Amon Düül II are perhaps best known as a krautrock band that grew out of a 1970s hippy commune in Munich. But dropping out of modern industrial society was always the farthest thing from their minds. Amon Düüll II wanted to change the world with their music, and for a long time they believed they would. "I never was a hippy!” recalls lead singer Renate Knaup in a 1996 interview with The Wire’s Edwin Pouncey. “I was a fighter. We were all fighters."
“Avant-garde” in the most literal sense, Amon Düül II hammered out their space rock jams at the frontlines of the 1968 student rebellions in Germany, providing a live soundtrack for protests and sit-ins and brandishing the slogan "everyone is a musician" -- a kind of youth-culture echo of artist Joseph Beuys’ "everyone is an artist." Like their more militant West German contemporaries (including the terrorist and strangely glamorized Red Army Faction), Amon Düül II seemed to blur the boundaries between politics and spectacle. But guitars and amplifiers were their weapons of choice, favoring group exaltation and expanded political awareness over bombs and bank robberies.
After splitting from what guitarist and songwriter John Weinzieri has called the “non-musical” members of the group, popularly known as Amon Düül I, the five remaining members set about creating a more traditional rock band. Although they never lost their taste for the long-winded group improvisations of the commune’s early years, their 1970s discography describes their evolution from a clan of wayward freedom-seekers into a mighty revolutionary unit.
With Wolf City (1973), their sixth album, the group yielded their most accessible offering to date and perhaps their most beautiful. The tracklisting alone signifies the overall tightening of their sound, with six out of the album’s seven tracks clocking in under six minutes. If the era of the 20-minute shamanistic freakout was over for Amon Düül II, this concentration of musical space left room for new vocal talent. And that talent was founding member Renate Knaup, whose stentorian alto had gradually crept its way up to the front of the mix, commanding enough to make even the most hard-nosed rock ‘n’ roller pick up a book of études.
People who believe overtly political art is bad art are usually not that far off the mark, but Wolf City steers clear of one important pitfall: though brimming with references to world hunger, economic imperialism, and prison reform, its structure is challenging enough to prevent it from descending into left-wing propaganda. As they leap between ice-slick bass grooves and explosions of rusty violin, loud-speaker diatribes, and German operettas, Amon Düül II pull off the kind of epic harmonic surprises that are usually found in classical music. We can hear this even in “Green- Bubble-Raincoated-Man,” the album’s most compulsively listenable number, where a simple chord change transforms a lockstep warrior chant into a cosmic guitar whirlwind.
For anyone who has ever wondered what it must have felt like to be in Germany or France during the late '60s and early '70s, Wolf City is probably a good place to start: the riffs on this album are positively blood-pumping, and it's hard not to feel like you are the edge of a historical precipice when you listen to it -- especially today. But Amon Düül were not looking for cheap thrills; more than rile up the masses, they reminded us that in order to bring about a change in attitude, music must also change the way we listen.
1. Surrounded by the Stars
2. Green-Bubble-Raincoated-Man
3. Jail-House-Frog
4. Wolf City
5. Wie der Wind am Ende einer Strasse
6. Deutsch Nepal
7. Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge
8. Kindermörderlied [bonus track]
9. Mystic Blutsturz [bonus track]
10. Düülirium [bonus track]
