4. CanTago Mago
Me and Budgie had conversations about how just about the time punk came along, we all had to disown our old prog albums and stuff; we couldn’t say we had ever listened to that. But of course, we did, and so Budgie and I talked about who we liked and who we followed. With [Can drummer] Jaki Leibezeit, I always liked that he said that you have to learn how to play monotonously. What I always thought of with the drums was once the rhythm’s there, there’s this whole space inside of it that you can listen to and focus on with the push and pull. That’s what I was always trying for. And you only get that by being minimalist, but precise with your minimalism.
I know how they did a lot of their stuff. I met one of the guys who was working with Jaki for years and he was telling me, ‘Yeah, they’d just turn up at the studio and play for 12 hours, and then they’d just chop everything up. Which, incidentally, is pretty much how me and Budgie made the album with Jacknife Lee. We had previously started it with [Bauhaus drummer] Kevin Haskins, and he had to go off and play with Bauhaus. So we’re like, ‘Okay, what do we do?’ I knew Jackknife sort of socially, and I knew what he did. I was at this old hippie festival in Topanga, he lives up that way, and we were sitting there talking for an hour. Then [The Doors drummer] John Densmore came out and introduced Willie Nelson’s son’s band. I’d never seen them. I really didn’t know who they were at that point. And I’m not really, as you can imagine, a huge country fan. But I watched them and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is like punk country. I get this. I absolutely get this.’ So we had that conversation that was pivotal to me, because I thought, okay, I don’t need to be too precious about what we’re doing. Let’s try and do it with somebody else..
I played Jacknife Lee all the stuff, and then he said, ‘OK, well, let’s just rip it up and start again.’ So Budgie came back over and he stayed at my house and we went up to Jacknife Lee’s place, which is about half an hour’s drive from me, every day for about two or three weeks. He has this Aladdin’s cave of instruments. You know, it’s got everything in it you could ever think of. And we would sit there in the morning talking and then we’d go, ‘Okay, we should go and make some music.’ And that’s exactly how we did it – the same way as Can. Then we’d go home. Next day, we come back up, press the button on the computer and Jacknife would go, ‘What do you think?’ He had cut and pasted a whole bunch of stuff. So we did it entirely that same way.
