Amon Duul
Psychedelic underground

With a bit of imagination, it could be the best rock album in history.

With a bit of realism, it's one of the worst. It's up to you to choose. Honestly, I don't know.

Unless, in the game of opposites, the worst is actually the best.

Take the seventeen fabulous minutes of track one, horrendous cacophony born, (fifty-fifty) from freak idealism and an almost punk urgency.

Ah, they're acoustic guitars and wild percussion that almost completely cover up graceless and screaming voices.

And there's an incredible sense of joy, an almost crazy happiness. It's instinctive and liberating music, not cerebral...

Yes, instinctive and liberating.

"The song that sings of the step that follows the candor without regard," said the poet...

And, besides the poet, we have to once more cite the iguana, not the musician, but the desperate philosopher of street poetry, when he talks about a sound that swallows up all suffering...

A sound that performs an opposite and complementary function to the Vuh magic (of, I don't know, "Hosianna mantra" and "In der garten pharaos").

Yes, the Vuh magic, the kind that, if you manage to slip a single note in your pocket, lets you outpace any mystical mystic (whether wise or tripping).

Yes, that one (the Duul magic) swallows suffering and the other (the Vuh magic) takes you to paradise.

What do you say? Do your speakers seem to be in the grip of coughing and hoarseness? Kraut is the stuff of great musicians and these people seem to have ended up there by chance?

By chance? If only!!! Passing by those parts, I'd join in too with my tambourine.

Ah, gentlemen, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts!!!

And the process matters more than the result, the road more than the destination.

And anyway, if you've been a bit irritated, relax because from track two onward it seems almost serious avant-garde.

That if you attach the name of avant-garde (the serious kind) to something, those facts (of process and result, and road and destination) are almost taken for granted, it's a matter of good manners.

Anyway, the second track features psychedelic, refracting chords just slightly disordered...

The third is a half-tribal, half-street Velvet-style drumming with a sepulchral lament in the background. The title is rather lovely: "Mama Duul and her kraut band set in motion."

Are you calmer now that I've told you it's almost avant-garde (serious)?

Let's move on then...

Track four, a nice raw thing, is a kind of mystical hard rock, with a fabulous convoluted, monolithic, powerful guitar, accompanied by drums played by a hundred Bacchants who all look like Maureen Tucker.

The singing, shouted, is almost always in the background and only occasionally takes center stage.

It's chaos. And it can only be resolved with more chaos, that of an ending with slightly more avant-garde noise, that is, a touch of sophistication.

Track five will appear, quite different, also in "Phallus dei," the first album of Amon Duul II

Amon Duul II? In what sense II?

Amon Duul was a commune of artists, musicians, and political activists who, despite finding common ground in the cornerstones of sixties thought (drugs, free love, idealism), soon found themselves in strong divergence regarding the musical direction to take.

Hence the split: Amon Duul with their anarchic, instinctive, improvised, amateurish sound and Amon Duul II, equally wild, but much, much more musical.

I won't tell you lies. Amon Duul II was a hundred (and even two hundred) times better, but that's not the point.

Because this is the best rock album in history, and who cares if it stinks...

Where were we?

Ah, yes, we were at track five, but truth be told, I am missing words...

Let's say it starts with a few dissonant piano notes (at least I think) and then turns into a nightmare acid folk that sets off a kind of I don't know what...

But I am missing words, I told you...I'm really at a loss...

And I'm also at a loss for track six. So stop.

In the end, it seems to me that, perhaps, this music shouldn't be listened to on a record, perhaps you had to be there back then.

But then we weren't there, and even if we had been, we might have spent our time with dad and mom or with people like the Borussia Dortmund ultras (who are a fantastic team anyway)...

So, every now and then, it would be better to listen to this album, even if Duul II are much, much better.

Do this: out of ten, nine times listen to "Phallus dei" and once this.

Do this: still out of ten, six times listen to "Yeti" and four "Paradieswarts duul," our guys' second (fabulous, truly fabulous) album.

There, a miracle happened: the amateur improvisers learned to play.

But "Paradieswarts duul," one of the ten most beautiful kraut albums of the period, deserves a separate review.