A cinema drummer and a borrowed voice
The drums lock into a figure that does not develop so much as insist, dry and close, and a voice enters speaking several languages at once, none of them asked to explain.
Can recorded Vitamin C for Ege Bamyasi, released in 1972, at Inner Space, their studio in a former cinema in Cologne. They produced themselves. Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming is the spine, a pattern that feels machined and then, if you stay with it, deeply human. Michael Karoli’s guitar scribbles at the edges. Irmin Schmidt’s keyboards smear colour. Holger Czukay’s bass holds a line you could walk. Damo Suzuki sings as if the words were objects he had found that morning, English and invention in the same mouth. The sleeve is a tin of okra, the Turkish name of the album. There was no health-food manifesto. Schmidt said the can was a can Jaki had found in a Turkish shop, and that Can, there, meant something like life.
The track found a job after it existed. Czukay recalled that Vitamin C became the title music of Samuel Fuller’s film Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, which was often how it went. They made the music, and a use appeared later. That order matters. Nothing in the recording is trying to sell a scene. The vocal is half conversation, half weather. When Suzuki drops out, the band does not fill the hole with a solo so much as keep the room spinning. Inner Space, the old cinema, gives the drums less weight than their earlier castle tapes, and the vocal sits forward, almost intimate, which only makes the insistence stranger.
Vitamin C became the title track of Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, a movie by Samuel Fuller. That’s often how it was. We made music, then found a use for it later.
(Holger Czukay, Uncut, 2006)
The song has walked into other films and other bands’ rehearsals ever since, a lesson in how little harmonic movement a great record needs if the drummer is a composer. Liebezeit, who had come out of free jazz and then stripped it, plays here like a man who has decided that repetition is a form of intelligence. Suzuki does not narrate a story you could summarise. He inhabits the groove. Listeners who want a chorus will not find one. Listeners who want a place to live for three minutes will not leave.
What remains is the feeling of a band that trusted accident and then edited it with a ruthless ear. Can in 1972 were past the first shock of Tago Mago and not yet in the haze of Future Days. Vitamin C is the clear middle, funky without borrowing the costume, sung by a man who had been busking in Munich when they asked him, on the day they asked him, to sing that night. The cinema drums still sound like a heartbeat you could dance to, and the voice still refuses to tell you why.
