“Surfing on the Rhine”: How The Beach Boys wove their way into a 1974 electronic masterpiece
On the face of it, there’s not much that connects The Beach Boys to West Germany’s electronic music heritage.
While the synthesiser would show its sonic shimmer on certain cuts across the 1970s, and the Electro-Theremin famously lent its eerie whine on ‘Good Vibrations’ psychedelic marvel, The Beach Boys’ classic songbook all firmly dwelt in the surf and beat successors of rock and roll’s very American big bang, largely shaping a dizzying ten LPs before unveiling Pet Sounds’ pop innovations.
But what principal songwriter Brian Wilson captured right from their 1961 ‘Surfin’’ debut was an idyll. Virtually possessing a musical monopoly on California’s post-war glow, a time when the sunshine state entered its cultural mythos of hot rods, beautiful girls, surfing leisure, and crucially, the fun on offer at odds with previous generations, to that all new and vitally marketable demographic: the teenager.
The Beach Boys scored California’s spirit just as a certain Düsseldorf electronic quartet were keen to harness the new and emerging confidence gleaming from a Bundesrepublik Deutschland that had long been finding its feet from the ruins of fascism. Sensing this optimism in the air, Ralf Hütter had spotted Kraftwerk’s next conceptual beckon from across this new era’s cultural hinterland.
“Ralf had a kind of German idea in mind,” percussionist Wolfgang Flür reflected. “Germany also needed something like The Beach Boys. Something with self-understanding and immaculate presence, after the ugly wars that our parents had inflicted on the world. Something positive and youthful, that freed us from the stench of the past.”
For years, a queasy silence among a nation eager to rebuild the battered country and shake off the ghosts of Nazism found a confounding score in the saccharine schlager easy-listening pop that clogged the German charts across the 1950s and 1960s. However, a curious generation of Boomer kids questioned their parents’ muted silence on the past while embracing the day’s countercultural experimentation. Before long, left-wing communes and student campuses up and down West Germany became hotbeds of political and musical radicalism, a febrile nucleus the likes of Can, Neu!, Faust, and Amon Düül II all orbited.
Amid this maelstrom was Kraftwerk. Having ditched their former Organisation moniker, a long-haired and denimed Hütter and Florian Schneider spent the early 1970s’ cultural shift similarly forging a new identity for a post-war German generation in the rawer and slapdash avant-garde underground, unleashing a string of Kraftwerk LPs indebted to the rougher Krautrock jams of their peers. Yet, the pair begin to conceive of a fuller gesamtkunstwerk vision for their electronic conjurings, matching an increasing reliance on synth elegance with a tailored and formal dress of cropped hair and smart suits.
Kraftwerk would officially begin at this point in 1974. Deploying the new magical tonalities emitted from the Minimoog, EMS Synthi, ARP Odyssey, and the Robovox speech synthesiser, the earnest capture of Germany’s insurgent dawn would find illustration in ‘Autobahn’s celebration of the country’s pioneering system of motorways, affording any VW Beetle owner limitless cruise across Deutschland’s romantic terrain. Kraftwerk were keen to get behind the wheel of this alluring concept, forging the new sonic language that owed nothing to rock’s American DNA of blues and country, as well as shaping a new German idyll for the country’s electric zeitgeist.
The Beach Boys’ original influence, while overplayed, would play an indirect role, pointing the way for how to capture a certain region in all its mythology. Much was made of ‘Autobahn’s lyrical “Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn” refrain, to Anglophone ears sounding much like The Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Ann’, but Hütter denied any explicit wordplay on the sunny West Coast hit.
“In the case of The Beach Boys, ‘Fun Fun Fun’ is about a T-Bird,” he elucidated. “But ours is about a Volkswagen or Mercedes. The quote is really more ethnic. People said: ‘Are you doing surfing on the Rhine?’ Yes, maybe, but we don’t have waves. It’s like an artificial joke. But no, it’s not a Beach Boys record, it’s a Kraftwerk record.”
Catching Californian waves or cruising German autobahns, The Beach Boys’ presence in Kraftwerk’s pioneering electronic catalogue feels less surprising the closer one looks, both songbooks inescapably affixed to the lands they come from, and the West Coast sunshine beaming just as hard as Germany’s halcyon rays signposting the country’s exciting new era Kraftwerk were hurtling towards.
