KRAFTWERKFEATURE

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

it includes some of Lester’s own noise-driven heroes (Velvets, Stooges, MC5), well, that’s some unlikely common ground to mull over.

And Lester must’ve been tickled that, despite all the computations, he and Kraftwerk heard that same internal rock ’n’ roll station—and it was all right.

--BILLY ALTMAN

Billy Altman began writing for CREEM in 1973. Based largely on Lester Bangs’ recommendation, he became CREEM’s record review editor, as well as its New York editor, in 1976 and served in those posts until 1985. A founding curator for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and a longtime faculty member of the School of Visual Arts, he is the literary executor of the Lester Bangs Estate.

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Some skeezix from one of the local dailies was up here the other day to do a “human interest” story on the phenomenon you’re holding in your hands, and naturally our beneficent publisher hauled me into his office to answer this fish’s edition of the perennial: “Where is rock going?”

“It’s being taken over by the Germans and the machines,” I unhesitatingly answered. And this I believe to my funky soul. Everybody has been hearing about krautrock, and the stupnagling success of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn is more than just the latest evidence in support of the case for Teutonic railery; more than just a record, it is an indictment. An indictment of all those who would resist the bloodless iron will and order of the ineluctable dawn of the Machine Age. Just consider:

They used to call Chuck Berry a “guitar mechanic” (at least I heard a Moody Blues fan say that once). Why? Because any idiot could play his lines. Which, as we have all known since the prehistory of punk rock, is the very beauty of them. But think: if any idiot can play them, why not eliminate such genetic mistakes altogether, punch “Johnny B. Goode” into a computer printout and let the machines do it in total passive acquiescence to the Cybernetic Inevitable? A quantum leap towards this noble goal was accomplished with the advent of a crude sonic model-t called Alvin Lee, who could not only reproduce Berry licks by the bushel, but play them at 78 RPM as well. As is well known, it was the Germans who invented methamphetamine, which of all accessible tools has brought human beings within the closest twitch of machinehood, and without methamphetamine we would never have had such high plasma marks of the counter culture as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Blue Cheer, Cream, and CREEM, as well as all of the tine performances in Andy Warhol movies not inspired by heroin. So it can easily be seen that it was in reality the Germans who were responsible for Blonde on Blonde and On the Road as well; the Reich never died, it just reincarnated in American archetypes ground out by hollow-eyed jerky fingered manikins locked into their typewriters and guitars like rhinoceroses copulating. Of course, just as very few speed freaks will cop to their vice, so it took a while before due credit was rendered to the factor of machinehood as a source of our finest cultural artifacts. Nowadays, of course, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. People used to complain about groups like the Monkees and the Archies like voters complain about “political machines,” and just recently a friend of mine recoiled in revulsion at his first exposure to KISS, whom he termed “everything that has left me disgusted with rock ’n’ roll nowadays—they’re automatons!”

What he failed to suss was that sometimes automatons deliver the very finest specimens of a mass-produced, disposable commodity like rock. But history will have its way, and it was only inevitable that groups like the Blue Oyster Cult would come along, singing in jive-chic about dehumanization while unconsciously fulfilling their own prophecy albeit muddled by performing as nothing more than robots whose buttons were pushed by their producers. By now the machines had clattered VU meter first out of the closet for good, and we have most recently been treated to the spectacle of such fine harbingers of the larger revolution to come as Magma’s “Ork Alarm” (“The people are made of indescribable matter which to the machines is what the machines are to man...”) and of course Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, a quick-buck exploitation number assessed elsewhere in this issue.

But there is more to the Cybernetic Inevitable than this sort of methanasia. There are, in the words of the poet, “machines of loving grace.” There is, hovering clean far from the burnt metal reek of exploded star, the intricate balm of Kraftwerk.

Perhaps you are wondering how I can connect the amped-up hysteria of compulsive pathogens such as Bruce, Dylan and Reed with the clean, cool lines of Kraftwerk. This is simple. The Germans invented “speed” for the Americans (and the English—leave us not forget Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake & Palmer) to destroy themselves with, thus leaving the world of pop music open for ultimate conquest. A friend once asked me how I could bear to listen to Love Sculpture’s version of “Sabre Dance,” knowing that the producers had sped up the tape; I replied: “Anything a hand can do a machine can do better. ” An addendum would seem to be that anything a hand can do nervously, a machine can do effortlessly. When was the last time you heard a German band go galloping off at 965 MPH hot on the heels of oblivion? No, they realize that the ultimate power is exercised calmly, whether it’s Can with their endless rotary connections, Tangerine Dream plumbing the sargassum depths, or Kraftwerk sailing airlocked down the Autobahn.

In the beginning there was feedback: the machines speaking on their own, answering their supposed masters with shrieks of misalliance. Gradually the humans learned to control the feedback, or thought they did, and the next step was the introduction of more highly refined forms of distortion and artificial sound, in the form of the synthesizer, which the human beings sought also to control. In the music of Kraftwerk, and bands like them present and to come, we see at last the fitting culmination of this revolution, as the machines not merely overpower and play the human beings but absorb them, until the scientist and his technology, having developed a higher consciousness of its own, are one and the same.

Kraftwerk, whose name means “power plant,” have a word for this ecstatic congress: “menschmaschine,” which translates as “man-machine." I am conversing with Ralf Hiitter and Florian Schneider, co-leaders of Kraftwerk, which they insist is not a band but a you-guessed-it. We have just returned to their hotel from a concert, where Kraftwerk executed their Top Ten hit “Autobahn,” as well as other galactic standards such as “Kometennmelodie” (“Comet Melody”), “Mitternacht” (“Midnight”), “Morgenspaziergang” (“Morning Walk,” complete with chirping birds on tape) and the perfect synthesized imitation of a choochoo train which must certainly be the programmatic follow-up to “Autobahn,” to a small but rapt audience mesmerized unto somnolence. (At least half the people I took, in fact, fell asleep. But that’s all right.) Now the tapes have stopped rolling and the computers have been packed up until the next gig, and the Werk’s two percussionists, Wolfgang Fltir and Karl Bartos, who play wired pads about the size of Ouija boards instead of standard acoustic drums, have been dispatched to their respective rooms, barred from the interview because their English is not so hot. (I have heard of members of bands playing on the same bills as Kraftwerk approaching these gentlemen with the words, “So ya liked blowin’ all our roadies...” The Germans smiled and clapped them on the shoulders: “Ja, ja...”) Now Ralf and Florian are facing me, very sober in their black suits, narrow ties and close-cropped hair, quietly explaining behavior modification through technology.

Emotion is a strange word. There is cold emotion and other emotion, both equally valid.

“I think the synthesizer is very responsive to a person,” says Ralf, whose boyish visage is somewhat less severe than that of Florian, who looks, as a friend put it, “like he could build a computer or push a button and blow up half the world with the same amount of emotion.” "It’s referred to as cold machinery,” Ralf continues, “but as soon as you put a different person in the synthesizer, it’s very responsive to the different vibrations. I think it’s much more sensitive than a traditional instrument like a guitar. ”

This may be why, just before their first American tour, Kraftwerk purged themselves of guitarist/violinist Klaus Roder, inserting Bartos in his slot. One must, at any rate, mind one’s P’s and Q’s—I asked Hutter if a synthesizer could tell what kind of person you are and he replied: “Yes. It’s like an acoustic mirror.” I remarked that the next logical step would be for the machines to play you. He nodded: “Yes. We do this, it’s like a robber thing, when it gets up to a certain stage, it starts playing...it’s no longer you and I, it’s It. Not all machines have this consciousness, however. Some machines are just limited to one piece of work, but complex machines...”

“The whole complex we use,” continues Florian, referring to their equipment and headquarters in their native Dusseldorf, “can be regarded as one machine, even though it is divided into different pieces.” Including, of course, the human beings within. “The menschmaschine is our acoustic concept, and Kraftwerk is power plant—if you plug in the electricity, then it starts to work. It’s feedback. You can jam with an automatic machine, sometimes just you and it alone in the studio.”

They also referred to their studio as their “laboratory,” and I wondered aloud if they didn’t encounter certain dangers in their experiments. What’s to stop the machines, I asked, from eventually taking over, or at least putting them out of work? “It’s like a car,” explained Florian. “You have the control, but it’s your decision how much you want to control it. If you let the wheel go, the car will drive somewhere, maybe off the road. We have clone electronic accidents. And it is also possible to damage your mind. But this is the risk one takes. We have power. It just depends on what you do with it.”

I wondered if they could see some ramifications of what they could do with it. “Yes,” said Ralf, “it’s our music, we are manipulating the audience. That’s what it’s all about. When you play electronic music, you have the control of the imagination of the people in the room, and it can get to an extent where it’s almost physical.”

I mentioned the theories of William Burroughs, who says that you can start a riot with two tape recorders, and asked them if they could create a sound which would cause a riot and wreck the hall, would they like to do it? “I agree with Burroughs,” said Ralf. “We would not like to do that, but we are aware of it.”

“It would be very dangerous,” cautioned Florian. “It could be like a boomerang.”

“It would be great publicity,” I nudged.

“It could be the end,” said Florian, calm, unblinking. “A person doing experimental music must be responsible for the results of his experiments. They could be very dangerous emotionally.”

I told them that I considered their music rather anti-emotional, and Florian quietly and patiently explained that “‘Emotion’ is a strange word. There is a cold emotion and other emotion, both equally valid. It’s not body emotion, it’s mental emotion. We like to ignore the audience while we play, and take all our concentration into the music. We are very much interested in origin of music, the source of music. The pure sound is something we would very much like to achieve.”

They have been chasing the p.s.’s tail for quite a while. Setting out to be electronic classical composers in the Stockhausen tradition, they grew up listening on the one hand to late night broadcasts of electronic music, on the other to the American pop music imported via radio and TV. Especially, of course, the Beach Boys, who were a heavy influence, as is obvious from “Autobahn,” although “We are not aiming so much for the music; it’s the psychological structure of someone like the Beach Boys.” They met at a musical academy, began in 1970 to set up their own studio, “and started working on the music, building equipment,” for the eventual rearmament of their fatherland.

“After the war,” explains Ralf, “German entertainment was destroyed. The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where to feel American music, and where to feel ourselves. We are the first German group to record in our own language, use our electronic background and create a Central European identity for ourselves. So you see another group like Tangerine Dream, although they are German, they have an English name, so they create onstage an Anglo-American identity, which we completely deny. We want the whole world to know our background. We cannot deny we are from Germany, because the German mentality, which is more advanced, will always be part of our behavior. We create out of the German language, the mother language, which is very mechanical, we use as the basic structure of our music. Also the machines, from the industries of Germany.”

A person doing experimental music must be responsible for the results of his experiments. They could be very dangerous emotionally.

As for the machines taking over, all the better. “We use tapes, prerecorded, and we play tapes, also in our performance. When we recorded on TV we were not allowed to play the tape as a part of the performance, because the musicians’ union felt that they would be put out of work. But I think just the opposite: with better machines, you will be able to do better work, and you will be able to spend your time and energies on a higher level.”

“We don’t need a choir,” adds Florian. “We just turn this key, and there’s the choir.”

I wondered aloud if they would like to see it get to the point of electrodes in the brain so that whatever they thought would come through a loudspeaker. “Yes,” enthused Ralf, “this would be fantastic.”

The final solution to the music problem, I suggested.

“No, not the solution. The next step.”

They then confided that they were going to spend all the money from this tour on bigger and better equipment, that they work in their lab/studio for recreation, and that their Wernher von Braun sartorial aspect was “part of the German scientific approach.”

“When the rocket was going to the moon,” said Ralf, “I was so emotionally excited when I saw this on television. I thought it was one or the best performances I had ever seen.”

Speaking of performances, and bearing their general appearance and demeanor in mind, I asked them what sort of groupies they got. “None,” snapped Florian. “There is no such thing. This is totally an invention of the media.”

All right then, what’s your opinion of American or British bands utilizing either synthesizers or Germanic/Swastikan overtones? Do you feel a debt to Pink Floyd? “No. It’s vice versa. They draw from French Classicism and German electronic music. And such performance as Rick Wakeman has nothing to do with our music,” stressed Ralf “He is something else...distraction. It’s not electronic music, it’s circus tricks on the synthesizer. I think it is paranoid. I don’t want to put anybody down, but I cannot listen to it. I get nervous. It is traditional.”

Not surprisingly, their taste in American acts runs to those seduced (and enervated) by adrenaline: “The MC5, and the heavy metal music of Detroit. I think Iggy and the Stooges are concerned with energy, and the Velvet Underground had a heavy German influence—Nico was from Cologne, close to where we live. They have this German Dada influence from the 20s and 30s. I very much like ‘European Son.’ Nico and John Cale had this Teutonic attitude about their music which I very much like. I think Lou Reed in his Berlin is projecting the situation of a spy film, the spy standing in the fog smoking a cigarette. I have also been told of the program Hogan’s Heroes though I have not seen it. We think that no matter what happens Americans cannot relate it. It’s still American popcorn chewing gum. It’s part of history. I think the Blue Oyster Cult is funny.”

They did not, however, think it was funny when I wound up the interview by asking them if they would pose for pix the next morning by the Detroit freeway. “No,” said Ralf, emphatically.

“We do not pose. We have our own pictures.”

Why? “Because,” flatly, “we are paranoid.”

He was just beginning to explain the ramifications of German paranoia when Florian abruptly stood up, opened the window to let the smoke out, then walked to the door and opened it, explaining with curious polite curtness that “We had also an interview with Rolling Stone, but it was not so long as this one. Now it is time to retire. You must excuse us.”

He ushered us into the hall, quietly swung the door shut with a muffled click, and we blinked at each other in mild shock. Still, it was somehow comforting to know that they did, apparently, sleep.

Published September 1975