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In Writing

Read an extract from All Gates Open: The Story Of Can

April 2018

On top of the mountains by the Madonna of Utelle, behind Michael Karoli's house,
near Nice.

An extract from the two-book biography penned by The Wire's Rob Young and
Can's Irmin Schmidt, and published by Faber

The island of Tagomago basks in the Mediterranean Sea, less than a kilometre off the
north-eastern tip of Ibiza. Only a kilometre and a half long, it’s hardly more than an
outcrop of rock, the last vestige of an ancient volcanic rim. Even in the early 21st
century, there is little more than a handful of luxury hotels scattered around its rocky
acreage, connected by a single road; from the air it looks almost deserted, with rocky
coastal crags, odd-shaped inlets and a light covering of greenery and parched
scrubland. Nowadays Tagomago is owned by a Spanish entrepreneur and is hired
out to politicians and celebrities for luxury holidays or business functions. But despite
its exclusivity, there is still a wildness about it that no amount of infinity pools or
minimalist villas will entirely wipe out. A brother of the Carthaginian commander
Hannibal, Mago Barca, who lived in the second century BCE, is believed to have

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used the island as a bolthole during his many Mediterranean military campaigns. Its
name literally means ‘Mago rock’. In Writing

The members of Can considered Tago Mago, recorded in the closing months of 1970
and released early the following year, to be its second album. Unlike the previous two
releases, which had been compiled from tracks assembled over a longer time frame,
Tago Mago was a planned album from the start. From the giant head painted on the
gatefold sleeve (which, at a stretch, resembles the outline of the real island), to its
sprawl across four vinyl sides of a double LP, including two monumental tracks filling
an entire side each, Tago Mago felt big. Taken as a whole, its seven cuts were
confident yet exploratory, at times perilously close to collapse. The radical sound it
proposed left the group standing as isolated from its peers as Tagomago itself. At
last, after several months of bending to this sole task, Can’s energies were focused
and intensified, the magnifying glass tilted to just the right angle for the grass to
smoke.

“If you study music from all over the world,” Irmin mused to an NME journalist in 1972,
“it seems that in lands surrounded by water the music is influenced more by water
and air while the more you go into a continent, the more you get into a land mass, the
melody of the music becomes less important in comparison with the rhythmic
heaviness. It seems water has something to do with melody, while countries like
Germany produce music more of earth and fire. At various times Tago Mago is
wreathed in all of these elements, the roofless island and the horizonless interior.”

Myths surround Can’s Tago Mago, just as they swirl around the Balearic island itself.
One repeated assertion is that the island – and by extension the album – has a
connection with the occultist Aleister Crowley. While the group members often
referred to magic and occult practices around the time it was made, there is no
provable link between Crowley and Tagomago – it just seems to be one of those
fanciful legends repeated unquestioningly in print and online. As we’ll see, though,
there is a Crowleyan link to one of the album’s most significant cuts.

Several conflicting stories of Can members’ visits to the island circulated at the time
too. Even as late as 2014 Holger was spinning this blatantly nonsensical yarn to an
American interviewer: “Tago Mago is a magical work. Before Jaki came to Can, he
was trying to commit suicide. He was playing with Chet Baker in Barcelona, as a jazz
drummer. Then he went to Ibiza. And south of this island is a rock called Tagomago.
Mago means magic, and Tago was the name of a magic master who lived there. And
Jaki was on that rock and tried to spring down because he thought his life didn’t make
any sense. I think he is the one who said we should call it Tago Mago.”

But whether you choose to believe any or none of these unverifiable legends, one
way to make sense of Tago Mago’s barrage of aural sensations is to consider the
album itself as a magic isle of the mind, the remote site of initiation rites that take the
listener – and the musicians themselves – on a hermetic journey from light to
darkness and back again. In the course of its seventy-two minutes, it hits peaks of
rapture and plunges into the void. In texts that spin forwards and backwards, it
entertains visions of bloodflow, disturbing drug experiences, gnomic chants, mass
destruction, and winds up pleading to be cleansed. It’s a garden of earthly delights
teetering over a hellish, all-consuming abyss.

It was on this album that Can at last learned to harness its extra-sensory faculties. A
few years later, Irmin described the events on the record as ‘witchy surprisings’.
Michael, in 1974, told Nick Kent: “Tago Mago was our real magic album. Irmin kept
making these spells throughout the time it was being recorded, and I was warning him
against it. It’s something that you just understand and get into if you read a lot of
books about it.” Much later, he added: “We were interested in everything . . . in the
universe . . . in nature. Magic is a way to influence nature. That intrigued us. We
never tried to commercialise magic. We were also interested in things like astrology . .
. because it was an opportunity to explain certain things. Why are people born in the
spring . . . different from those born in the autumn . . .? Your environment is your
music, and thus we were a German group. If you live in the desert, you’ll make a

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music that’s different from if you lived in a rainforest. We lived near Cologne, an area
with a lot of industrial sounds and beautiful scenery.” In Writing

As Can embarked on the choppy voyage towards the edifice of Tago Mago, the
group’s make-up, and the powers at their disposal, had altered considerably. Their
last appearance of 1970 was supporting Black Sabbath at Essen’s Grugahalle on 16
December. As the new year broke, the West German Sounds magazine – the
nation’s equivalent of the NME – voted them second-best German group (after Amon
Düül II) and Soundtracks the second-top German album of 1970 (after Düül’s Yeti).
Since the spring Can had not only scooped up a new vocalist, they were also
supposed to be under the management wing of Abi Ofarim’s PROM organisation.
Until now their affairs, bookings and general arrangements had been casually
handled collectively by the group; private artist management was not permitted under
West German law at the time (all such dealings were supposed to be handled by a
state bureau), but the rules were relaxing fast in the new music-business climate.

As for the new vocalist, his lines could be as meaningful – or meaningless – as the
other instruments. Unlike Malcolm, whose enunciation was usually piercingly clear,
Damo forced listeners to strain to hear what he was singing about. Today there are
many websites devoted to reproducing lyrics, but Can’s texts – especially those from
the Damo era – are notably inconsistent, vainly transcribed by fans with cans, littered
with apologetic question marks and disclaimers. Can songs are neither arguments,
logical statements nor message-carriers; they’re certainly not the expressions of
sentiment modern ears have been trained to receive since the origins of opera and
the birth of the Romantic song in the age of Schubert and Wolf.

“I like Jim Morrison, but I’m not a Jim Morrison so I don’t have to sing like Jim
Morrison,” Damo said. “I’m not a protest singer, I’m not interested about politics really.
I’m just not so much interested about anything. That’s why I’m singing nothing – It’s
how myself is.”

“I was captured when I realised that he was a loud whisperer,” recalled Michael. “He
yelled only occasionally; usually he simply whispered loudly. I thought that was ideal .
. . Naturally, the sound of the band altered, from a group that had a screaming singer
to one that had a whispering singer.”

“He couldn’t really speak English,” adds the writer Duncan Fallowell, who got to know
the group around this time. “He’d been busking on the streets and he’d invented this
pseudo-language of sounds, which is very original – something Johnny Rotten later
tried to do with PiL, but it didn’t go very far – but Damo brought terrific range and
invention into something that’s actually gobbledegook. In order to register these
songs [with a publisher], they had to have lyrics, because in fact Damo was using his
voice like an instrument. The titles came later – I gave them some, they gave some.
And there occasionally the odd phrase would appear. But in a lot of them, the so-
called lyric you’re hearing is actually just sound, it’s not language. So I actually
invented lyrics that approximated to the sound, to satisfy some legal requirement. I
felt like Leonardo da Vinci, who was trying to put an enamelled surface of exactitude
over a violent sketch underneath, just to satisfy the demands of the emperor!”

For a heart-stopping moment, they nearly lost Damo. Back in May 1969, before he
met Can, he had been picked up by the police while busking in Hamburg, where it
was found that he didn’t have the required residence permit. A visiting Japanese
citizen was not technically allowed to earn money in West Germany, even as a
busker, without the proper paperwork. The case finally caught up with Damo in 1971
and he was re-arrested. A friend of Irmin’s who worked in the police force happened
to notice Damo in custody and reported back to Irmin that he was being threatened
with immediate deportation. Can’s damage limitation mechanisms went into
overdrive: they obtained references from various distinguished individuals, including
the writer Paul Schallück, Cologne’s cultural councillor Dr Kurt Hackenberg, and
Stockhausen himself, who wrote open letters in support of Damo in the national
press.

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Letter from Karl-Heinz Stockhausen to the Immigration department of the City of

Cologne: In Writing

Dear Director,

My name is Karl-Heinz Stockhausen; I am the head of the WDR Studios for Electronic
Music, composer, and a Cologner by birth. My former student Holger Czukay, a
member of the beat group the Can, has explained to me that their singer Kenyi
Suzuki [sic] has been arrested by the police and will probably be expelled from the
country, and that he was certain that the group could not function artistically without
him (I hear that he had been playing guitar on the high street and accepted money).
In case my opinion means anything to you, I would now like to urgently request that
you do not lump such artists alongside criminals and parasites. Society dearly needs
birds like these. Perhaps you do not care for beat music or pop music, but maybe
your children do. This group is the nest in Germany at the moment.

‘Where would we be . . .’ you must be thinking.

Now, you must judge musicians like these differently and put aside your prejudices,
and you should not allow these people to be deprived or simply chased away, even if
they have broken a public law. Do not clean out the stables on account of any inbred
German ‘love of regulations’, as if it was 30 years ago. And please do not destroy
such a sensitive soul in custody, etc.

Please take heed of this.

Yours

Stockhausen

At last Irmin thought of the well-connected current head of WDR, Werner Höfer, who
was already favourably impressed with Can. (He liked Irmin’s interview responses on
the steps of Schloss Nörvenich, and invited the group to perform at a televised music
awards ceremony. They delivered a monotonous pounding beat, dissonance and
extreme volume, pressing on for several minutes after they were asked to turn off.
Höfer loved this even more.) On the day that Damo was being driven to the airport to
be deported, Irmin pulled out all the stops, begging for Höfer’s help before putting on
his smartest suit and, in a bid to try and hold up the plane, presenting himself at the
foreign ministry, where he was treated somewhat snootily. Höfer telephoned a close
friend – no less a personage than Walter Scheel, the German foreign minister at the
time. Half an hour after the call was put through, Damo was granted permission to
stay in the country. Irmin returned to the ministry in his scruffiest hippy attire, and
relished being bowed and scraped to when the staff realised his request had been
sanctioned by one of the highest-ranking politicians in West Germany.

All Gates Open: The Story Of Can is published by Faber on 3 May. Launch
events will take place in Manchester (3 May), London (4), Dublin (6), and Bristol
(7). It's available to buy from The Wire's online bookshop.

By Rob Young & Irmin Schmidt

Comments

Fantastic story. Looking forward to reading the book. You seem to have forgotten the
launch in Oslo, April 28th.

Leo Avanti 28|04|2018

Looking forward to reading this but would point out that the giant head painted on the
gatefold sleeve is not the original cover, this was the reissue and CD cover. It was
originally packaged in an envelope style cover with a live photo on the front

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Peter Dover 30|04|2018

In Writing

Though they're an album apart, have you noticed 'Oh Yeah' follows on perfectly from
'She Brings The Rain' ... just like the lyric of the latter -- She brings the rain, oh yeah

Zak 28|05|2018

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