Hello, friends, and welcome to “The Annotated Road Taken,” Episode 7, a musical and informational accompaniment to our conversation with the original lead singer of Can, Malcolm Mooney.
Can is a band shrouded in mystery. With slow-building and hypnotic grooves, hard-to-decipher lyrics, and an almost ominous feeling that pervades their best work, Can has always seemed otherworldly in all of the most appealing ways. The early-’70s triptych of classic albums (Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi, and Future Days) has achieved legendary status and continues to influence pretty much any musician interested in nonmainstream sounds. The imagery of the band at its peak—a lefty, lofty musical collective, toiling away studiously in some remote German studio crafting intricate yet sprawling masterpieces—remains powerful to this day.
A large part of Can’s mystique derives from its origin story, when four Germans (Holgar Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Leibezeit, and Michael Karoli) met a young American, then traveling and searching his way through Europe, and asked him to perform with them. That young man, more of a painter and a saxophonist than a singer, was Malcolm Mooney, and the rhythmic and energetic propulsion he brought to the group set them on their now iconic path. Malcolm’s time with the group was an intensely felt 18-month period that ended with his return to the U.S., as he burned out more than he faded away. Can’s vocalist role was soon filled by a Japanese busker named Damo Suzuki, and as such, Malcolm’s place in musical history was left unattended for decades, existing mainly as a name in liner notes and a voice on a handful of early recordings.
But somehow, my guy Baio managed to track him down! As Chris and I set out to give The Road Taken a shape and choose the voices that would give the most interesting portrait of touring and performance, we each wanted to find one artist who had directly inspired our early musical development. For Chris, Can has always been a total touchstone, with Malcolm in particular being a figure of intrigue. After making contact, we were thrilled to be able to spend time with Malcolm and hear about how this kid from Yonkers, New York, ended up fronting on one of the most influential German bands of all time. It was fascinating to hear how he thinks about these moments of intense creativity and passion, some 50 years past, and how they continue to inspire and move him.
Let’s get into it!
12:20 “I was reading the book All Gates Open …”
To prepare for our conversation with Malcolm, both Chris and I consulted this new tome that covers the entirety of Can’s career in incredible detail. It’s too comprehensive to be an introduction, but is definitely worth a read for anyone who is interested in the band and their full story.
13:50 “My dad brought home Ornette Coleman’s Change of the Century …”
This incredible album, which features Ornette and his group pushing the boundaries of jazz toward a freer, more radical aesthetic, had a big impact on young Malcolm and his musical identity. It was a big change from the doo-wop that Malcolm had previously enjoyed, by groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Jesters, and the Paragons. The influence of both of these disparate sonic worlds can be heard in Malcolm’s brief, electrifying run with Can.
27:29 “I started listening to Gagaku …”
By his friend Richard Martin, Malcolm was introduced to various non-Western music traditions, which also started to influence his outlook. One genre was gagaku, a centuries-old form of Japanese court music. The other main example, as Malcolm describes it, was “Iranian wrestling music,” which proves to be a little more ethereal and harder to pin down, but I believe it’s something at least similar to this, a workout based in an aptly named gym called a “House of Strength.”
30:40 “Like this piece that you did, ‘Sunflower’ …”
Before we turned the mics on and started the formal conversation, Malcolm asked us about what Vampire Weekend was up to. At that point, our latest album, Father of the Bride, had just been released, and we discussed one of the attendant promo appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Malcolm then asked to watch it, so, in quite a surreal moment, Baio, Malcolm, and myself all watched VW play “Sunflower” on late-night television. Malcolm seemed really into it!
33:00 “There was a composer by the name of Emmanuel Nunes …”
One of the many colorful characters who Malcolm crossed paths with in the European trip that climaxed with his joining Can was composer Emmanuel Nunes. A Portugese composer based in Paris, Nunes had a long career writing for various chamber ensembles (here’s one example of his work) and even spent some time with another Can-adjacent pioneer, Karlheinz Stockhausen.
37:20 “Then we went to see the Hendrix show …”
The Jimi Hendrix Experience came through Cologne, Germany, on January 13, 1969, a show that Malcolm and some of his Can bandmates attended, and which proved to have quite an impact on the band’s burgeoning identity. Malcolm had mentioned that Hendrix’s albums had already been important musical touchstones before his heading to Europe but seeing the band live, with all of Hendrix’s flair and the improvisational interplay amongst the trio, proved to be an even more influential experience. An “official bootleg” recording of this show was released recently, but for visual reference, here is some footage of the Experience from a week before the Cologne show during a concert in Stockholm.
39:50 “It was the same castle where Ulrich Rückriem lived …”
Malcolm and Can seemed to have a way of coming in contact with various surreal characters during their early years. The sculptor Ulrich Rückriem is a prime example. Separated by only one floor in the Schloss Nörvenich, a country manor house outside of Cologne whose origins trace back to the 15th century, it was inevitable that there would be some interdisciplinary, conceptual exchange between Rückriem and Can, particularly with Malcolm and his training and identity as a visual artist.
44:10 “Jaki Liebezeit lived right around the corner from the bahnhof …”
During these heady days, Malcolm often stayed with Can drummer Liebezeit, whose apartment, as stated here, was near the Cologne central train station. This inspired Malcolm’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics on the early Can song “Outside My Door” (“I can hear the train whistle outside my door”), which is a song he still performs today, like this version from Brooklyn’s Union Pool.
44:40 “To jump around on that one, there’s the Chevy commercial …”
In early 2019, Chevrolet debuted a commercial during a college football game that featured Can’s “Mary, Mary So Contrary” as its soundtrack. For a band like Can, whose impressive mystique and obscure nature continues to fuel die-hard fans, licensing their song to a Chevy commercial is an interesting choice. Personally, I always support musicians who make money off their art ethically, but others were not so forgiving—including one gentleman who “nearly shat [him]self” when he realized exactly which guitar riff was trying to sell him a Silverado.
48:05 “The rap group the Fat Boys? ...”
Even more surprising than sharing studio space with a minimalist German sculptor, Malcolm has a genuine friendship with the manager of the Fat Boys! I will never pass up an opportunity to post a link to the incredible “Wipeout” video.
1:00:31 “I wrote the lyric on the plane …”
After a decade and a half away from Can while pursuing his visual arts career back in the U.S., Malcolm reunited with the group in the mid-’80s. Here, he discusses writing the lyrics for the song “Last Night Sleep,” which was included on the soundtrack for Wim Wenders’s cult classic film Until the End of the World. Despite all of the time spent away from the group, Malcolm describes this song as one his and Can’s quickest-ever compositions, proving that as a unit they retained their connective spontaneity.
1:26:34 “I get the call to go to France to do the Rite Time album …”
Rite Time (1989) is an interesting coda to Malcolm and Can’s collaboration. Recorded shortly before their Wenders soundtrack work, the Rite Time sessions were the first time that he and the band had seen and worked together since their explosive 18 month run in the late ’60s. Technology, context, and the times had changed for everybody in the interim, but truly some of the magic remained.
1:37:00 “So we’re doing the Barbican show …”
The Barbican show discussed here was a concert in April 2017 by an assembled group called the Can Project. Malcolm appeared alongside original Can member Irmin Schmidt as well as Thurston Moore and many others. While Malcolm had been performing in various groups throughout the years, this performance marked a reintroduction to the larger Can audience, to which he continues to perform for and interact with to this day. I give Malcolm a lot of credit for, as he puts it, trying not to “live on the laurels of the past” but rather to honor the original spirit of the music, one of in-the-moment inspiration and an almost reckless abandon, and inject new life into these sacred texts with each new performance.
