Can - Oh Yeah live.

[jeffk]

Nobody else like them.

[tory]

Shut up Damo YOU COCK

[oh oooh]

Jan 12, 2019 22:57:17 GMT tory said:

Shut up Damo YOU COCK

Hm. 

The weakest link?

[doctorlouie]

It's magnificent stuff.

[DarknessFish]

One of their absolute best, isn't it? My main issue with the footage is that there always seems to be some bastard stood in front of Jaki, and these are one of the few bands were you actually want to see what the drummer is doing.

[dipstick]

Years ago I had a nightmare that I was at a Can concert with purple hued redwoods, and a lush blue green lawn. I got up to run around and look at the scenery but Damo jumped out from behind a tree with his mic and started screaming at me.

[Reactionary Rage]

It’s their greatest moment for me. The Can song I would play to newbies if I was trying to convince them that they were capable of greatness. Has anybody used this song in a movie? You feel that somebody should have by now, particularly in the 80s when Cold War paranoia was at its height. Has any song from that era captured a similar level of apocalyptic presentiment? The nuclear explosion, the fall-out cloud of accompanying static descending on the scorched earth; the machine-like pulse ominously rising from the ashes. Jaki’s elastic groove, Schmidt’s gloomy keyboard, Damo’s backward vocals in subline tandem. Fantastic. And then they throw in one of those typical Can curveball edits. The metallic twang of a sitar (?) takes things down a notch but then they start up again, gradually building in supernatural intensity; Karoli delivers some magic on the geetar, Damo gets even weirder and then around 5.20 something approaching rock n roll genius happens (I’m listening to the studio version, not the live clip posted btw, solly). Remember that scene in Blue Velvet where Frank says, “now it’s dark”? Well, now it is dark and the band are flying but there’s a fluidity and incremental lightness to Karoli’s guitar and Jaki’s drums that delightfully offsets the aforementioned darkness, like the suns rays briefly promising respite through an atomic haze but then they throw in one final curveball and we descend back into the post-apocalyptic shadows. Not many bands have exhibited a similar level of rock n roll gestalt like Can do here. They have other songs, other moments that achieve something similar but I think this is their masterpiece. Listening to it now it’s easy to understand why it took so many people years and years to catch up with them. You can glimpse the machine future here but still taste the sweat and thrust of an earlier rock n roll age.

The fucking thing thrills me to my core.

[doctorlouie]

Top post.

[oh oooh]

Yes.

'Oh Yeah' is the only Can song our old pal Ian MacDonald rated, by the way...

A deep distant detonation echoed by an aftershock and a seething high-frequency fallout of fire and rain. Out of this drizzle rises a robotic one-bar drum figure, icily cycling around a gloomy sequence of open chords atmosphered out by organ and guitar.

Everything stems from the bass, mechanically oscillating in perpetual rise and fall (root-third, root-fourth, root-fifth, root-augmented fifth). This goes on for a while. Then the bass dives down an octave. Things get darker. Presently, ambience and tempo alter, clearing like rain swept off a windscreen. A chilly disembodied voice begins to sing in cracked Japanese. Soon comes another alteration of ambience and tempo - a cinematic wipe effected by an edit - and the mood turns urgent, gradually intensifying into agitated hysteria with a splinter-shriek guitar solo. Finally: pause, hold - and back to the gloomy perpetual rise/fall cycle we began in. Fade.

This is Oh Yeah from Can's 1971 album, Tago Mago. It's Can at both their best and most characteristic - by no means invariably the same thing.

www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_uncut-aug97.html