“When I saw a mushroom head, I was born and I was dead.”

I first discovered the music of Can via The Flaming Lips’ In a Priest Driven Ambulance, which features a song loosely based on ‘Mushroom’ from Tago Mago. As Wayne Coyne tells the story, they heard the song once and loved it so much that they were inspired to make a sloppy cover of it on the spot. The dull repetition of ‘Take Meta Mars’ doesn’t really do much for me, but I was intrigued enough by the Lips’ obvious enthusiasm for the song¹ that I had to check out the source material.

While many consider this album to be a holy grail, my view is that Can hadn’t quite reigned in their wilder sides enough to pull off something of this stature. There’s an argument to be made that chiseling off the sharp edges leaves you with something dull and uninspired, but I don’t think that applies here. I mean, I really like certain parts of it, it’s undeniably groundbreaking for its time, it predicted entire musical genres decades before their advent, etcetera, etcetera, but huge chunks of it are dominated by hardly accessible sound collages that aren’t integrated well into the rest of the album. And I just can’t sign off on that in good conscience. I’m all for albums that meander and take a while to come around to, and for gargantuan song lengths (‘Halleluhwah’ is my favorite song on the album), and for sound collage, but you can’t just explain away something as harsh as ‘Aumgn’ or ‘Peking O’ like it’s no big deal. If you want something like that to dominate your album—these two tracks take up nearly half an hour of the double album—you need the other songs to prop it up. Lead your listener into it and segue out of it smoothly. Better yet would be to realize that it is a stylistic misfit next to the other songs and avoid shooting yourself in the foot by cutting it from an otherwise delightful experimental rock record.

But as much as I find myself put off by the one-two punch of ‘Aumgn’ and ‘Peking O’, I’m equally intrigued and overwhelmed by the ingenuity and ecstatic creativity found on the other tracks. And it is upon those that the legend of Can is based. Things start off mildly with ‘Paperhouse’, a dreamy psychedelic number that gradually rises in tension until it turns into a paranoid groove before an abrupt ending and transition into the aforementioned ‘Mushroom’ which apparently serves as “the song” that is used to introduce new listeners to the band.

‘Oh Yeah’ is an easy seven minutes, per Can standards, notable for its reversed vocal line that always makes me think of The Man From Another Place from Twin Peaks. The dreamy synths and bursts of guitar from Karoli give the song a nice moody texture, but it’s predictably Jaki Liebezeit’s loosely robotic drumline that carries the whole thing. Likewise, ‘Halleluhwah’ is a Liebezeit showcase, similar to Bonham’s limelight moment in Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick’. The percussionist shines as he rolls out a beat that is methodical in its precision and yet transcendent in its execution. It doesn’t really change that much throughout the song’s whopping eighteen minutes, but the other musicians—notably Czukay on the bass—and Suzuki give the song a nice varying texture such that it never gets boring. But, to be honest, I could probably just listen to the drum and bass for a long time before I got tired of it.

After the extremely palatable first half, the album transitions into experimental soundscapes with the back-to-back behemoths of ‘Aumgn’ and ‘Peking O’. Under the right circumstances, ‘Aumgn’ could cause some serious distress for the listener. It has a very sinister vibe that is as likely to induce nightmares as a pleasant listening experience. The phrase ‘aumgn’ was created by occultist Aleister Crowley as an adaptation of ‘Om,’ and the song itself would probably have fit better in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than the latter portion of Tago Mago. The types of disturbed sounds explored here were eventually taken up by acts such as Throbbing Gristle and Current 93, but Can is, once again, years ahead of the game here, even if I don’t like the results, situated as they are on this album. ‘Peking O’ is less terrifying, but not as good as ‘Aumgn’. For some reason it features a goofy drum machine instead of their uber-talented percussionist.

It would be interesting to wind back the clock and see what the reputation of this album would be if, instead of the two clashing halves of a double album, it was released as two separate albums. From ‘Paperhouse’ through ‘Halleluhwah’ they had what probably amounts to a bona fide classic album, and the runtime was long enough to constitute one. The second half is fine, but it’s completely different from the first half, excepting the closer ‘Bring Me Coffee or Tea’, which ends the album like a breath of fresh air after surfacing from the extended experimental collages. Suzuki settles into chanting mantras and the musical backing is a slightly dark and disturbed pulsing of exotic instrumentation and experimental drumming that crescendos into subdued mayhem.

The musical talent is evident, but never shoved in your face like it is by many progressive rock acts. And these guys are not content just to experiment with arrangements but with instrument choice, the use of non-musical sounds (dog barks, tape hiss, etc.), and recording fidelity. It’s not prog, it’s not jazz-rock, it’s not psychedelic punk rock. It’s all of those things, but its own thing, as well, and it’s hard to believe it came out in 1971.

Favorite Tracks: Paperhouse; Oh Yeah; Halleluhwah.

1. This was also before I realized that Wayne Coyne gets excited about a lot of things, and that such an experiment was probably not unique—it only happened that the final product was recognizable as the song it was imitating.

Sources:
“Take Meta Mars”. Psychiatric Explorations of the Ever Enlarging Brain.