APRIL 20, 2024, Kunstpalast art museum, Düsseldorf. Eberhard Kranemann, now 79, is playing explosive free jazz guitar inside a partial recreation of the city’s legendary underground club, Creamcheese. He is accompanying his younger self, leading his proto-industrial band PISSOFF on a recording made at the original Creamcheese on May 6, 1968. Behind Kranemann, a screen shows footage of the city’s shamanic Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, deadpan in a fedora and trench coat as he semaphored hand-signals in response to PISSOFF’s set that night, 56 years previously.
A Düsseldorf nexus of visual art and music, inspired by Andy Warhol’s The Dom and named after Zappa’s fictional character Suzy Creemcheese, the club was opened in 1967 by artist Günther Uecker. Televisions, installed along the walls, were permanently switched on – as were many of the clientele. “We smoked a lot of dope and took a lot of LSD there,” says Kranemann. It was a world of revolutionary sound and vision that timid, flute-playing student Florian Schneider-Esleben wished to enter. This, maintains Kranemann, is where Kraftwerk began.
“PISSOFF was anti-music,” Kranemann says. “It was very rough material. Free, free music. Only art students or some people who were against society came at first. It was a protest, a revolution against shit society, shit parents, shit politicians – to destroy everything! Florian liked it very much, and asked me, ‘Can I play with you?’ We had a big gig at the Art Academy, Düsseldorf, in 1967, with Tangerine Dream and Guru Guru, and Florian played with me in PISSOFF. Then Florian and I met in our homes to make other kinds of music experiments. First only us two played together. Then the next year, Florian met Ralf Hütter…”
Revolution, confrontation, LSD trips… this is all a world away from the incarnation of Kraftwerk who are in residence this month at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. As Kraftwerk, in various forms, has done for decades, four band members stand in a line behind podiums. Now only
