A straight road with clouds overhead
The drums begin as if a car had already been moving for an hour, a steady bright pulse with no verse to wait for, and a guitar lays long notes over it like weather changing on a motorway.
Neu! recorded Hallogallo in December 1971 in Hamburg with Conny Plank, for the album Neu!, released the following year. Michael Rother played guitar. Klaus Dinger played the beat that other people would later call motorik, a word Rother has treated carefully, preferring the picture they actually used: a fast-forward movement, a straight road, clouds and colours passing overhead. They did not write the piece out. They played, at night, in winter, and Plank, who could remember every good bar, organised the guitars. At one point he turned the tape around. Rother played to the backwards sound, and Plank flipped it again, so a new line runs in reverse under the forward drive. Ten minutes, and almost no harmony to hide in.
Rother has called the track one of the most optimistic he knows, a strange claim for a record made in the dark by two men who would not stay a band in any ordinary sense. They thought of Neu! as a project. When they played together, it existed. The optimism is not lyrical, because there is no lyric. It is directional. The music does not look back. Dinger’s kit is the road surface. Rother’s guitar is the sky. Plank is the reason the two do not blur. Later, when people heard Autobahn, or a hundred rock bands stealing a straight beat, they were hearing cousins of this opening. The original still sounds narrower, and freer, than its children.
Hallogallo has this very optimistic ambience. It is one of the most optimistic tracks I know.
(Michael Rother, Electronic Sound)
On stage in the early years the piece was hard to reconstruct. They had little gear, a fuzz, a delay, a wah, and listeners imagined a laboratory. The record is more human than that myth. You can hear small unevennesses in the beat, a guitar that blooms and then thins. Rother has said that even now he does not fully know how it came together, and that Plank’s memory was part of the composition. That is a producer’s highest credit: not a sound, a structure. The track opens the album because it had to. Everything after is a variation on having already left.
What remains is the sensation of travel without a destination poster. No city is named. No singer tells you how freedom feels. The freedom is the refusal to change chords just to prove you can. When a harmony does appear elsewhere on the record, Rother has said he had to think hard before allowing it. Here he barely does. The arrow flies. Fifty years on, the road is still straight, the clouds still pass, and the drummer, difficult, brilliant, gone, is still the engine you cannot argue with.
