How did Krautrock happen?

But, I think that David Tibet pretty well summed up the kraut phenomenon outside the "classic" bands: "Steve Stapleton used to play me a lot of kraut stuff, nearly all of which I hated because it was hairies going crazy on soloing with Marxist dialectic overtop, which sent me crying and running to the toilet."

Besides, hipster consensus has moved on (thank god) so the reissues will thin out a bit...what are they on now? Tropicalia? Bollywood?

Old Fart!!!

Faust, Can, KW, Amon Düül all came directly out of the 1968 student revolt. KW's sleeves concept-designed for a time — certainly Radioactivity – by a pupil of J.Beuys.

I was one of those people

-- N_RQ (bl0cke...) (webmail), June 14th, 2005 11:19 AM. (later) (link)

Kraftwerk invented hip hop.

i might've mentioned this before, but my dad was present in a building when baader-meinhoff bombed it.

My connection to extremism: the guy whose computer science research I followed up on was a Unibomber victim.

germany kept it weird... some were deep underground like Hirscht Nicht Aufs Sofa, but I heard Krautrock in early Mouse On Mars

Conny Plank's Studio

Didn't a lot of the original success of the Krautrock scene have to do with the fact that it was a UK phenomenon? I guess that sounds very circular, but weren't some of the bands (Faust for example) popular in England and unknown or hated at home?

I always wondered if

2000 Light Years from Home by the Rolling Stones

was a secret influence on krautrock

the rhythm chugs in kraut ways kinda...and the swirls, the swirls

(lol, me saying SPK = krautrock.)

One word I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet in this thread: MINIMALISM. A lot of the main riffs of krautrock, if you're a musician, are really hard to avoid if you are consciously playing minimally. I guess this is what the VU contributed, and that's obvious. The Dream Syndicate bootleg recordings, which I'm not sure the krautrockers would have had access to, have a lot of similarities with a lot of this stuff, having shared an ideological foundation -- minimalism being a hot new current in influential classical musics at the time and LaMonte Young's fluxism being very much influenced by Dada and surrealism, which were much closer to home for the Germans.

And, yeah, I bet the Rolling Stones sounded really awesome to some stoned out Germans at the time! Their rhythm section had some almost-motorik moments before they went all hillbilly. The Stones, the Stooges and the Velvets were actually the only rock & roll bands (pre-kraut, i suppose i mean) who weren't dumb as rocks, but the Velvets get all the credit because they were the only ones pompous enough not to hide it. (they were probably the dumbest of the three, too)

The Stones, the Stooges and the Velvets were actually the only rock & roll bands (pre-kraut, i suppose i mean) who weren't dumb as rocks

!! Oh come on -- the Yardbirds and Beatles and Doors and Animals and Byrds and Beach Boys were as smart as your more primitive plants, at least.

So, nobody here has put forward the "trying to do Miles Davis but getting all the notes wrong" theory?

And how do the Godz fit into this? And Hapsash and the Coloured Coat? And Yoko Ono? And James Brown?

expanding on Andrew L.'s first dead-on thumbnail post

There's enough truth to the stereotype of Germans as hyper-efficient engineers to explain how their musicians weren't afraid of using technology to directly express themselves, unlike other countries where the electronics were usually deployed self-consciously, cerebrally or with an element of kitsch -- Germans had no problem identifying with the new machines & heard the cosmic music. Stockhausen was a huge public figure in the 60's, giving concerts & seminars everywhere (& had two members of Can for students, the earliest & most mainstream Krautrock group). German teenagers had an extra dose of revulsion & hatred for their parents' generation that gave the music even more of an edge. And though all major record labels were indiscriminately releasing weird things at that time, the German record labels were hungrily searching for a German correllative to the Beatles or the Beach Boys -- so things like Kraftwerk / Neu! / Faust were getting signed to majors to release bizarre debuts entirely on the basis of sounding different, no one knew what was going on

Faust is my favorite example of all of these threads -- most of the group were anarchic madmen, but with a journalist / record exec advocate, & most importantly a live-in engineer hired from Deutche Grammofon who built them a studio and captured every last freakout in high fidelity -- so they had not only the ability to space but the mentality to engineer the document

I posted this to another thread I can't find, but in 1996 I was chatting with Dieter Moebius and after the second beer I asked him 'What was it about Germany that allowed Krautrock to happen' and his instant response was 'You have to understand, we hated our fathers'

Dieter Morbius

xp

Also, certain memebers of Jefferson Airplane were rumored to have IQs approaching those of tree shews!

Seriously, though -- "Don't Worry Kyoko" Live Peace In Toronto came out in 1969; certainly some future German rockers must have heard those, right? Also wondering if "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly (a very repetitive 17 minutes, 1978) might have been an inspiration; I'm guessing there's a pretty good chance it may have been an actual hit in Krautland, given that at least two German disco acts (Disco Circus and 16 Bit) covered it in later days.

And speaking of German disco (which I swear somehow evolved out of Kraut-rock -- the liner notes to the first Silver Convention album offered clues* to that effect), Boney M actually put out an album and song called 10,000 Light Years in 1984 which I've always thought might be inspired by the Stones song.

* -- says the group "belongs to a new generation of artists who have broken with the established image of German music."

Though I guess some of that actually pre-dated or was contemporary to the Krautrock scene, so maybe it's not correct to speak of it as an outgrowth.

Who were the first krautrock revivalists? The Legendary Pink Dots? Thin White Rope was much later.

like chuck said, PIL.

and PIL were way early considering that there were still people in germany making actual krautrock in 1978. they were pre-revival-revivalists.

Wire were pretty early, too. And Swell Maps weren't far behind.

Revival might not even be the right word, no?

by the early 80's there were loadds of bands working off of krautrock though. i was just listening to that hunters & collectors album that they did with conny plank the other day. from,like, 1983. and they are a minor example. (though they did name their band after a can song which is nice)

only Tangerine Dream & Kraftwerk had continued commercial success, and mostly by abandoning everything they had in common with the other bands, Can struggled on with disco singles, Brain and all the other fringe labels dried up and stopped putting things out. Some of the other bands threatened to go mainstream, that's the way I hear the inclusion of lyrics on Neu! 75 / Harmonia Deluxe & La Dusseldorf, and the clips of them playing their singles live on German TV shows. Klaus D. Mueller's pretty dismissive 'insider' account hasn't been linked yet on this thread: http://www.furious.com/perfect/krautrock.html

I'd recommend Hirsch Nicht Aufs Sofa's Im Schatten Der Möhre as a signpost of where the ethos was by 1987 i.e. way underground. Lots of great music - Metabolismus, Asmus Tietchens (once he went industrial), Doc Wir Mirran, but it's less about the cosmic rock, more about alienated weird urban industrial, so a smaller audience

so have other folks seen that BBC4 documentary on krautrock? it's typically limited and the ending is not satisfactory at all, but there are lots of good interview segments and there is much speculation on this thread question.

one other thing i learned from the documentary = michael rother is extraordinarily well-preserved. he is a good-looking gentleman. also appealingly soft-spoken.

the guys from faust are nuts. i've always thought that band was a bit overrated compared to some of the other german bands of the time. but what do i know.

There's already a thread on it:

BBC Krautrock documentary

"Mrs Brown, you have a lovely HERO!"

― Mark G, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 10:41 (1 year ago)

haha!

if CCR didnt invent the motorik beat noone did

OTM. "Keep On Chooglin'" is the birth of Krautrock, IMO.

i had an idea once that i was tempted to expand upon about CCR (and other similarly repetitive boogie type stuff) being sort of an american krautrock, but then decided it was just the w33d talking.

huh, that's actually kind of an interesting idea.

i mean, didn't w33d have a part to play in both krautrock and american boogie?

did the w33d make y'all forget Moe Tucker?

"Keep on Chooglin" sounds more like motorik to me than anything I've heard by VU.

Some others remark on the similarity:

motorik

It all goes back to Bo Diddley imo

i dunno...have any of the kraut dudes ever talked CCR? like frankly i just don't see that as a band they would have been listening to...

They don't have to have heard it. It's kind of like calculus being independently invented by Liebniz and Newton.

By the way, Bayou Country (on which "Chooglin" appears) reached #33 on the German charts, so it's pretty likely that the Kraut guys did hear it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creedence_Clearwater_Revival_discography

chooglin' has a bluesy shuffle to it that is absent from the motorik beat. it still sounds krauty though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg44BKJhqk0

krauts tsarted rockin and a legend wasb orn

honestly there are a million sources for the motorik thing--it's really high-modernist minimalism coupled with rock instrumentation coupled with late-60s tendency for rock bands to jam out. so you are all correct.

:D

cookies for everybody!

krautrock cookies are hella experimental

allow cookies

'bootleg' fits what we're getting at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4eE3ZxlF28

whatever we decide or don't decide, we can agree that Creedence was fucking awesome. also: cookies.

also also: hawkwind

i mean, i haven't really listened to them, but aren't Endless Boogie supposed to sorta be an updated take on canned heat/creedence boogie mixed with kraut motorik/minimalism?

the little i've heard i'd say yeah

"Keep on Chooglin" sounds more like motorik to me than anything I've heard by VU.

"The Gift" is pretty motorik, if you ask me.

Motorik seems to have so infused music in this decade, I gotta wonder if the next decade will produce a Nickleback of motorik.

... we've already got one, Kasabian

Well you just got me to listen to a band I'd been ignoring. Can't wait for the North American derivative. I'm thinking the singer should sport a rat tail.

I've been ignoring them as well but I have heard it said they have Krautrock influences - maybe via Primal Scream, rather than directly. Personally I think Primal Scream aren't far off being the Nickelback of Motorik but people seem to take them seriously, for some reason.

primal scream are the pearl jam of motorik

discussing motorik and the velvets and nobody's mentioned Sister Ray?

Sorry, I can't get past the krautrock cookies. Mmmmm.

http://bigozine2.com/features06/DTkrautrock.html