#454: Can, 'Ege Bamyasi'

United Artists, 1972

The year is 1972. Germany was split in two by a stone wall, with one half of the community  living under Russian communism and the other under German capitalism. East Germany and West Germany formally acknowledged the sovereignty of each other via the Basic Treaty and Munich Olympics were a big smash. One hitch – along with the games came the Munich massacre when a group of Palestinian terrorists held nine athletes hostage and murdered two Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village.

The nation was fractured, the culture was fractured and the community is still healing today from that 40+ year break. 

Can also released this award winning album that same year and created space for the *krautrock* genre that would be sustained through today. 

The band’s first drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, was born in East Germany during the Nazi occupation. His musician/music teacher father was mysteriously murdered. Once Russia occupied East Germany, he lived in poverty with no running water and very little food. His mother took him to West Germany before the border was closed and they lived as refugees into his adulthood. 

He joined various jazz groups and performed. He grew weary of jazz elitism by the time he was 19 which is right around when he met up with Can. 

He claims the name for the band, Can, is an acronym for Communism, Anarchy and Nihilism whereas the other members claim it has a more positive meaning that has to do with “can” as in “able to.” 

Either way, it was Liebezeit who survived the worst of the fracture of his community and still looked upon it with irony telling the public he named his own band Communism. To be able to look at trauma and name it and then unleash that trauma into the world is very punk, and strangely possibly healthy. There is a healing in owning the story and then deciding how it is told.

 British music weekly Melody Maker wrote: "Can are without doubt the most talented and most consistent experimental rock band in Europe, England included." 

They fused the punk lifestyle into jazz and created krautrock and the beginnings of real experimental rock. 

The band is also surprisingly diverse. Multiple members were American, Mooney (African-American sculpture who suffered mental breakdown and left in 69) was replaced by a Japanese singer and had a Jamaican bassist and Ghanian percussionist. 

This is where it gets difficult for me to conceptualize East & West Germany. Both spaces feel a little tense, if you know what I mean, with one side of the wall more extreme than the other. But I didn’t realize in my American naivety how much of a cultural center Germany was pre-Berlin Wall. 

I stayed awake last night thinking about fractures, breaks in relationships, communities, and belief systems. 

I feel fractured. Within my own extended family there are gaps and breaks. We cannot talk about certain things. Within my own neighborhood there is a “them” vs “them” of which both sides I do not identify. It is a feeling that a wall has been built between our own families and our own congregations, between the vaccinated and not, the reproductive rights people and the not, the religious vs the spiritual, the fearful vs the optimistic. It feels like making one bad move will break the whole bone in half. 

I feel paranoid about adding stress to the crack, fearing that all the tiny little bridges I’ve built around myself will split perfectly in half, leaving me alone and unconnected but still surrounded by chaotic clumps of people yelling at one another. 

Can chose to put pressure on the crack. Acknowledging the fracture at all times and creating out of its gaps. They created their own wall of sound heavily mimicked by Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Pink Floyd. A wall more powerful than that running along Berlin. A wall of sound that that blows a listener over, embracing the chaos and filling the fractures with the noise.

---

Top songs: Pinch, Vitamin C, Spoon