Deutsche Rock

 

Krautrock is a generic term used to bundle together and characterise mostly experimental, avant garde German rock bands from the late ‘60s to late ‘70s, that employed a fusion of classical music, jazz,  electronica  and rock, trying to create a rock sub-genre that owed as little as possible to the blues and the accepted norms of rock from the USA or the UK. The Krautrock bands wanted to utilise ad display a German  sensibility.

 

I first took note of Krautrack from the NME (in the period 1977 to 1981) whose writers emphasised the big names such as Can, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Faust, Kraftwerk, Neu! and Amon Düül II, that is, the avant garde or highly political bands.

 

From this list, it seemed to me at the time that were only a few German rock bands, which is what made these bands unique and interesting beyond merely the music they produced.

 

I did take note of the Köln band BAP, who sang in the Kölnisch dialect, and later some of the bands of the Neue Deutsche Welle, like Nena,  who were obviously a reaction to the punk and Ne2 Wave bands from the UK in the late ‘70s but who were hardly Krautrock. The latter appeared to be quite at odds with mainstream rock, a small coterie of experimentalists who fought against the system.

 

Of course, at the time, I had no exposure to these ‘70s German bands, as they weren’t played on South African rock radio much. In an early episode of a German police procedural television series, called Tatort, dubbed into Afrikaans  and translated as Misdaad for the South African audience, there was a long stretch of dark, night-time and suspenseful imagery set to the soundtrack of a gloomy, doomy trancelike piece of rock music, like nothing else I’d ever heard on radio or television and my imagination persuaded me that this was Krautrock.  I must admit I’ve not really done a lot of research into trying to find or identify this piece of music and it might not have been German at all.

 

So, though I knew of Can,  Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh, I had no idea what any of it sounded like. The closest I came was to a double LP called Disaster by Amon Düül, which consisted of acoustic guitar and percussion jams, with the odd vocal interjection.  It was very disappointing, as there seemed to be nothing avant garde or intriguing about it.  It sounded like a bunch of people in a room, messing about and making a home recording.

 

At about the same time, a sales guy at Sygma Records in Stellenbosch tried to interest me in an album by some German jazz rock quartet (saxophone, organ or guitar, bass and drums) on a record with one lengthy track on each side. I listened to a couple of minutes of the first track and decided against buying this record. The music wasn’t entirely what I was into at the time and, though I lived long rock jams, it seemed to be less than value for money to buy a record with only two numbers on it.  I’ve no idea anymore who the band was, and though I’ve always thought of them as German, I might be mistaken about that too. it was a long time ago and I didn’t pay particular attention then.

 

My general ignorance about Krautrock  changed a couple of years ago when, on YouTube, of course, I came across two compilation videos called Deutschrock – Nacht 1 and Deutschrock – Nacht 1, a series of complete programmes of a West German  television show from the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s called Beat Club, that featured well-known British and American rock acts of the day as well as home grown bands,  and a very good, German documentary about Krautrock.  There are other Krautrock documentaries, mostly produced by UK or American based entities, but they concentrate on the “big” names and still endeavour to present a picture of a small, brave, adventurous group of musicians striking a blow for original German rock, which is a skewed, incomplete picture of the German music scene.

 

What I learnt from these YouTube videos is that the German rock was quite extensive. There were many bands who obviously targeted an international audience  by singing in English, and who  played the typical hard rock or psychedelic styles of the period, and as many who sang in German and, as I’ve mentioned, fused jazz and classical influences and who therefore sound more exotic.

 

Just off the top of my head, these other names come up: Birth Control, Guru Guru, Kraan,  Frumpy, Jane, Eloy, Xhol Caravan. It seems that many of them favoured a heavy organ sound (not synthesisers), with energetic drumming, agile bass lines, mostly rhythm guitar and, either or both, saxophone and flute and liked extended pieces heavy on atmosphere and groove but not necessarily tune, though a band like Frumpy, fronted by Inga Rumpf, clearly had a commercial agenda informed by a combination of Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin.

 

There are also the metal bands like Scorpions, Aksept and others who clearly aim for, and represent, the international, commercial ambitions of any serious musician, and I suppose none of them, patterned after the prominent British and American metal acts, would ever have been included in any definition of Krautrock even if they originated in Germany. 

 

German rock music of the “Krautrock era” is obviously more diverse than Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can or Popol Vuh, even if the electronic experimentalists are accorded the most critical attention and praise. As in any musical scene, the artists are a mixture of ambitious, commercially driven acts and the ones who do exactly what they want, out of the mainstream and with no real thought of financial success, at least not until they, too, are eventually absorbed into the mainstream as times and tastes change.

 

If Krautrock encompasses by definition only those well-known and critically acclaimed  bands like Tangerine Dream or Can,  it seems to me that it is simply a music writer’s lazy way of dealing with a subject that is far more complex. One can argue that the British or American rock writers, who monopolise the literary criticism of popular music, were perhaps confined to only those acts from Germany who had international releases or seemed to be more esoteric, intellectual and revolutionary than the mainstream German rock scene, and ignored the rest, and decreed that these outsider bands, even if Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh were acceptable enough to score movie soundtracks, were the only German bands worth considering and/or liking.  Anyone who wants to make a relatively short documentary on Krautrock must perforce focus on fewer musicians and for this reason alone, the emphasis will always be on the same small group of bands, to the detriment of exploring what was a much larger scene with far more diverse music.  Most historians simply follow and reiterate previous history writing and this is how rock critics work too. There are certain conventional wisdoms and accepted, widely held “truths” that are continuously reinforced by repetition, as if  no contemporary rock critic is prepared to apply their own faculties and critical examination of the work in front of them, to determine whether the assessments and opinions of their forebears has merit.   Hence, Krautrock being limited to a few usual suspects.

 

Deutsche rock is varied and wide ranging, and often so truly Germanically strange that it does sound like an invention with only a vague nod to the common rock roots we’ve grown up with, and is fascinating for that very reason, whether you’re into electronic soundscapes or free from jazz noisiness.