7.06.2008

Going Beyond Yeti

If you follow along, you know that I often wake up wanting to hear German Psychedelic Music. I once treated you to a video of "Soap Shop Rock" and hoped you would seek some of this out. Most readers prolly already have affinity for Amon Duul II, so this might just be incidental, but I like to make with the grand statements, the realizations of truth, and I can honestly profess that Amon Duul II was the greatest band on the planet at one time. The belief used to be that all one needed from their discography was Yeti, after all it's become synonymous with Krautrock and is the cover of Julian Cope's indispensable Krautrocksampler.

I had flirted with a couple other albums around the same time but had always come back to the "Archangels Thunderbird." Lately though (blame it on the Terrastock) I've been sucking up all of it -- especially the album's after that -- Carnival in Babylon, Wolf City, Viva La Trance, and the most overlooked of the bunch Made in Germany, which is disputably the country's first rock opera. Don't get me wrong, Sabbath is a behemoth among mortal men, but imagine being an acid-washed, burnt-out, bomb-sheltered, teen in post-war Bavaria? Were I that kid, there wouldn't be much left of my b-cells. It's easy to like both sides of the band, but once they were of the impression that their arena-fortified stone-age metal would save their civilization, they were absolutely loco (by retaining the penchant to jam on forever, incoporating a stage-show, smoke and mirrors, wild costumes, more drugs). This (below) isn't that yet, but if anyone can direct me towards a dvd document of the band I'm all eyes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

beast of a band. it's a crime that Yeti isn't kept in print.

my favorite post-Yeti record is the eponymous Utopia LP from 71. it was a side project, but has been reissued a few times under the Amon Duul II name. the original pops up on ebay pretty often and goes really cheap.

check it out if you haven't heard it.