Damo Suzuki: Can’s free-floating vocalist gave us some of the 1970s’ most open-minded rock music

 

"A 1971 TV clip from the long-running German series Beat Club shows guitarist Michael Karoli, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt – all in luminous psychedelic colour – methodically coalescing around the abstract groove of the song Paperhouse. After about a minute of jazzy extemporisation, the camera cuts suddenly to the extraordinary figure of Suzuki, stick-thin with cascading hair and naked to the waist. He sings in blank verse with no rhyme scheme, often hard to decipher and gliding freely between soundalike words – but the gentle, reflective longing is unmistakable. Towards the end, you finally catch one line clearly: “You can make everything what you want with the head”. The sense of infinite possibility that suffused Suzuki’s lyrics resonated perfectly with the adventurous spirit of Can – whose genesis in part was through the West German art scene – and his fluid wordplay was at the heart of some of the strangest and most exotic rock of the 1970s." 

read more>

Damo Suzuki: Can’s free-floating vocalist gave us some of the 1970s’ most open-minded rock music | Music | The Guardian