What Was Old is Neu! Again (Part 3 of 3)

Continued from Part Two…

In Perfect Harmonia (continued)
A subsequent performance would yield more positive results. “We once played in Hamburg,” he recalls. “That was 1974, and there was a small crowd; maybe 50 to 70 people in that venue.” In the first row of the audence were three men, all dressed in black. “One was a German journalist, our fan,” Rother says, laughing again. “We had one! Another was Brian Eno.” That was the first meeting between the former Roxy Music member and the German musicians. Longtime admirers of each others’ work, they quickly became close friends as well.

1975’s Deluxe replaced the drum machines with Guru Guru mainstay Mani Neumeier on real drums. Plank co-produced the album with Harmonia. Rother emphasizes just how important Plank’s role was. “Conny had the ability of hearing the elements when they were maybe not even completely born, like the first notes on the guitar,” he says. “Everything was happening quite fast, but even then he was certainly ahead of us. He knew what was coming together. He saw it happening.”

The songs on Deluxe moved in the direction of Rother’s more pop-oriented aesthetic. The breathtaking “Monza (Rauf Und Runter)” suggests what – in a perfect world – that ill-fated fusion of Neu! and Cluster might have sounded like. But tensions between Rother’s rocking, tuneful approach and his ex-Cluster band mates eventually led to disagreements among the trio. The members of Harmonia went their own ways after releasing just two albums.

“By summer ‘76, Roedelius and Moebius no longer believed in the project,” Rother says. But before Harmonia’s final dissolution, the group briefly reunited, this time teaming up with Brian Eno. Though the results of that studio collaboration would go unreleased for more than two decades (eventually finding release as Tracks and Traces), the late-period Harmonia hinted at possibilities yet unexplored.

For his part, Eno would build upon those possibilities soon enough. His mid-’70s trilogy of (in the loosest sense of the term) pop albums – 1974’s Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Another Green World from 1975 and Before and After Science (1977) all display the influence of Harmonia, filtered through Eno’s own unique sensibility.

Looking back, Roedelius says that Harmonia wasn’t particularly successful on a commercial level. “I’m not sure about whether it really [encouraged] the label to continue working with us,” he says. “But they wanted to do it, and it worked out for a period of two years.” With some sadness, Rother concurs. “We recorded two albums that were commercial failures, disasters,” he says.

Roedelius says that by the end of that time, he was ready to move on to something else. “My aim was always out of the moment,” he explains. Live performance in a conventional rock-band manner held no interest for the experimentally-inclined musician. “To rehearse always the same tracks, that was not my thing,” he insists. “Always doing the same thing? That’s not my aim.”

Yet Roedelius – who has released more than 100 albums across more than a half-century – acknowledges that the work he did with Harmonia has made an impression. “Oh, yes,” he concedes. “It was new and it was fresh, and it was with rhythm. It was sort of German popular music for the first in that time. There should be some influence, I think.” In fact it’s difficult to imagine such groundbreaking albums as Brian Eno’s Another Green World existing were it not for earlier tracks like Harmonia’s “Ahoi.”

Neu! and Then
Rother says that he was ready to continue with Harmonia, but with Moebius and Roedelius opting out, he returned to his on-again-off-again musical collaboration with Dinger, reactivating Neu! and making what is perhaps the group’s most accessible outing, the proto-punk Neu! ‘75. One of that album’s standout tracks, “Hero” would exert a major influence on British singer John Lydon when (as Johnny Rotten) he fronted a new group, Sex Pistols.

In the years after Harmonia and Neu!, Rother launched a solo career. Though much of his work wouldn’t be released outside of Europe until reissues in the CD era, his first three solo albums – 1977’s Flammende Herzen, 1978’s Sterntaler and Katzenmusik from 1979 – were all significant sellers in West Germany. Displaying a more melodic spin on the Neu! concept, those albums combined effective use of keyboards with Rother’s always-compelling guitar work. Drumming from motorik pioneer Jaki Liebzeit helped connect it sonically with Neu!’s early work.

Rother admits that the comparatively mainstream success of his early solo records caught him somewhat by surprise. “It was suddenly like a rocket,” he says. “I remember getting these phone calls from the label, Sky Records, every two weeks: ‘I have to re-press another 3,000!’” He looks back on those days as “an incredibly happy time. The basic idea of my music hadn’t changed at all, but my musical ideas were suddenly accepted!”

Underscoring the artistic esprit de corps he shares with former collaborator Roedelius, Rother emphasizes that such mainstream success was never a goal. “There was no evaluation of commercial potential or [anything] like that,” he says. “It was this: ‘I feel it. I like it. It touches me.’”

And Rother has continued to be surprised by the long lasting, far-reaching influence of his work with Neu! and Harmonia. He recalls first learning about Stereolab and Sonic Youth, two groups who proudly count his work as an inspiration. “Somebody told me, ‘There’s this band who has a track called “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!”’,” he says with a burst of laughter. “I thought, ‘That’s funny!’”

Today Rother remains busy with a wide array of projects, both in the recording studio and on the concert stage. In recent years he has mounted touring tributes to Neu! (Dinger passed away in 2008) and Harmonia, while continuing to make new music of his own. A frequent collaborator these days is Italian singer and electronic musician (and Rother’s life partner) Vittoria Maccabruni. The couple are among the artists featured on the second disc of the new, expanded reissue of Musik von Harmonia. Their rework of Harmonia music features throbbing synthesizer and an icy Maccabruni vocal reminiscent of Velvet Underground-era Nico. Seven other artists contribute their own remixes and/or reworks, helping connect the music Harmonia made a half century ago with the present day.

Asked how he feels with the knowledge that an entire new generation now has the opportunity to hear and learn about Neu! and Harmonia, Rother is candid. “It sounds like boasting, but I knew we were ambitious,” he says. “I stopped copying the Anglo-American music tradition [because] I knew I couldn’t continue that path anymore.” He characterizes his work in the early ‘70s as “assembling little bricks of musical ideas, hoping that someday a house would develop.”

And if someone back then had told him that people would be discussing and listening to that music in 2024? Michael Rother smiles broadly and replies, “I probably would have just started laughing!”