An Introduction to Krautrock / Amon Düül II Pt I
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We gotta just ease into it, you know? We got a rolling start. Rolling start. I don't think that's a thing. Yeah, it is. Rolling start is always a thing. Everyone does a rolling start. How do you do a rolling start? Do a rolling start by somebody says something wacky like, Oh my God, I got too many cockroaches in my elbows. What? That is a sudden halt. What?

Okay, we're going to talk about something really important. Okay, yeah. It's supposedly called krautrock. Supposedly. But that's, some people don't like that. They consider it derogatory, of course. I totally, I see that. So we're trying to come up with other names, like deutschrock. Deutscherrock. That sounds cool. Kosmisch rock.

Well, Cosmiche is a subgenre of Krautrock, Cosmiche, Motorek. Whatever. That's good. Gematzes. Gematzes. Also good. Gematzes being, you know, the things with the letters. What do you call that? Acronym. That's right. Acronym of German experimental. Wait. Music. Music.

Oh, yeah. All right. German experimental music of the 60s and 70s. Yep. So there we go. Or we'll just call it Krautrock. We're just going to call it Krautrock. Welcome to No Dogs in Space, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm Carolina Hidalgo. And welcome to a massive, massive series that we've got planned. We're going to take a deep dive into Krautrock, of course. We're kind of in the middle of an experimental season right now. Experimental-ish. The experimental season is in itself experimental.

Yes. But we're going to be covering a ton of bands that all fall under the umbrella of Krautrock. So we're going to be getting deep into Deutschland. So let's begin. Now, no matter where you're from, what your background in music is, or how old you are, the music that falls under the umbrella, known for better or worse as Krautrock, is just plain odd. Interesting.

It is from over here. I just wanted to let you know. But we've done a semester of this, basically. And it gets cool when you get into it. Yeah, it's an acquired taste for some. And as a genre, it can feel impenetrable, especially when you consider that Kratrock isn't a genre at all.

Really, it's more of a loose collection of German experimental bands active in the 60s and 70s. Gematzis. Put another way, calling krautrock a genre of music is like calling cheese a genre of milk.

That makes sense. Yeah. That makes sense. I'm glad it makes sense to you. To me. But with this series, we want to remove the impenetrability of Krautrock and cordially invite you to join that conversation you've heard time and again at your local record store. Noy versus Can. Mooney versus Suzuki. Amon Duel 1 versus Amon Duel 2.

Actually, the correct pronunciation is almond duel. Oh, fuck. Okay. Yeah. From now on, almond duel. That's the last time I'm going to do that. Okay. In fact, we want to give you enough knowledge where you can decide for yourself whether the guy making the argument that almond duel one is better than almond duel two is being sincere or just contrarian. Or maybe it was an almond duel one. Okay.

Overall, though, Krautrock really isn't about genres or styles or even scenes. Krautrock is about the kids who made the music. And when something is about the kids, it's almost always going to have its roots in rebellion.

But Krautrock's rebellion is unlike any in modern music history. See, most musical movements are rebellions against their present. And while Krautrock certainly was that, it was also a rebellion against its country's fairly recent past. Specifically, these kids were rebelling against the horrific legacy of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

This rebellion went far beyond mere historical context. Many of the key members of the Krautrock movement were the children of people who had either been active Nazis or, at the very least, had tolerated the Third Reich.

That's all to say that recent German culture for these kids had been tainted and they needed a German culture all their own. They needed something that not only had nothing to do with the Nazis, but nothing to do with the British invasion happening at the time or what the Americans were doing in California. That's right. Represent, represent. Sorry, Nas has been in my head all day, all day. From the German youth's perspective, they were at a cultural zero point. And that's a place where things always...

always get interesting. Using little more than raw creativity, the musicians of the Krautrock movement tapped into their own German identities and points of view. Because after all, Germany is a country of innovators. Outside of, you know, 1933 to 1945. Yeah, but besides that. Germans have always had a rich culture of art, literature, and science. But above all, Germans know how to fucking make music. Damn straight. Fuck.

Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Strauss, Wagner, Mozart, fucking Hans Zimmer. Yes. Each and every one of these guys were German or Austrian. And in the 20th century, that compositional innovation that began in the classical era continued to evolve.

See, even before the Kratrock movement began, composers in Germany like Karl Heinz Stockhausen were on the cutting edge of early electronic music. And while this stuff is, to say the least, a challenging listen, it's...

It's like children screaming. Half of his songs are children. It freaked me out, by the way. Just be careful. But it's cool. It's important. Himnen is a masterpiece. I love Karlheinz Stockhausen. Children screaming. It's nonetheless another musical milestone. And then finally came the bands. Cannes, Kraftwerk, Faust.

Amundul 2, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Noi, incredibly influential each and every one. Without Amundul 2, you might not have Slayer, no Cluster, no Bowie in Berlin. And most of all, if you don't have Kraftwerk, then the entirety of 20th century music history changes because saying Kraftwerk is influential to the music we know and love is like saying Oxygen is influential to human life.

In other words, despite or perhaps because of their experimental nature, the bands that make up the krautrock movement are secretly some of the most important bands in modern history. You're losing, you're losing, you're losing, you're losing, you're losing. Gemini Fire, your hair is burned.

♪ Yellow Joe's Kamali Day ♪ ♪ Sunshine Girl, Sunshine Bay ♪ ♪ Sunshine Bay, it's a rainy Sunshine Girl ♪ ♪ ♪

Oh my God, you guys are in for so many treats. Yeah. It's going to be a treat extravaganza. You guys are like a bunch of little dogs and we got a whole pocket full of treats for you.

Yes. I agree. I'm sorry. It's just this train analogy is weird and Georgie's staring at us. But you're right. You're right. This is going to be really fun. This is going to be crazy. This is, of course, going to be experimental. We're going to figure this out as we go along. Yeah, we definitely are. Now, amongst the kids that were coming of age in the 1960s, the Germans were unique in the Western world. See,

See, at the end of World War II, the Americans and the British came out as either heroes or studies in courage. The rest of Western Europe, meanwhile, ended up somewhere around the middle when it came to their international reputations, save for maybe Italy, who exited the war considerably lower. Yes, they lost. That's what we're saying because they were fascists. Yes.

Germany, however, had become the worst villains in human history. And some of the seminal figures in the Kratrock movement had actually been there to see it. Yeah, like Ermin Schmidt, the keyboardist and co-founder of Cannes. He was born in Berlin in 1937, and he still has vivid memories of the Allied bombings from when he was five.

He even remembers the sky glowing with the red flames and watching the Deutschland Holly burn. Deutschland Holly. It's their Madison Square Garden. It's like a big arena, a big venue. Deutschland Holly.

Yes. Because little Ermin Schmidt, he was happy to see it burn down because the week before he was there for the circus and he hated the clowns in the show. So at the time when he saw it burn down, he thought the clowns must be melting. He was smiling. Yes, yes.

Yes, all of my plans are coming to fruition. It's fantastic. Erwin was the he was the oldest of the 1968 generation. You know, the 1968 generation being that everyone was in their teens or in their 20s during the year 1968. Makes sense. So many of them were born right before, during or right after the war. So they were a lot of them were too young to even remember. Just Erwin is just weird with clowns.

Well, that's the thing. If you were just some kid in Germany in the 60s born during or after the war trying to make sense of life and your own country's history, you found yourself at a loss because you weren't really allowed to ask your father or grandfather what he'd done in the war. His

History classes stopped at World War I. You didn't say the name Adolf Hitler and the word Jew might as well not even exist. You don't say for or against because you don't want to get the answer. You don't want to hear that answer.

At best, when asked about atrocities like the concentration camps, the mother or father of a German kid growing up in the 60s would say they simply didn't know anything about it. Even if those parents happen to live in places like Dachau, where the first concentration camp operated for 12 years, just 10 miles northwest of Munich. People within the village of Dachau would say, oh no, we didn't know what was going on over there. We just let them do their thing. We lived our life and that was it.

But at worst, if you asked how Germany strayed so far into the path of evil, you'd be told that Nazism was simply a good idea, badly executed. Jesus.

Really, while everyone was well aware of the existence of the Third Reich, all a kid in Germany had was a vague idea that your country had been responsible for atrocities beyond imagination between 1933 and 1945. And nobody, not your parents, not your extended family, nor your teachers, none of them were willing to talk about it at all.

at any great length. No, many of them didn't. But that's probably because of shame or maybe they didn't feel any responsibility or they were in denial, like you said, or maybe they were totally complicit, which is terrifying. Oh, and before we begin, I just want to say I am not a historian. Yeah, well, it's very important to say I'm not. I don't have any

affiliations with historians. I'm just a girl who read a couple books, watched a documentary or two, and I'm just doing my best to show how Germany directly reflected the experimental rock music scene of the 1960s and 70s. That's it. You say you're a girl who reads books. I say you're a woman who knows your shit. Oh, that's really nice. Thank you. You're welcome. Oh, that's kind. But even so, even so, I do not have a degree in this whatsoever. So consult your local historians. And if you want, you can trust, but always verify. I will read a list of sources at the end of each episode.

So here we go. When World War II ended in 1945, most of the people of Germany lost their homes, their belongings, their infrastructure. So right off the bat, they were homeless and starving. And it was only going to get worse. Every major city was completely bombed and people kind of just walked around in a daze amongst the rubble.

All they thought about was how do we not starve? Not how do we reflect on what we just did? I mean, there was very little justice in Germany towards Nazis, at least at first. And also you have to remember the mass suicides from the most complicit Nazis that ever Nazi. They were they were they were all dead. They were all dead. Or so they say. Oh, God, we're not getting into that.

Not today. That's what they want you to believe. And from a coldly logical point of view, it did make sense to the allies now in control of Germany to take care of the most basic needs of the German people first.

especially because both the Americans and the Soviets were looking for allies in the upcoming Cold War. That really fun thing that happens right afterwards. Well, they knew they already knew before World War Two was over that the next big bads were going to be the Soviets. And the horrible treatment of the Germans after World War One led directly to World War Two. And they all knew that. So I think they were trying to prevent that from happening again.

Yes. So to rebuild Germany as fast as possible, the Americans figured out the Marshall Plan, which is basically financial aid to Germany and most of the countries in Western Europe. I believe that the Soviet Union said no. No. Well, you know. But with this Marshall Plan, people could eat and shop and live in a somewhat normal life. Only sugarcane

was rationed, but you could go to a store and get like most anything you wanted. The people rose from starvation to a stable economy in just a few short years. They called this the economic miracle. Yeah, they even commercials even had a slogan that they would use. They would say now back in stores, which was code for you couldn't get this during the war. The Nazis wouldn't let you have this.

You can get it again. Yes, because Germany had been rationing their food for like over a decade. Yeah. So now it's like, oh, I can get whatever I want. This is insane. Right. So even so, the allies also figured we need to do something about these Nazis in Germany. Like, yeah, we got to feed them. We got to make sure that they're, you know, that they're going to survive. But there's still a lot of Nazis around. We need to start something called denazification. Right. So the Americans...

They tried this. God bless their hearts with a long ass questionnaire. So everyone in Germany had to fill out a questionnaire in order to find out who was a Nazi party member or affiliate or innocent bystander or, you know, just following orders. What's the point of this? Because like, how are they going to like

Are they just going to take everyone on faith? They're going to put them into different categories for judgment. But how are they going to like, what are they cross-referencing this against? If they already have the roles of all the fucking SS members, you just put it like, oh, that guy's in the SS. You just check and see if he's an SS before you make him a judge.

That was also a hard part. Who judges this? And then we had to wean out the judge. You see, the thing is, it wasn't feasible to judge every single person one by one to see if they deserve to be part of German society, the new Germany. Germany 2.0. Yeah, it was. And by the way, they tried the exact same thing in Japan and they couldn't do it there either. It's hard. It's like trying to take pee out of a

pool. You just can't do it. All right. And also, it didn't help that the Americans forced Germans to watch horrifying and detailed documentaries of the concentration camps and the treatment of the Jewish people, like as if they would just suddenly snap out of fascism. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. That's not going to help. Billy Wilder, very famous director, you know, he made Sunset Boulevard. He said the Germans are our allies of tomorrow and we cannot afford to antagonize them. Remember World War I that led to World War II, just like what you said? I mean, he didn't say that. He said, I made Sunset Boulevard.

But anyway. It's a fabulous movie. It is. It is a fabulous movie. It is. It's wonderful. And some like it hot. It's very good. Anyway. Billy Walters is great. So, okay. But the problem is there are still Nazis in the government, in schools, particularly in universities and in law offices. 90% of German lawyers were Nazis. That's not

a lawyer joke. That's just true. They really did try to remove them and then when they realized there weren't enough resources to have schools and universities, they were just like, I guess you should go back but just promise? Like,

Like, what do we do? Just go. So they left. So, yes. So what happened? It was that everyone kind of just left the idea of denazification behind and they were just like, so do we move on now? And move on. They did.

Germany accepted the Coca-Cola brand of American capitalism and entertained themselves with, you know, Heimatfilms, which is like homeland films, like stuff that harkens back to the old days of Germany. A lot of very, very conservative entertainment. They didn't want to take risks in any way whatsoever. And they entertained themselves with a type of music that's particularly German called Schlager.

Now, Schlager is a little hard to pin down, but it basically takes pop music trends from America and the UK from beat music to country. When disco hit big, you had disco Schlager songs. They just kind of take it and they put it through a German blender and then serve it up to the German public. Here's an example of a Schlager from, I think this is the late 50s, mid to late 50s. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

Closely related to Schlager was a genre known as Volksmusik, songs that were not quite folk and not quite Schlager, but were usually updated German folk songs of yore. While

While Schlager was usually pretty innocent, a lot of it was about cowboys for some reason. In Germany? Yeah. They got mountains. I know. There were a lot of songs about cowboys and a lot of songs about mom. Okay. And remember the good old days. Well, remember the good old days. But that's the thing about Volksmusik is that Volksmusik tunes were full of Nazi dog whistles. In particular, there was a hit called Schwarzbronnussel.

Schwarzbraun ist die Haselnuss Schwarzbraun bin auch ich, bin auch ich Schwarzbraun muss mein Mädel sein Gerade so wie ich

Oh

You know, I saw in an interview that Jello Biafra said that before his shows, I think this was after Dead Kennedys, that before his shows would start that, you know, how you do a playlist for the audience while they're waiting. He would play only Heino music, which is like this. The guy that you just heard. Yes. That was Heino. Jello Biafra would play this for about 45 minutes.

minutes before he would come on. And by then they were rabbit. Typo negative would do the same thing when I got to see them at Irving Plaza. They played the chicken dance for an hour and a half. They just did it. Clap, clap, clap, clap. And it's that fucking hour. And it like we were the crowd was maddened by the time typo negative went on. But then they just fucking killed it. R.I.P. Peter Steele. Hmm.

Now, if you were a teenager in Germany in the 60s and you were looking for culture outside of Schlager, you did have another choice at hand. The Americans were still an occupying force in Germany during this time, and they'd been imposing American culture and capitalism on the German people since day one of the occupation. So you could always take a cue from them.

There was also the option to emulate the British, whose songs were broadcast on pirate stations playing pre-recorded shows from ships on the North Sea. Eventually, the Germans who heard and dug those American and British songs formed cover bands, and they played shows in old bomb shelters across West Germany. And as we covered in our Monk series, whole scenes in cities like Hamburg formed around bands that either covered British music or were themselves British.

This is where the Beatles got their start. But for some Germans, the idea of forever covering songs that were produced by the countries that occupied them, that rang hollow. I think it was Future Days that put it as a cover band and a cover nation.

In some young Germans, there was a burning, insatiable urge to create music that was specifically German, truly German, completely free not just from the Nazis, but from the pop music coming from America and England as well.

The exceptions when it came to rejecting foreign influence when it came to these kids were, of course, the more experimental bands that were themselves rejecting what was popular in their own countries. Namely, these kids loved the psychedelic sounds of early Pink Floyd and the uncompromising individuality of Frank Zappa.

♪

No way to delay that trouble coming every day. Now, Trouble Every Day is obviously political, but Krautrock itself was not political aside from notable exceptions like Flo DeCologne. But surrounding these bands was a political revolution that was just as filled with rage as any of the others happening in almost every Western country in 1968.

But even though Krautrock was mostly apolitical, the revolutions in West Germany during the 1960s provided Krautrock with a framework and culture in which it could develop.

The German youth were disgusted both by what the previous generation had done in their country's name and by the slaughter of the Vietnamese people being perpetrated at the command of the American military. These kids saw the genocide of the people in Vietnam as the same as the genocide of the Jews in Germany just a few decades earlier. And they were double pissed because these genocides were being staged from bases within Germany itself. Yeah, that's enough to get pissed off.

There was definitely friction. Yeah. Especially with what we called the 1968 generation, right? And that's why a lot of young people in the 60s started the slogan, don't trust anyone over 30. Why? Why?

You know why? Right. Because a lot of teenagers and 20 somethings of West Germany rebelled because they felt they had good reason to question authority and sometimes even completely reject it. A lot of these kids, especially what you call the counterculture kids, the artsy ones, the musicians, the rockers, the stoners, the activists, the beatniks, the hippies, the gamblers.

is what they call them in Germany, kind of like hippies. Gammlers, double M, no B there, just so you know. Gammler. Yes, exactly. These kids would sometimes have long hair and would dress differently. And maybe they were a little unwashed. Maybe a lot unwashed.

So what? But it was their progressive opinions and their aesthetic that made them a target. That's what made them a target. Yeah, it wasn't just that they didn't wash their hair every Tuesday. But it didn't help. So here's a rundown of what was going on in West Germany in the 1960s with the youth population.

In the summer of 1962, a small group of young street musicians in Munich were playing to an audience of about 150 people or 150 beatniks, as they were called in the daily newspaper. Sure. Behind the times. Yes. The police intervened and threatened to arrest them for disturbing the piece and playing after 1030 p.m. Oh, wow.

This led to a scuffle between the cops and the beatniks, one that escalated to a four day riot that involved up to 20,000 protesters on the street. Hundreds of them were arrested, many of them beaten by police on horseback. This became known as the Schwabing riots.

and the precursor to the growing unrest and eventual rebellion of the West German students against authority figures. This is what we call a watershed moment. It really is. This is 1962. This is when shit starts ramping up because it wasn't just America that was a mess during the 60s. It was almost every Western country. Yes. And then the media started tying the Schwabian protests to communist activities, thus equating young people, beatniks, long hairs, whatever, anyone different or not clean cut

As communist. And this was a sort of like it wasn't exactly statistic terrorism, but it was something very similar because to the older generation, a communist was the most evil thing that you could be. Because remember, the number one enemy of the Nazis was the Soviet Union. So if the newspapers are saying like, oh, yeah, all these kids out here, they're communists. It's basically telling you you can do whatever you want to these people. These people are an existential threat. Violence is justified against these people.

Absolutely. So things got much worse in 1966 when a new chancellor was named after a devastating election that kept the conservative government in place. The new chancellor was Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a politician who during the Third Reich was directly connected to the Nazi party working for Joseph Goebbels in his ministry of propaganda. My God.

This led to outrage. Yeah, of course. By the youth, of course, the student movement in particular, their biggest organizations, the SDS is the socialist German students. They decried that they were living in a police state surrounded by Nazis. Well, I mean, your chancellor is...

He is a Nazi. Yes. Like you have look into his closet. There is a uniform. Yeah, he didn't throw that one away. No. Just press the button and then the back will slide open and there's all his gear. He's like Nazi Batman. So this led to protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, be-ins, teach-ins, happenings. They were all...

Happening. Okay, so these series of protests culminated. Okay, get ready into three big events. Yes. Okay, one. The first was the murder of West German student Benno Onesorg in 1967. This happened at a protest against the Shah of Iran who was visiting Berlin for a state dinner and a night at the opera. Yes. So the German student movement considered the Shah a brutal dictator.

So they went out in droves to protest him and his wife outside the opera house. So this protest turned violent, but got even worse on the second day when the chaos led to a policeman shooting an unarmed 26-year-old Benno in the back of the head. Benno wasn't a member of the SDS, and he had never been to a demonstration before this one. He left behind a wife, a pregnant wife, actually, with their first child. The policeman who fatally shot Benno was acquitted six months later.

More things change, more they stay the same. Two, the shooting of Rudy Dutschke in April 1968. That's the second big event. Yes. Rudy was a political activist and somewhat unofficial leader or spokesman for the for the SDS. Right. He was shot by Joseph Bachman, a house painter who said he shot Rudy because he was on a mission to, quote,

kill a dirty communist. Such as terrorism. Yes, he was actually he was also carrying a cut out from a right wing paper that actually did say stop now. Otherwise, there will be civil war. It's like directions. That's a lot of times, as we know, as we know.

As we know. So Rudy, he survived the shooting, but he had significant brain damage. He would die 11 years later from his injuries, but not before forgiving his attacker, Joseph, in 1969. Joseph Bachman would die by suicide in 1970. But in 2009, it was confirmed that Joseph had ties to neo-Nazis. What? Participating in shooting practices with them. No. You know this. No.

He never. So the third big event was the passing of the emergency laws in 1968. This is a big one. Yes, basically a bill that said the government can expand their powers regardless of constitutional rights in the event of an emergency or crisis that they themselves can define, which sounded too much like the Weimar Constitution self-cancelling statute, which was a big part of legitimizing the Nazis in the early 1930s. Kind of helped them get into power. Right.

Article 48. Yes. Look it up. It's the Reichstag fire. It's all that shit. It didn't help the Nazis get. It was a little bit more help. It what? It put him in. Oh, OK. So it helps. Right. So now I'm not saying I'm not saying the conservative government of West Germany at the time were fascists or even had designs on a total authoritarian regime. But it does seem clear from the civil unrest that scores of people were not being represented, their voices not heard.

particularly the youth. Yes. What we've been talking about this whole time. The ones who are labeled subversive, unruly, communist, therefore dangerous, which led to the violence I just mentioned. And then, unfortunately, begins a feedback loop of extremism that we'll talk about in that next episode. But it doesn't matter right now. Right now, the kids are mad as hell. And to be fair, a lot of them are communists.

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Now, out of these increasingly aggressive protest movements came the inevitable rock bands, both inspired by and featuring members of the movements themselves. Likewise, some of these bands toyed with violent rhetoric in their lyrics, although they weren't blatantly calling for violence. For example, Tonschstein-Acheben, who formed in 1970, provided a handy and hostile slogan for later protest marches. It went, Macht kaputt was, euch kaputt macht.

Translated to English. It sounds fucking awesome in German. It sounds even better when you hear what it actually means. Destroy what destroys you. I'm going to destroy you.

That's so cool. I mean, that could be a Dead Kennedys song. It really could be. And that's 1970. So that's about nine years before Dead Kennedys plays their first show. Yeah. That's amazing. Now, Tonschsteiner Scherben, or the Scherben, as they're known to their fans, Der Scherben, they became a cult favorite. They gained brief infamy in Germany when their audience set fire to a stage during a festival while the band played Macht Kaputt.

after the festival's organizer made off with the cash box. I heard about that. That's the one where Jimi Hendrix did his last festival appearance right before he died. Yeah. Yes, because Embryo was there and they said, yeah, we went after Jimi Hendrix and it was really cool and the check bounced and everything. And then Mac Caput, that song was playing and then the whole thing went to craziness. But Rod Stewart was there, which was cool. Anyway, I'll give you the sources. It was really fun.

Well, Tannstein und Scherben is widely considered to be one of the first German rock bands to actually sing in German. And they're still beloved in Germany today, although they're virtually unknown outside of Germany. Mostly they're known in Germany for a squatter anthem called Rockhaus Song, which I fucking love.

The Marian square was blue, so many bulls were there And Menschmeyer had to cry, that was probably the tear gas And he asked someone, "Tell me, is there a party today?" Someone said something similar, "Britain is being occupied" And also Zeit said, "Menschmeyer was empty for long enough" "Oh, how nice it would be, but there are no more cops in life" But the head of the unit was screaming, "Cut the Marian square, there's enough space to cut it!"

*music*

So catchy. But there's a reason why it's not really that popular outside of Germany is because the lyrics themselves, I read the translation of the lyrics and it's just all of these names and events that I have absolutely zero reference for. It's extraordinarily political and extraordinarily topical. But there was another band that was born from the German protest and counterculture movement of the late 60s that was not overtly political.

Despite finding, at best, middling success in Germany, this band ended up being far more influential and far more innovative than any other German rock group in the international sense, which is pretty much Krautrock in a nutshell. See, after the emergency laws that Carolina mentioned were put into place, a protest was called four days later at the University of Munich. Right in the middle of the protest...

a commune who had been experimenting with music as a shared social activity, set up their amps just to the right of the main entrance to the university. This group of about a dozen men, women, and children, most of whom had no idea how to actually play a musical instrument, launched into a chaotic den of an experimental yet still inspiring performance in the middle of what was effectively a riot.

Eventually, the actual musicians in the group would split away from the commune to form an actual band that has the distinction of being the first we'll cover in this series. They're one of the darkest. They're one of the heaviest. They're one of the loudest. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Amun. Amun.

The intoxication kids are ready to pit. His desires are scattered. His nerves are steadied.

Fucking hallucination guillotine. Okay, we finally made it. We made it to Amandul 2. Okay, so to make music like that live and in the 1960s, you're going to have a lot of members. It's true. We're talking Amandul 2. Now, this is the beginnings of psychedelic music, of prog rock, space music, heavy metal, at least lyrics wise. And so this is not a song or an album. This is...

Yes. Amundul 2 is unexperienced. Capital A, capital E. It's really fun, but it's also something you need to be in the mood for. And also your significant others also need to be in the mood for. They're just going to end up staring at the speaker the whole time if they're not.

But this is important stuff. You'll see as we dive into Amandoul's story for the next episode and a half. And this story starts with German national Chris Kerrer, born only two years after World War II ended and grew up in Kempten, South Germany. The whole Amandoul scene, this is all in the south, particularly in Munich. So this is the goatee of the Germany map head. Oh.

Or the crotch of the torso. Okay. I can see the goatee. I know what you mean by the goatee. Yes. Okay, good. We'll do that then. Instead of crotch. The crotch of Germany. No, no, no, no, no. The goatee. Also, a fun fact about Chris Carer. He was once arrested by the police for throwing candy during a protest. Jeez, what kind? I don't know. My guess is Goomy Bears. Goomy Bears.

I like how you used the German pronunciation. That's the only way to say it now. So Chris Carer, he grew up playing violin and saxophone. He loved Coltrane. He played in a jazz combo with his friends, Peter and Ulrich Leopold, in boarding school. When he was in boarding school, he loved jazz. And that is until 1967 when Chris Carer saw Jimi Hendrix live in a small but super cool music venue called the Big Apple right there in Munich.

So that show was on May 16, 1967, which is actually two weeks before the monks played with Jimmy at the Star Palace in Kiel that we talked about in the last series that you heard. It's nuts. I know. So this is the same time. So after seeing Hendrix live on stage, Chris Carer went home, broke all his jazz records and traded his saxophone for an electric guitar because he was inspired to go a different direction because of two reasons.

One, there were no girls in jazz. There never are. And second, he needed something more performative than a jazz ensemble. Yeah. So he told his friends from boarding school, you remember Peter and Ulrich, hey, forget jazz. Let's figure out something new. And Peter and Ulrich Leopold, they're just fucking they're insanely talented, just like Chris Carer. And they were brothers. Peter was the older one of the two. He was a beast of a drummer. Can we play a snippet of Peter Leopold's drumming? Yeah, let's hear it. All right.

Remember, this is a very drum-heavy band.

Dude can fucking drum. Yeah. And the music's going to get weirder. So when... Yeah, that's from an album when they started going a little more commercial. I know. Because experimental is exactly that. You'll see. So when Chris, Peter and Ulrich, they all finished boarding school or I've also heard were expelled from it. They decided to move into the center of Munich. So Peter and Ulrich Leopold, they moved into their own apartment on Klopstockstrasse.

Pretty good. I think. Yeah. And pretty soon the Leopold brothers and Chris Kerr were jamming on Klopstrasse. I like to call it Klop Street. Klop Street's better. And also like they were jamming. They're playing. You know, we're done with school. They had other boarding school friends who are also coming around like Falk U. Rognar. I call him Falk U. That's his middle name. Ulrich. Falk U. Falk U's great. He's a photographer.

Photographer, artist, later messes around with the bass, with the keyboard in the band. And then there was a bongo player, Christian, who went by Shrat. He's great. I've been told that if you were alive in 1967, then you knew a bongo player. You knew six bongo players. They're like fucking cockroaches. By, I don't know, kindergarten. I'm sure. OK, so these friends, they're coming together. They're hanging out and they're listening to music. They're jamming the music.

Because they're all locked in and they're ready to do something new. The time of the beat groups was over. And now it's time for the new generation to make some new art. Something that's not American or British. Something that uniquely defines their generation. But what is it? What will it be? What am I? That is the central theme of our series right now. I know I should be telling you, but that's what it is. Let's drop some acid and see if the answers come to us.

Well, as Klopstockstrasse became more of a hangout spot and more drugs started getting involved, the taste of the people who made it their home began to evolve more into the realm of the psychedelic, as tastes on acid are wont to do. There was, of course, your Jefferson Airplane, your Floyd, your Zappa, but there were two lesser known albums that had an outsized influence on the members of Amandul. And they are, it takes an effort, but you're happy at the end of the day.

One was an English group called Hapsash and the Colored Coat, which was mostly a heavy meandering mess with moments of brilliance that I'm sure were made even more brilliant on acid. It just takes a very unique appreciation to get into it. At least that's my opinion. I agree with that opinion because it's more of an historical artifact than anything else. Like here I'm like, oh, there were these dudes playing this really heavy music. It's a mess and it's not necessarily brilliant.

But it's a moment in time. It's a moment in time. It is. But the record that was even more of a template for Amandul when it came to the variance of influences on their work was an album that was put together and released as almost a lark because some of the best studio musicians on earth just felt like making a psychedelic record. That was called The Salib People.

The Salib people was basically a bunch of members of the Wrecking Crew. You know, the Wrecking Crew, the guys who backed hundreds upon hundreds of hits here in America. For Phil Spector, Wallace Sound, that kind of stuff? Just any solo artist. Name any solo artist from like 1960 to 1980 and...

It's pretty much guaranteed you get a member of the Wrecking Crew that played on it. That was that was the kind of the base of it. You also had the drummer who composed half of Eric Clapton's Layla and murdered his mother later on during a schizophanic. You had the guy who played the flute part on Going Up the Country by Can Heat, you know, did it.

That one. That guy was necessary. Yep. And at the helm of the whole project was musical chameleon, Rye Cooter. My dad's ears just perked up when I said Rye Cooter. Cooter is widely considered one of the greatest guitarists in history, and he's a hell of a singer-songwriter to boot. And he led the Salib People's Session just after a short stint with Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. The

The result of Cooter's psychedelic experiment was sitar by way of beef heart, and this record somehow made its way into the apartment at Klopstockstrasse and changed the way the future members of Amon Dool 2 thought about music. ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

Some cool, weird shit. Yeah. California wasn't... Sorry, by the way, that's from the album Tanyet, 1968. It's the only album they ever put out. It's on YouTube, in case you're wondering. And I don't even know how to spell anything. But look it up as best you can. C-E-Y-L-E-I-B, People. It's a great album. I mean, a lot of the songs are like,

25 seconds long, minute and a half, minute 12, because they're just fucking around. But this had such a huge, huge influence on the members.

of Amundul 2. Now, California was an impossible destination for the kids at Klopstockstrasse, so they did the next best thing and took a weekend trip to the UK to check out the scene in London. Guitarist Chris Carer, drummer Peter Leopold, and a few others attended a festival at the legendary Roundhouse venue in London in 1967. While details are scant on what they actually saw that weekend outside of some free jazz and a performance by the Animals, the trip

opened Chris Carer's eyes to a new range of possibilities. In just briefly dipping his toe into the British scene for a weekend, Carer saw that his loose group of musicians fucking around in an apartment in Munich were far behind what the English were well into. So he returned to Germany with a new resolve to take their music to the next level.

Perhaps more consequently, though, Chris had returned with a fellow German who'd been working as an au pair in London for a few years previous. Her name was Renata Naup, and she would become an essential member of Amen Duel 2 as eventual lead singer. And my favorite member, by the way. She's my favorite. She's awesome. She's badass. Renata's amazing.

Now, Klopstopstrasse soon began attracting some of the brightest young artistic minds around in film, photography and even light shows to create a full multimedia experience. But the problem was that none of them were leaving after they fucking showed up. It got crowded. It got real crowded, actually. You know when it's like not cool anymore? Yeah. That's what happened.

So, at the end of 1967, the Leopold brothers and Chris Carrer moved to a larger apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse, where Hitler had supposedly once given a speech from the balcony.

But with all these young, open-minded people hanging around in a single space, it was almost inevitable that they latch upon a way of living that flew in the face of everything Hitler stood for while also rejecting the traditional Western family structure, rebellion against the past and the present. Like so many others in Germany at the time, the kids at Prinz-Regenten-Straße, right in the middle of Munich, formed a commune. Yes! Yes!

Prince Regent Street. Prince Regent Street. Okay, there we go. So yes, when the Leopold brothers, Chris Carrier and all them, they moved in together. They did this to become a commune because they were anti-society, anti-nuclear family, anti-everything. But pro-LSD. Yeah. Isn't that fun? Okay, so their apartment. Some say essential. It was to a certain degree. And then eventually, you know, they said like we had to leave that behind. But that's for later.

Yeah. So their apartment in Prince Street was in an upper middle class, bougie neighborhood, actually, where doctors and lawyers live. Because remember, these guys, Peter, Ulrich, Chris, Balku, most of them are long haired hippies, sometimes wearing Indian robes and colorful jackets. They're eating yogurt. They don't have jobs. They're anti-job.

They share everything together. Food, weed, psychedelics, music. They play music all the time. Even the children. Yes, there's a toddler or two running around. Everyone is a musician. So just hand out some bongos or tambourines and we all get going. That's their life every day. That was the vibe of the house, the commune. And it sounds freaking awesome, at least at first for a weekend. Yeah.

But the thing is, the guys are rather the commune. They would let anyone in who was unusual, which could be fun. You know, anyone who can handle the unconventional. Very Dada, very Fluxus. Yes. Like one guy. There was a British dude that stayed with them for six weeks in the same corner of the house. He didn't do anything. He didn't say anything. He just hung out in his corner eating butter sandwiches and everyone loved him. What a great guy. What's his name? Who cares? Yeah.

This is what we call a social experiment, an art commune, a drum circle gone too far. Far too far. Definitely much too far for their neighbors. I mean, these guys would be walking down the street and someone would poke their head out the window and would actually say, you all belong in the fucking concentration camps. You deserve to be gassed.

That's what they would hear just rounding the corner. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. Like I said, Nazis still around. Not all of them hiding so well. And their neighbors, they looked at this commune like they were criminals, like hoodlums, which brought them some attention. Actually, a journalist came over. He toured the place. He talked to the people in the commune. And a week later, the journalist published a story in the paper in a commune. They all huddled together to check out their featured article in the big print. And it said this commune sucks.

And if this is the future of Germany, then we need Adolf back. And they're like, wow. Yeah, like what's on page two? But that kind of rejection from the older generation or maybe the more conformist, straight-laced, conservative groups of people and the media especially included, they just emboldened the commune even more. They're like, fuck it, we're going to do what we want. And besides, what's wrong with what we're doing? At least we're not Nazis. But what...

Are we right? So a few months after the commune moved in together, they said, we need to figure out what to call ourselves, because there's loads of communes all over Germany, all over the world, really, at this time. And they identify in their own ways, like political communes, like Commune One or Commune Two, not very creative with their name.

And sex communes. There were sex communes. The ones who practice free love, baby. That kind of stuff. Rosie Rosie. That was one. Great name for a fuck commune. But this is a music commune. One where we want to make something new. A new musical revolution. An awakening. If I may. You may. Okay. Something that's German, but not. Something like international music. Like a name that needs something else. World music. That's it. Yes. But not of this world. Right.

Space music. Cosmic music. Yeah. Yes. So let's take Amun from the Egyptian sun god Amun-Ra and duel a word that doesn't exist. It really doesn't exist. No. I'm sorry. It's not a Turkish word for moon goddess. They did try. They retroactively tried to say, like, it is a word for Turkish moon goddess. It's not. It's not. They just fucking made it up. It was before Google.

So Amundul. Okay, perfect. It's neither American nor English nor German. It's unique. It's pithy. It's Amundul. Amundul. So by April 1968, the commune were calling themselves Amundul. And with a new name must come a new ideology. Of course. Music shall be our language and improvisation will be how we communicate directly.

between each other. This is how we change the world, not by preaching, but by living it. We're the youth of 1968. And after the legacy our parents left us, we deserve better.

So we'll make it better. We'll jumpstart a society we can be proud of. And in a way, we know how. Solidarity, brothers and sisters. Together, we are stronger. Never give up. Never surrender. What? Galaxy Quest. Yes. It's 1968. It's the age of Aquarius, baby. There's a cosmic vibration going through the world and the revolution is happening now and it's being carried by the music.

I was born in the wrong decade. I'm loving this stuff. I'm believing I would never live in a condo. Of course not. We couldn't live like this at all. Absolutely not. I don't like it. I don't even like when people talk to me when I'm in the bathroom. But

I love this whole idea, though. Yeah. And in theory, all of this is very cool. In theory. And as you said earlier, for a weekend, it's very cool. Maybe even for a month. It's very, very cool. But it just tends, as we'll get into later, these sorts of ideas just tend to collapse under their own weight.

Now, again, if you'll remember from our Monk series, the Beatles had cut their teeth in the city of Hamburg, and Germany was no more immune to Beatlemania than any other Western country in the early to mid 60s. As a consequence, Germany had its own generation of beat groups inspired by the Beatles and the rest of the British invasion bands. Most popular were the Lords. Oh, yeah, the Lords. Who are quite possibly the most awkward beat group of the era. I still like them for some reason. It's...

I mean, not this song. It's so awkward. It's fun. I was born, you know, couldn't speak. I'm gold, my mother were. And she learned me to say. I'm sun system. And she learned me to say. Life is so hard each day.

How do you manage to play a guitar riff awkwardly? I don't know, but they make it work somehow. It's competent, yet it's awkward. The lords. NetCredit is here to say yes. Because you're more than a credit score. Apply in minutes and get a decision as soon as the same day. Loans offered by NetCredit are lending partner banks and serviced by NetCredit. Applications subject to review and approval. Learn more at netcredit.com slash partners. NetCredit. Credit to the people.

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Now, as you can imagine, the kids living in an apartment commune, listening to the Salib people while they were being told they should be gassed in concentration camps, they didn't really vibe with bands like the Lords. Likewise, even going over to Britain, the Rolling Stones, arguably the tougher of the big two British invasion bands,

Their songs weren't speaking to the kids in the commune either. This was despite the fact that Mick Jagger was trying to write more revolutionary material, specifically with songs like Street Fightin' Man. Yeah, that's a great song. It is. ♪

Now, Street Fight Man was actually about how England was sleeping on revolution, while so many other Western countries like France, Italy, Germany and the United States were taking it to the streets on a regular and bloody basis. I think the UK had like one protest. It was a pretty big one, to be fair. We're not going to say it was a big one. I think thousands of people, lots of people heard, you know, yes, some people got beaten by police on horseback. I mean, come on. One.

Yeah. I mean, it was bad enough. I'm just going to stay home. Yeah. Really, what it came down to was that the beat groups that had formerly represented a counterculture in Germany had become too mainstream and didn't speak to the Prinz Regis and Strasse kids at all, whether those groups be British or German. Therefore, the Amundel Commune did what all innovators do when the music they want to hear isn't being made.

They made it themselves. That's right. So like I said earlier, during my really cool Oppenheimer run, the emergency laws were approved by the government in May of 1968. And thousands of people stormed the streets to protest the emergency laws that had ironically been put in place to prevent future protests. That's fun, right? And in one of those demonstrations, Amundul had their first

public performance in the University of Munich. You mentioned this earlier in the episode. Well, their first gig was relatively peaceful and serene, but

Powerful. It was different from what the students would normally listen to. It's not a song you'd normally hear from America or Berlin. It's not even really a song. It's completely different. And it's something the students relate to. It's Amandoul. Yeah. So after this gig, they started booking real shows in clubs and underground venues like the Blow Up Club in Munich. There they put together a music and light show called... It's...

Okay. It's called the transparent magic show, which I think is an obvious man. I'm not sure, but it's kind of, I think they're trying to going with like, uh, exploding plastic, inevitable light and music show that Andy Warhol and the velvet underground did, uh, the velvet underground. We're doing that stuff in 1966, 1967. And this is Munich, 1968. And almond dual is already on top of that. And I,

I'm sure it sounds much better in German. Yeah, probably. Let's say yes. Transparent magic show. That sounds like something for children. Yes. That's a good point. Okay. Yes. Almond Gold, they had like colors swirling around everywhere, kind of like the Velvet Underground. Same idea. Lava lamps, projectors screening porn films while another projector was showing Donald Duck cartoons on top of each other at the same time. It's an artistic choice. It's very clever. Yes. Yes.

And they even had a bubble machine to add more ambiance. Although one time at their show, their bubble machine malfunctioned and it went into overdrive and engulfed each Amandou band member into one giant bubble because it's Spinal Tap. This is always, always leads to Spinal Tap. Always. And they also have their Nico, kind of. Yeah. A German model named Uschi Uwe Mayer. She didn't sing, but she played the hell out of those maracas. Everyone was staring at her maracas. I

to be that literal and not literal. So the band. You'll be here all week. Yeah, seriously. So the band, they did their multimedia shows because presentation is very important. Of course. And it was a hit with the crowd. People would show up every week to watch Amandul because it was different every time. Lots of jamming, lots of improvisation. See where this takes us. Because remember, we're communicating with the cosmic universe. That's right.

Now, out of the 10 to 14 people at the Amundul commune at this time, out of all those people at those shows, only about five or six knew how to actually play music. Yeah, because it's a lot like just like mess with it. You know, they hand you something and you just kind of hit it and see what goes on. Yeah, you're not really going to be handing out like guitars to the toddler. You know, it's a lot of people with drums and six dudes who know what they're doing. It's a lot of percussion. Percussion heavy. It's a drum circle gone too far. Yes. Yes.

And most of those five or six musicians who actually knew what they were doing, they had backgrounds in jazz. They'd cut their teeth on everything from the more experimental work of Miles Davis and John Coltrane to highly structured band leaders. This is actually one, I think, one of Amandul 2's big influences that don't really get enough credit. One of my personal favorites, a guy named Don Ellis, specifically this song from his album Live at Monterey, 3-3-2-2-2-1-2-2-2. That's the fucking time signature. ♪

Thank you.

You know, I've never heard Don Ellis before this or this song, and now it makes sense. Right? Yeah. All right. Totally makes sense. Well, we got about five or six Don Ellis records at the house that we're going to need to listen to tonight. Okay. Well, that's good. I'm glad it's only three in the afternoon. We have time. Jazz, however, would not be the basis for Amandul's early work. See, one of the main guys in Amandul was this

singer-songwriter named Rainer Bauer. He was from Vienna. They always say that. He's Austrian. Yeah, always. They always make sure to say he's Austrian. Rainer from Vienna. And he came into the group, he came into the commune, really, with a fair amount of rock songs or like, you know, singer-songwriter tunes, tracks like that.

They took those originals, Amandul took those originals, and they expanded them into 30-minute improvisational explorations that were inspired mostly by the Sid Barrett era of Pink Floyd. ♪♪♪

And see, that's going to be part of the problem with this experimental rock stuff is that, you know, like, yeah, you might think like, oh, wow, that about halfway through that, you might be thinking like, oh, wow, this song's going on for a little bit too long. And then that fucking part comes in. That absolutely wonderful part comes in that doesn't make sense unless you hear the 30 seconds that came before it. And that's why choosing the music for these episodes is really fucking hard. Yes, you have to clear your afternoon. Yes. But even though

Amandol had rock roots. They did not consider themselves to be a rock band at all. For them, the band was more abstract, something closer to an auditory representation of a desire to live life in a different way.

man. Okay, we got it. The problem, though, is that when it came to commune living, abstract ideas can very easily evolve into rigid rules. And like so many other communes, Amundul became something that bordered Amundal.

on Sinister. This is a problem with a lot of times the counterculture, the hippie-ism, like the whole like live their life the way you want to, be free of things, and then you're eating a ham sandwich and they're like, are you going to eat that? Yeah. And then you're like, oh, but you're ruining the whole rules thing that we're not supposed to have them.

Yeah, I mean, do what thou wilt is the whole of the law eventually goes bad. Okay, it happens. Eventually, the Amundul commune predictably began to place an oversized emphasis on sex. Free sex for all soon became mandatory sex for men.

and not every man was into it. Chris Carr, for example, remembered an incident in which he admitted that he hadn't had sex in a month. This was apparently a grave offense because some of the other men in the commune began accusing him of being either gay or impotent.

So Chris quote unquote proved that he was up to the commune sexual standards by reluctantly taking a willing woman and having sex with her right there on the floor as 20 other commune members either watched or milled around in the background just going about their day. This is Maggie's farm by way of Ari Aster. Like this is fucking unsettling. It's weird. As far as singer Renata Knopp went, she...

She bristled against the strict rules the commune had placed on spending. Anytime anyone wanted to buy anything, they had to go beg the commune's cashier for money. And if any rules of any kind were broken, the offender had to go in front of a tribunal to explain their actions.

The final straw for Renata came when she and a fellow commune member took a trip to the south of France for two weeks. And when they returned, they discovered that they were scheduled to defend themselves in front of the commune tribunal because they hadn't asked permission to leave the house. That's bullshit. Freedom my ass. Yes. It always ends up like this. You always end up trying to be the opposite of and then you're back at the anus of fascism. It happens. It happens.

It's just the horrible cycle of extremism. Yep. And all this bullshit, of course, strayed far away from what sort of commune Amundul was supposed to be. This was supposed to be a music commune for the purpose of making actual music. And by making every commune member a mandatory member of the band, music became just another dictate. That also meant the music sounded fucking terrible. Yeah. OK. It's.

A matter of debate. OK, let's keep going. There are some good parts, but we really don't have to defend it or ostracize it. Yeah. So because the commune had become more about politics than music and because there was no way the serious musicians in Amundur could be in a band with dozens of people who couldn't play, the group split.

Ulrich Leopold and Rainer Bauer became the leaders of the original Amundul group, while guitarist and violinist Chris Carr, singer Renata Knopp, organist Falk Yu Ragnar, and bongo player Shrat Thila left the commune to start their own group. The problem was what to do with the name. See, the group that split off, they really liked the name Amundul.

but the commune wouldn't give it up. So to avoid a legal fight that none of them could afford anyway, and to still retain the vision that they'd spent so much time developing, the split-off group, the group made of actual musicians, they called themselves...

Amundul 2. And that's why it's called Amundul 2. The members who left said they named the band Amundul 2 to avoid confusion. But that, as you can imagine, backfired because that little 2 at the end caused nothing but confusion for the rest of their fucking career. It took me so long to figure out the difference between Amundul 1 and Amundul 2 back in the days when I was just downloading shit off of the fucking internet off of SoulSeek and just getting whatever. Why is there 1 and why is there 2? I didn't understand it.

It's weird because I also sometimes have to type Amundul uppercase I uppercase I. None of it makes sense. OK, so that yes, that made the communal Amundul Amundul one. But remember, they don't call themselves that. It's just us, the fans that call Amundul Amundul one. So, you know, it's not like Amundul two said, OK, now you have to call yourselves Amundul one. And they said Amundul.

OK, it didn't happen. No, it was Amandul and Amandul 2. OK, so they were done with each other. Right. Except for two weeks later when they ran into each other at the 1968 Essen Song Festival, which, by the way, Amandul booked before the split. But Amandul 1 said, that's our gig. You guys are the ones who left. So Amandul 1 played and Amandul 2 watched.

That's what just had to happen. And I mean, well, because they did not want to miss this festival. By the way, the Essen Song Festival is actually quite historical. It's the first music festival in Germany, and it's the first time a large audience was exposed to what would later be called

It was a music festival, but it was also very political. It was tied to the local SPD, Germany's Socialist Party. They had speakers, underground film screenings and stuff like that. It just meant to bring awareness and, of course, to rock out to the music. I mean, most of the kids were just there for the music anyways.

It was put together by music journalist Rolf Ulrich Kaiser, who set it up with funding from the city of Essen, who regretted it almost immediately. They always do. It was a financial failure, but a big win for us long hairs. I'm going to include myself.

in that for some weird reason. But it was cool. I mean, there were dozens of bands and artists on the American side. There was Foggs, Tim Buckley, and Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa's band, who made a lasting impression in Germany from what I heard. Yeah. And the krautrock bands like Guru Guru, Soul Caravan, Amandool One, and this band, which I...

I find them quite fun. Tangerine Dream. Yeah, they're pretty good. No, no, they're fun. I like them. Oh, yeah, it's Tangerine Dream. This is what they sounded like at the Song Festival, by the way. ♪♪♪

incredible i mean yeah tangerine dream their fucking their entire catalog is vast it's fantastic uh and what's it called ultimate fool part one okay so we're gonna definitely have a video playlist a youtube video playlist and also a spotify playlist yes we will as we do for every single show just search my name marcus parks for spotify and search no dogs in space on youtube uh for that playlist and after this episode if you really want to check out a

cool Tangerine Dream performance. Look up the one that they did in a cathedral. And I think like 1969, 1970. It's fucking incredible. Awesome. OK, back to the Essence Song Festival. Remember, this is huge. The Kratrock bands, they're playing in front of an audience of over 12,000 people. They're finally given for the first time a platform for just being original. Finally, the birth of German indie rock music. Yeah, it happened there in three days.

So Amandou played and I heard it was chaotic. Yeah. But fun, chaotic. Not everyone liked them, but the model, Ushi Ubemeyer, she got favorable reviews. Remember, she's playing the maracas. Yeah. And killing it. Killing it, I hear. I want to be really, what? I want to be really supportive. I used to be a percussion player in a band. Like, there's not a lot of ways to kill it at the maracas. She managed to, okay? Tick, tick, tick.

I mean, that's what more can you do? So it was a big event. Imagine two hands. So it was a big event that people still talk about decades later. This is the first time that thousands of like minded creative individuals from Germany are all gathered together in one place, including the famous and infamous Commune One, Kainz.

One of the guys from Ka Einz, Rainer Langhans, he loved Amundul 1's performance so much. He said in his blog slash memoir that you can look up online that it was something akin to punk. It was very punk where you don't have to know how to play an instrument to play music. Well, OK. Yes. Or sound. They're making sounds. And Amundul 1 would play themselves into a trance that was mesmerizing. And remember, everyone's on acid.

So Commune One or K1, they were a political commune from Berlin who, like the Amundel Commune, believed in sharing everything and living in close quarters together and taking away any ounce of privacy one might have. They even removed, K1 even removed the doors from their bathrooms because they thought it was like a barrier to their beliefs or some shit like that. It was very bourgeois to have privacy.

Oh, yeah. It's bougie to shit in peace. It's also bougie to have money. So give it to me. You don't need it because you're enlightened. It's really what some people would say in communes. So according to an Amundul One member, K1 were inspired by Mao Zedong, who forced Chinese students to live in a farm community for two years. So agrarian.

very very and somehow these german socialists thought great idea i i don't know i don't i don't know why they i mean one where they're in to each their own to each their own i'm trying to be as open-minded as humanly possible but the lack of privacy is really what gets to me not the mao zedong uh approach to uh commune living that's not what gets to you it's the bathroom door

It is my safe space. It is my sanctuary. I understand. Okay. So also K-1, they were actually also at the Shaw protest, you know, the one where 26-year-old Benno was shot. And they were also close with Rudy Duchke, you know, the guy who was also shot. So many people were shot. Rudy thought, actually, he considered joining K-1 but ultimately decided against it because he didn't want to share his wife. I understand. We all understand that. So I'm

Amundul 1, since they were a commune 2, they were friends with K1, with commune 1. And they would go visit them in Berlin sometimes. And Amundul 2, they were not the biggest fans of K1. I mean, I think it was Chris Cowher who said like, yeah, we hung out with them and they're cool, I guess. But these people aren't interested in art or music or anything. They're really only into their dogmatic ideas, which is boring after a while. Have you ever hung out with a libertarian? It's kind of like that. Yeah.

Or a communist. Yes. I mean, just anyone who's really big into their principles. And, you know, because we're all full of contradictions, people. Of course. That's what we all are. Yeah. And to be holding on to things really hard and preaching, it can be really exhausting. No, well, it's like I said in the Manhattan Project series, the last podcast on the left. Communists are really fun hangs until they get too drunk and they only talk about communism and then they get reelected.

really insulting. That's by hour two. It can be. It can be. Not all. Not all communists. Now, Amandou One's performance at the Essence Songtog was impressive enough to catch the attention of a producer named Peter Mizell, who ended up signing Amandou One, which

With Rolf Ulrich Kaiser, Mizell co-owned the now legendary Hansa Studios. Yes, we've talked about this. We have. Hansa, of course, would be where Iggy Pop recorded parts of The Idiot and Lust for Life less than 10 years later. This would also be where Bowie would record both Low and one of his greatest singles, a song about two young lovers separated by the Berlin Wall. I am real, stay with me

Shadow of a rise, a wicked storm, and the same design for all of us.

We're not going to do the German version. Well, I don't know if, okay, I don't know if the German version, I don't know if he sung it at Hansa Studios in the big hall by the wall, which gives it its sound because that's the reason why it's so echoey is he sang Heroes in this gigantic, beautiful room. And I don't know if Helden was sung in the big hall by the wall. You want to hear a little bit of it? I do. Yeah, just a little bit. Regardless if he did this in Hansa or not. I'm going to be slow.

Cool. I feel like I understand German now. Sounds good. He sounds good. Yeah, he sounds amazing. No, I took two years of German, like I said, and I fucking understand very little. But still, you're very good at correcting me. You're very, very good at that. You asked me to. I know.

I did one seven years ago. So I took it to heart. So back to Hansa Studio. So Amandul One, they go to Hansa Studio in Berlin to record their debut album. So Amandul One is, remember, Peter and Ulrich Leopold, Rainer Bauer from Vienna, Uschi Ubenmeyer, the supermodel, who's also dating Peter Leopold, by the way, and a bunch more. It's a large group of people and the rest. Right. And they're

Amandoul, they do what they always do, which is to jam and improvise and shake those maracas and bongos and a lot of percussion. Just have at it. It's all improvisation with a bit of music here and there. Can we get a snippet? Oh, we absolutely can. I love it. I actually really love this song. It sounds like a spider owl. Cool. On the prowl.

Okay, now everyone knows what we're talking about. See? A spider owl. But it could be. It's interesting. That's from Amandul One's debut album, Psychedelic Underground, which is really actually perfect description of what's going on here. So remember, Peter and Ulrich Leopold, at least they know how to play their instruments. They come from a jazz background.

But soon there's going to be problems between the brothers, Peter and Ulrich, and also between Peter and the rest of the band, really, and also problems between Peter and Commune One. You see, the band Amandul One, they were staying with their buddies at Commune One's house while they were in Berlin, and it was all fine and dandy until Amandul One said, OK, we got to head over to Hansa Studio to record this album. And K-1 said, oh, we're coming with you.

And they're like, what? Yeah, we're coming with you into the studio, into the recording booth with you. And I'm going to sit on this drum kit and fuck with it because it's now being occupied by K-1. We share everything. Therefore, nobody has anything. Dickheads. And Peter Leobold, the drummer and owner of said drum kit said, no, that's mine. Get off my stool. And the K-1 guys refused, but.

which made Peter so pissed off, he walked out in the middle of the recording. He was done with those guys, and he was done with Amandul 1-2, and unfortunately, he was also done with supermodel Ushi Ubemeyer because she decided to stay with Commune 1 when she fell for Rainer Langhans, one of the more charismatic members of K-1. So,

Peter, and we'll talk about them next episode. Yeah, I think Peter leaving it probably has more to do with the commune one guy stealing his hot girlfriend than it did with the drum set incident. Yeah, well, Rainer Langens, if you look at a picture of him, he's like very 70s hot. He's a dreamboat. He looks like Sideshow Bob, but like better and rounder. They all kind of look like Sideshow Bob, honestly. With the John Lennon round glasses, and they're super cool. They're super hip.

So Peter Leopold, he went home to Munich and to Amundel too with his drumsticks in his hand saying, I lost my drums and I lost my girl. Can I join you guys instead? And by the way, you're right about political communes. Just focusing on the music is the way to go. I get it now. And they did let him in after much discussion.

Now, while it seems like the split between Amundul 1 and Amundul 2 would have been seen as a positive event for the more serious musicians, it had a terrible effect on guitarist Chris Carer. He felt that his original vision of a musical commune had been lost in pointless ideologies and internal politics, and this failure resulted in a small, nervous breakdown.

He retreated to his mother's house and stayed in bed for two weeks. But when he finally recovered, he returned to Amundul 2 triumphant and inspired. By his account, he'd spent his convalescence composing entirely in his own head about 80% of the first Amundul 2 album. Phallus Day. Yes! Yes! Yes! This is my second favorite album. ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

Now, do you hear the difference between musicians who know what they're doing in the spider owl song? I should have walked down the aisle to this. Although the Star Trek Deep Space Nine piano thing that instrumental. The piano version of 3AM at Quark's version. That was pretty good, too. But this.

This is something else. This is like, I see Chris Kerr. I see, well, we're going to talk about John Witzel. Like there are just so many ideas put into one place at one time and it is fantastic. It is. And that's where we'll pick back up next week for the continuation of our Crop Rock series with Amundul 2 Part 2 with the recording of Falisday and the album that made Amundul 2 Legends, Yeti. Oh, I'm so excited for you.

You, the audience. Sorry, the listener, the listener. And before I give the list of sources, I do want to plug a set that Marcus and I are doing in September, which is now ish is very, very soon. If you're listening to this episode, when it comes out, it's in like two days. So, yes, that we are doing. We're sharing the bill with Jane Spooner, who wrote The High Desert. Really fantastic. Like, I can't.

mention this enough, please pick up. That's a great graphic novel. You can call it comic book, graphic novel, whatever you want to call it. Fantastic. It's great. And we're doing this show on September 9th. And James Spooner is also the guy who directed Afropunk as well. Yeah, that's good too. Yeah, so we'll be together at, what's the name of the place? The place is called Footsie's

James and the two of us and one other DJ are going to be alternating sets from 5 to 10 p.m. on September 9th. That's Footsies in Los Angeles. The show is called Razor Cake Hearts Drinking Beer and Listening to Records. We've gone to one before. It's a fucking great bar. It's a great place to go and listen to music. It's a happy hour DJ set. And we hope to see all out there. It's going to be on September 9th, 5 to 10 p.m.

alternating sets, us and James Spooner. It's going to be fucking killer. Absolutely. It's going to be so great. And I do want to also promote the taco truck that is in front of that venue. It's the best fish tacos I've ever had. Those women know how to make some fucking fish tacos. All right. For sources, right? This is going to be a weird list. Okay. So Tanzerlemming book by Ingeborg Schober. It's actually a book in German, which I translated from Google Translate and then had...

wonderful, wonderful research assistant, also associate producer. Yeah. Patrick Fisher, help me out with the translation of that. Yeah. OK. And giving us context to everything. Absolutely. And Times and Sounds, a great book, Times and Sounds, Germany's Journey from Jazz and Pop to Krautrock and Beyond by Jan Rietz. A fantastic book. It was in German, translated into English. And I can't

Like I we talk about it on our stream. It's fantastic. This book, I really couldn't recommend enough. Like this is just one of those extensive yet still entertaining music books that you dream of reading. It's like cannot recommend times and sounds enough.

And then there's Future Days, Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary New Music by David Stubbs. The Cambridge Companion Book to Krautrock, edited by Uwe Schutte. And then there is Euro Rock, European Rock and the Second Culture by Archie Patterson. And then for the history buffs, I read Aftermath, Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945 to 1955 by Harold Johnner.

What a book. I think everyone should read this book. It's fantastic. And then there is The Miracle Years, A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949 to 1968, edited by Hannah Schisler. And then Widerstrecken, Music and Political Activism in Cold War Germany by John Tyler Paddy at the University of Tennessee. This is a master's thesis that I found online. Very like it was so helpful. So thank you for reading.

getting your degree and then putting it online for me to read. And of course I use tons of stuff online, articles, interviews, uh, interviews I found on the wire mojo and uncut magazine, uh, and kraut rock and prog rock message forums. It was a lot of combing through stuff, a lot of prog rockers. And I like kraut rocks, not prog rock. And other people's like, yes it is. And then I had to go through that shit. I had to go through that shit.

And a blog by Rainer Langens, you know, the guy, one of the principal members of Commune One. He posted a memoir online. Google his name with blog and you'll find it. But it's also in German, by the way. And a big thank you to Emily Votov for outlining the Cambridge Companion chapters and the Future Days chapter on Amund Dool. Very, very helpful. Thank you. Thank you very much for setting up the timeline. And a huge thank you to Patrick Fisher, who is now...

Well, now we promoted him to associate producer of this Krautrock series that we are doing now because he has been like without him, we wouldn't be able to do this. Yeah. Now, Patrick, Patrick has really been invaluable to giving us context to these German translations to tell us like, oh, they're actually joking here. What's the analogy with this? What does it mean? The oven stove is not working. What the hell does that mean? The days of sniffing the dirt are over. Exactly. Exactly.

He has been very helpful. Thank you to him and his father for helping and translating a lot of the stuff that we've been asking for. And also promotion stuff. We're on Instagram. NoDogsPod. I'm on there as Carolina Deidre Hidalgo. We got T-shirts with men's and women's sizes on LastPodMerch.com. LastPodcastMerch.com. LastPodcastMerch.com. I wrote that.

wrong. Check out the playlist of our songs for every episode on YouTube. Just Google no dogs in space and YouTube and you'll find us and Spotify. You can search that as well. And we've started doing a live stream on Twitch on the last podcast network, Twitch channel, go to twitch.tv slash last podcast network to find us there every other Monday, uh,

At 7 p.m. Pacific Time. Pacific Time. 7 p.m. Pacific Time. Every other Monday. So check out twitch.tv slash Last Podcast Network to find out which Monday we're going to be coming up next. We've already done a few. So go check it out. And you can see some of our past episodes already. And you can also find those on YouTube as well if you're not a Twitch person. Yeah, absolutely. And this is going on forever. So we should just finish. We should finish. We're done. But we also have a Band of the Week because...

As I remember now, now I remember it's been a while since we recorded. If you make noise and you're a person or maybe a social experiment collective, whatever you want to be, a group of people, one person, and you make noise and you have it on an MP3 or Spotify or whatever, Bandcamp, you want to send it to us. We would be honored to...

to play it at the end of an, of our episodes. Yep. No dogs in space at gmail.com is where you need to send it to. We get so many, so many fucking submissions, but it's so great. So many of you guys have great stuff that send to us, but sometimes really all it takes is meeting me outside of Gelson's supermarket. Yes.

This really happened like what, last month? This happened last month. I met this woman outside of the supermarket where we shop and she's a big No Dogs fan and she sent me her girlfriend's band and it's fucking amazing. We're just encouraging people.

to bump it to us at Gelson's because we do go to Gelson's what every other Monday yeah that's really all it takes and I had to play it because it's fucking great it's so good it's so so good it's a band called Rocket uh their new EP is called Normal to Me uh you can find them at Rocket the band uh

They're about to go out on a nationwide tour. So check them out. If you want to see some cool live music at a venue near you, you can also, of course, go to their band camp and they're also available on Spotify. So here is Normal to Me by Reckless.

Rocket. Thank you all so much for listening. We'll be back next week with Amundul 2 Part 2, which is Part 2 and probably a nine-part Kratrog series. Yes, and then the beginning of Cannes. So we're going to go into Cannes and Faust. So we'll let you know as we go along. Und Kraftwerk. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Goodbye. Bye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye

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