OFF: More on Amon Duul II

[K Henderson]

If anybody makes it through this ridiculous pile of verbosity, you win a prize!

First, Doug lets me know his feelings in no uncertain terms... :)

>First of all, is anyone interested in trading their CD of 'Dance of the
>Lemmings' or 'Yeti' or the Utopia (ADII spin-off) album for my copy of the
>20-track 'Made In Germany'?  Or anything else good, before I exercise
>Amoeba's "return-anything-you-didn't-like-within-a-week-for-85%-of-the-
>original-price" policy on it?

Hey...that's a pretty good deal.  Though every time I've shopped there, I've
left the city within a day or two.

>>Might some of this material be the source of certain snippets of music
>>that I heard (but didn't recognize) on those Japanese retro-pastische
>>things that I have (Kobe and Eternal Flashback)???
>>Or is this all-different stuff from anything I've heard elsewhere?
>
>I haven't heard those, so I couldn't say.  The "Freak Out Requiem"s sound
>like 'Phallus Dei'/'Yeti'-era outtakes to me ...

Well, I've just gone back over my Kobe and E.F. discs, and I wouldn't be
surprised if some of this stuff does appear somewhere in here.  Kobe is
pretty lame if you ask me...most of the stuff is sampled bits and pieces
from Yeti and DotL I believe, mixed and remixed and spliced together with
other noises (extracted bits of percussion from the background brought way
up front or so it seems).  And particularly annoying is the frequent use of
a 'faux vinyl' click noise that's obviously added intentionally 'cause the
click always sounds the same, and it repeats obviously slower than 33 1/3
rpm speed.  I can't stand listening to these parts.  There are supposedly
six tracks but it's all indexed as a single 66 minute piece.  Makes it even
harder to jump ahead to something not so grating.  The weirdest thing is
that the thing ends up with (about 90 seconds of) Master of the Universe
straight off of ISoS.  I guess the Cap'n Trip boys are suggesting that this
was the end of the Dave Anderson era of AD2, but then this is where he
reappeared or something.

E.F. is way better.  And in fact, this seems very much like a 'Dawn of
Hawkwind' analog for AD2.  Again, we've got 67 minutes of stuff all indexed
as one track (no separate titles this time), and it again has a few moments
taken directly from the albums (Cerberus is in there for sure, and maybe
something from DotL Side 4?).  But then there are some obvious pre-Phallus
Dei demo recordings in here also.  Including most obviously a slowed-down
earlier version of Kanaan, which then leads right into the P.D. version of
the same tune.  There's also a couple different folk/skiffle type pieces,
with violin and soprano? sax, suggesting indeed Chris Karrer is heard here,
and I think I hear his voice mumbling stuff in the background.  I don't hear
Renate sing, but I think I hear her space whisper voice two or three times.

There's another half-structured jam tune with one small bit that sounds very
familiar, something from Yeti Disc One I'm pretty sure....I'm not good with
song titles these days.  Late in the piece there's another longer and more
'rockish' jam with occasional respites of just 'ooh' and 'aah' vocals.  Very
ethnic sounding with Shrat obviously banging on bongoes.

Well, anyway, this isn't so bad, and in fact Doug you really need to hear
this one, but again it isn't as interesting as the stuff on the 2nd LPs of
Yeti and DotL IMHO, and that's the stuff that doesn't interest me as much as
their crazy multipart lyrical songs.

>>And I played my Made in Germany copy again last night...why is this album
>>so disrespected?!
>
>Because it's mostly awful?  I bought a copy yesterday, and that was my
>impression after the first listen.  There were some good bits, but they
>were few and far between, and many of them were buried (i.e. cool phase-
>shifted guitar solos that you can't hear 'cause of the DAMN ORCHESTRA!).
>The negative ones go on for too long (like the orchestral overture)

Less annoying than some of the vocal histrionics in Phallus Dei.  :)

Anyway, the orchestra is off-and-on for me.  Like Moorcock's
readings/singings on WotEoT and the 80s albums.  You know, some days it
doesn't seem right not to hear them in succession with the regular tracks,
some days I just can't stand hearing them and skip over them.  That Overture
is the same way for me.  Pretentious rubbish for sure...but some times I
have to listen to the whole thing anyway...it wouldn't be a 'rock opera'
without it.  :)  In the rest of the album, there is a time or two when the
brassy horns piss me off, but for some reason I'm not completely thrown off
by them...and it's not really *that* prevalent I don't believe.

>It IS a weird album (and I usually like weird albums), mostly because all
>the extremely varied elements that are thrown into it just don't work with
>each other.

Well, I think your criticisms are valid, and it's just one of those things
that for some reason works wonders for me.  The weird album I picked up
recently and feel sort of 'burned' by is White Noise - An Electric Storm.
Have you heard this thing?  Well, Side Two is acceptable, but man, Side One
is total bollocks.  Hoo boy!

>>I suppose part of my love for this work is that this was the first ADII
>>album that really got me going on them (even though it was the second one
>>I got, following Phallus Dei oddly enough - it being the first of the
>>classic period and MiG being the last)...and that was the crappy version!
>
>Hmm ... it was the EXACT opposite for me ... I first bought the US MiG, and
>thought it truly sucked.

There's a temporal perspective here that's sort of important, given that I
was hearing them at a fairly young age (18 or 19), just a couple years after
being introduced to Hawkwind, at that point the only even remotely unusual
thing I had begun listening to.  So Phallus Dei came into my possession
around the same time as Gong - You (which I didn't get at all at first) and
a Hillage album perhaps, and the first Egg album, and maybe Nektar - Down to
Earth.  You see, all Hawkwind-connected albums.  I didn't know *anyone* who
listened to what I was discovering, so I was completely on my own.  I didn't
even know what it was called.  Had never heard early Pink Floyd then.

So Phallus Dei was just totally off the wall to me.  I kinda liked some
things there, but was a little surprised it sounded so different than what
Hawkwind seemed to me.  Made in Germany I guess made more sense to me 'cause
it sounded a little more like normal rock music, but yet the songs were
hardly conventional.  I suppose this explains a lot.  But then I have the
same reaction as everyone else to HiJack (which I heard quickly thereafter)
so that doesn't exactly jibe.  That album is *truly* bereft of musical
ideas, the usual take on MiG which I don't think is accurate.  I mean, the
'instrumental hero' on HiJack is not even in the band (per se)!  I'd say
that Olaf Kubler's flute and sax playing outshine *all* of the other
instruments on that album.  It's mostly Lothar and Renate vocalizing to
half-hearted strumming.

But the thing I guess I was ranting about with MiG is all the times that I
see writers talking about how they were pressured by the record company
(probably true) to do some mainstream singles, and so MiG is the result of
that.  Or that the album was 'ordinary' or lacking musical ideas.  And I
think that's crap.  You can say it turned out poorly (as you did, Doug)
which is fine, but don't ignore the fact that this was wildly ambitious and
hardly full of anything that would make a good single (well, maybe that
awful Wide Angle...but then they left that off the US version, so...).

With some people (and I'm thinking of the Freemans and Asbjornson I guess
who wrote the twin Krautrock bibles, but I don't mean to single them out
even though I just did), I get the impression that there's a stock way of
thinking about old, "classic" music in a kind of snobbish way I suppose.
And that there are certain things that it's ok to like and other things that
are just not ok to like.  And that different bands with different talents
and/or 'voices' aren't really allowed to be accepted for what they were, but
rather judged by some perspective of the entire 'movement' surrounding them.

Maybe I'm not being clear here, it's hard to express in words.  Like take
the Scorpions for instance.  This was the first band from Germany I ever
heard, c. 1981 with Animal Magnetism probably.  (I was a metalhead long
before I heard HW, obviously.)  The 'ok' thing is to say that "Hey, they
were a krautrock band once, when Conny Plank was their producer and they
made Lonesome Crow in 1972."  So whenever you read about the Scorpions from
a krautrock perspective, obviously this album is 'great' (or at least very
acceptable) and everything after that is horrible trash.  Personally, I
think that Lonesome Crow isn't a particularly good example of a krautrock
album, and they in fact went the direction that they *should* have gone in,
and made metal albums cause that's what they were good at (at least when
Roth was on guitar).  And so I prefer 'In Trance' and 'Taken By Force' more
than Lonesome Crow, even though the latter is by far more similar to what I
have now in my collection overall.

I think maybe a similar thing has happened historically to albums like ASAM
and Levitation which I believe are both underrated.  They just didn't meet
expectations (well, when ASAM came out, HW was still only one 'thing' up to
that point) and so it's hard to accept them at face value.

OK, now back to where we were....

>>   BBC Live would go about here
>>7. Vive la Trance
>>8. Pyragony X
>>9. Vortex
>>9. HiJack (tie)
>>   Nada Moonshine # belongs here to, but won't officially include it
>>11. Only Human
>>12. Almost Alive

Well, I think I'd now revise this a little bit.  Pulled out Pyragony today,
and forgot how bad this one is too!  I usually think of the fact that at
least it has "Flower of the Orient", but the rest of it is pretty dire.  And
I think I sold Vortex a bit short on the other hand...it's got three or four
decent tunes (and then a couple really awful things too).

So, let's say...
(I didn't count numbers correctly above, so add one more)

8. Vortex
9. Vive la Trance
10. Only Human (70% disco-jazz rubbish)
11. HiJack
    Nada Moonshine # belongs here to, but won't officially include it
12. Pyragony X (90% disco-jazz rubbish)
13. Almost Alive (100% disco-jazz rubbish)

>... and I'd avoid all of these (and MiG).

Well, it's true that there are no 'must haves' here, but I have them all on
CD (mainly to be komplete) and think all but the last two (and also Meetings
with Menmachines...actually I don't have that CD!) are worth keeping.

But what someone might do who doesn't have any of this later material and
has some interest...there's a compilation (The Greatest Hits, oddly enough)
of Hijack-through-Vortex tunes that's actually not so bad a selection. It's
got Traveller and De Guadeloop (a rare Faustian sort of thing for AD2 though
too long) from HiJack, Metropolois and La Krautoma (edit) from MiG, Flower
of the Orient, and Don't Turn Too Stone and Kismet (the best tracks from
Only Human).  Unfortunately it only has the awful Mona from Vortex instead
of Holy West or something decent.  It's on the Vinyl Records label
distributed by Hot Productions in Miami FL.  Cat No. HTCD 5501-2.

>>ObCD: Kraan - Andy Nogger (EMI reissue) Just in the mail today! Great!
>
>Oh man, on New Years Day, the guy we were staying with woke us up at 8AM
>(we passed out at around 3.30AM) blasting Kraan (no idea which album).
>That still stands as my most miserable experience of 2002 so far ...

Well, Kraan is probably a band you wouldn't much care for, though I'm sure
there are albums you'd be more receptive to, and others you couldn't stand
for a minute.  They have always been a proggy 'jazz-rock' band first and
foremost, though their first four albums have a distinct psychedelic flavor.
In 1975, like everybody else in Germany it seems, they became an antiseptic
fusiony band that still showed talent but their sound of course is really
dated.  So they're not all that different from Gong.  I think Wintrup is the
best album, and the ones before and after (Kraan and Andy Nogger) are both
fine works.  Wintrup does have an annoying final track 'Jack Steam' but you
can stop it early.

Whew!

Grakkl (FAA)

P.S.  What's going on with Hawkwind?  :)  I promise I'll stop now.