in Munich looking for the legendary Cosmic Cavern? Krautrock mix CDs from Danny Rampling and Jeremy Healy? Isn't a special musical secret now in danger of being spoiled? And isn't all your fault, Mr Cope?

The Druid is having none of it. "I'm just glad that all the things that have happened recently have put straight all those people who declared this music to be nothing more than crap Euro Rock," he says. "People were laughed at for being into this music. A few years back I used to get pissed off when I went into a second-hand record shop and saw all these albums just sitting there not being appreciated. Somebody just needed to define this music..."

For the record, it's called Krautrock and Neu means "new" in German".

A YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO KRAUTROCK
EIGHT KOSMISCHE KILLERS
Even if you think Noel is a genius you should try and listen to these:

Can "Tago Mago" (Spoon/Mute)
Ash Ra Tempel "Same" (Spalax)
Cluster "Zuckerzeit" (Spalax)
Faust "IV" (Virgin)
Neu! "Neu '75" (Germanofon)
Amon Düül II "Lemmingmania" (Captain Trip)
Cosmic Jokers "Galactic Supermarket" (Spalax)
Harmonia "Deluxe" (Spalax)

©1996 The Face

Nice piece by Reynolds. He's much better when he's enthusiastic about something rather than talking about why music is broken.

― Fastnbulbous,

Oh totally. At what point in time did he become so jaded? (did posting on ILM early on contribute to that ? or was it Dissensus? haha)

WE CAN BE HEROES
Andy Gill, Mojo, April 1997
Born into Germany's economic miracle but cultural wasteland, World War II's children set about alchemising the 60's revolutionary spirit into sound and vision. Wildly radical then, highly influential now, Krautrock is back. Andy Gill recalls some of the most outlandish, other-worldly music in rock history, and meets the legends who made it.

It's sometime in the bleak widwinter of 1973-4, and Faust are playing Sheffield City Hall. The occasion is one those early Virgin Records package tours which attempted to revive the collective spirit of the Motown and Beat-boom era revues within the context of that label's sternly uncompromising -- some would say largely unlistenable -- roster of avant-garde art-rock acts. Gong may have played, or perhaps Henry Cow or Hatfield & The North, and there may have been a film of label whizzkid Mike Oldfield performing his celebrated Tubular Bells at somewhere like the Albert Hall; it's hard to be precise, recollections growing mercifully more cloudy with the passing years.

Faust, though, remain clear in my mind to this day -- quite an achievement, since they played in near-total darkness, save for the illumination furnished by a couple of TV sets facing the band, and a pinball table positioned off to one side. In front of the TV sets are a couple of comfy, overstuffed armchairs, and behind them a drum kit. A block of concrete is dimly visible centre-stage.

Like virtually every other British 'head' of unquenchable curiosity but limited means, I'd recently invested in the copper-bottomed uncertainties of The Faust Tapes, 49 penn'orth of musical madness decked out in the deceptively calming waves of Bridget Riley's op-art painting Crest, and I was prepared for -- well, just about anything, really. Even so, I got more than I bargained for.

Through the gloom, it's possible to make out a few reassuringly hairy figures lounging comfortably in the armchairs, cradling bass and guitars. A single-minded drummer appears, and sets up a rhythm of spare, minimalist efficiency. The loungers strike up a chord and plod along earnestly for awhile. And then some. There is none of the decorative embellishment or flashy musicianship of the most 'progressive' rock of the time: this is pure riff, and nothing but, as focused as anything by James Brown, if not as danceable. How could it be, without a second chord to play against? It's like a perpetual set-up with no pay-off.

Five or 10 minutes into the piece, one of the musicians puts aside his instrument, levers himself out of the armchair, and sidles over to the pinball machine where he plays awhile, the bleeps and sproings of the leisure machine offering welcome detail over the riff which churns on, unstoppable, like a golem. His game over, he turns his attention to one of the TV's, changing channels randomly. Then, bored with that, he moves over to the concrete block, picking up something which had until then been hidden behind it. It's a tool of some form, either a hydraulic drill or, more likely, an electric-powered Kango hammer, which, without more ado, he sets to work on the block.

The noise is deafening -- and dangerous, with fragments of concrete spitting out into the front rows of the audience, who shield their eyes behind their arms. But the shock is utterly exhilarating, prompting the same thrill of modernist liberation that early 20th century audiences must have experienced at Dada or Surrealist exhibitions, or at the performances of Futurist Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori noise machine, or Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring -- the feeling that some Rubicon has been irrevocably crossed, that taboo boundaries have been sundered. Jaws drop all around the hall. Even those who had been getting restless about the relentlessly static music are won over, gleeful smiles creasing faces at this majestic bout of art-terrorism. If they could be heard over the din, they'd be cheering.

Like all great aesthetic transgressions, it also draws the requisite outraged reaction, but from an unforeseen source. Suddenly, the drill is silenced, along with the TV's, the pinball machine, and the electric instruments. The stage power has been cut. The hall lights, conversely, fade up. Bemused, the musicians grin at each other as a neatly-dressed man -- the hall manager, or someone in suchlike authority -- strides to the front and addresses the audience.

"That's quite enough of this!" he shouts at us. "This is not music!" It's the perfect complement to the performance -- so perfect that, for a moment, I suspect it's part of the act. It isn't, of course. It's some sad Horatio, left to vainly guard the bridge of musical politeness against these barbarian hordes. Or, more prosaically, trying to save the polished wood of his stage from getting scratched to buggery by the shifting concrete block.

It's an unequal contest. Immediately, even those who had been bored by Faust's performance are seething with indignation at this suit's attempt to control their taste. Boos resound around the hall, and a slow handclap sets up. The suit departs, but the power stays off. One of the musicians comes to the front of the stage and says, sans microphone: "Hey, it's your gig. Are you gonna let this guy tell you what you can listen to?" The clapping gets louder, and the drummer takes up the beat again, while his colleagues bang along on whatever comes to hand. It's no more complex a rhythm than before, but it's a great deal louder, and there's a euphoric, collective spirit to it that wasn't present earlier. The fourth wall of performance has been shattered, and nobody who was present will forget it, or listen to music in the same way again. Who would have thought that one chord and the simplest of beats could be a life-changing experience? And what more could you want from a gig?

IT'S FEBRUARY 1995 -- FEBRUARY 17, TO BE EXACT -- AND FAUST ARE playing London's Queen Elizabeth Hall.

In the foyer, the city's avant-rock cognoscenti mingle earnestly during the intermission. Veteran improvisors AMM have just played a typically detailed, engrossing set, and hypothetical goatees are being figuratively stroked in contemplation of their work. It's a mixed crowd, though, not entirely composed of bedsit intellectuals. Over by the windows, a group of what appear to be filthy European bikers are laughing loudly and drunkenly. There are quite a few professiorial types d'un certain age, counterbalanced by a substantial complement of young, crusty hippy types. A curious Jarvis Cocker wanders around, making the most of a relative anonymity that will, within a matter of weeks, be but a distant memory.

There's a strange air of expectant, barely-suppressed violence quite at odds with the open-minded atmosphere of the Sheffield show two decades before. It's not like the audience doesn't know what to expect; on the contrary, for some in the audience, their expectations are every bit as pre-formed and rigidly demanding, in their own way, as those inflicted upon teen acts like Boyzone: if bourgeois conventions aren't given a damn good kicking tonight, well, they'll have something to say about it. No matter that such knee-jerk expectations are in themselves just as comfortable and bourgeois as those of more conservative types: in the '90s, even revolution has its own formal style.

A large curtain of scrim hides half the stage. In front of it, two men stand motionless, one a barefoot bassist, the other a balding drummer standing, Mo Tucker-style, behind a drum kit which, in the intervening 20 years, has shrunk to just one snare, one tom-tom and one cymbal. Behind the scrim, backlit so his shadow looms hugely, is Tony Conrad, the minimalist-violinist with whom Faust once recorded an album entitled Outside The Dream Syndicate. A cellist and another violinist sit alongside him, also motionless. Conrad plays a chord, then keeps on playing it, a piercing, mesmeric drone of immense, ear-endangering volume. Some time later -- about 10 minutes into the performance -- the other string players join in with similarly minimal intent, setting up a static harmonic drone which continues for another 10 or 15 minutes before the bassist and drummer suddenly launch into the kind of riff which Status Quo might have discarded as being too basic. The drummer bangs each drum alternately at regular tempo, looking for all the world as if he's jogging on the spot; the barefoot bassist, meanwhile, pummels his instrument with such single-minded fury that, shortly after he begins, one of the thick, well-wound strings has snapped. Have you ever tried to snap a bass string? It's not easy. Usually, you need pliers, but there are no tools available on-stage tonight.

The performance continues, with no discernible subsequent change, for another half-hour. But this time, no hall manager turns off the power or leaps on-stage to berate the audience's musical taste -- and the self-satisfied applause (not to mention a certain relief) which greets the piece's conclusion stands in stark, smug contrast to the sense of exhilaration felt two decades earlier. For an encore, the barefoot bassist gives the floor a desultory thump with a nearby hammer, almost like an abbreviated gestural signature, before the ensemble wade into another 10-minute piece. No-one, save maybe a few of the old-dear ushers, has been outraged, and it's my guess that no-one has been liberated, either. We all got exactly what we expected.

FAUST WERE, BY COMMON CONSENT, THE MOST EXTREME OF THOSE German bands of the early '70s that came to be regarded under the collective rubric of Krautrock -- a patronising British term (pointedly satirised in the track of that title on Faust IV) covering a multitude of disparate musical approaches spanning the entire spectrum of composition and improvisation.

At one end, Faust would be deconstructing the nuts, bolts and griders of rock music through relentlessly monotonous pieces like 'It's A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl', and laying the groundwork for today's sampler-collagists through the intricate cut-ups and splices of their astonishing debut, Faust Clear, which, as its name suggests, was released on clear vinyl in a clear plastic sleeve imprinted with an X-ray of a hand and sleevenotes in German by producer Uwe Nettelbeck. (The follow-up Faust So Far would be in contrastingly sombre none-more-black, packaged with a set of tasteful prints illustrating each of the song titles.) At the other end, Kraftwerk would labour over exquisite melodies and metronomically precise rhythms, taking the concept of machine-music to its logical conclusion, and ironically, providing the groundwork for the future development of black American music.

In between, all manner of musical endeavour was encouraged, from the trance-scapes of Tangerine Dream and the space-rock of Amon Düül II to the psychedelic proto-punk grooves of Neu! and the Eastern-tinged mysticism of Popol Vuh. What's extraordinary about virtually all these bands -- apart from the music itself, which was rarely less than that -- is that despite severely limited commercial returns, their influence was so wide-reaching that most are still working today; or if, like Can, they're no longer together as a band, the various members are still engaged on projects every bit as bonkers. Most Anglo-American bands of equivalent age and popularity, by contrast, have long since succumbed to the reaper, or totter as sad parodies of their former selves.

The difference is cultural, of course. For British and American bands, the hippy era represented mainly freedom from the utilitarian chains which post-war redevelopment had placed upon their parents. The '50s, the era of Ike and Mac, had been a time of parsimony perpetually passed off as a great bounty -- "You've never had it so good! -- and by the allegedly Swinging '60s the younger generation was determined that its surroundings and activities should reflect that supposed bounty. Despite the undercurrents of political unrest, the gaiety of the hippy era was primarily, for Brits and Yanks, a guilt-free indulgence in the wealth of new possibilities.

While German youth of the same era shared similar hopes and desires, there were other, much darker influences at work on their world view. As Can's Irmin Schmidt explains, "All the young revolutionaries of 1968 had parents who were either Nazis or had suffered under the Nazis, and the relationship of the parents to the Nazis, and of their children to them, was a special German thing, and had a big influence on the '68 troubles. And for 20 years, we had got rid of culture. It wasn't just towns that were bombed, culture was bombed too, and you can't rebuild culture."

Consequently, the iconoclasm of the times cut that much deeper with these German bands, and provided them with a more enduring cast of mind. When Faust took up their road-drills and attacked concrete blocks on-stage, it was with the same order of symbolic destruction that would fire the original punks a few years later: tear down the walls, cut out the cancer. Except that in their case, the cancer in question was more than just a vague feeling of generalised boredom or, as the Germans have it, Weltschmerz. And as with German performance artists of the '60s -- such as Otto Muehl, who would climb inside freshly-slaughtered animal carcasses, or the self-mutilator Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who eventually bled to death after severing his own penis -- German musicians of the period applied fearsome standards to their work: it wasn't just a brief diversion, it was a whole-hearted attempt to find a new route to the future, by exorcising the past.

In doing so, they rediscovered their own national identity. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter explained to Lester Bangs in 1975, "After the war, 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 cannot deny we are from Germany."

TO THE BRITISH AUDIENCE STUMBLING UPON KRAUTROCK ALBUMS, they were like the proverbial mystery surrounded by an enigma.

The minimal cover designs of early Faust, Neu! and Kraftwerk albums promised something completely self-contained compared to the psychedelic fantasies of Roger Dean which dominated the home market's 'progressive' iconography. The brave mix of art, noise and strange beauty present in most Krautrock was also somewhat at odds with the lumbering traditionalism of Yes, Genesis and ELP, whose work always seemed to be apologising for not being classical music.

Just as revolutionary was the discomfiting blend of deep seriousness and mad humour that most Krautrock bands displayed as they pirouetted at the interface of new technology and new consciousness -- who else but a Krautrocker would dare pass off the same piece of music at different speeds as separate tracks, as Neu! did on their second album? Not least among Krautrock's attractions was the thrilling notion that somebody had entrusted all this expensive new machinery to such obvious headcases.

Aficionados sought out anything recorded at Conny Plank's legendary studio, where many of the great Krautrock epics were recorded. Meanwhile, alerted by the strange, exotic soundtracks to Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic films, the curious unearthed the mystical, mantra-like music of Florian Fricke's Popol Vuh, the most overtly religious of the Krautrock groups (Fricke himself appeared in some of the films, most notably as the deaf pianist in The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser). Others were more extreme in their interest: David Bowie, ever the intrepid explorer, went the whole hog and actually moved to Berlin, where he and Brian Eno would fashion two of pop's great leaps forward (Low and Heroes under the influence of Krautrock).

"I was a big fan of Kraftwerk, Cluster and Harmonia, and I thought the first Neu! album, in particular, was just gigantically wonderful," admits Bowie. "Looking at that against punk, I had absolutely no doubts where the future of music was going, and for me it was coming out Germany at that time. I also liked some of the later Can things, and there was an album that I loved by Edgar Froese, Epsilon In Malaysian Pale; it's the most beautiful, enchanting, poignant work, quite lovely. That used to be the background music to my life when I was living in Berlin. In a way, it was great that I found those bands, because I didn't feel any of the essence of punk at all in that period, I just totally by-passed it."

Bands proliferated in the wake of the pioneers featured here. Names like Guru Guru, Ash Ra Temple, Between, Agitation Free, Cosmic Jokers, Embryo, Wallenstein, Brainticket, Triumvirat, Novalis, Ramses, Kraan, Jane, Hoelderlin, Grobschnitt, Floh De Cologne and Achim Reichel fought for space in the limited Krautrock market. Meanwhile, older bands like Neu! split into their separate elements, adding names like La Düsseldorf and Harmonia to the fray. Before too long, the Krautrock section of the record racks was bulging with synth-twiddling weirdos and space-rock cadets, many of whom seemed to have little grasp of quality control. People like Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler released vast quantities of electronica, while the borders between true Krautrock and the more mundane German heavy rock bands started to blur as the '70s wore on.

Eventually, interest inevitably waned in the genre as a whole, save for the occasional boost such as that given when Johnny Rotten owned up to liking Can, or the ripple effect caused by Kraftwerk's hit singles. Through the '80's and '90's, the Krautrock light was kept aflame by such as the Freeman brothers, Steven and Alan, via their Audion magazine and Ultima Thule record shop; and, more recently, Julian Cope published his Krautrocksampler guide to the genre, re-igniting wider interest in the form.

As for the bands themselves, there are fresh stirrings from various quarters: Popol Vuh last year released City Raga, Florian Fricke's attempt to come to terms with current technology and musical style, and Amon Düül II have likewise put out Nada Moonshine and hauled themselves back into live performance. Tangerine Dream have never cut back on their recording schedule, augmenting their own releases with a constant stream of soundtrack work. And Kraftwerk... well, Kraftwerk proceed at their own pace, with scant regard for fashion.

IT'S DECEMBER 2, 1996, AND Faust are playing The Garage, at London's Highbury Corner.

On-stage there is a vast array of percussion -- metal pipes, tin things, drums, cymbals -- alongside an adapted keyboard with wires bristling from its back and sundry boxes piled on top of it. A cement mixer grinds out a rhythm, while the bassist hammers away at a minimal beat. Out front, an enormous oil-drum on wheels stands ready to be pummelled, while fenced off for our protection, a sculptress grinds away at a metal construction, sending showers of sparks across audience and band alike.

At one point, the bassist tears off his clothes, jumps into the audience and makes his way to the side, where he starts flinging paint at hundreds of album sleeves stapled to a board, smearing it liberally across them. (The sleeves, when dry, are then used as personalised covers for a numbered limited-edition of 300 12-inch singles, costing 㿀 each -- mine's number 155). Later on in the proceedings, he again jumps into the crowd and makes his way to a tarpaulin-covered machine in the centre of the room. It's that most invaluable of musical instruments, a threshing-machine. Straddlind it as the crowd cheers, he dumps into its funnel sack after sack of dead leaves, which come blasting out across the assembled masses.

Compared to the monotonous Queen Elizabeth Hall show a year and a half earlier, it's an all-action show: action-painting, action-sculpting, action-playing. When the lights go up, the scene is one of devastation, a cross between factory, forest and artist's studio. No-one turned the power off, though. It's almost like a continuation of their shows from 1973-74, a belated picking-up of the baton they so noisily dropped back then, and a resumption of the spirit of Krautrock.

"We should have communicated with Kraftwerk and all those others back then," acknowledges Jean-Hervé Peron before the show. "We should have invited them to Wümme, because all these groups, in their different styles, were creating a movement. We didn't realise that at the time. Now, that movement is accepted and appreciated, but we didn't know then. We were spread all over, and nobody felt the urge to bring all these people together. Now people are talking about putting on Krautrock festivals."

Copyright © 1997 Mojo Magazine.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/images/artists/d__l__amon/AMON-DUUL-1---1.jpg

Of all the groups lumped together under the Krautrock banner, Amon Düül II was the most psychedelic, the most cosmic, the most out of control. Edwin Pouncey went to Munich to meet the group's surviving members: there he heard a tale of 60s hippy communes, internecine warfare, drug-fuelled counterculture nights, and strange encounters with Can, Jimi Hendrix and the Baader-Meinhof group. This article originally appeared in The Wire 144 (February 1996).

When the German rock explosion (now recognised as Krautrock) first hit these shores in the early 70s, the temptation to label it as a thriving and productive little European movement was too much for the music press of the day to resist. In truth, the groups involved in making Krautrock happen were spread out across a vast land mass, and many of them were unaware of each other's existence. Can were from Cologne, a city that has now grown almost to the size of Los Angeles. Dusseldorf, the industrial heartland of Germany, produced Kraftwerk, Neu! and Cluster. Berlin, the capital, was home to Tangerine Dream. And Munich, a remote Southern city situated in the magical kingdom of Bavaria, spawned Amon Duul.

"In Germany it was all intolerance and badmouthing each other," explains founding Amon Duul II guitarist Chris Karrer. "We had to fight to be accepted by the people." Amon Duul II and Karrer's fight to be heard continues some some 30 years later with the release of a new record, Nada Moonshine#, and a reissue/tour programme that is slowly coming together and should start rolling during the next few months.

Of the original group, four members have managed to survive the various upheavals that have become an integral part of the Amon Duul mythology: Karrer, his longtime comrade and vocalist Renate Krotenschwanz Knaup, bass player/computer programmer Lothar Meid, and artistic supervisor/lighting director (and occasional synthesizer and keyboard player) Falk U Rogner. All agree that this time it's break or bust for Amon Duul II...

"I never was a hippy! I accepted them but it was never my thing. I was a fighter. We were all fighters, not hippies" - Renate Knaup

In the beginning there were three Amon Duuls. Amon Duul I was the infamous political/musical commune group led by Ulrich Leopold, the brother of drummer Peter. Amon Duul II formed when Chris Karrer broke away from the commune to concentrate on broadening the musical side of Duul. But before either of these, there was Amon Duul O. Formed in 1966 and featuring Karrer on guitar, Lothar Meid on bass and drummer Christian Burchard (who would later form Embryo), ADO was a short-lived experiment which indulged the trio's early obsession with John Coltrane/Ornette Coleman-inspired free jazz. "I grew up in the 50s during the Elvis Presley era," explains Karrer when I met the group in Munich last December. "At the age of ten I was into dressing up like Elvis, all that "Blue Suede Shoes" shit. But the next giant step for me was when I saw John Coltrane in 1965 and everything I had seen or heard before suddenly seemed immature. I launched myself into the free jazz scene; we used to hang around jazz clubs in Munich and Barcelona, anywhere we could discover more about this music.

"The next stage in my musical education was when I saw Jimi Hendrix in 1967. I followed this girl to find out where she was going because there were no girls at the jazz club I used to visit. She went into this new club I hadn't seen before which had a poster outside saying this guy Hendrix was playing there. It was such an event to see him perform in such a small club, standing on this tiny stage in front of these huge Marshall stacks, surrounded by 400 screaming mini-skirted girls and plucking this flaming guitar with his teeth. After Hendrix I went home and broke all of my jazz records."

So intense was Karrer's experience that he went in search of a new group that could recreate and extend Hendrix's brand of freeform psychedelia. He found what he was looking for by stumbling into the communal camp of Amon Duul (I), a straggly bunch of politically-aware outsiders and freaks which at the time included Ulrich and Peter Leopold, together with Rainer Bauer. Later, the commune would expand to take in Bauer's sister Ella (aka Elenora Romana), Helge and Angelika Filanda, Uschi Obermeier and numerous cats, dogs and children.
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The music they made was equally sprawling and chaotic, an extended acoustic and percussive thrash which was recorded for posterity during a mammoth 48 hour improvised workout. A section of this was released in 1969 on the album Psychedelic Underground, while the rest of the session was shelved. When Amon Duul II began to attract attention, however, further unauthorised sections of the work began to appear. Eventually, a second single album, Collapsing - Singvogel Ruckwarts, and two double album sets, Disaster - Luud Noma and Experimente, were released, much to the displeasure of all concerned. According to a source close to Ulrich Leopold, the man responsible was Psychedelic Underground producer Peter Meisel, who "cut the tape up and added extra, unconnected sound effects and things to beef them up a bit".

"I had nothing to do with that recording session," claims Karrer when asked about his involvement with the project. "The only original thing from that period which hasn't been released yet is a 1967 recording of the basic Amon Duul band."

Feeling somewhat discouraged and in need of adventure, Karrer teamed up with artist/photographer friend Falk U Rogner and together they made their way to London, primarily to meet up with another Munich colleague of theirs, Renate Knaup, who was working as an au pair in Muswell Hill.

"I was 16 and a half when I went to work in London," Renate recalls, "and I remember telling a friend at the time that I'm going to be a singer and nothing else. Before I left Germany I was totally into The Beatles and Otis Redding. I knew Chris from Munich from that period; he was playing guitar in jazz clubs but he wasn't really into doing that. When they came to visit me they were already talking about forming the group, so I came back with them to Germany."

Meanwhile, Karrer discovered that London circa 1968 had much to offer the young musician: one experience in particular would have a lasting impact on the music of Amon Duul II. "While we were there we went to the Roundhouse where we saw a free jazz band playing on the same bill as Family, The Animals and some other bands," he explains. "I thought to myself, 'These English people are much further ahead than we are'." When they returned to Munich both Renate and Falk were integrated into the original Amon Duul family, but the continuing chaos, political dogmatism and musical mayhem was becoming unbearable for Karrer and Knaup.

"Everybody was allowed to make noise," remembers Renate with disgust. "I found this so ugly sounding that it made me clam up. If that was their idea of making music it was certainly not mine. I was an amateur too, but I wanted to bring another dimension to the band. "There were also certain rules you had to obey and if you broke any you had to go in front of this tribunal and explain your actions to these fuckers! Even when I wanted to buy a new pair of stockings I had to ask the 'cashier' for money. This is why we split from Amon Duul I,; they were too involved with this political shit."

Chris Karrer, meanwhile, had another reason for wanting to go it along. "Amon Duul I were going completely against this semi-professional jazz musician image which Peter Leopold and I had adopted. I was really astonished at the direction Ulrich Leopold had chosen to go; for me it was like listening to a bunch of amateurs."

The crunch came when Amon Duul I and Karrer's version with Renate on vocals appeared on the same stage at the infamous Essener Sonntag Festival in october 1968. The ensuing battle between the two groups caused a split, and Amon Duul I and the newly formed Amon Duul Ii parted company.
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There were now two communes of musicians, both leaderless, to worry the upright citizens of Munich. "We were hated so much by the normal people," laughs Renate. "We were living in this huge flat with seven rooms in Prinzregentenstrasse; it was a house where Hitler once gave a speech from the balcony. In front was a taxicab rank with these drivers hanging around all day." "The normal citizen looked at us and saw a mixture of gangster, hippy, criminal and ape," continues Chris. "Once somebody rang us up with a nice voice and asked if they could do a feature article on us about how a commune works. They came and asked us questions, took our photos and disappeared. One week later the article appeared and it said: 'This kind of community stinks and if this is the future of Germany then we need Adolf back.'"

Another reason for the authorities and regular folks to be fearful was the opening in 1969 of a club in Leopoldstrasse called PN. It was soon to become a regular venue for Amon Duul II and their army of freaky followers.

"The guy who ran this club was 20 years older than us and from a totally different scene," explains Renate, "but he sensed there was something going on that wasn't just a fad but a movement. He accepted all these crazy people for what they were; everyone was allowed to express themselves in any way they wanted. At that time acid was the drug and many people took too much. To see them freaking out in front of you was worrying sometimes because they looked as though they were going insane. There were some really eccentric people there too. I remember very well this Russian guy called Anatole: everybody had long hair but he was completely bald."

"He used to dance to our music in a very extreme fashion," adds Chris. "Once I saw him at the front of the stage with this naked old woman and he was shoving his Vaselined finger in and out of her backside to the rhythm of the music while ringing this bell at the same time." "We never had the police coming round," smiles Renate. "There were never any fights."

Amon Duul's successive and successful appearances at PN soon aroused record company interest: in 1969, the group's first album, the notorious Phallus Dei, was released by Liberty. By this time the group had expanded to an eight-piece: joining Karrer, Knaup, Leopold and Rogner were English bass player Dave Anderson (formerly of Kippington Lodge), drummer Dieter Serfas, Shrat on percussion and vocals, and guitarist John Weinzierl, whom Chris and Falk had liberated from boarding school in order to have him play in the group.

The music on Phallus Dei (aka God's Cock) owes much to the shambling and hypnotic improvisations of the discarded Amon Duul I, only this time the playing is more accomplished and ambitious. Renate, however, felt that her talents were not being used to the full.

"When I joined Amon Duul II I started to really get into the music. I never had any problems with experimental music: I loved Ornette Coleman, but the problem I had in the beginning was self confidence. It was difficult to be the only woman involved inside this macho, musical mafia. Phallus Dei had no words for me to sing. I only did these oohs and aahs for the vocals. I wanted to be a soul singer, in the same way that Hendrix was a soul singer."

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The second Amon Duul II album, Yeti (1970), gave Renate a more prominent role and boosted the rest of the group's confidence in the recording studio. With a mixture of short songs and cosmically-tuned improvisational tracks, Yeti can be heard today as one of the cornerstones of both Amon Duul's career and the entire Krautrock movement.

"We were satisfied with what we had done," suggests Renate. "We felt proud about Yeti and we were among people who loved us. Nobody could harm us any more."

As well as the feeling of well-being which the recoding of Yeti produced within the group, it also offered the opportunity to hold out an olive branch to the surviving members of Amon Duul I, who had also just recorded their second album, Paradieswarts Duul. Rainer Bauer, Ulrich Leopold and flautist Thomas Keyserlingwere invited to contribute a track to Yeti entitled "Sandoz In The Rain", a gesture of friendship which produced one of the record's most precious and exciting moments.

"We had some free time while recording Yeti, so we asked them if they wanted to do something," explains Chris. "After Yeti was released, the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company in Switzerland wrote us a letter wanting to know if it was their company we were singing about [it was in the Sandoz laboratories that Albert Hofmann discovered LSD 25]. We wrote back saying, 'No, it's just an English code name.'"

There are two more reasons why Yeti is an important Krautrock icon. Firstly, it features the group's most popular song, "Archangels [sic] Thunderbird", which was composed by Renate and based on the tune to a favourite hymn she used to sing in her local church choir.

"They recorded the music track in the studio and I had to record the vocal on top. I went into my room with the Revox and for two days I rehearsed. When I was ready I went into the studio and sang it once and everybody went, Wow! This was the way I had to do it. This was always a man's band and if any of them could have sung properly they would never have chosen me, a girl, to be their vocalist."

Chris listens to this with a bowed head, but then he looks up and says, "I'm a big fan of Renate; she's more creative than even she thinks. She knows how to write a melody in her head, and that's composing."

Yeti's second important component is Falk Rogner's mystical and haunting gatefold sleeve design, one of many images he designed for the group using a mixture of collage and photography.

"For the Yeti cover I used an image of Der Sensenmann[The Grim Reaper], who is often depicted in old German woodcuts," he says. "At first I didn't intend to use this photo for the cover. I had been taking some photos with a member of the Amon Duul I commune called Wolfgang Krischke who was the sound man for Amon Duul. Some months later he was found frozen to death near his parents' house; they said he had taken some acid and fell asleep in the snow. He was a very good friend to Renate and me and an outsider member of the Amon Duul scene. When he died I thought that the photo would be a perfect tribute to his memory. He never managed to find his way into Amon Duul properly when he was alive, so maybe his image as Der Sensenmann will work as a strange cover image and he could be remembered as a magical person."

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Later on that same year Amon Duul II produced a second double album, a sequel to Yeti of sorts, entitled Dance Of The Lemmings. Here the group's exploration of their new found musical power was slightly less focused, causing side-long tracks, with titles like "The Marilyn Monroe-Memorial-Church" and "Restless-Skylight-Transistor-Child", to blunder along in a cosmic fog of freefalling improvisation; as a result Renate's vocal was lost.

Lemmings did, however, introduce a couple of important new players to the group's complex sound tapestry: Alois Gromer (an old boyfriend of Renate's) on sitar, and an American ex-GI and jazz keyboard player called Jimmy Jackson, whose contribution to Lemmings and the three Amon Duul-related records that followed involved him playing an extraordinary church organ that would become a crucial component in defining the group's sound.

"It was a large, ancient Mellotron-type instrument that had been designed by some crazy instrument builder," Renate explains. "For every key on the keyboard he had made a tape of that note which had been sung by a real choir. It wasn't sampled or anything." Chris adds: "He devised a system where he took about 150 matches and stuck them in the parts of the keyboard that didn't work. He painted these with different colours so he knew which keys he could play. It was the first such instrument in the world and Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh used it for his soundtrack music to [Werner] Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath Of God. It's in a museum now."

*

Amon Duul were now on United Artists, the label that had signed Can in 1969. A certain rivalry existed between the two groups, and because of the publicity it generated, was allowed to flourish. Years later, Chris is still laughing about how Can's attempt to sabotage an Amon Duul II show in Barcelona by doping their guitar player John Weinzierl with cough mixture failed miserably. "We went on and played so well that most of the audience went home after our set. Of the 5000 people who were there, only 500 stayed to watch Can play."

More damning is Karrer's account of how Can succeeded in cornering the film soundtrack market, an act of self-promotion that, according to Karrer, caused the first real rift in the German rock scene. "The new German film makers like Wim Wenders and [Rainer] Fassbinder wanted music for their films. They came to bands like Can and Amon Duul and asked us to compose something. We all made a decision to say that we would need ten per cent of the budget for the music, which was about 20,000DM. But Can said whatever price the other bands have decided upon, they will do it for less. After that there was no scene, and even today there is no solidarity between the bands."

*

In 1971 Amon Duul II went back into the studio to record Carnival In Babylon, which featured Danny Fichelscher of Popol Vuh on drums, Lothar Meid on bass, Joy Alaska on backing vocals and their trusted producer Olaf Kubler on sax. One of Carnival's highlights is a John Weinzierl song entitled "Kronwinkl 12", a semi-autobiographical piece which referred to the group's newly rented commune in the country, paid for by the advances and royalties from United Artists. Kronwinkl was a huge Gothic guest house attached to a castle and with its own private chapel. It became an open house for freaks and hangers-on: often the group were unaware of who was inhabiting their country retreat. Renate remembers one particularly memorable encounter:

"We came home very early one morning after finishing the final gig of our German tour. Falk and I went to our room and found to our astonishment that someone was asleep in our bed. I screamed, 'What the fuck is going on, who are you?' Then we saw it was Andreas Baader of the Baader-Meinhof gang. At the same time Chris yells out, 'Whaa...someone's in my bed!' And it was Baader's accomplice Gudrun Ensslin. I went upstairs and said to Frau Ensslin: 'Would you be so kind as to explain why you broke into our house?' We were political but we weren't into carrying guns and killing people like they were. We were into making things change through our music. Everybody thought that Baader and Ensslin were being taken care of by someone else, so we all went to sleep. When we woke up the next afternoon, we discovered that they had stolen all our newly-bought clothes."

The following years saw the group back in the studio and undertaking a series of extensive European tours to promote such records as Wolf Cry and Viva La Trance. Prior to this they had taken part in a project called Utopia which had been masterminded by producer Olaf Kubler, the resulting album was an interesting but ultimately messy-sounding experiment which smacked of self-indulgence.

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"We tried to be more commercial on Wolf City and Viva La Trance," Renate sighs. "Wolf City was the best album as far as I'm concerned, but after that something changed." "We were very anti-German. e did n ot want to be German, we wanted to be multi-cultural" - Chris Karrer

*

The classic Amon Duul period ended shortly after the release of Viva La Trance in 1973. When their contract with United Artists was terminated, the group signed a new deal with Atlantic/Atco, a move that would eventually tear it apart and scatter its members across the world.

From the start there was trouble when news was leaked that the German branch of the company was seriously considering renaming the group Olaf And His Swinging Nazis. The records that followed were equally dodgy sounding. Hijack and Made In Germany (a double concept album that claimed to be "Deutschland's Erste Rock-Oper") were supervised by a producer called Jorgen S Korduletsch, who added an army of professional session musicians to the basic Duul sound and buried it under an avalanche of string arrangements and studio gimmickry. The only interesting tracks on Made In Germany are four solo synthesizer pieces recorded by Falk Rogner while the rest of Amon Duul II were out of the studio.

"I felt it was important to experiment and do things for me," he explains. "The little electronic things I did for Made In Germany were like short films; you hear Techno and electronic crossover things today, but I was doing that 15 years ago. At that time Lothar wouldn't touch a machine and Renate refused to sing along with one. I always listened to that kind of music in my studio: I listened to Suicide. Made In Germany was the single worst concept that came out of the head of Jorgen Korduletsch and the rest of Amon Duul knew that. It was a period when the producers started to take over."

Worse was to come, however, with Pyragony X, Almost Alive and Only Human, on which the group was reduced to a five-piece rock outfit that bore little relationship to the massive, brain-pulsating beast heard on Phallus Dei and Yeti. Amon Duul II was now reduced to a name, and for many of the key members, it was time to do other things.

Renate was one of the first to make a decisive move: she sent in search of a vocal teacher who could show her how to breathe properly so that she could develop as a singer. "I did that for a year, and then through Danny Fichelscher I met Florian Fricke and got more and more into his music. i experienced a lot through Florian's music. What I did with Amon Duul was spontaneous and, apart from by myself, I didn't rehearse. Florian's music makes you feel stoned when you sing it; the repetition makes you high. He always sat next to me and we sang it through together until I had it right. I found a closer sense of what it manes to sing."

As the 70s collapsed into the 80s, Renate began to record with Fricke's group Popol Vuh, while Chris Karrer was trying to salvage what was left of Amon Duul II for one final recording. In 1981 every member of the original line-up came together with new producer Jorg Evers to record Vortex, a new set of songs that attempted to edge the power of Amon Duul's past music into a new decade.

"Vortex was a tribute to Renate," says Chris. "She did some of her greatest work on this album. [But] because there was no real interest after the record was released, everybody was disappointed and went their own way again. Renate went back to Popol Vuh, John ent to Australia, Jorg Evers the producer tried to form a punk band, and I went to record and tour with Embryo and [Viennese fantasy painter and musician] Ernst Fuchs."

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Another attempt to resurrect the Amon Duul name was put into action by guitarist John Weinzierl and bassist Dave Anderson at the latter's Foel Studio in Wales during the mid-80s. What started off as a viable project, however, turned sour when Anderson, reportedly unknown to Weinzierl, began to release records complete with pictures of Karrer, Knaup and Falk circa 1969 on the sleeves. The rest of Amon Duul II were outraged, and as a result Weinzierl and Anderson were ostracised. Anderson had also teamed up with Hawkwind lyricist Bob Calvert for one of his Amon Duul projects, and when Calvert died in 1989, a 'gathering of the clans' event was organised at the Brixton Academy in London. Those from Amon Duul II who showed up were John, Chris, Renate and Peter Leopold; Falk was also expected but he missed his plane and failed to appear. A similar event was held in Italy later that same year, but after that the group drifted apart again.

What brought them back together was not another reunion attempt but the threat by a German businessman to use the name Amon Duul for one of his ventures. This galvanised the group into making a stand. The original six members got together, sued the businessman, and managed to settle out of court in their favour.

Following this legal success, the group was further encouraged y the interest that was generated by the release in 1992 of a set of live BBC recordings from 1973. The record was the pet project of Duul disciple Phil Burford, who believes that this was the point at which Amon Duul began to re-evaluate their potential.

"I think this was the catalyst," Burford explains. "When they saw how Live In Concert went down with the press, that sudden strength they had at that time gained momentum. They played a concert in 1992 and the following year they went into the studio to record Nada Moonshine#."

*

With the release of Nada Moonshine# last year, Amon Duul are back on the track they wobbled off so many years ago; only this time they are going in another direction. And, unlike previous detours, it is a direction which those involved are happy to pursue.

"Lothar is using a computer, which has long been a fantasy of his," says Renate. "Chris didn't like Lothar's machine sound at first and he boycotted it. Eventually he saw that it was just another way of composing music and getting things done. I now think that he has finally bitten into the technological apple and he likes the taste of it. I think it's a wonderful combination when he acoustics of the instruments and the vocals come together with the heavy sound of the computer programming."

It would seem that, finally, everything is falling into place for Amon Düül II, but chaos is never far away whenever the group decide to do something creative together. After recording Nada Moonshine# it was decided to remix the title track for a video. Unfortunately, the record company involved in releasing the album had neglected to pay the studio and the tapes were confiscated until payment was received. Eventually it was decided to go to another studio and re-record the track. "It came out perfectly," Renate beams, "it moves much more than the original did."

Hearing such ramshackle stories brings to mind the taloned, Lovecraftian stormtrooper that leaps out of the cover of the group's 1973 Live In London album. The crawling chaos that this monster represents still seems to haunt Amon Duul, while at the same time providing the context for its still unique, psyche-warping music.

"I'd love not to have so much chaos," says Renate. "For me chaos is destructive. But yes, chaos could be the thing that makes Amon Duul the band it is today. Without chaos it would be boring."

Recalling GERMANY CALLING and DEUTSCH ROCK
by Davy McConnell

Internet fans to the pHinnWeb site will wonder about the reason for this title and what exactly the content can be. Well, perhaps not surprisingly, it's about two aspects or viewpoints of Krautrock from long ago that deserve to be published -- one of them for its overall and unjustified negativity and even hostility, and the other for opposite reasons. Germany Calling was a series of articles in the British weekly magazine New Musical Express back in 1972 and 1973 that I read at the time about the emergence of the new experimental rock scene in what then West Germany. I have written most of the present article as a summary of the general pessimism of that series, which was written by a certain journalist calling himself Ian McDonald in NME but whose real name, I believe, was Ian MacCormick, brother of the former bass player of Matching Mole, Bill MacCormick. Recently, after many years, I decided to go to the British Library's newspaper library in London to obtain photocopies of the series and remind myself of what I read, with negative amazement, all that time ago. From the same library, I obtained a photocopy of the first-ever Krautrock article that I had ever come across, even earlier in 1972, in the rival British weekly rock magazine Melody Maker. It was called Deutsch Rock and was written by, judging from the article itself, a fair-minded journalist called Michael Watts. In contrast, this was a refreshing positive account, and after my analysis of MacDonald's series, I have summarised the contents of this single article, with satisfaction.

So, in beginning with MacDonald's NME series, I have placed his words in double inverted commas, while all other uses of inverted commas are in single form. My comments intersperse MacDonald's statements on some occasions, but when this doesn't occur, it doesn't mean that I agree with him, for I would be hard-pushed to agree with anything negative that he uttered. Internet Krautrock fans will also readily find their own words of astonishment in response to MacDonald's bizarre views, unhelpful descriptions and erroneous statements.

The first part of Germany Calling appeared in the NME issue of 9 December 1972, and was spread over the centre pages, with three separate sub-titles or headings that represented what the series was about: (1) The first IN-DEPTH examination of the strangest rock scene in the world; (2) German rock challenges virtually every accepted English and American standpoint; and (3) Several groups consist of two, even one, performer. How long before the machines take over? There were the following five captioned photographs that added fascination to the article: (1) Berlin's Cluster duo prepare for take-off; (2) Neu from Düsseldorf ponder what to do next; (3) Tangerine Dream inspecting the Berlin Wall; and (4) and (5), captioned together, Popol Vuh and Can -- worshipping in the church of their choice. The last two photos were indeed taken in churches.

It is ironical that MacDonald was unbiased and even positive in this first part of his series. He described the social and political background that led to the rise of the new music, and this is wll worth reading in its entirety, but it is too detailed to summarise in the present article. Furthermore, anyone reading the two pages of the first part, and not realising what was to follow in the later parts, would have the impression that MacDonald was a converted fan of the new German rock scene. However, this was far from the case, although he did not despair of all of it. Recalling Germany Calling, in publicising what is part of the early Krautrock story, concentrates mainly on MacDonald's reviews of the individual bands and artists -- the subjective aspect -- rather than detailing the historical and factual material of the German rock scene from his series -- the objective aspect. His portrayal of the latter is generally acceptable, and is very useful to Krautrock fans who are interested in the music's history. It is his bias in the former that forms the reason for much of his credibility and logic being put into question through the present article.

MacDonald had praise for German rock's differences from typical Anglo-American rock, especially in the improvisational aspect, in that "German bands tend to play their 'compositions' live until they have them as they want them, following which they recordd and cease to play them ", he explained. And he immediately added: "One wonders why that logic cannot equally be seen apply to Anglo-American rock groups." He amplified what he meant by quoting the bassist and manager of the German-based British band Nektar. 'German audiences', noted Moore, 'don't go for careful reproduction in concert of something recorded in a studio. They like records -- but they think that live performances should be very different experiences. They're not into perfecton. They're into feeling.' MacDonald took up the matter again. "Some groups, like Can or Kraftwerk, are so 'into feeling' that, when they go into the studio to make an album, they simply jam for a certain specified period -- select the tapes they deem preferable -- and edit them to manageable length. This is quite extraordinary considering the infrequency with which the average German group undertakes a recording session. In their palce a British band would be at each other's throats over whose songs were finally to be committed to the care of posterity, or (at the very least) utilising every studio facility to caputre take after take of the numbers they'd preplanned."

MacDonald highlighted another difference between some German bands and their Anglo-American counterparts by his valid statement that "a by no means inconsiderable faction of German groups, including Cluster and topliners Tangerine Dream, confine themselves in their albums to tonally-free sound improvisation with no tempo. It's safe to say that, within the Anglo-American sphere of influence, not even the Third Ear Band has laid down three-quarters of an hour of music without key or regular pulse. In Germany such blatantly avant-garde proceedings are taken for granted by ordinary rock audiences." Or, in his other words: "Many German bands lack drummers entirely (those which don't, frequently relegating him to a strictly metronomical function such as might easily be fulfilled by a machine, an idea pursued to its logical conclusion by Kraftwerk's Ralf Hütter), and the general absence of possibilities for guitars in freeform has lead to an accent both on keyboards and on sound-effects instruments." From here, he was led to a possible future scenario. "Thus it is that several German groups consist of two, or even one performer. The final step -- a band consisting of no members at all -- is more than likely to materialize in the near future."

MacDonald next explained that the music's emergence was mainly due to the enterprising few people who had founded the Ohr and Brain labels. These were writer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and publisher Peter Meisel for Ohr, and Bruno Wendel and Günther Korber for Brain, who were two refugees from Ohr. An indication of the importance of both labels was given by the following words from him: "So far the [Brain] label has sixteen records to its credit and is doing very well -- remarkable, since Ohr [with over thirty, he had earlier stated] has all the top German groups under exclusive contract except a handful already snapped up by Polydor and United Artists." He could haved added Philips to the last tow.

At the end of part one, he communicated some useful information about the recording studios. "Geram recording techniques were in a primitive state when the current boom began three years ago. These days production standards are more than adequate, but the number of studios equipped to handle rock groups is small and most bands limit themselves either to Conny Plank's Starstudio in Hamburg, or to Dieter Dierks' 16-track at Stommeln just outside Cologne. Amon Düül II record at Peter Kramper's small Bavaria studio in Munich; the 'cosmic' groups [he meant Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream] at a 8-track in Berlin; and Can have their own Inner Space Productions studio in Colgne's Schloss Norvenich, a castle converted into a cinema. The most advanced studio of all, however, inhabits an ex-schoolhouse at Wümme, somewhere off the road between Hamburg and Bremen in the countryside adjoining Luneburg Heath." And following on this last sentence, he suddenly hinted, for attentive readers, that perhaps he was not a fan of the German scene in general: "Here the sole spectacular success of German rock is quietly making its own mythology -- but more of that next week." NME readers of the time would have been unaware of which band he was referring to, but Krautrock fans reading the present article wil know. However, it was in part three that he would describe the music of Faust.

More history, rather than musical opinion, began the second part of MacDonald's series in the issue of 16 Decmeber, occupying three, though not complete, pages: here were outlines of the origins of the early history of Can as far as their first album Monster Movie and of the Amon Düül commune, both without criticism. Then came the start of his derision about the German rock scene, in that "two-thirds of it consists of bad imitations of Anglo-American rock, a lucrative, if otherwise pointless, pursuit, of which the leading exponents are Birth Control, the country's richest band ... [who] have an album released here on Charisma, whilst their various followers are all on the Brain label, all to varying degrees, ploughing the same tedious furrows as Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and amongst whom are Gomorrha from Cologne, Jane from Hannover, and Grobschnitt from Dortmund." In particular, how he could liken the progressive Grobschnitt, on the basis of their first album, to the stated British hard-rock bands is beyond my comprehension.

The original Amon Düül were soon in the firing line. "The least necessary [bands] are those Revolutionary Head ensembles which, far from learning to play their instruments, have never attempted to come up with any but the most primitive of musical ideas. The prototype for this movement is the collective Amon Düül ... [which] commenced to lay down 20 hours of improvised instrument clouting, some of which has unfortunately emerged on two Ohr releases, Collapsing and Para Dieswärts Düül." Other adherents of the Revolutionary Head, he continued, included Ash Ra Tempel, "a kind of pre-Diluvian Hawkwind (whose second album, Schwingunger, is an advance on their first solely in that it's played on electric rather than acoustic instruments and is therefore louder), and Mythos, a sloppy little imitation of a sloppy little English group called Continuum". Of course, regarding Ash Ra Tample, he was wrong about the electro-acoustic difference, and he would have realised this easily, had he just listened properly. The next band fared no better. "Likewise to be avoided is a record called Mandalas made in 1970 by a quartet of Heidelberg University students calling themselves Limbus 4, and which comes on like the Incredible String Band under teargas attack."

MacDonald then turned to Guru Guru and mentioned their first three albums, UFO, Hinten and Kanguru, before explaining that he had asked his NME colleague Tony Stewart, who had been a drummer in Germany in 1967, for his opinion on how developed the German scene was. Stewart's response was: 'If there were any British bands five years out of date, they'd go down a storm in Germany at the moment'. MacDonald then continued: "In fact there ARE British bands five years out of date (mishandlers of the Hendrix theory in its earliest stages like the Pink Fairies and the Groundhogs) and Guru Guru sound remarkably like them, once their disguise of simplistic electronics have been pierced. Thus, this band forms the link between the more boring 'cosmic' groups of Berlin's Revolutionary Headland and the plagiarists of British heavy rock which operate mainly between Hamburg and the Ruhr." Guru Guru were one of the first German bands I'd heard, and my view about them all those years ago were that they were well ahead of British hard-rock bands. Perhaps MacDonald just didn't like this to be true.

He placed Embryo, Xhol and Annexus Quam in the same category only because they were among the few groups in Germany to include wind instruments in their line-up. In describing Opal, the first album by Embryo, he said that "though the music on it could not have been made by people of any other nationality, its lack of substantial material eventually defeated the romantic semi-competent appeal it shared with the early Velvet Underground (to whom this group bears no other resemblance)". His IN-DEPTH examination should certainly also have revealed the band's second album, Embryo's Rache, and possibly the third, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with both having been released on United Artists before his series. In referring to Xhol, based on their three albums -- with Electrip, recorded by Xhol Caravan, being counted as the first -- he summarised that "they're prone to long interludes of monochordal wandering, punctuated by sudden anomalous departures into soul music. No explanation is offered by them, neither do I recommend their records." Now why should Xhol HAVE to offer such an explanation and why should MacDonald have been surprised about their soul connection, for he had earlier acknowledged their original name of Soul Caravan? Anyway, for me, Xhol were, and still are, most intriguing band ever. Their music was superb and MacDonald's lack of recommendation had no meaning for me. And of the third of the wind groups: "A slightly better bet is Düsseldorf's Annexus Quam who, having got over the dreadfulness of Osmose, their first album, are now playing amnesiac free-jazz on a new one, Beziehungen, a sound pleasant from a safe distance but a somewhat dubious purchasing prospect." So, what exactly did this mean?

On the folk-rock side, two duos were next 'dealt with'. His description of Witthuser and Westrupp was "a pair of unprepossessing appearance, whose stock in trade (apparently) is bawdy and satirical songs performed to various sorts of acoustic accompaniment. Unless you speak German you'll find their music, as presented in albums like Lieder von Vampiren and Tripps und Traume, banal in the extreme; moreover a degree in Gibberish would be unlikely to qualify you as a hierophant of Sturmischer Himmel, the first recording of Paul and Limpe Fuchs, a Teutonic Two Virgins whose central interests appear to be the sounds of sheep, Alpine horns, and yet more bongos."

Not everything was negative in part two, for MacDonald had managed to offer some praise. It was "quite mortifying" for him to discover the music and radical philosophy of "the excellent Floh de Cologne", as he introduced this Marxist band. "Fliesbandbaby's Beat Show, made in 1970, is a rough a rady combination of Brecht-Weill theatrics and small-scale rock-n'-roll, whilst Profitgeier, ironically lauched as 'the first German rock-opera' in the following year, represents a considerable advance in both music and lyrics, featuring a libretto that contains, as well as the sung and spoken words, short essays on various aspects of capitalist exploitation and full Marxists reading-lists on a wide range of topics." However, in another aspect, he cautioned: "Floh are by no means a comfortable experience (they even managed to impress the world-weary German newsmen by freaking out in the middle of their first and only press-conference, overturning the tables, and charging at the cameras bellowing 'Fuck for money!')"; but he concluded by saying that "though the casual rock-fan will get little out of Floh's records, any German-speaking socialist should find Profitgeier remarkable both as music and as sophisticated propaganda."

MacDonald felt encouraged that none of the sub-genres of German rock existed in complete isolation. "Lying between the more conventionally-based of German rock bands and the radical 'cosmic' groups like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, and Cluster, is a music which retains, albeit in a much-simplified shape, the organisational references of the former (such as regular tempi, a home key, occasionally even thematic material), whilst taking full advantage of the latter's freedom of concept and practice." Two essentially-similar bands were classified here: firstly, Kraftwerk, whose personnel history, with a split leading to the formation of the second, Neu!, was briefly outlined and who were stated to be "a cold, mechanical group, seemingly bent on eliminating all traces of emotional expression from their music". This was not necessarily criticism as such, but it was soon in evidence: "For me, the music [of Kraftwerk] is hard without convincing structure, heartless with no redeeming dignity, and ultimately a numbing bore -- quite unlike Neu's first album [he didn't 'spell' the name correctly, as 'Neu!', with its exclamation mark], constructed following similar principles, but nearer to the wellspring of Teutonic emotional expression." Now with reference to Neu!s album, MacDonald continued: "Sonderangebot maintains interest in the sound of a phased cymbal for over five minutes, Weissensee and Lieber Honig get as tender as a German group is ever likely to get, and even Kraftwerkian tracks like Hallogallo and Negativland project a warmth and imagination which, theoretically, just shouldn't be there. In Neu, a previously development in German rock is beginning to explain itself -- but even so, I recommend a careful listen before any investment is made". It is MacDonald who leaves the readers mystified.

A more detailed and partly critical account of Can's progress from Monster Movie through Tago Mago to Ege Bamyasi, but also mentioning Can Soundtracks, then followed what he had written earlier in part two. "Their thing is free jamming over deliberately simple motifs for, on occasions, quite inordinate periods of time, and only on Monster Movie does this rather risky self-limitation (Can prefer to see it as total freedom) produce anything consistently gripping. Mary, Mary, So Contrary, from this album, remains on of the most powerful statements of German rock [though he didn't say why], making the hour of modal improvisation on Tago Mago, their second, appear even more impoverished than it actually is. Ege Bamyasi, the band's latest, contains two more lengthy exercises in bleak repetition, but also features a number of the shorter, more controlled numbers that graced the listenable sections of the preceding albums -- and these, like Outside My Door (Monster Movie), Oh Yeah (Tago Mago), and Vitamin C (Ege Bamyasi) can prove as hypnotically engrossing in their way as, say, a long Taj Mahal blues, or Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." He summed up Can like this: "A strange, unique band of intellectuals struggling to make people's music in a prevailing anti-celebral climate, Can epitomize a central contradiction of German rock, play some good and some awful music, and look unusually happy for a bunch of incipient schizophrenics. At the very least they're honest and articulate and cannot be ignored. Try Ege Bamyasi for yourself. I'm not a Can person, but it's very possible that the world is full of them and they ought not to be denied." Now why could he not have shown such objectivity, as in his last sentence, throughout his series?

On the cosmic side, Tangerine Dream were acceptably and interestingly described as "like a Pink Floyd without a beat for, since Fly and Collision of Comas Sola on their second album Alpha Centauri, no regular pulse has appeared anywhere in their music -- a fact which may deter the more rhythmically-orientated listener". He followed the undeniable fairness of this assessment with another: "Anyone, however, for whom A Saucerful of Secrets remains an avenue worthy of further exploration, will find Tangerine Dream fascinating." Then he went partly into negative mood again by summarising their three albums of the time. Electronic Meditation ... "was a poor effort, pretentiously conceived and confusedly executed with Froese's blues-based guitar sounding laughably anachronistic against the aural backdrop of synthesized sound." Of the other two members, he remarked that Schnitzler "forthwith split to form a rival 'cosmic' group, Eruption, who have not recorded yet, whilst Schulze left to pursue a solo career, the first fruits of which have blossomed on Irrlicht, his sonomontage of synthesized orchestra". This last statement may have praise, though MacDonald may, instead, just have meant 'appeared' by using 'blossomed'. There is room for doubt.

The title track for Alpha Centuri, he said with no definite forthcoming criticism, "is an extensive essay in restful doodlings from Udo Dennebourg's flute and the synthesizer of Roland Paulyck and, as such, forms a link between this album and the band's most recent project -- the enormous 'largo in four movements' for moogs, VCS3s, organs, vibes and massed cellos: Zeit". However, a wrong statement followef about a personnel change for this double LP: "Here Franke is replaced by Peter Baumann and guest-artist Florian Fricke, the foremost German exponent of the synthesizer. I am bored; you may be in raptures". In fact, it was Schroeder who was replaced by Baumann, but Schroeder also played on Zeit as a guest, as did Fricke, and a proper look at the relevant album covers would have prevented MacDonald from communicating wrong information to his NME readers. While the error cannot be counted as greatly significant in itself, it sill suggests -- especially in conjunction with his other statements -- a slipshod attitude from him as he carried out his IN-DEPTH examination.

Sarcastic remarks regarding Tangerine Dream and Cluster, and their array of electronic instruments, came next. "Even though they're one of Germany's best-paid groups, Tangerine Dream's equipment is so expensive that they all have other jobs during the day to pay for the installments. Frankfurt's Cluster are by no means as wll known and must have to struggle to keep the hire purchase companies from reclaiming their mass of electronic gadgets, organs and electric cellos." Still, some praise for Cluster did emerge: "Dieter Moebius and Joachim Roedelius make a less passive sound than Tangerine Dream -- in fact, Live in der Fabrik, from their Brain album Cluster II, is reminiscent of the coruscating electronics from The Ipcress File -- and , for this reason, they emerge as more enthralling than the generally rather bovine contemplations of Zeit."

Preferable to Tangerine Dream and Cluster in the filed of electronics, he said, was the work of Wolfgang Dauner and his group, with the release of Output in 1970 on the ECM label, and a new one, Rischkas Soul, which was soon to appear on Brain. "The subject here is jazz synthesized with humour and a tremendous enrgy -- recommended." With the definite implication to the NME readers that he had heard Rischkas Soul before its release -- for how could he truly recommend it without hearing it? -- his later words indicate otherwise, as I quote how he 'changed his mind' (?) about this recommendation.

The last paragraph of part two introduced Amon Düül II and the fact that they had recorded five albums, though Phallus Dei and Yeti, the first two, "are rough and heavy affairs, far more interesting than the average German rock of the period, but poor by today's standards". However, more of a positive -- as well as of a negative -- nature was to be said about Amon Düül II in part three.

Part two contained photographs of three bands already mentioned: Floh de Colgne, Amon Dül II and Can; and there was also one captioned Faust: not so well known, but real German leaders. The music of Faust would be described in the third and originally-inteneded final part, which appeared in the issue of 23 December and occupied only about half a page.

Continuing with Amon Düül II, MacDonald referred to the dual leadership of the bans in Chris Karrer and John Weinzierl, and to the album Dance of the Lemmings, with their respective compositions Syntelman's March of the Roaring Seventies and Restless Skylight-Transistor-Child -- "both side-long strings of continuous ideas, neither of which are totally convincing, if readily distinguishable, stylistically". And for the second record of this double LP: "Of the improvised tracks, the freeform Marilyn Monroe Memorial Church stands out as beating Tangerine Dream at their own game, whereas the rest sinks without memorable trace." It's strange how he could see nothing positive about three excellent and intricate guitar-based instrumentals that made uo the remaining side of the double album. Then he referred to Carnival in Babylon: "whilst sweetness and light only by comparison with the three preceding records, it is certainly a more relaxed album, showing the Düül, for better or worse, trying to marry certain Anglo-American compositional ideas with their uniquely Germanic sound. The end-product, partly the result of shaky, ensemble work (German rhythm-sections tend to be either inflexible or very wobbly, and Amon Düül's can manage the extraordinary feat of being both simultaneously), leaves one wondering whether the group have any clear idea of what they want to be. Personally, I'd prefer they opted for the harmonies and time signatures of Weinzierl numbers like CID in UrukKronwinkl 12 rather than open-ended rambles like Hawknose Harlequin and, on the evidence of their latest and most successful release Wolf City, that's just what they're doing."

His remaining statements about Amon Düül II were both quite positive and slightly negative, describing them as "a bold and inventive organisation, and Wolf City shows them gaining in confidence and ability with great strides", but adding: "The only reservation I have is that they may be striding towards a point at which it will no longer be possible to hear them unawares and identify them instantly as German, but this modest tendency may just be the outward manifestation of a long-deserved holiday from having borne the cause of independent German rock these five years. Still, one can't help wishing that some of their better titles (Gulp a Sonata, Flesh-Coloured Anti-Aircraft Alarm, Rattlesnakeplumcake, Overheated Tiara, Sleepwalker's Timeless Bridge, and A Short Stop at the Transylvanian Brain Surgery) concealed music of comparable inspiration. By world standards, a group to watch, even so."

Thus, with Amon Düül II having been hazily praised, he then asserted: "The best, you'll be relived to hear, has been reserved for last." This was Faust; and smalled, invidual photgraphs of their five members formed only the only illustrations in part three. In saying that Faust "are a single-handed justification of all the ballyhoo that's been kicked up about Krautrock in recent years," he mentioned, without opinion, their second album, So Far, that was only available in Germany, and a third album, a double, that was projected for release early in 1973. Of the latter, he added that "advance hearing of some of the tapes that might form sections of it have convinced me that it could be a masterpiece". He was also particularly impressed in hearing Meadow Meal from Faust's first album: "Using only self-designed equipment (no synthesizers), the group have, in this track, produced the first genuine example of rock that Britain and America could not only never have conceived, but which they would, at present, find technologically impossible to emulate. This is truly avant-garde music, played with a panache and an amiable humour duplicated by no other German band." Again, it's beyond my comprehension how he could be such a fan of Faust and yet be so anti towards nearly all the other bands of German rock. Yet, strangely and in spite of his great interest in Faust, he did not devote a proportionately large amount of space to them. He said much more about Can, for example, and was "not a Can person".

This was intended to be the completion of MacDonald's survey -- at least, possibly for the time being. However, in contrast to the overall positivity of part three, a mostly negative 'Late Arrivals' section was added at the end, where he was back to his usual attitude. "A brief glance at the very newest releases and imports from Germany does little to alter the generally gloomy scene portrayed in the preceding article", was his introduction here; and then he outlined the several releases individually in his more expected and less than complimentary manner, beginning with Amon Düül's Disaster. "Sounding no better than Collapsing and Paradieswäärts, it lives up to its name." Duisburg's Broselmachine, a Teutonic Steeleye Span, "do what they do with skill and restraint, but the final aim of the exercise eludes me". Why did there have to be a "final aim"? Three other bands were then quickly and unfavourably summed up in one sentence: "Wallenstein's Blitzkrieg (Pilz) is a tasteless exhibition of flash-rock in the manner of ELP; Gash sound like a rather grandiose German Wishbone Ash; and Os Mundi, on their Brain album 43 Minutes, present a stodgy evocation of early Colosseum and Graham Bond." So then we knew: Wallenstein sounded just like ELP.

For the next band, he couldn't tell his readers anything informative: "Stuttgarts's Kraan don't sound like anybody in particular, not even themselves -- but their record company, Spiegelei, is new to me and has a fried egg for a logo. I'm quite partial to fried eggs." The NME readers would, I'm sure, have preferred to know something definite about Kraan, rather than have space filled and wasted with one of MacDonald's eating passions. And, as well as Kraan's first, self-titled, album had he heard their second, Wintrup -- recorded November-December 1972, just prior to the time of his series appearing, but not released until 1973 -- to have been able to say that they didn't even sound like themselves? I doubt it. Oh, I know... he just couldn't be bothered to take a real interest -- a recurring feature with him throughout the series.

Two further releases concluded his series. "From what I've heard of it, Popol Vuh's debut album, In Pharaoh's Garden, is conceptually par for the 'cosmic' course, if rather more subdued than its stablemates. Synthesizer-player Florian Fricke fails to live up his reputation and Holger Trulzsch is a boring and clumsy percussionist on this showing." I wonder just how much he heard of this album -- a few minutes here and there? His procedure: lift the stylus forward a good half inch and see if the next bit registers immediately? No. Try again, and so on. Still no. Oh well, thumbs down. And next and last: "Canaxis 5 by the Technical Space Composers' Crew is an Inner Space Production dating from 1970 and released on the private Music Factory label. It features Roland Dammers and Can's Holger Czukay playing with loops, electronics and field-recordings of Vietnamese peasant songs -- which could have been very interesting but, through self-indulgence, isn't." Then his name appeared at the end, and that was the end of his series -- or so the NME readers thought.

Whether or not at this time he intended to follow up his series was not known by the readers, but a fourth, and ultimately a fifth, part did appear in the spring and summer of 1973. What became, in effect. the fourth part of Ian MacDonald's series on Krautrock in NME was incorporated within a separate two-part series called Common Market Rock, classed as 'An NME Consumer's Guide' and also negatively subtitled Or just what have let ourselves in for? Part 1 of this series, in the issue of 28 April 1973, featured France, Italy and Germany, while part 2. the following week for 5 May, referred to Denmark, Holland and Ireland. MacDonald covered France, Germany and Denmark, and his NME colleagues Armando Gallo (Italy), Tony Stewart (Holland) and Steve Clarke (Ireland) completed the series. The section on Germany was even smaller than part three of the original series, and a repeated photograph of Faust from part two was the only German illustration.

So off MacDonald went again, mostly negative as usual. "I've little to say about Krautrock that I didn't say in my 98-part series Germany Calling (December NMEs), exceot that recent releases seem to indicate that -- with the loosening of record company prejudices -- German rock is becoming complacent. Aside from brief hearings of new groups like Brainstorm and Tomorrow's Gift, both of which are potentially onto something interesting, and the promise of equally stimulating stuff from names like Agitation Free and Association PC, most of the recent product of the German scene seems to consist, in varying degrees, of copies of Anglo-American styles. The steam appears to have goneout of the experimental side of the country's output -- which is, after all, the particular facet of the music British listeners find most intriguing. Rejects on this score include new releases by Drosselbart, Iblis [sic], Wlapurgis, Hoelderlin, Wallenstein, Ihre Kinder, Emtidi, Emergency, Message, Epsylon [sic], Marz, Jeronimo, Wyoming, Pell Mell, Frame,Sameti and (despite the presence on the session of jazz pianist extraordinaire Mal Waldron) Embryo's second album Steig Aus." Again, in addition to MacDonald's IN-DEPTH examination failing to revealthe existence of Embryo's true second album, Embryo's Rache, and their third release, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, his opinion about Steig Aus is strange, for thisdistinctive and innovative jazz-rock album has a definite European Sound. Ironically, three Americans -- Mal Waldron, Jimmy Jackson and Dave King -- contributed to it.

Curiously, MacDonald mentioned that a band called Scarecrew, "recently signed to United Artists, are recording their first album in Germany", and, "shrouded in mystery, the only information on them is that their line-up includes ex-members of Tangerine Dream." He made a reasonable guess about them: "They could, in fact, be Conny Schnitzler's Eruption under a new name." However, it seems that the band he referred to as Scarecrew was one called Scarecrow that was formed by the notorius John L (real nameManfred Brück) of previous Agitation Free and Ash Ra Tempel connection, though Scarecrow, ultimately, never did make any recording.

His advice to the NME readers was that the first German record that they should think of buying was Faust's first album. "The best-selling releaseby any German band, it gets more awesome on every hearing and could be among the most important rock records ever made. Their follow-up, So Far, is not in the same class but it still cuts any other German group dead." He added that "a cut-price collation of some of Faust's unofficial material entitled The Faust Tapes will shortly be available on the new Virgin Recors label".

MacDonald summarised his overall opinion with these words: "In the wider view, however, German rock still seems to be missing its own point: which is that it can only really succeed in the area outside the Anglo-American zone, in which it has arrived too late and ith neither tradition nor originality sufficient to rise above earnest plagiarism. We don't ask for phoney nationalism, Herren und Damen. Just something new and real."

The last-ever part of Germany Calling -- at least, that I recall -- appeared in the issue of July 1973 ans was contained in a spearate section within album reviews in general. It only occupied a quarter of a page, but because its text type was smaller than usual, its length was longer than that of part four. There were no photographs.

MacDonald's negativity was still evident, but there were a few surprises too, and one of these was described first - at least, after he had stated that 20 per cent of the new albums followed the country's earlier experimental ventures, with the remainder operating withing mainstream rock as established by Britain and America in the 60s. So why was it that I was not interested in Anglo-American mainstream rock of the 60s and early 70s, whereas I was fascinated by the new German rock scene? For me, there must have been a difference between the Anglo-American and the Teutonic music to account for my difference in taste. Krautrock fans, through their own experience, will no doubt agree. However, it seemed that MacDonald couldn't discern the difference.

"Tangerine Dream", he introduced his first surprise, "have, in the past, been guilty of over-solemnity and pretentiousness, but their fourth Atem (Ohr) has shaken most of that off. The dolorous mellotron dialogue on Fauni-Gena is a small masterpiece and the general atmosphere is less laboured than in their earlier efforts. All Pink Fluid [sic] fanciers and electronic music aficionados will go gaga over this one." And the positivity was followed two paragraphs further ahead. "Ash Ra Tempel, on their third album Join Inn, have cleaned up their previous mucky incompetence and are now into speedy, moto perpetuo jams with all the reverb, length and inconsequentiality of The Grateful Dead. It's better than their earlier tries but is bound to point out that some sort of improvement was more or less inevitable." He was now praising a German band for sounding like an American one.

However, in the intermediate paragraph, he wasn't impressed by Neu!, in now 'spelling' their name correctly. "There were some pleasantly disturbing moments on Neu!'s first LP, but on Neu 2 their impetus has run out, allowing them to drift back into the relentless unimaginativeness of their father group Kraftwerk. The absent-minded boredom of the first side is weirdly offset by the actively-concerted boredom of Side 2 which consists entirely of the twin sides of the band's 1972 singlw (Neuschnee and Super). played on a portable gramophone in the studio at different speed settings, complete with surface-noise and jumping needles. Andy Warhol is alive and well and living in a tape recorder in Düsseldorf apparently."

He was also pessimistic about the Cosmic Courier label. "Recently Ash Ra Tempel moved to Rolf Ulrich Kaiser's newest label 'Kosmischen Kuriere' to record a bunch of junk called Seven Up with naughty old Dr Timothy Leary. Grandpa takes a trip! Kosmischen Kuriere promises to be the most vapid enterprise in the history of the world if its second release, Lord Krishna von Goloka, is anything to go by. Here an ageing German pseud called Sergius Golowin directs a programme of colour-supplement mysticism for weekend dropouts, aided and abetted by young German pseuds Walther Westrupp, Bernd Withhuser, Klaus Schulze and Jürgen Dollase, of whom I have spoken elsewhere. Spray literally with DDT before handling." MacDonald had mentioned in part three that the leader of Wallenstein, Jürgen Dollase, "claims to be a reincarnation of the famous general of that name and clothes himself accordingly".

On now, negatively, to a solo artist: "Peter Michael Hamel's Vertigo double album Hamel shows him to be a Teutonic Terry Riley. All his arcane procedures with modal scales, ragas, aleatoric devices and ring modulation are listed with an academic dryness which unfortunately overflowed from the sleeve-notes into the music. Dullsville, man." Strangely, MacDonald's IN-DEPTH examination of the new German rock scene had failed to reveal the existence of an album on the Wergo label, called Einsteig and being the first album in 1971 of Hamel's multi-national band Between. This included a gentleman by the name of James Galway on flute -- or, as the album credits stated, Jimmy J Galway, flute (Ireland). Now what would he have made of that intriguing fact, I wonder? Maybe nothing much, except probably something derogatory.

MacDonald then turned "from the consciously exploratory to the guys who are simply into having a good time", as he described a few releases connecting the German scene with jazz and blues. "Klaus Doldinger's Passport (Atlantic) has done good business in Germany and it's not hard to see why. Sounding like a streamlined Graham Bond Organisation, Doldinger (tenor, moog) Jimmy Jackson (organ), Atlantis drummer Udo Lindenburg and Amon Düül II veterans Olaf Kubler (tenor) and Lothar Meid (bass) are impressively together. Jackson, who along with Mal Waldron, was somewhat blurred out of Embryo's recent rather steamy essay in the same filed, Steig Aus, here comes through cleanly behind the simple, soaring tenor lines (frequently scored in bold unison). Not an earth-shaking set, but as tight, stratospheric jazz-blues completely convincing. Nice cover, too." Again, there was a strange comment amid the above, for on Steig Aus, with the cover stating 'featuring Jimmy Jackson', the suberb Hammond organ sounds of Jackson were most prominent. Just how much of this album did MacDonald listen to?

Next was a band that he had mentioned in part two. "The Bond/Hiseman bias of Passport is no coincidence, as can be seen by the actual presence of Hiseman on a forthcoming album by The Wolfgang Dauner Group which also features a guest appearance by Larry Coryell. Between now and then we have another Brain release, Rischkas Soul, with Dauner's band departing from the aggressive electronic experiments of Output, their debut on ECM." But what had he said in part two about Rischkas Soul? Well, that it was "jazz synthesized with humour and a tremendous energy -- recommended". And what was he saying now? Well... "Rischkas Soul is firmly in the jazz-blues bag and somewhat a disappointment."

More negativity followed. "Other bands tending the same cabbage-patch are Gorilla, a German answer to Chicago, and the multi-national Sinto, neither of whom are worth the asking price. Behind them, queuing up to play precisely the same old rock we've heard for years are Electric Sandwich, Cornucopia, Lava and Novalis. Thirsty Moon rise a little above the dross, but not significantly, and that tiresome trio Guru Guru reappear for the fourth time with a drag rock and roll medley on the Brain label." He couldn't even be bothered to inform the readers of the titles of these albums, because he wasn't interested in them.

MacDonald still didn't know what to make of a band that he had already mentioned. "Kraan, whose second album [Wintrup] recently reached these shores and whore are currently just about the hottest new band in Germany, are a problem to assess. Interesting qualities poke through the gloom on both their records, but there is nothing in evidence to justify their high reputation. Try Wintrup for yourself." Perhaps he should have added '... because I can't be fully bothered myself'.

The final reviews of Germany Calling referred to the albums of Frumpy. "Now known as Atlantis, they were one of Germany's top bands between 1971 and 1972, recording four records for Philips and winning several polls. All Will Be Changed and Frumpy 2 consist of turgid, organ-dominated techno-flash but, with the addition of guitarist Rainer Baumann the band found its feet as a straightforward blues-based rock-group, allowing mannish lady vocalist Inga Rumpf a chance to stetch her larynx over the usual sort of crowd-pleasing material. However, their third album, By the Way, retains the tension between what were essentially two different bands and some felicitous cross-fertilisation ensues. Frumpy Live reveals the transition completed and whas the last thing the band recorded before their name-change. With a development oddly akin to Stone the Crows, Frumpy did what they did well but opened no new doors."

MacDonald then summarised his findings from this fifth and last part. "Listening to these albums has, on the whole, revived my flagging interest in German rock. It's such a crazy scene over there that it's worth wading through any amount of rubbish in order to keep in touch with what's going on. In this case, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Doldinger made the effort more or less worthwhile. That's all gentlemen. Dismiss -- and keep an eye out for low-flying Messerschmitts." By this time, did he realise that Krautrock was catching on after all, and that he should start to acknowledge that there was indeed something worthwhile there? Did he not want that Spiegelei or fried egg on his face? ('Egg on the face': an English saying that means being left to look foolish.)

And that was the end of Germany Calling -- at least, as far as I know it, because MacDonald could have made further occasional references afterwards, such as in reviews, without me being aware of them. Obviously, he was not a fan of Krautrock. He didn't need Krautrock in his musical life, though anything positive that he did obtain from it was simply an unexpected bonus. He didn't listen to the albums with objectivity, probably barely listening to them at all because he wasn't interested or couldn't be bothered -- and then he made wide-sweeping statements, mostly of the music's unsuitability, from the viewpoint of someone knowledgeable on the subject. He was not the right person to have produced a series on it, because of his lack of interest in, and even personal bias against, the new German rock scene. As a journalist, he should have presented an objective report on this new music, even on the understanding that, in general, he didn't like it; but instead he spread, through the page of NME, his own negative and sarcastic views, aimed at turning the readers away from it. Was it a case with him of 'I can't understand what it's all about, and, anyway, it'll never catch on -- so it must be no good'?

Well, Krautrock did catch on, having flourished worldwide over the last quarter of a century since MacDonald uttered his pessimistic and almost offensive statements -- originally when vinyl was still king but more so in recent years, with most of it having been reissued on CD, and previously-unreleased material having also appeared. I have used the word 'offensive', even if I have softened it by preceding it with 'almost', in the sense that MacDonald verbally attacked the artists of Krautrock in a manner that was injustified, if only because they had caused him no offence in the first place, as they struggled, inventively and successfully, against a surrounding commercially-dominated and mainstream-minded world to produce highly creatinve and artistic music that, seemingly, had no commercial and mass-media value. And no one can doubt that the Krautrock musicians succeeded -- not necessarily as a measurement in commercial units, but certainly in terms of artistry and creativity. And they succeeded in another scene: longevity. Not only did the depth of the music ensure its lasting value, but some of the bands or individual musicians are still in the business -- or, rather, the art -- of making tihs music.

The two most striking examples of longevity are Tangerine Dream and Embryo who, throughout the period since MacDonald's critical series, continued to make recordings and play live to many people worldwide. The courageous Tangerine Dream, under the guidance of Edgar Froese, their one consistent member, deserve much acclaim for their dedication and daring that took rock music a significant distance in space further than the already-inventive Pink Floyd. Tangerine Dream's greatest measure of courage lay in them having the audacity to offer rock music without a beat, on record and in concert, and the fans loved it. So too does great credit go to Embryo, and their one consistent member, Christian Burchard, from initially being an excellent progressive jazz-rock band, in having transformed over the years into an impressive collective of many varying members to produce what is now counted as 'world music', integrating musicians from various parts of the planet and breaking down, through music, the often-absurd man-made barriers. And just for the record, here are some of the other Krautrockers who have well outlasted MacDonald's expectations, by remaining in musical existence into the 90s or by making a return in recent years: Faust, Ashra (Tempel), Cluster, Guru Guru, Amon Düül II, Popol Vuh, Agitation Free, Conny Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze, while many others still well into the 80s. And it should not be forgotten that the essence of Krautrock is emulated by many present-day bands. What would Ian MacDonald say to all of this, I wonder, in retrospect of his general dismissal of Krautrock in 1972 1973?

So, who has had the last laugh? Certainly not Ian MacDonald, who had the first laugh, in his singular way. However, the last, and best, laugh belongs to the spirited and inventive Krautrock artists, whose success is testified by the non-mainstream popularity of their music all over the years, and to the loyal Krautrock fans who have enjoyed the music -- especially, regarding both, those who have digested the present article, and who, therefore, now know what was mockingly and pessimistically said about Krautrock all those yeards ago by one critic, through his medium of the NME.

Michael Watts knew better, positively. He was a journalist for the rival British weekly music magazine Melody Maker -- and he was the writer of the first Krautrock article that I read. His coverage of the new German rock scene, entitled Deutsch Rock in the MM issue of 15 April 1972, was probably the reason why MacDonald's series was classed as the 'first IN-DEPTH examination', with the implication that the account by Watts was not an in-depth one. However, for a single article, it was indeed in-depth on the subject. Although it occupied only about one page of MM, the page-size was larger and the text was smaller than that of NME. With a sub-title stating that Germany's new music is possibly more interesting than any in Europe, the article contained three captioned photographs: Kraftwerk, actually just Florian Schneider-Esleben; Lucifer's Friend; and Amon Düül -- ie. AD II.

Watts began his article by paraphrasing Can's Michael Karoli in saying that European rock groups were no longer influenced by what was happening in Britain and America. "He's right", affirmed Watts, "as British audiences will shortly see for themselves when Can arrive in this country, to be followed at some future date by Amon Düül II. It's no coincidence that both these bands are German. Of all the continental countries trying to create their own rock situation, Germany is the one that seems most fertile and experimentally-inclined. It's an exaggeration to say that German musicians have formed their own rock scene, independent of outside influences, but at least a handful of their bands are pursuing paths that are more adventurous than the majority of their Anglo-American counterparts and virtually all the other Europeans." The principal views in his next paragraph, regarding the German bands, also contrasted with MacDonald's attitude. "It's important that they be encouraged, that they have the success in the British and American markets which they so desperately want. At a time when British rock is so insistently harkening back to the past, these are possible pointers for the future. This is no attempt however to foster the idea of mass rock and roll movement; just to indicate that there's good music across the Channel which is not receiving much recognition in this country, even though the German record market is considered to be the fourth largest in the world." What chance of encouragement, success and recognition was there against attitudes like that of MacDonald? Yet, in spite of his media negativity, the German bands triumphed.

The next few paragraphs of Watts' article concentrated on the similarities of German rock with the Anglo-American style, and here, straight away, emerged one of the statements of negativity in his whole review. "It should be stressed from the outset that the main percentage of German bands are essentially imitative of Anglo-American pop. It's not an absolute rule of thumb, but these second-raters tend to adopt English names, like Birth Control, Lucifer's Friend and Epitaph." However, in perspective, it should be remembered that there were so many German bands that the most innovative and experimental, combined with the best of those whose style was less of that nature but still good in terms of Anglo-American rock, represented something very worthwhile.

But, again, significant differences began to be highlighted. He explained that young Germans were anxious to express their own concepts, ceasing to be bound by the framework of Anglo-American pop, and they saw the rock tag as a convenient way to do so. "This is particularly true of the musicians with political motivations, like Ton Steine Scherben, with its utterly left outlook, Ihre Kinder, and the Marxist Floh de Cologne. Their emphasis is on lyrics rather than music, and their subject matter is frequently a diatribe against the capitalist system. This is notably the case of Floh de Cologne (English translation 'Flea'), who have released an album with the translated title of 'Conveyor Belt Baby's Beat Show'."

The article listed the German bands that best represented the new music. "The main torch-carriers for intelligent German rock music are a nucleus of groups headed by Can and Amon Düül II. They include Embryo, Kraftwerk, Guru Guru and Tangerine Dream. Between them they define the best of German rock." A more sympathetic approach to the problem of the cost of the musical equipment was also shown by Watts than by MacDonald, as the subject led to the avant-garde nature of the German scene. "Although most German rock groups lack the financial support to equip themselves with the VCS3s and Moogs that bands here [in England] accept as almost obligatory, they show a fascination with electronics, and use sound effexts not as embellishment but for themselves. It's not too farfetched to suggest that Stockhausen is the father figure of German rock, especially as Irmin Schmidt, keyboards player with Can, and Holger Czukay, the bassist, are both former students of the composer. Both men are intellectuals and perhaps see the rock tag as a means of packaging music which is nearer to the avant-garde than to the Top Twenty."

Having stated, with positive implication, that enough had been written elsewhere about Can's two albums on United Artists, Monster Movie and Tago Mago, Watts described, in praiseworthy manner, both sides of the electronics album Canaxis 5 by Czukay and Dammers, under the name of the Technical Space Composer's Crew. Immediately after explaining that album was available directly from the private Music Factory record company in Munich, he declared: "It's worth it." Then there was more praise for Can, as he related that he had witnessed them playing live for four hours, except for intermissions. "Can's performances are as unflagging as their rhythms. At Cologne's Sportshalle in late January they did a free concert in front of 10,000 people -- the city council had given their blessing in the name of modern Kultur. To hear them thundering away like a non-stop express is something of an experience, but the repetition of their open-ended act was finally a little too much for these English ears at first go. Their enthusiasm seems to work better in the edited context of an album."

The remaining substantial paragraphs of Watts' article consisted mainly of describing the five other bands that he had listed as the torch-carriers for the new German rock, and with these descriptions generally containing no significant negative aspects -- in contrast to MacDonald's views -- they are worth quoting in their entirety from the original article.

"Embryo have an album called Embryo's Rache ('Revenge') on United Artists, who, along with Phillips and the avant-garde label Ohr, release most of the better-known German product. They are rather jazz-orientated, with a soprano sax, flute and organ, but unmistakeably German, with that heavy, insistent drum rhythm. While they sing in English, they're basically instrumental, but they're not averse to political songs, like Espagna Si, Franco No, with its line about '[R]evolution is the only way'. However, the most interesting track is the last, Verwandlung, with its use of mellotron and paino leading into Edgar Hofmann's violin, which sounds as if he's been listening to Don Harris." [There was no mention of the first album Opal, but, at least, Watts, unlike MacDonald, had discovered Embryo's second album, and his article appeared eight months before MacDonald's series.]

"Kraftwerk (Power station), I understand, have released two albums, one of them, Organisation, on RCA, and the other, simply bearing the band's name, on Philips (whose English office say they've never heard of them). The band revolves around Ralf Hütter on organ and Florian Schneider-Esleben on flute, violin and electric percussion. Though some of the Philips album reflects a trivial use of sound, there are truly strange moments like the heavily-phased drumming on Rückzück, which fades in and out of the speakers with the cold precision of a machnine. In fact, they've got the most 'mechanical' energised sound I've ever heard in places. Their name couldn't be more apt."

"Tangerine Dream, on the other hand, a Berlin group, are far less earthbound. If 'space music' is not too overworked an expression, that's them. Sort of Pink Floyd-minus-tunes meets King Crimson's 21st century schizoid man. They've got two albums out on Ohr, Electronic Meditation and Alpha Centauri, and I've recently heard a single, Ultima Thule (Parts One and Two), which if I recollect rightly, is a phrase from Virgil meaning 'Furthest Thule'. Most of the musical substance seems to be done with a mellotron and an organ but it's pretty effective, even if Part Two does bear a certain resemblance to Set the Controls."

"Guru Guru are also on Ohr (it means 'ear', incidentally) with an album called UFO, and they should be checked out because of their drummer, Mani Neumeier, who plays electric percussion, which several other of these bands have (Can and Kraftwerk, for example)."

Before describing Amon Düül II, Watts mentioned "a number of other bands who are worth checking out". These were "Parsival [sic:], who play something akin to chamber rock, and are light, airy and pastoral in approach; Georg Deuter, who combines a mixture of electronic sounds, bongos, straightforward guitar and sitar -- one track is called Krishna Eating Fish and Chips; Klaus Weiss, a prominent drummer in Germany who has recently recorded a super-percussion album Niagra [sic:] with other drummers from the States, England, Germany and Venezuela; Eiliff, who have a bassist called Bill Brown, and are organ-dominated with rather orthodox arrangements; and then there's Et Cetera, Gila, Xhol, Cluster, Popol Uuh [sic:] (who are supposed to be ferocious)." But it was Amon Düül II who were Watts' favourite band, and he devoted the most space to them, by far.

"Of all the German bands, however, the most assured is Amon Düül II. If they can maintain an equilibrium within the band and continue to remain unaffected by the various personnel changes, there seems no reason why they should not become a positive force on the international rock scene. Their organisational sense is the question mark that hangs over their future. For nearly two years they've been planning to come to England but have never made it ultimately. If the performances are like their records they will prove a revelation to English audiences."

"In terms of awareness of the rock idiom they're head and shoulders above the other competition. They're less 'alien'-sounding than Can and Kraftwerk; they have absorbed the Transatlantic musical vocabulary. But their music has remained their own, despite references to the Dead and the Airplane on the first two albums, Phallus Dei and Yeti, and Hendrix and the Floyd on Dance of The Lemmings. They can encompass an astonishingly wide range of sensations, from the far-out space rock of Lemmings to the tingling acid rock of Archangel's Thunderbird on Yeti, which made one of the best hard rock singles ever. In many directions they have taken ideas from Anglo-American pop and gone further than the original."

"Their new album, Carnival in Babylon, is their most composed. It's almost gentle even, with rather pastoral-sounding vocals from their girl singer, Renate, newly-returned to the group. The music is not as experimental as on the previous albums but there's more texture: nice bass lines, particularly on All the Years Round, and deft strokes from the two guitarists John Weinzierl and Chris Karrer. With these two lies the future of Amon Düül."

"When I was in Cologne three months ago, Weinzierl explained to me that it wasn't their purpose 'to have superficial success and to be celebrated as super pop stars'. Nevertheless, in Germany their reputation approaches mythical proportions. They are prophets in their own land."

Then, Watts ended his article, immediately and simply: "If rock and roll is really as homogenous [ie, everywhere similar in origin or descent] as everyone says it is, we in England should be getting that message too." [ie, realising Amon Düül II to be a quality band]

The difference in the attitudes of the two journalists was very evident. Michael Watts, generally throughout his detailed single article, was open-minded towards, and had much admiration for, the new German rock scene, whereas Ian MacDonald, who seemed not to listen properly, just condemned the vast majority of the music over his longer series, only seeming to ease off slightly and latterly as Krautrock's popularity began to increase. Indeed, against the ironical situation for MacDonald that Krautrock has flourished over the whole period since both authors' reviews, I must praise Watts for his excellence in publicising the music in such a positive way. To me, these two journalists, without them or me realising it at the time, were making an important contribution -- if indirectly -- to the history of Krautrock. Their accounts for MM and NME are a long way back in the Krautrock literary past, but they are all the more significant for that very reason, with virtually all Krautrock fans having been unaware that such articles ever existed, until reading them now. This is why I wanted to publicise them in the Internet. Perhaps, if someone produces a detailed chronological history of Krautrock at some time in the future, the reviews of Ian MacDonald and Michael Watts will be incorporated into that history.

A Washington Post article http://www.arm.ac.uk/~ath/music/td/articles/td_washpost.html

Ian MacDonald - Anything I've ever read by him seems bitter too.

Then came the start of his derision about the German rock scene, in that "two-thirds of it consists of bad imitations of Anglo-American rock, a lucrative, if otherwise pointless, pursuit, of which the leading exponents are Birth Control, the country's richest band ... [who] have an album released here on Charisma, whilst their various followers are all on the Brain label, all to varying degrees, ploughing the same tedious furrows as Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and amongst whom are Gomorrha from Cologne, Jane from Hannover, and Grobschnitt from Dortmund." In particular, how he could liken the progressive Grobschnitt, on the basis of their first album, to the stated British hard-rock bands is beyond my comprehension.

The original Amon Düül were soon in the firing line. "The least necessary [bands] are those Revolutionary Head ensembles which, far from learning to play their instruments, have never attempted to come up with any but the most primitive of musical ideas. The prototype for this movement is the collective Amon Düül ... [which] commenced to lay down 20 hours of improvised instrument clouting, some of which has unfortunately emerged on two Ohr releases, Collapsing and Para Dieswärts Düül." Other adherents of the Revolutionary Head, he continued, included Ash Ra Tempel, "a kind of pre-Diluvian Hawkwind (whose second album, Schwingunger, is an advance on their first solely in that it's played on electric rather than acoustic instruments and is therefore louder), and Mythos, a sloppy little imitation of a sloppy little English group called Continuum". Of course, regarding Ash Ra Tample, he was wrong about the electro-acoustic difference, and he would have realised this easily, had he just listened properly. The next band fared no better. "Likewise to be avoided is a record called Mandalas made in 1970 by a quartet of Heidelberg University students calling themselves Limbus 4, and which comes on like the Incredible String Band under teargas attack."

MacDonald then turned to Guru Guru and mentioned their first three albums, UFO, Hinten and Kanguru, before explaining that he had asked his NME colleague Tony Stewart, who had been a drummer in Germany in 1967, for his opinion on how developed the German scene was. Stewart's response was: 'If there were any British bands five years out of date, they'd go down a storm in Germany at the moment'. MacDonald then continued: "In fact there ARE British bands five years out of date (mishandlers of the Hendrix theory in its earliest stages like the Pink Fairies and the Groundhogs) and Guru Guru sound remarkably like them, once their disguise of simplistic electronics have been pierced. Thus, this band forms the link between the more boring 'cosmic' groups of Berlin's Revolutionary Headland and the plagiarists of British heavy rock which operate mainly between Hamburg and the Ruhr." Guru Guru were one of the first German bands I'd heard, and my view about them all those years ago were that they were well ahead of British hard-rock bands. Perhaps MacDonald just didn't like this to be true.

He placed Embryo, Xhol and Annexus Quam in the same category only because they were among the few groups in Germany to include wind instruments in their line-up. In describing Opal, the first album by Embryo, he said that "though the music on it could not have been made by people of any other nationality, its lack of substantial material eventually defeated the romantic semi-competent appeal it shared with the early Velvet Underground (to whom this group bears no other resemblance)". His IN-DEPTH examination should certainly also have revealed the band's second album, Embryo's Rache, and possibly the third, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with both having been released on United Artists before his series. In referring to Xhol, based on their three albums -- with Electrip, recorded by Xhol Caravan, being counted as the first -- he summarised that "they're prone to long interludes of monochordal wandering, punctuated by sudden anomalous departures into soul music. No explanation is offered by them, neither do I recommend their records." Now why should Xhol HAVE to offer such an explanation and why should MacDonald have been surprised about their soul connection, for he had earlier acknowledged their original name of Soul Caravan? Anyway, for me, Xhol were, and still are, most intriguing band ever. Their music was superb and MacDonald's lack of recommendation had no meaning for me. And of the third of the wind groups: "A slightly better bet is Düsseldorf's Annexus Quam who, having got over the dreadfulness of Osmose, their first album, are now playing amnesiac free-jazz on a new one, Beziehungen, a sound pleasant from a safe distance but a somewhat dubious purchasing prospect." So, what exactly did this mean?

On the folk-rock side, two duos were next 'dealt with'. His description of Witthuser and Westrupp was "a pair of unprepossessing appearance, whose stock in trade (apparently) is bawdy and satirical songs performed to various sorts of acoustic accompaniment. Unless you speak German you'll find their music, as presented in albums like Lieder von Vampiren and Tripps und Traume, banal in the extreme; moreover a degree in Gibberish would be unlikely to qualify you as a hierophant of Sturmischer Himmel, the first recording of Paul and Limpe Fuchs, a Teutonic Two Virgins whose central interests appear to be the sounds of sheep, Alpine horns, and yet more bongos."

He summed up Can like this: "A strange, unique band of intellectuals struggling to make people's music in a prevailing anti-celebral climate, Can epitomize a central contradiction of German rock, play some good and some awful music, and look unusually happy for a bunch of incipient schizophrenics. At the very least they're honest and articulate and cannot be ignored. Try Ege Bamyasi for yourself. I'm not a Can person, but it's very possible that the world is full of them and they ought not to be denied."

don't suppose any ilxors have read this article?

a separate two-part series called Common Market Rock, classed as 'An NME Consumer's Guide' and also negatively subtitled Or just what have let ourselves in for? Part 1 of this series, in the issue of 28 April 1973, featured France, Italy and Germany, while part 2. the following week for 5 May, referred to Denmark, Holland and Ireland. MacDonald covered France, Germany and Denmark, and his NME colleagues Armando Gallo (Italy), Tony Stewart (Holland) and Steve Clarke (Ireland) completed the series.

sadly I cant find anywhere with lots of good articles on funk.

man these are some cool posts here, AG

I am still doing listening for my ballot, a touch of stomach flu + a Sunday night KM show derailed my efforts for a while, right now I am imagining a whole genre of music that patterned itself off of Paul Kantner & Grace Slick's Sunfighter the same way doom metal patterned itself off of Master of Reality

new direction for KM?

http://stuckbetweenstations.org/2011/01/11/cosmology-of-pfunk/

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-08-15/features/1993227178_1_stuff-kool-funk

lol xxp I wish!

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Be Bop Deluxe - Sunburst Finish (EMI) 76
Guitar virtuoso Bill Nelson could deftly navigate between glam, pop, prog and metal, sometimes within the same song. He could do everything but write a hit, until the gorgeous “Ships In The Night,” from his band’s third album. He followed it up with two more solid albums of futuristic glammy prog pop, but was unfortunately unable to repeat the success of Sunburst Finish. The band broke up, and Nelson pursued a more experimental avant garde direction in his solo career.

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Crack The Sky - Crack The Sky (Lifesong) 75
Crack The Sky were formed in Ohio, and later based in Baltimore. Their impeccibly recorded prog rock was just catchy enough to get nationwide radio play, though “Ice,” “She’s A Dancer,” and “Surf City” never became hits. Despite Rolling Stone designating their self-titled debut as album of the year, they coasted below the radar throughout their lengthy career. Nevertheless, their first album stands the test of time as a classic.

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Heavy Metal Kids, Heavy Metal Kids (Lemon) 74
Like Dead Fingers Talk (and Steely Dan and Soft Machine), Heavy Metal Kids took their name from a Burroughs novel. And like Dead Fingers Talk, they resided in a no-man’s land between glam and punk that robbed them of the recognition they deserved. Mixing the boogie rock of The Faces and Slade with elements of prog and art rock, singer Gary Horton had a perfect, gravelly shout that inspired AC/DC to invite him to replace Bon Scott. They release three solid albums, the best of which was the self-titled debut, with several enduring anthems, peaking with the frenzied crescendo of “Rock ‘N’ Roll Man.”

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Sweet - Desolation Boulevard (Capitol) 74
Sweet were originally dismissed for their bubblegum pop singles, which actually were pretty great, as mentioned previously. Basically, they matured into a great rock band that spanned from glam to metal to progressive pop. Like Sweet Fanny Adams from that same year, Desolation Boulevard was loaded with hits like “The Six Teens,” “Fox On The Run” and “Teenage Rampage.” “Medussa” was never a hit, but it’s one of their most unique accomplishments, a jaw-dropping experiment in psychedelica that deftly mixes prog and metal.

There's more here like Cockney Rebel, Jobriath, City Boy, Dead Fingers Talk, Deaf School, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Sparks, but the ones are above are likely to be on my ballot.

Gary Holton of course became famous for a hugely popular tv series and sadly died before the 2nd series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet was completed.

FnB post as much of your reviews as you like. They're most welcome. Anything that helps get ilxors to check albums out.

Looking through the list and I see a lot of names I'm not familiar with: AR & Machines, Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffaloes, Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias, Alphataurus, Ame Son, Arachnoid, Area, Arti & Mestieri, Barrabas, Bruce Palmer, Bull, Chico Magnetic Band, Circle X, Cos, Coum Transmitssions, Crushed Butler, Culpeper's ORchard, Dark, Demain, Demics, Dennis Coffey, Dorn, Donnie and Joe Emerson, Edward H. Dafis, Electric Sandwich, Eloy, Emtidi, Erkin Koray, Etron Fou Leloublan, Flied Egg, Fusioon, Gary Wilson, Gaseneta, Genya Ravan, German Oak, Gift, Good Rats, Hairy Chapter, He6, Human Instinct, Hurdy Gurdy, Illes, Jan Dukes de Grey, Jane, Jasper Wrath, Jeff Liberman, Johnny Moped, Junie, Karat, Kennelmus, Khan, Kin Ping Meh, Kraan, Larry Coryell, Las Grecas, Lser Pace, Le Orme, Legionaire's Disease, Les Rallizes Denudes, Les Variations, Lost Aaraaf, Lula Cortes, Madrigal, Malo, McChurch Soundroom, Message, Michael Quatro, Modulo 1000, Monitor, Mother's Finest, Niagara, Ofege, Osanna, Osibisa, P.F.M., Pau Riba, Pavlov's Dog, Paul Levinson, Pichhio dal Pozzo, Premiata Forneria Marconi, Punishment Of Luxury, Rabbitt, Rosa Yemen, Sand, Sapo, Satan's Rats, Savage Grace, SBB, Selda, Semool, Silberbart, Skull Snaps, Strawberry Path, Syrius, T2, Tarantula, Teenage Head, The Drones, The Gizmos, The Hand of Doom, The Kids, Three Man Army, Tirogo, Titus Groan, Üç Hürel, Univeria Zekt, Univers Zero, Vertical Slit, Virus, Vulcan, Walter Wegmuller, Weidorje, Wicked Lady, Yatha Sidhra, Yonin Bayashi, ZNR.

Are all of these really ending up on someone's ballot, or did people go a little crazy with the noms??? Please enlighten us if any of these are must-hears!

I suspect at least a couple of those are not real.

Are all of these really ending up on someone's ballot, or did people go a little crazy with the noms??? Please enlighten us if any of these are must-hears!

I can personally say that Les Rallizes Denudes are occupying a very high position on my albums AND trax ballot. They do one thing and they do it really well. http://youtu.be/6H29NgCbXKU

Donnie & Joe Emerson are on their too, their album is really good...not so rocking, but bizarre and cool. http://youtu.be/ONIJXHvoynw

The SBB album Slovenian Girls is some slinky psychedelia that I love. 2 incredibly long jams make up this album and are both worth the hefty lengths.
http://youtu.be/6KPI3PE5Yd4

Chico Magnetic Band is also pretty interesting. Very fractured Jimi-styled rawk. There is even a cool cover of Cross Town Traffic on that album. http://youtu.be/oskTP4qhU7I

The Niagara album is very cool. Skeletal percussion driven fusion out of Germany.
http://youtu.be/ELdbrgDUlWE

A.R. & Machines is fucking awesome, but the Seth Man can say it better than I can. http://youtu.be/BTHnG97KVxs

I picked these out because they are all on my ballot somewhere.

That's what I'm talkin about.

A.R & Machines rule Check em out. Pavlov's Dog are awesome hard rock but it all depends on your tolerance for the singer David Surkamp who sings like larry the lamb on helium (i think he's awesome and even the late Martin Skidmore was a fan of them). If you like/tolerate Geddy Lee then you might dig em (i love em but hate rush haha)
German Oak are pretty damn good.
Wasn't really a fan of german band Eloy the time I heard them many years ago but some do rate them. Same with Jane ,Emtidi and Hairy Chapter. But if you like heavy german prog then they are worth checking out.
Erkin Koray and Selda are amazing turkish psych and those albums are essential.
Mothers Finest were a hard rockin (white iirc) funk band . Osibisa were funk and i think a later incarnation was quite succcessful.
Les Rallizes Denudes are awesome noisy bastards!
Sand are a really good krautrock band. Walter Wegmuller was about as weird as krautrock got.
Kraan are awesome krautrock too. Really go check em out.

The rest I dont know and I have been meaning to say this since nominations opened but I CANNOT BELIEVE THERE IS A BAND CALLED FLIED EGG

Les Rallizes Denudes is badass!

Bruce Palmer was the bassist for Buffalo Springfield. After they broke up, he recorded The Cycle is Complete and then kind of became an acid casualty. CiC has been getting some discussion in the 1971 Scaruffi poll thread. It sounds to me like an odd amalgam of Little Feat and Amon Duul II. Favorite track is probably the last, "Calm Before the Storm", which kind of reminds me of Blues Control's more ethereal moments. Unfortunately, thats not on youtube, so here's the first track, "Alpha Omega Apocalypse": http://youtu.be/YjdSxF4SLzo

Las Grecas' record is this sort of awesome psych-calypso record made by two gypsy sisters. One of the first records JF featured in his ill-fortuned Listening Club, it's a white-hot dance-rock record. one of the tracks jacked for Gonjasufi's Sufi and a Killer album was "Bella Kali" (Erkin Koray was also 'sampled' heavily for that record, I'm told)

Bella Kali: http://youtu.be/YjdSxF4SLzo

Achilipu: http://youtu.be/8bqdHJuxPbc

Orgullo: http://youtu.be/Rjq3ZbfURYU

Amma Immi: http://youtu.be/lLEViQaETBg

apparently the Amma Immi youtube is incomplete

cheers d.a.m.

It's funny but the ones I listed I would have assumed FnB would know of. I thought he was the font of musical knowledge!

A.R. & Machines thirded, I can also vouch for Alphataurus (Their s/t album made the lower reaches of my ballot - this is my favourite track: http://youtu.be/BOIOsN1Az6s).

That's a band I've never heard of. Usually in these polls if bands are nominated I've never heard of its because the following 3 nominated them - edward iii, acid metrics and rudipherous.

So if anyone wants to tell us why they nominated the albums or want to campaign for them please do!

btw which A.R. & Machines do you think is the best?

39 ballots are in btw. Thanks to those who voted and keep em coming!

Ha, no musical knowledge comes out of my ass. I have to suckle at every available teat like the rest of us addicts.

heyup ferrignu here.
@AG,'pologies no time to fart around w/ a ballot anymore. schedule sadly upped a gear (hooray for €) i shouldn't have spare time for this, even ! gawd bless you all!
@fastnbulbous - if i had to pinpoint any recommendations from your list of "unheard of" items:
check: chico magnetic band (hall of mirrors yowl-rock), kennelmus( tv theme tunes vs twangy surf guitar vs proto sun city girlsiness), lula cortes & ze ramalho ( uetzcoatl worship brazilian psych w/ flutes & weirdness), osanna (aggressive, dramatic, operatic italian prog unbeatable on "palepoli", univeria zekt & weidorje are magma spin-offs in the same vein, gary wilson is a creepy stalker persona besement geek doing steely-dan loverz jamz

Well look on the bright side , you can now check out a bunch of stuff you had never heard of now thanks to the poll. Which is always my prime motivation in running them and why I like larger roll-outs.
So everybody who has access to Spotify please subscribe to http://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/1rFbtUwZlcYHBD6gcemMeK

xp
does that mean you cant do a ballot or you're putting in a quick one?

Minimum is a top 20 maximum is 100. You can do anything inbetween obviously.

A top 20 can be rattled off in minutes!

btw which A.R. & Machines do you think is the best?

I've only heard A.R. 4 but I voted for it - it's not *that* rocking to be honest but it's a great record.

I do wonder though if I should allow a min of ten (1 album per artist max) but a recommended min of 20 (ie id still prefer everyone to do 20 at least) but you can understand why balls and i wanted to avoid ballots of the top 10 best known albums of the 70s and then just end up with the same old boring top 10.

I recommend
http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0002/895/MI0002895418.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

Cool, I'll check that one out.

Is there a lack of punk love on ILM now? No chat on punk at all, probably hardly any votes. wtf are all the punks?

punk and prog fans get in here!

Go have a listen to my fave 70s punk LP
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdkwjdrelg1qkoukro1_1280.jpg

http://open.spotify.com/album/5Wmr7UWbQr7XuBb1wbKbXg

mike t-diva pointed out to me that the opening post wasn't changed so here is something for those just reading for the 1st time
You can vote for a minimum of 20 and maximum of 100 albums, But you CANNOT VOTE FOR MORE THAN 3 ALBUMS BY THE ONE BAND unless YOU FILL OUT A FULL BALLOT OF 100

If a kindly mod can edit the 1st post that would be most helpful.

Looks like we got over the 40 ballot mark!

I have never listened to "A Wizard, a True Star". Remedying that now.

oh you're in for a treat!

I'm not hugely into punk but it's more of a singles thing isn't it? I'll be voting for that adverts album, it & another music in a different kitchen are the only punk albums that I can remember (offhand) enjoying from start to finish.

Also: you poll dudes need to learn how to play hard to get a little :-)

?

just funnin man, your tireless "everybody vote" enthusiasm is cute & made me smile is all

ssooooo is anybody gonna vote for that emerson lake & palmer album?

I see, well dont forget to vote in the sister poll run by the viceroy Takin' Care of Business: ILX 70s RAWK TRAX VOTING RULES AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD - VOTING THREAD!- Closes Nov 8th 11.59 PM UK Time - All ILXORS/LURKERS WELCOME

I dont think this poll can compete with Madonna though.

Yeah but Madonna will be over with by 3/8

they said that after her first hit

Has anyone else discovered album(s) they like that they had never heard before?

Pavlov's Dog sounds OK so far but also don't sound very different to me from other American AOR bands that you hate. If someone told me it was an early Styx record, I would have probably believed them.

"doesn't sound... told me that album was an..."

None of them have a song like Song Dance I first heard them when my mate bought a 2 albums in 1 Double LP in the late-ish 90s. At first the vocals made us laugh hard but i grew to love them.

http://youtu.be/bn6PoixRZcs

ok since ILM will be down for a spot of maintenance tonight it would be a great time to do the poll!

k sweet I did nominate Paul Kantner's Sunfighter. First track on that is called "SIlver Sppon" and I have grown irrationally in love with it in the last 24 hours...

http://youtu.be/7Is2OeUZ6Sg

nothing quite sums up 1971 like Grace Slick balls out singing a song she wrote celebrating cannibalism on an album where her infant daughter is on the cover. \m/