Disconnected #1: German Rock
How did we miss the good stuff in the mid-to-late-’70s?
Even in the early ’70s when many thought the rock remained vital, a lot of experimental stuff remained unheard or never quite made it to the mainstream. My guess, too, is that this has often been true in rock, even in eras that seemed to embrace experimentation. How many albums did Captain Beefheart ever sell? If this is true, it also seems to suggest that a popular form like rock often has an artsy, avant-garde side that may be 1) no more popular than any other avant-garde, and may 2) reveal that rock never loses it’s vitality: it just goes underground.
If rock remained vital during the mid-to-late-’70s, it’s possible that many people missed it because too little attention was paid to earlier innovators. For instance, in 1971 it’s doubtful that many in the United States had even heard of Faust’s self-titled debut. Most rock fans were more likely listening to Led Zeppelin’s IV or Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story. But while both of these albums were and are considered great albums, I don’t think that either were inserting a lot of new ideas into the rock paradigm.
Faust, on the other hand, was inserting new ideas, even though it was never as much fun as IV or Every Picture, and even while it never really rocked. But because these latter albums and not Faust helped defined what rock was during the early ’70s, there was less chance that a mid-to-late-’70s audience would understand Eno’s ambient pop-rock or Bowie’s musically adventurous Berlin trilogy. Other experimenters–Pere Ubu and Public Information Limited–would be even harder to comprehend in the U.S. Without being able to trace a line from Faust or Can or Cluster to Bowie and Eno, rock from the mid-to-later part of the ’70s looks less imaginative than it should.
