CAN and "What Happened to Your Sense of Adventure, Son?"

Original Cover Art to Can's Tago Mago. Featured on the 40th anniversary edition.

I got into CAN around the time I had just started playing in Ultraboy. This is probably around early 1992 about 6 months after the Singing Spoons had broken up. Kelly Shane and I were both working at Vinyl Fever around that time and he was ordering in all kinds of awesome import stuff. I had read some stuff about these guys and liked what I heard about their approach before I had listened to a single note.I had him order me a bunch of their albums. It was expensive  and I think only a comp was available in the US at the time. Well, I got WAY into them. We even did a total freak out cover of "You Doo Right" in Ultraboy. I have no idea what it must have sounded like. We only played it once and that was at a show at the Down Under.

A little background on how I decide to jump in on a band...

I am often drawn into music through an interesting album cover or just an interview/buzz about a band. That doesn't happen much anymore because 1) I am older and have more listening experience which tends to dull the excitement and 2) I just don't have as much time for discovery between raising a kid and working a soul destroying 9 to 5 job.3) With the internet it easy for me to get into overload mode and just give up.

Could this be the answer to my long standing question of "What happened to you?" For example, how does someone go from digging on Zappa and the Mothers to listening to Bonnie Raitt in their BMW (I think they included a copy of "Nick of Time" with every E-Series circa 1990-1992)? Is there a natural law that determines Neil Diamond in your middle aged life? But this is all a digression and I kind of dig 'ol Neil.
There are all kinds of things in life that can rob you of listening ambition...not all of them bad, by the way.

Anyway, back to CAN. I was always way into "prog rock", but I was also into all that 80's shit on SST. I had pretty much exhausted all of my options for both those things that were worthwhile by the early 90's or at least I thought I had. Enter CAN. It had never dawned on my dumb ass to check out late 60's/early 70's bands from Germany, Italy, etc. As a matter of fact a lot of these band's work was languishing in obscurity except for hard core freaks. Later in the 90's, this stuff kind of came way back into fashion with US reissue campaigns and readily available imports on the french Spalax label.

I found CAN's brew of jamming and heavy, rhythmic work-outs pretty intoxicating and a balm to my psychotic turmoil at the time. I was more into the early Malcom Mooney period when I first got into them. He was the vocalist on "Monster Movie", "Soundtracks" and "Delay 1968". Mooney could best be described as "ranty". After he flipped they got Damo Suzuki who is totally hippy dippy and makes pretty terrible fashion choices. They really started extending outwards and it got harder to tell what instruments were playing. The bassist Holger Czukay started in with some awesome deep grooves and went to work with the razor blade on the tapes. Sounds like they smoked the tapes and then spilled bong water all over the mixing board.
The drummer Jaki Liebezeit  is just fantastic and plays in these super hypnotic grooves and repetitive patterns.

I cannot recommend this reissue enough and hope they do more like it for their catalog. They have reissued the catalog a few times over the last 20 years, but I am hoping for definitive versions in 2012.
If you're enthused by Can or want to give them a try, avoid their late 70's stuff. It is a little more commercial sounding and Czukay is more in the role of producer than bassist on some of it.