KRAFTWERKFEATURE
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the balm.
With Al beginning to take over the planet, it’s quite an eye-/ear-opener to read Lester’s 1975 combination (as we used to call it in rock write circles) “think piece"/interview with Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, the uberlords of Germany’s pioneering techno-pop band, Kraftwerk. Somehow, as only he could, Lester manages to give context to the band’s futuristic synthesizerand vocoder-driven music and colder-than-freon image by beginning the story with thoughts on the relationship between sound and technology, including a nifty shoutout to the group’s homeland for its role in post-World War II counterculture by way of
inventing methamphetamine (or, as we used to call it in recreational drug circles, speed)—a common-ground source of energy for such “high plasma marks" as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Blue Cheer, and, yes, CREEM itself.
We could talk about Germany before the end of WWII, but that’s quite another matter, and one that Lester lets us gain insight into by letting Ralf and Florian discuss their laboratorylike composing and recording methods with such matter-of-fact statements as, “The German mentality, which is more advanced, will always be part of our behavior.” Still, when Ralf rattles off his favorite American music, and