No, I never saw Holger Czukay perform live but I watched several performances on TV in Köln, and I met him one time. Some of the performances were actually live and others were full playback. I remember watching his band Can perform on a TV show and wondering whether they were actually performing this particular time. I was around 15 at the time and had learned to look for the telltale signs. Are there microphones on the drums? Is the singer using a regular microphone, but without the cable, to make it look like a wireless mic? Are the guitar and bass plugged into anything? My mom used to say I was ruining performances for her by pointing out that a singer’s lips and the singing didn’t actually sync up and they weren’t real performances… well, just miming really.
So I was watching a Can performance and everything seemed to be plugged in and… could they be doing this live in the studio???? Then the guitar player, Michael Karoli, took a solo. During his solo he slowly turned around, with a smirk on his face, and…. the end of the cable, the one that was supposedly connecting his guitar to the big amp behind him, was in fact stuck into the back pocket of his jeans. I roared with laughter and loved that they were poking fun at the full playback. (Many years later I had some interesting experiences with full playback in Mexico and in Germany, myself…)
At this point, in the Seventies, Holger was already playing shortwave radio and dictaphone instead of bass. I think Rosco Gee was on bass. Not many understand the huge influence Holger had on music. The use of cut up radio voices on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s excellent album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts goes back to Holger who had been doing that for many years already. In the late Seventies Eno visited Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne many times. In fact Eno said he was inspired to create Music for Airports after an experience of waiting for his flight from the airport in Köln. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is an excellent album and I merely want to point out that Czukay’s influence on music is disproportionate to his fame. I am sure he liked it that way.
One late afternoon in the early Eighties, sometime between 1981 and 1983, while I was visiting my parents in Köln, I walked around the city. (((I thought about this and am not sure whether it is correct… could have been around that time, or around 1986, when I was back in Köln to buy the classical guitar that I ended up recording most of NF with))) I stopped at a cafe and while I was there I saw Holger come in and sit down at the bar. I walked over to him and we started talking. He ordered a glass of Fernet-Branca, advertised on German TV as hellishly bitter, to make himself more brave, or so he claimed. He explained that he had to do a difficult mixing session that evening. The subject turned to recording and microphones and Holger explained that the where (of microphones) is much more important than the what. He said he had gone to Hamburg, where Irmin Schmidt (founder of Can) was conducting the orchestra of the NDR (public radio station) in a performance of his music. While the orchestra was recorded in the modern fashion, with the use of dozens of microphones, Holger went looking for the “one sweet spot” in the room and recorded the performance with a single mic. He claimed that his recording sounded far better than the official record did. I believe it. It’s an art, finding the sweet spot of a room. Perhaps it’s an art that is going extinct.
I am so glad that I plucked up the courage to talk to Holger that day. I’ll never forget it.
Anthony Bourdain recorded a show in Köln in 2016 (Parts Unknown, Season 7, Episode 7). It’s an excellent excellent show and I was hugely impressed with Bourdain’s (and his researchers’) knowledge about the city. I had a big smile when Bourdain met Irmin Schmidt for a meal around 21’ into the show. The first image of that section was Czukay playing bass, actually. Definitely worth seeing the entire episode!!
Previously:
my 2008 post on Holger’s 70th birthday, which links to a great post by Echoes. Quote:
Holger Czukay enjoys his status as a homunculus in the machinery of pop music. “I did an interview with German MTV and at the end I asked the director of the station if they had a chief editor. He said, No. I said, Take me. I can make your station very successful. Don’t play anything that I like and you’ll become very successful.”
I was asked how come I had a song on the soundtrack of Groundhog Day. Funny story, that. One evening, we were working in the studio in Santa Barbara, recording The Hours Between Night + Day, when I received a call from the soundtrack division of Epic Records. We need another song for this soundtrack and would like you to record “You Don’t Know Me”, by Ray Charles. I don’t know the song, or the movie, I replied, and what’s in it for me, if I interrupt my work to record this tune for the soundtrack? Well, this is going to be a big movie and we would make sure you get more work on soundtrack albums. Of course we will pick up the studio cost for the duration of this recording, and oh, we would need the song by tomorrow evening.
I turned to Jon. He knew the song and said we could bang that out pretty quickly, if we had to. So we did. We ran after the carrot, like musicians are often made to do. Then the carrot turned a corner and another corner and then it disappeared into some crevice. And that’s how I have a song on the soundtrack album of Groundhog Day. Can’t say the tune does much for me, neither the original nor our version. I think Jon’s bass is great and I do like the electric guitar feedback I added! It was a work for hire, or the promise of hire.
Go to David Sylvian’s Vimeo page instead and watch the video there. He also wrote beautifully about the sessions and according to his text the video was recorded in Berlin in 1983. The musicians are, in order of appearance, Ronny Drayton, David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, and Steve Nye.
I found a video that was recorded at Hansa Studio Berlin, with Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The album Brilliant Trees (link to Apple Music) was released in 1984, so these sessions must have taken place circa 1982-1983, I imagine. Three of the musicians in this video are no longer with us: Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
This week I came across a flag I didn’t know, hanging in front of a house in the neighborhood. A white field with three alternating red fields expanding from the center blue circle with the Zia symbol in white. A search for flags with a Zia symbol didn’t bear any fruit, so I took a photo and made an image search. I discovered that it is the flag of Wichita, Kansas:
Wichita’s official city flag was adopted in 1937. Designed by a local artist from South Wichita, Cecil McAlister, it represents freedom, happiness, contentment and home. The blue sun in the center represents happiness and contentment. The Zia symbol for permanent ‘home’ is stitched on the blue sun. The three red and white rays that alternate from the off-center blue sun represent the path of freedom to come and go as one pleases Flag of Wichita, Kansas – Wikipedia
I admit didn’t get a sense of home and the path of freedom from looking at the flag and was worried what it might represent. For me the flag has a slightly sinister look.
Then I came across this article, from 2019, by a TV station in Albuquerque.
People in Albuquerque, however, believe the artist simply tweaked our Zia and took credit for the work.
KRQE News 13 did ask Wichita Tourism officials if they suspect the artist ripped off the Zia Symbol back in the ’30s, but they chose to ignore that question.
This bears interesting similarity to the English flag copying the design of the flag of Genoa – link to my post. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is to never trust a flag?
This is one of Santana’s least known albums outside of Japan, for the simple reason that until 1991 it was not released in the US. Carlos Santana: “It was beautiful and ambitious and the music was fresh, but it was nothing that Columbia could handle. With the album cover and packaging and the three disks, it was just too expensive for them. They didn’t believe it would sell enough. Even after the Japanese finally released Lotus in the summer of 1974 and it became the bestselling import at the time, Columbia wouldn’t budge, and even Bill Graham couldn’t make them.” Santana 1972-1974, Part 5: Lotus
I did not know this. I went to Santana’s concert in Köln, on 23 September 1975, and a little later that year I got the Lotus album. In fact, I still have it, although I cut a page from the huge booklet (weren’t the big booklets that sometimes accompanied 12″ vinyl LPs amazing?!?!?) for Carlos to sign:
If Aliens visit Earth, the only reason they will let us live, in my opinion, is that we make some pretty great music. We are shit at taking care of each other and the Fauna and Flora of this planet, but the music is something that will impress the aliens. Play Kind of Blue again, the Alien commander orders, music is their saving grace.
