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September 1968: Freak-out: The Krautrock Revolution begins with Amon Düül
Among the guitars-the muff of 1000 years: Before September 25, 1968, shameful Elvis imitators such as Peter Kraus the sound of German rock music. Of course there were braving beating bands like the Rattles, but hardly anyone dared a radically own style. “Germany had a skimming at the time. As a young person, they wanted to make a clear setting,” recalls Uschi Obermaier, one of the few icons of early German pop. She witnessed the birth of the German underground rock live. In September 1968, at the “International Essen Song Days”, she stood on stage with Amon Düül and waved Maracas.
The municipality, founded in Munich in 1967 by the guitarist and violinist Chris Karrer, had traveled together with children and dogs at the Essen Festival. In addition to the German representatives The Guru Groove (who later later guru guru), Tangerine Dream and Floh de Cologne, the collective freak-out of Amon Düül made the difference. In his standard work “Kraut dryer”, Julian Cope describes the band’s early pieces as “Extraordinary Classics and Extremly Raw”. A song by the Düül debut “Psychedelic Underground”, which was recorded in 1968 but only published in 1969, finally gave the young genre his name: “Mama Düül and her sauerkraut band plays up”. The British music press, including John Peel, was enthusiastic – the term Krautrock was born …
Despite the devastating reviews at the time, “Psychedelic Underground” is now a cult album, especially in Neo-Psychedelic and Psychedelic and Psychedelic circles. It is definitely the first real Krautkrock plate, even if “Phallus Dei” is certainly the more well-known album of the band that was already fragmented in Amon Düül and Amon Düül II. Anyone who hears the work today should consider what condition this music was created and was consumed. Contemporary witness Obermaier describes the usual state of awareness of the herb rocker: “I was disappointed from the first time marijuana smoking. I thought the walls would move-and nothing happened. Later there was acid trips where the walls really moved. Light explosions and so, there was something.”