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The Ghost In The Can (Interview by Wolf Kampmann) Jaki Liebezeit Whenever I talk to other Can members about the construction of the songs, I'm told that everything depended on the groove - and therefore on you. The groove - or the rhythm - was always the basis of music. That's true today, and perhaps for the first time, really true. First the form gives the music a foundation, and then the color can be added. I think that's completely natural. The magic of the first Can album comes from the rhythmic unit that you build with Malcolm Mooney. Did you also personally feel a certain pressure from this unit? Pressure, no. But Malcolm had an unbelievably strong sense of rhythm which was expressed through his voice. I've rarely met someone whose voice was capable of creating such rhythms. The combination of voice and drums was unique. I've never experienced anything else like it. Your background was in free jazz. Can must have been a completely different experience for you. I purposely broke away from free jazz. First I'd played regular jazz, then free jazz, and then at some point this development came to an end. Where should it go. There's nothing freer than free. I didn't want to play this music anymore and wanted to play rhythm again. I broke away radically from jazz and have never played it since then. But could you use the experience that you'd gathered in free jazz in Can, or was it a completely new beginning? No, I was already interested in rhythm before I started playing free jazz. At the beginning of the 60s I listened to Indian and Arabian music. I was always open to music that was happening around the world. I lived for a couple of years in Spain. I learned a lot about rhythm from flamenco. But then I came to Germany and met my friends, who were all playing free jazz. They said you and your old-fashioned rhythm: it doesn't exist anymore, repetition and all that doesn't fly anymore today. I couldn't argue. Anybody who said anything against it could talk until he turned blue and never find a listener. I played free jazz for about two years, but then lost interest in it because I noticed that it wasn't at all free. There were simply too many limitations. Rhythmic repetition was forbidden. That was accompanied by some kind of Schönberg-Hindemith theory which stated that all notes were equal. That, of course, had a lot of consequences. No preeminence for octaves, no harmonic rules, and all notes are equal with regard to rhythm. There was no more repetition. Repetition is the foundation of every rhythm. If I were to continually change, I'd get noise instead of rhythm. When I started with Can, I thought now I can and must start very primitively from the beginning again. As simple as possible. I didn't actually succeed with that, but at least I slowly found a way back. How did the band actually work together in order to make music? That was played out on a rhythmic basis. We all had musical imaginations. I'd learned a great deal from free jazz about form and structure. There was no fast or slow, but thick and less thick. It's another way of thinking that was useful later for another kind of music. I didn't think anymore about fast or slow, just about thick and less thick. That's an interesting aspect, because Can's songs are differentiated by their density. For instance, “Saw Delight” was perhaps the thickest record; but the less dense records, the more reduced records, were the most interesting. That's probably true. I can only work with space when I let go of something. In contrast, if I play a lot of fills, there's no more room in the music. I've always aimed to play space. That means always leaving something out. Pause on purpose and play with not playing the notes. That's just as important as playing the notes. That creates a place for the imagination, which I've always strived to do.

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The difference between Can and other groups is that you dealt with rhythm as if it were melody. There's a wise old saying: rhythm and melody are always connected to each other. If you free a melody from rhythm you can't understand it anymore as a melody. On the other hand, a rhythm always suggests a melody. You hear a rhythm and then promptly imagine a melody. Every rhythm is a little melody model. In "Yoo Doo Right," there's a spot in which Holger plays the rhythm with the bass and you play a melody on the drums. The drums play the vocal melody the whole time. Rhythmically seen, the notes are the same. In my opinion, the drums are actually a melody instrument. I can't let a rhythm stand alone because you wouldn't perceive it as a rhythm. Despite your unbelievably rich rhythmic variations, you've never played a drum solo. I never wanted to. And never needed to. I mean, the whole time I'm playing solo. I've never thought of myself as accompaniment for a voice. Instead, I'm always an equal element among four other instruments. It was an important element, that carrying a lot of weight, that had a very particular responsibility to the music. If the others had suddenly stopped, I would've carried on playing. I've always played only particular rhythms, never a rock or jazz rhythm. I still don't know even today how they go. Instead, I've always played in cycles: a particular rhythm that I kept up to the end, using small variations and interruptions. I discovered a different rhythm for each Can song. But I stuck to it from beginning to end, just like the harmony parts. That's probably the biggest difference between me and the other drummers of that time. People think they have to constantly change their rhythm. I introduced a rhythm and then stuck to it. Does that work for improvisation? What does improvisation mean? Of course I conjure some kind of rhythm, but then I have to understand it so that I can repeat it - and eventually vary it, although within very narrow limits. That means that I stay within the structure of the rhythm, exactly as you would stay within a key. Wasn't it sometimes difficult to continue playing these cycles without getting distracted? I don't let myself get distracted. There would have to be a big disturbance. But normally I can ignore disturbances. As a drummer you have to keep things calm anyway and let the others play. The drummer keeps the beat. That's probably similar to what a conductor does. He never forces his way into the foreground, and he makes sure that the music is good. In the last hundred years the drums have been terribly underestimated. They're finally starting to be emancipated. Unfortunately, there are hardly any drummers anymore. Machines are used for everything. In techno, the beat is introduced by a rhythm machine and then it drives some other synthesizers. If you look at it that way, it's the dawn of the golden age of the drums. But that's exactly the principle by which Can worked. A rhythm is introduced and then everything is built on top of that. As I said, rhythm is melody. There's a basic melodic motif, upon which variations can be endlessly built. I've always had the feeling that you were Can's precision machine. While the others could buzz around experimenting in other areas, you brought an unbelievable precision to the group. At that time I wasn't so precise, I believe. Since then I've learned a little more about precision. When Can started I wasn't as precise, as compared to today. Our ways of hearing music have changed, too, due to the computer and rhythm machines, and we really notice it right away when something isn't right. Listen to the old Beatles records. Ringo Starr would have been fired in a minute from any contemporary amateur band, because he just battered the drums. But nobody noticed it at the time.

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What did Malcolm's departure mean for you? I was pretty sad. I thought it was a shame. But then Damo Suzuki came along and he brought other qualities into the band. Malcolm was very American. That's why the first album was still fairly American. Later that disappeared. “Tago Mago” is not at all American, I think. All of the American influences were blown away. You really hear the difference on “Soundtracks”. Malcolm's voice makes the songs sound much more raw. With Damo, the music became more refined. The difference between the two was overwhelming. Malcolm came out of a gospel tradition. He still sings today in a gospel choir. Every Sunday he goes to church and sings with his gospel group. In contrast, Damo was a street musician who just sang what he wanted to. He also didn't speak very good English. What he did with language and lyrics - well, it was pretty unusual. Did you have to work out a new rhythm concept with Damo? I carried on with the concept that I'd begun with. I'm still working with this concept. But at that time I was at the beginning, making a lot of discoveries. In those years, many things became clear to me. For instance, I learned a lot about the correct way to play rhythms. But wasn't there a great difference? First you'd built a unit with a singer and suddenly you were the single rhythmic impulse. The others were still there: Irmin on keyboards and Holger on bass. They both played a great deal of rhythm. And Damo simply had a different feel for rhythm. I won't say that it was worse, it was just different. I have the impression that there were also more influences on “Tago Mago” that today might be called world music. That was an important element from the beginning on. Everyone in the band had already heard ethnic music. Irmin was interested in everything Asian. We were constantly looking for things that were happening around the world, at a time when nobody else was interested. You only knew what was going on in England and America. The rest of the world was discovered in the eighties, and we'd discovered it twenty years before. On his first record Holger was using original Vietnamese singing. The difference between “Tago Mago's” two records is - from the perspective of the drummer - the openess of the second record and the closeness of the first. The worst is: I don't listen to this stuff anymore. I don't even own any records. I gave them all away at some point. Holger can give you very precise information. But somehow I'm not interested in the past anymore. There were steps in development, but everything moves on, and I'm still in development. It's all about discovering something new. Since then, I've built myself a new drumkit and I want to make other kinds of music. More with synthesizers and loops, so that I don't play the old drumkit anymore. My new kit contains only drums; it doesn't have any pedals. There's no hi-hat or any of those things. I think that's better. If drumkits are to continue to exist, they won't exist in the way that they were built for jazz and rock. Music is definitely going in another direction. Unfortunately, even rhythm machines are just imitating the usual drumkit sounds. But new ideas about drums will be developed. Apart from the instrumental responsibilities, how did the band function? First, there was complete equality among the musicians. Among the instruments, including the voice. There was no lead guitar or a single composer. Everything happened collectively. The keyboard was responsible for sounds and rhythms, the guitar played chords, the bass added a certain foundation. Actually, everybody was responsible for rhythm. It wasn't just that the drums played the rhythm and the others played music. The voice never played a special role. Especially Damo's voice, which

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functioned like an instrument. The lyrics were not written apart from the music. Instead, the singer had to figure out how he fit in, just like every other instrumentalist. I have the impression that Damo moved the music into a much lighter sphere. Malcolm Mooney was a black American who'd had a fairly difficult past. Damo was simply a much lighter person. He ran away from his home in Japan when he was 16. He made his way to Moscow and then went on from there. In hindsight, Mooney was a similar case. He showed up because he wanted to get out of the army in America. He was with a friend, on his way to India. He wanted to meet some guru there, who, however, was at the time in America. On his way back, he came here and stayed to hang around in some art scene. Holger and I discovered Damo in Munich, where he was sitting on the street making music. We didn't have a singer at the time and asked him if he wanted to play with us. He appeared with us almost immediately on stage and everything went great. In opposition to most bands who divide their works into concerts and recordings, the band also made soundtracks. Did that make a difference to you? It's basically the same thing, making a record or recording a soundtrack. Of course, we'd never seen the film before, but Irmin had. He told us what it was about, and things just went on from there. We could simply put ourselves in the right mood. The rest was completely normal studio work. But when you work on a film there are certain requirements, whereas you can get more abstract with a record. We didn't bother with what went on in the film. We simply made the music and it always fit. Irmin structured it so that the timing was right. Naturally, we knew something about the atmosphere of the film, and whether it was a lighter, or a more tension-filled story. A certain change occurred around the time of “Ege Bamyasi”. Suddenly you were stars. Was that a change for the band? Nothing that we didn't want. Of course, we didn't make music simply in order to become successful. We got a little attention with the Durbridge film. That meant that the concerts were a little more crowded. We never felt like stars. So you didn't really live the rock and roll life... We never felt like a rock band. Just the opposite, we tried to stay out of the rock business and find our own direction. Something that was not so strongly tied to English and American music. At that time, it was always called Can, the pop band. It was actually more pop than rock. The later records were much more pop-oriented: for instance, you brought disco elements into your music. Was that a conscious process? That was actually not a conscious process. I can remember a disco song with the title "I Want More." That was actually not a glorious chapter for us. Disco was really at a high point then and we couldn't free ourselves from its influences. We also had fun with it. But it was not our intention to jump on the disco train. On the other hand, a continual refinement of the instrumental handling is discernible. Did this help or hinder the band? Personal ambitions were always developing. But they were immediately discouraged by the others. We were always a collective, and made sure that nobody turned into the bandleader or the head of the group. The highest title we awarded was speaker of the group. That was usually Irmin, because at that time he was the best talker. I believe that Holger's overtaken him since then. But without a doubt, there were individuals who strived to take over the band.

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Holger had problems because on one hand, he played bass, and on the other hand, he worked on the production aspects. He said that at some point there was dissatisfaction in the band. How was that expressed? Somehow Holger's bass-playing developed strangely. At the beginning he played bass guitar. Actually he couldn't play bass at all and had no exact ideas. So he played bass as if it were a guitar, using an arpeggio style. At first that was very good. He developed his very own individual style. But then his bass was stolen. He had a Fender Mustang. Then he bought a Fender Jazz bass. From then on his bass-playing went downhill. He was too ambitious and wanted to play like the great bass heros. And that was really bad for Holger. According to my taste, he played bass well at the beginning, but then later became an average bass player. That lead to difficulties for the group. Perhaps he was a little overburdened. He concentrated too much on his production skills, which was - for him - much better. At the time of “Ege Bamyasi”, Irmin gave an interview to “Bravo”, in which there was talk about a second guitarist by the name of Henner Heuer. Do you know what that was all about? I don't remember that. Funny. Maybe it had something to do with the Heuer guitar. That's a guitar brand. I believe, though, that it was either a joke or a mistake. Nobody by the name of Henner Heuer ever played with us. I can only dimly recall hearing the name in connection with us. In comparison to your other albums, “Future Days” is almost an ambient record. We always had problems with singers. First Mooney left. Then Damo was only there for a short while: two, perhaps three years. Then he got married and wanted to become a respectable person, not such a hippie. Since then he's gotten over it. But we didn't have a singer. Karoli tried a couple of times but was never really satisfied. So we concentrated more on instrumentals. We did a couple of live shows without any vocals at all, as an instrumental group. Did that make a difference to you personally? Actually, no, because the vocals were never the most important part. The music as such didn't change. Holger says that the band worked with samples long before sampling technique existed. We worked as if we had a computer. Holger edited to death. He had an enormous amount of fun with that. Now that he has a computer, he doesn't do that any more. But in those days he cut tape like crazy. Rolls of tape lay in piles all over the place. Because at the beginning we didn't have any mixing board, he had to get the sounds by cutting. In the studio, the takes were often far too long. He had to cut out parts and exchange them. Even later, when we had a mixer, Holger would make various mixes and then edit the different mixes together to create something new. With a computer, that's no problem today. But at that time it was a different story. First he had to mix in different ways, using various filters; or he made completely weird mixes, so that he could reconstruct the song later with new sounds. Were you yourself interested in the mixing process? Playing is still what interests me the most. Mixing - fine - never really interested me. Usually the songs were recorded in the studio and then weeks later they were mixed, so that you actually lost the relationship to the recording. I occupied myself very little with mixing. Holger had a lot of fun with it. But Irmin and Michael were involved in the process. At the beginning, as I said before, we didn't really do any mixing. That started around the time of the fourth or fifth record. With “Landed”, I believe. That was the first time we really had multi-track equipment. Before, we used a two-track. There was no mixer. That's why Can's early stuff is the best. That definitely had something to do with the production. We played everything live, there were no overdubs, and few possibilities to do an overdub onto the master copy later. In the best case, we were able to work with a four-track. With a 16-track, everything is a little bit broken up, and each person

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works for himself. One would send the others home and say now I'm going to record my track. We didn't work as a team anymore, and with that, it was really all over. In my opinion, the first records are much better than the ones that came later. There isn't anybody who wouldn't agree with that. I believe that it had to do with the system. Our system of making music was destroyed by multi-tracking techniques. But why then did you stick with this technique instead of returning to the old way? Somehow it was too late for that. You can't go back. We didn't know that then. At that time we thought it was an improvement - and from a technical standpoint, it was. It just wasn't artistic, from a production point of view. The group's spontaneity suffered: it was replaced by individual work. There would only be one musician in the studio for days. Before, we were all together in the studio, we worked on the music together, developed ideas together. But on the records it still read, "produced and written by Can," just like before. The basic ideas were still group compositions. Basic band, we called it in those days. There was a little rhythm, bass, a couple of harmonic structures. But they would then be picked apart by an individual who took over control of the group, and then the songs usually became worse than they were at the beginning. Almost up until the end, the ideas were still coming from the band as a group. That was the basic principle of the band: that, from the beginning on, there was no band leader or vocal star heading the group. Everyone in the group had the same rights and his own special function. The harmony instruments were responsible for the harmony, the drums dealt with the rhythm, as did the bass. The functions were shared and grew. Later that got away from us, which lead to the end of the band. Due to the technical developments, there was suddenly no reason any more to continue as a group in the original sense. You still made a great many albums despite all of that. There were quite a few. But in my opinion they weren't necessary any more. The first five albums were enough. The band could've then broken up in peace. In rhythmical hindsight, I think that “Flow Motion” is different from the other records. You've got a reggae song, a waltz, a couple of tracks with a ritualistic feeling, and everything sounds very relaxed. Naturally, in the middle of the seventies we were open to a lot of influences. For example, the disco wave. But all that didn't help the group. I still think the first records are the best. Did the band know that these records weren't as good as the first? Actually, we found that out later. While making them...hard to say. You always need a little bit of distance in order to realize what was really going on. Today I can do that. Could it possibly have had anything to do with the fact that you no longer had a singer? I don't really think so. The singers were integrated as musicians. Apart from Malcolm Mooney at the beginning, the singer was never in the foreground. The singer had no solo function. But when Michael had to sing and play guitar...that was actually something different than if he'd only had to play guitar. He did that out of necessity, while we thought somebody has to sing, which of course was a mistake. Today we know better. You don't need vocals. For a short while we played without a singer, and that worked. Actually for a rather long time. I can remember a concert we played in Berlin in the former Sportpalast. We didn't have a singer and that was perfectly fine. That was an enormous concert, with

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The Free. Or were they already called Bad Company? And The Flock. A concert with unbelievable police furor. One group, I think it was The Flock, didn't want to play; the public went crazy and suddenly a dreadful panic broke out. Hundreds of armored policemen came and beat people with clubs. That was absolute horror. I ran off directly. That was the greatest horror show that I've ever experienced. Worst of all, they beat innocent people, who had nothing to do with the whole turmoil. There was only a small group of people who broke some rows of chairs, tore up the area in front of the stage, and destroyed the lighting. That had less to do with us than with the other bands. We managed to get out fairly undamaged. The sound system was provided by the concert organizer - that was not good. That was just before the end of the Sportpalast. A couple of years later it was torn down. A big break occurred when Reebop and Rosko Gee joined. The rhythmic concept changed colossally. Reebop was one of the world champions on conga. An absolute Superman. I had a lot of fun playing with him. Rosko, whom we'd met in London, actually brought him along. He was the bass man. He had a girlfriend in Bonn, simply came to visit us, and from then on played with us. Both of them had played with Traffic. As long as the band still existed, this cooperation worked very well. Holger was able to concentrate more on tapes, radio samples, and other strange stuff. But was that Can, or Can meets Traffic? No, that didn't have anything to do with Traffic. That was still Can. We didn't change. Instead, they became integrated into the Can system. But this system didn't really function any more. They wanted to bring in their own compositions, but they didn't understand. They simply didn't get it, the ideology in the group. That the old style of songwriting didn't function. We were never in our lives songwriters, the way it is in 99% of the bands. A completely different ideology is behind that. There were no composers who wrote the music, neither interpreters, nor hierarchies in which the drummer is on the lowest level. Up until that, I think it was a little disgusting, that a group always appeared as a group. Usually, one writes the lyrics and another, the music, like, with Lennon/McCartney or Jagger/Richards. And the rest of the band is actually interchangeable: musicians who were occasionally thrown out. Nobody was replaceable in our band. We always made sure that nobody became the boss or Number One. Were you able to manage that without difficulties? We managed that without difficulties because nobody wanted someone else to become the boss, so that a sort of employee mentality would develop. Everyone was responsible for the whole, and that was important. Each of us was the boss, and each of us was equal. Naturally that came from the political ideas of 1968, when communal thinking sprang up. We were never a commune, never lived together, but in the studio everyone had equal rights and was equally responsible for the group. For you, as a drummer, it must have been a radical change to suddenly find yourself playing with a percussionist. That was wonderful for me because he was simply a splendid percussionist. There is hardly anyone like Reebop. Unfortunately, he died at the beginning of the eighties. He was one of the greatest conga players who ever lived. You can hear him on the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." When Reebop joined, the rhythmic structure changed. “Saw Delight” flows more, it's more danceable. You don't have to listen so intently. But the album is one big catastrophe. None of us liked it. It was recorded on 24-track and mixed weeks later. The original idea had disappeared by the time it came to mixing. Five people just couldn't stand at the mixing board. Then only two were there, and the original ideas were lost. In my opinion, the record is not good at all. But that's normal. A group doesn't live that long. My theory is that a group

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lives about as long as a dog. After ten years at the most, it's over. Like in a marriage. At some time the excitement wanes. The members also developed in different directions. It was reasonable to break up the group instead of going on simply for the money. We said - radically - we're quitting now. We knew that the creative process didn't work as well as it had in the beginning. It's over; everyone can do what they want to do now. There must have been extreme tension between Holger and Reebop. It wasn't that bad. I believe that Holger was also a tough case. Today it's a little easier to get along with him. Before, he was a little stubborn. And Reebop didn't like that. Holger was a little authoritarian. He had occasionally tried to rule the whole roost. But the others successfully put a stop to that. I think the album “Can” is very beautiful. Do you mean “Can Delay”? No, the album “Can”, from 1978. Those must have been old recordings that they brought out somehow. No, that was the album with "Can Can" and "Aspectable." That was the absolute fall and decline of the group. I hardly know anything about that album. Whereas I think that some of the old reductionist virtues are reflected on this album. I'm not certain if this album doesn't consist of cut and pasted material. There are so many records with new versions of songs. I'm not sure if those recordings stem from the old days. Well, here, it clearly states: recorded 1978. I can hardly believe that; in 1978 the group was already at an end. There's a spanner on the cover. Ah, it's slowly starting to dawn on me. The record's been completely erased from my memory. I still have to ask about one song. How did Jacques Offenbach's "Can Can" come about? Oh, that was a compulsory exercise. First, because of the name of the track. And second, because Jacques Offenbach lived in Cologne. That was a compulsory exercise that wasn't really successful. At one time I read an interview, in which one of you said that Can was like a tree whose branches could simply no longer grow. How were you then able to make “Rite Time”? That was more of a vacation idea. Karoli had a house in the south of France, close to Nice, with a studio. We were all there, more or less on holiday, and started playing around in the studio. We didn't have the idea to reunite the group. That was really a spontaneous idea, to try something in the studio. Why did you use Malcolm Mooney on this record, instead of Damo? Damo didn't want to play anymore. He'd started a completely different life. He worked for a Japanese company, for which he still works; he was married and had two children. He just didn't want to play anymore. How was it then, working with Malcolm after so many years? We'd seen each other every now and then, and I'm still in contact with Malcolm. We simply had fun together. The record isn't really very good, I think. No wonder. The original geist, the spirit, had leaked

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out. The geist in the can was gone. The enthusiasm, the excitement, the optimal cooperation, had slipped away from us. How did “Rite Time” differ from the other records before it? We didn't see ourselves as a group anymore. Instead, it was more of a voluntary get-together, playing without obligations in the studio, without intentions or hopes. And what the press made out of it was just not true. In a certain sense we're still a group. We've just put aside this name. We still work together in the studio. I still work with Schmidt and Karoli, as well as Holger - although recently we haven't done much together. But I've played on a number of Czukay, Schmidt, and Karoli records. Our relations to each other are perhaps much better. There's simply no pressure. Why then was “Rite Time” not released until three years after it was recorded? Sometimes that's the way it is. It took a while until we found a record deal. Normally, a certain amount of time goes by between production and release. Or the record company has already requested a record. It's always taken rather a long time for a record to be released. It's always taken at least a year.