Every time I go to Rosemary’s Tavern (a red vinyl cave on Bedford Avenue that, for me, usually bookends a sausage pizza) I hear Can’s “Mother Sky.” It doesn’t really matter when you come in during the first half, since even on the record it starts in the middle of a guitar solo — but at the midpoint it takes several turns that aren’t really comprehensible without the previous seven minutes of tortured development. Rosemary’s serves Budweiser in thirty-two ounce styrofoam cups: the bartender is an old man in a state of contented stupefaction: the color of the decorations has gradually averaged to a warm ochre. A few minutes in, Damo Suzuki sings a meandering pattern around a languid bassline, and the setting and the song settle into a comfortable congress with each other.

“Mother Sky” is the first cut on the flip side of Soundtracks (1970), a compilation album of Can’s early work for films, and Suzuki’s first work with the band. In this period their deep, loose psychedelia proved to be unusually well-suited to his frail wailing. With most fourteen-minute freakouts, the danger is in formlessness: improvisation gradually unwinding until the song’s drive relies entirely on the thinning appeal of a clocked-in rock beat. But the level of technical competence of Can was always dangerously high, and they go in the other direction: the longer they’re allowed to attach and reattach components to their compositions, the more formally airless they can become. That doesn’t happen with “Mother Sky,” though, its shrill guitar tones just gauze over a lock-step but ductile rhythm section, and it finds its changes at just the right moments, allowing the groove to deepen only just long enough and then get slowly rubbed out, always moving at the pace of one individual instrument. The familiar metaphor of schizophrenia in psychedelic music seems like it might be oversold by Suzuki’s plaintive refrain of “madness is too pure like Mother Sky,” but the combined effect is opioid, sensually balming while remaining distantly unsettling.

Comments

1. ↩ doorknobs / 7 May 2010

   This is where I say, “I never really got into Can,” and trivialize all your hard work. Except: I always wanna give Can a more prolonged burn. One day!

   Also haven’t been to Rosemary’s in forever. I wonder what the always-playing song is at Turkey’s Nest. “The Model”?