Damo Suzuki died. It was a bleak mid-February day in the Pacific Northwest, the kind of day that reminds you it’s still a long way to spring. Fittingly it reminded me of our time in Berlin one February, a place Damo and his band mates would have known well.

Damo was 74, singer for the German rock band Can. Their music was at times unnerving, almost always strange, sometimes the most original I’d heard. They were a group of musical savants, the bass player classically trained, the drummer regarded the best free jazz player in Europe, the singer, a goofball Japanese guy named Damo.

The album art was draped in that late ‘60s psychedelia but the music much more than that, otherworldly, both rhythmic and dissonant. Sometimes Damo didn’t sing as much as growl or babble, but as with the best bands it all cohered. One of their first records I heard, a collection called Cannibalism 2, had an infinity mirror image on the cover with a creepy-looking German in a trench coat with bad hair. At times it sounded like the soundtrack to a nightmare.

I took a few years to go through Can’s catalogue, spanning the years 1969 to 1979. To my ear there were three eras: the more raw, unhinged sounds of their first record with singer Malcolm Mooney, the peak middle period with Damo, and the post-Damo ‘70s that leaned more on synth.

In the summer of 1992 I immersed myself in Can living in a one-bedroom beach bungalow with three other men. Despite being above a gas station it was a good location, right between the ocean and the bay on Division. And late at night in utter darkness with just the gas station glow we played that far-away voodoo music called Can.

Later I would turn my percussionist friend Loren on to it in the back seat of someone’s car driving around our home town on a hot summer night with the windows down. And Loren, gesturing madly with his arms, aping Damo’s wild stylings. I would later boast to my drummer friend, I turned you on to Can.

Can was one of those guests I brought into my home and let stay a while, they became part of the scenery of my young life. It isn’t music I’d recommend to most because it’s weird and often difficult, but I’m grateful to my friend Dave Dever for introducing us. And to my friend Mike for telling me Damo passed on Monday, texting “it’s a perfect bleak day to lose yourself in Can.” I already did, a long time ago.

Categories: music, writing

Tags: can, Damo Suzuki