Tuesday, May 31, 2005
ce n'est pas un gilet
Can - I Want More
Maybe it's best to start a little slow. I'm nervous, a little bit like when I had my first turn at the record store way back in the 1990s. I think I played something off of the Tortoise Remixes album. My friend Karen suggested I play Can because all record store clerks like Can. It turned out she was mostly right, at least in my neck of the woods (Chicago). I suggested this track "I Want More" to the Darkness (I call him by his given name mostly but I'll bow to convention) when I was at WZBC a week or two ago. Their vinyl stacks are surprisingly solid considering the stories I've heard of student djs skimming all the good stuff out of LP libraries across the country. I don't have a copy of Can's Flow Motion nor can I say that I have I listened to it all the way through, ever, but I like this song a lot. I only discovered it while watching the Can DVD set that came out a year or two back. At the time I didn't care too much for the live footage/documentary film thing at the beginning but the other live performances knocked me out. Towards the end (of the DVD & their career as a band) there's footage of the band playing on the Old Grey Whistle Stop (or something) circa 1972. "I Want More" has charted in England, their first "hit". It's vaguely disco, deceptively simple in the way some of the best Can often is. I can't explain its appeal to me. When I hear it, all I can picture is Irmin Schmidt in what looks like a vest made of pull-tabs, bobbing his head, raising his left hand to the crowd in between keyboard stabs. Amazing.
(And please don't make me for a pretentious Francophone. I used the interdarpawebnet to translate that phrase above. Hooray 21st Century!)
Maybe it's best to start a little slow. I'm nervous, a little bit like when I had my first turn at the record store way back in the 1990s. I think I played something off of the Tortoise Remixes album. My friend Karen suggested I play Can because all record store clerks like Can. It turned out she was mostly right, at least in my neck of the woods (Chicago). I suggested this track "I Want More" to the Darkness (I call him by his given name mostly but I'll bow to convention) when I was at WZBC a week or two ago. Their vinyl stacks are surprisingly solid considering the stories I've heard of student djs skimming all the good stuff out of LP libraries across the country. I don't have a copy of Can's Flow Motion nor can I say that I have I listened to it all the way through, ever, but I like this song a lot. I only discovered it while watching the Can DVD set that came out a year or two back. At the time I didn't care too much for the live footage/documentary film thing at the beginning but the other live performances knocked me out. Towards the end (of the DVD & their career as a band) there's footage of the band playing on the Old Grey Whistle Stop (or something) circa 1972. "I Want More" has charted in England, their first "hit". It's vaguely disco, deceptively simple in the way some of the best Can often is. I can't explain its appeal to me. When I hear it, all I can picture is Irmin Schmidt in what looks like a vest made of pull-tabs, bobbing his head, raising his left hand to the crowd in between keyboard stabs. Amazing.
(And please don't make me for a pretentious Francophone. I used the interdarpawebnet to translate that phrase above. Hooray 21st Century!)
