How detective fiction shaped the sound of Can
With Shasta Fay’s car pulling off, the odd rhythm of ‘Vitamin C’ bursting through the speakers, and the green flash of the title, the opening credits of Inherent Vice immediately bury themselves in the mind. It was a masterstroke on Paul Thomas Anderson’s behalf that he wed Thomas Pynchon’s winding, weed-laced tale with the strange sound of Can. It just made complete sense.
Most people don’t know that the pioneering German krautrock band’s connection to the world of detective fiction goes far beyond their best-known song being used in one of the greatest neo-noir films ever made. According to keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, the genre even shaped their influential sound.
1972’s Ege Bamyası by Can is undoubtedly their most famous album due to the inclusion of ‘Vitamin C’ and the iconic cover, which features the band’s name on a tin of okra. While that track rightfully takes many plaudits, the entire record comprises classic tracks by the band, including the lead single ‘Spoon’. That song was a significant success for Can, hitting number six on the German chart.
Regardless of being a deeply innovative song for the time, most of its commercial success was due to its use in the television mini-series Das Messer. Strangely, the thriller was based on the work of English writer and Hull native Francis Durbridge, who created the popular gentlemanly detective Paul Temple. However, Das Messer was based on a novel featuring one of his other famous characters, Tim Frazer, The Mellin Forrest Mystery, and starred German icon Hardy Krüger.
Astoundingly, ‘Spoon’ wasn’t the first music Can had made for cinema. They had already been very successful with the soundtrack for the science fiction film Millionenspiel, which led to them being asked to do the music for Das Messer. The band immediately accepted and started working on it. However, when Schmidt took the music to the editing room, the director, Rolf von Sydow, went crazy, as he hated the music. He told him he wanted commercial music, not avant-garde. Can were in luck, though, and the people who had commissioned the music loved it and maintained that they would keep the song, no matter what the director said. This ended a few days of sleepless nights for Schmidt, who was scared they’d wasted their time.
Das Messer was critically panned. However, Can’s talent shone through. All over the country, from the cities to the rural villages, their song was celebrated for its extraordinary vision and cogent presentation of music’s future. It shot up the charts. This success would be how detective fiction shaped the band’s sound.
The song is the first time Can use the drum machine in a recording, which was still a mostly unknown entity in popular music. Explaining how the track shaped their sound, Schmidt told Uncut: “It was the first one, certainly in Germany, nobody had heard this kind of sound, that was one of the things that this funny director was so… For him that was so unusual, commercial, and yeah, I don’t remember any peace at that time using a drum machine, especially using it rhythmically in this weird fashion.”
In true form, Can were plainly having fun with the fresh innovation of the drum machine, they weren’t taking themselves too seriously, a common theme with things that are pioneering. Still, it proved an impactful decision which went on to provide them with a key part of their sound, and give the world of German detectives one of its most memorable scores. Perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson had seen Das Messer before compiling his soundtrack.
