Note: For an index of all articles in all three Favorite Songs series, click here, then scroll down.

Who They Were: A hugely influential German band whose members, together and with others, pioneered the (questionably-named) “Krautrock” genre, that touched and shaped countless other musical movements of the past 50 years. The core members throughout the group’s history were Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Jaki Liebezeit (drums), Holger Czukay (bass/electronics), and Michael Karoli (guitar). In the group’s earliest incarnations following their 1968 formation, Americans David C. Johnson (reeds/electronics) and Malcolm Mooney (vocals) supplemented the quartet; Johnson was gone within a year, and Mooney followed him out in 1970. CAN then recruited Japanese busker Kenji “Damo” Suzuki to handle vocals; he fronted the group through what’s generally considered to be their era of greatest achievement. (Damo died a couple of weeks ago, and I offered a more detailed telling of his story via an obituary, here). Following the mercurial Suzuki’s departure in 1973, CAN recruited Traffic’s Rosko Gee (bass) and Rebop Kwaku Baah (percussion), with Czukay shifting into electronics and production roles before drifting away from the group. The remaining members went their separate ways in 1979, with one brief reunion and a new album in the late 1980s featuring the return of Malcolm Mooney on vocals. All of the members of CAN continued making influential music with a wide variety of collaborators (often including each other), mostly until their deaths; Schmidt, Gee, and Mooney are now the only members still living.

When I First Heard Them: Gosh, this one is hard for me to answer. I have been aware of CAN since the late ’70s, in large part because they were frequently name-dropped or referenced in interviews or reviews by artists I liked, or had “rock family tree” connections to same (e.g. Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Hawkwind, etc.). I know that the first song I heard by them was “Oh Yeah,” and I know that I heard it on a compilation album or a mix tape, because I remember how it jumped out from matrix of a bunch of other stuff that didn’t excite me, but I can’t find any compilation album or label sampler that seems to fit my memory, nor can I think of who would have given me a mix tape featuring that song. I know the first album I owned by them was the Cannibalism compilation, which came out in 1978. I will guess that I bought it in either 1981 or 1982 in Jacksonville, North Carolina, just before I headed off to the Naval Academy. I picked up a couple of the “wrong” CAN albums from cut-out bins while in Annapolis, featuring the latter-day, post-Damo line-ups. My interest in the group was bumped over the years by The Fall‘s tribute to CAN’s singer (“I Am Damo Suzuki,“) by Czukay’s ongoing collaborations with a variety of interesting artists (e.g. Jah Wobble, The Edge, Brian Eno, etc.), and by my print review of the 1997 remix album Sacrilege, which finally drove me to acquire the full catalog, and then to nab various reissues and compilations and live and “lost tape” collections that have emerged over the past quarter-century.

Why I Love Them: CAN’s music had one creative foot firmly planted in highly technical and theoretical musical precepts; Schmidt and Czukay were both former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen, often dubbed “The Father of Electronic Music” for his aleatory techniques and serial compositions performed on and by non-traditional instruments. But the group’s other creative foot was restless and loved to dance, to a variety of rhythms from a variety of cultures, and it dragged the group in myriad spirals of interest around a central axis anchored by Liebezeit’s relentless and metronomic “motorik” drumming and Czukay’s dubby bass. Having read about CAN for a long time before I actually heard them, I expected their music to be chilly and Teutonic, like Kraftwerk, or Cluster. But it rarely was, in part because the group could establish some stone-cold masterful riffs and jam improvised leads atop them for ages, in part because Mooney’s passionate blues/soul-based performances and Suzuki’s ethereal scat-styled word soup were decidedly not stereotypically German-flavored. The group’s latter-day Rosko/Rebop era found them further exploring a wide variety of global rhythms and textures, made far weirder than most “world music” by Czukay’s use of shortwave radios and oscillators and other sound-shaping non-instruments atop Karoli and Schmidt’s more traditional soloist’s instruments. While their music is almost always and instantaneously recognizable as CAN, their music also rarely sounds the same or hews to common tones and traits; they could do what they did, and the common magic of their creative approaches made it theirs, regardless of what it actually sounded like. There are some really influential musical artists who I appreciate, but don’t really care to listen to that often. Then there are other artists who just make pleasing music of no particular lasting import who I love to listen to, regularly. CAN are one of a small number of groups in my personal collection who were important and influential enough to appeal to me intellectually, but were also accessible and engaging enough to make me grin and groove bodily, when I just wanted some rhythm and melody in my life spaces. That’s a sweet spot to sit, for sure.

#10. “Below This Level (Patient’s Song),” from Rite Time (1989)

#9. “Father Cannot Yell,” from Monster Movie (1969)

#8. “Vitamin C,” from Ege Bamyasi (1972)

#7. “Spoon,” from Ege Bamyasi (1972)

#6. “Don’t Say No,” from Saw Delight (1977)

#5. “Yoo Doo Right,” from Monster Movie (1969)

#4. “Oh Yeah,” from Tago Mago (1971)

#3. “Midnight Sky,” from The Lost Tapes (recorded 1969, released 2012)

#2. “Future Days,” from Future Days (1973)

#1. “Halleluhwah,” from Tago Mago (1971)