In a thread entitled Band You’ve Had NO Success Turning Friends Onto, Townsperson Petesecrutz bemoaned:
I have faced much difficulty in turning friends on to Amon Düül and Amon Düül II.
I believe this is the band I’d seen small, mail-order ads for in ’70s magazines like Trouser Press. Wasn’t there always something a bit pathetic about this band’s attempts at selling their music? I seem to recall them having a proto-Dungeons & Dragons luster that made critics snigger. However, as I often find while reading Comments on Rock Town Hall, I became intrigued by Petesecrutz’s very personal plight. Shortly thereafter, I figured I’d give this band another try.
I’d sampled some of their songs in the past, but they didn’t click. I can’t recall which album I started with, but this time I went on eMusic and started with something called Wolf City by version II of the band.
I sampled a number of tracks and, among others, downloaded the following:
Amon Düül II, “Jail-House-Frog”
Let’s face it, for a fan of The Doors‘ “Peace Frog”, the title was highly appealing. Before this number peters out into peaceful frog sounds and then an early Roxy Music-style jam, it’s got that slightly awkward twin-guitar attack I love on The Pretty Things‘ SF Sorrow album. I have a friend who gets mad at me for liking that album. “They can’t write a song to save their life!” he yells at me. I could care less with that twin-guitar fuzztone they get. “Jail-House-Frog” was not the revelatory slice of hippie-psych I’d hoped for, but it was worth trying some more downloads.
Amon Düül II, “Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge”
All right, now here’s some of the smelly, hippie, communal-living, psych-rock that I’d been hoping to hear! Many moons ago, when I dated a hardcore Deadhead girl who surprised me by owning a bunch of Gong albums among her Dead boots and the Dead Package Deal of assorted albums by The Band, Van Morrison, and Little Feat – and James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. I borrowed a stack of Gong albums, certain to find enlightenment. It was not to be. Have you ever heard that band? They’re all the in-my-face, look-at-the-trails-maaaaaan, hackey-sack kicking nonsense that turns me off about the Deadhead sideshow. Gong did not deliver, but had they delivered way back when, they might have sounded like Amon Düül II playing “Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge”.
For those of you who know me well, as much as I can enjoy the unintentionally funny stuff and guitar tones of such music, these two songs from Wolf City did not exactly strike paydirt, but they held promise for getting me to the next level, the Cult Admirer stage of a rock nerd’s life. The album Yeti, which I downloaded in full, might be the bridge I sought!
On Yeti, the guitars are more slashing, sounding a bit like Piper at the Gates of Dawn-era Pink Floyd and, perhaps not so strangely, New Picnic Time-era Pere Ubu or Television. David Thomas and Tom Verlaine strike me as the sort of loner, weirdo-visionaries who would have sent away for mail-order albums advertised in the back pages of Trouser Press by this band. Check out the following tracks from Yeti.
Amon Düül II, “Burning Sister”
Amon Düül II, “Eye Shaking King”
Sophomore year in college, right at the end of the year, I made friends with a tall, super-rock nerd guy from somewhere deep in the midwest who, I’m sure, also sent away for these records. I wish I could remember the guy’s name, but I left that school following sophomore year, never to return. I can still picture his thick, straw-textured, strawberry blonde hair and British politician/Michael Caine-style ’70s glasses. We’d listen to The Residents, King Crimson, and other records that ensured that neither of us would ever get any closer to the lips of (another) Deadhead girl who’d bravely hang with us during these rock nerd power-lifting sessions than the bong we’d pass her way.
I don’t reasonably expect that the hard-won Rock Nerd Turn-On Points now due to Petesecrutz will immediately pay dividends for me, but this is my way of saying Mad Props to a Townsperson who wouldn’t give up. Keep on truckin’, you space hippie freak.
I’m happy to see that my sad failure to turn others on to this band had some success. I recommend Yeti and Tanz der Lemming as “key” Amon Duul II recordings. The other recording are rather hit and miss compared to those two which I hold in high regard.
Any band that’ll release an album called PHALLUS DEI is alright by me. Plus I’ve always been fond of the unfounded urban legend that all of Amon Duul I’s albums were recorded during one 24-hour acid-fuelled jam session and then sliced into album length chunks.
Hint: try PARADIESWARTS DUUL next. Spacier, mellower stuff overall.
This is encouraging. Already I’ve got 2 Amon Duul buddies. Who else wants to hang with us?
Yeti is one of my all time fave Krautrock records.
I’ve got that Paradise and Warts album, courtesy of a friend. Not exactly the kind of thing I’d listen to too much, or too closely, but just right for those occasional moments of wanting to transcend the space-time continuum.