Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt – All Gates Open: The Story Of Can

Faber and Faber

tl;dr – you probably need this book if you’re a fan of Can. You probably need it if you’re a fan of well-written things about music. STRONG TRIGGER WARNING – contains Bobby Gillespie.

So a qualification upfront – despite really liking Can, I wouldn’t describe myself as an expert; I’m most familiar with Tago Mago, haven’t listened to the complete canonical catalogue (let alone the extended posthumous catalogue or the masses of solo works) and have a definite preference for the Damo Suzuki era. Having said that, I’m reviewing the book rather than writing the thing. Heaven for small mercies etc.

There’s a bit of a dénouement in terms of the structure of the book, but I’ll get to that in a bit. The book that you’re probably expecting is better than it should be, and as good as Can deserve — it captures the diffuse sources of Can, it recognises their complexity (rather than merely re-gurgling about krautrock); there’s plenty of biographical detail, early life stuff, later life stuff, context, partners, artists, managers — all the composite parts are here, dancing around. A bunch of lazy journalistic tropes are put to bed — Hans Joachim Irmler of Faust confesses he’d never met Can until well after they were gone. (Interestingly, there’s talk of how Can and Faust were seemingly on rotation with their UK tours — when one was there, the other wasn’t).

I suspect this book is as much a product of irritations and agitations surrounding previous literature on Can, but having not read those, I shouldn’t comment. But insofar as this could’ve easily been a re-hash of well-known contextual stuff about Can — student protests, hippies, post-war Germany, movements in (white) rock music — All Gates Open really operates with a surgeon’s precision and concision. No mean feat at a hefty 550+ pages.

For instance: it’s very easy to list towards the more “orthodox” academic roots of Can; the Karlheiz Stockhausen connection is explored, but in the sense of Stockhausen as a person and a teacher as well as the students’ relationship to him. So you get anecdotes about Karlheinz which renders (probably my favourite living composer) Helmut Lachenmann as a toady bastard; but the tone is never about painting members of Can as iconoclasts to the avant-garde, but registering their position within musical thought and approaches; it’s imperative to the story of Can that the band be thought of in collective terms. The other side is that Can aren’t rendered as a rock band, or a kosmische one either — there’s a lot of practical detail, as much on production techniques or processes, but never ceding to those great rock tropes of proto-punk (or whatever) which have always bored the hell out of me.

While the “play more repetitively” of Jaki Liebzeit is indulged a fair amount, there’s enough here describing why that was imperative to Can’s music and methods. Moreover. I’m often left with the impression from journalism around Leibzeit that Can’s drumming is considered (cough) motorik or precipitous to a bunch of electronic genres; this book puts him in a different tradition, and opens up the wealth of variation in his drumming. While Leibzeit was opposed to the sort of free playing that he came from, he also wasn’t pugilistic or facile in his syncopations.

All Gates Open is a book that gets really close to the metal of the band — so the peculiar sense that Holger Czukay was at once this entirely fastidious documenter, editor, producer (etc), he was equally entirely pliant in the face of Leibzeit’s (entirely correct) understanding of the function of the bass in a rhythm section.

There’s necessarily an element to writing about a band that’s exploitative — insofar as I’m imputing a perspective on a book with this writing, so too does Rob Young impute his own narrative upon his exhaustive research on Can. But there’s a line he could easily have crossed, around speculation to do with Suzuki’s later disengagement from the band, and his reticence to retrospect on Can; and to Young’s credit he doesn’t contravene Suzuki’s express wishes, merely states them plainly and without further speculation. Within the context of this book such speculation wouldn’t have been unwarranted, but it’s also not necessary, so a real tip of the cap in Young’s direction there. I have the strong suspicion that whatever help and support the band (or estate) gave the book is due to Young’s sincere respect for the band as people.

If it sounds like I’m gushing, it’s definitely because I’m gushing.

But here’s the real clincher of the piece — we get to the end of the Can story, with some chat about the various reunions, some discussion on those later members and the records that are considered weaker (arguably unfairly — this book made me listen to the last two records, which I’d always foolishly avoided) and then there’s a fairly abrupt shift of gear into the Irmin Schmidt part of the book — a series of diary entries, interviews, other bits and bobs of written ephemera. So in this bit we get some fairly hefty stuff, but in a way more unbuttoned sense than the biography section of the book; it gives a strong picture of Schmidt as a living breathing thinker / composer / guy, his processes, reflections, connections with John Cage, film, art, opera (etc).

Probably the most satisfying bit of the Schmidt section is the conversations with other artists — so Wim Wenders gives his cinematographic perspective, Peter Saville lucidly articulates Can’s (arguably somewhat weak) visual aesthetic, John Malkovich gives some chat for some reason, Mark E Smith… well, you know what he was like…, Geoff Barrow from Portishead neatly articulates a bunch of stuff that’s as much about his relationship to hip-hop as it is Can. You get these interrogations of Can from a load of perspectives, in a fairly unrushed and loose sense, fitting to Can’s methods — never quite a Fluxus-esque anything goes, but as much about enacting anarchy (the anarchy of political theory, rather than the anarchy of lazy rhetoric) as a technique of revelation.

Criticisms, you say? But one — Bobby fucking Gillespie is not an interesting person; his perspective is not worthwhile. I don’t understand why he’s here, he’s fucking rubbish, it’s fairly clear he has the most circumspect of likings for Can and there are better gobshites (aforementioned MES). So while you have someone like Alec Empire being lucid and engaging (and he wrote “START THE RIOT!!!!” in all caps, probably), you have Bobby Gillespie apparently interrupting a conversation to say “Oh, I once took a bunch of drugs and did a sieg heil”. Absolute fucking bore of a human who shouldn’t have been let within a country mile of this book. And in quite a profound way is an absolute rockist, which is demonstrably the crucible of bore and sexism in this world.

But that asides — yeah, seriously fucking amazing book. The folk I know who are into Can are already on the waiting list for this book, so I’m sure those folk won’t be disappointed; I can’t imagine many folk being disappointed, to be entirely honest — on so many levels it hits hard. There’s just enough purple prose to stop it being fusty, while just enough scholarly research to stop it being flimsy; the tone’s light and quick and in the unturning of stones there’s obviously been a judicious amount of thinking about making a suitable testament to an astonishing band. A labour of love but not a fetish of rockism. Big up the writers, innit.

-Kev Nickells-