Tangerine Dream, "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola"
We’re gonna stick in 1971 for another minute, but on a subject that couldn’t be further removed from Sly & the Family Stone and still qualify as rock. Not so long ago I mentioned “Fly and Collision of Comas Sola” (Apple Music, Spotify) in one of my psychedelia posts (see “Im Süden/ Hard Coming Love”), now I’m coming back to it again barely a month later. Here’s why.
Those among you who are subscribers know I publish to this Substack at 3:12 PM every Monday. Sometimes—and this is a peek behind the curtain—I don’t quite have the prose down and refined to my liking, and I’m right back into the text at 3:13 making post-deadline adjustments. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Not so last Monday, though, because at exactly 3:12 PM when my “Spaced Cowboy” post dropped, I was standing outside the Corner Bar in Progressive Field, staring at the sun. Seconds later, the new moon had completely obscured the solar disk, and Greater Cleveland subsisted in a phase of total eclipse for the next three minutes.
In the run-up to totality, I was listening to Tangerine Dream’s Alpha Centauri (Apple Music, Spotify). This wasn’t a random choice: lately I’m in a habit of going to Guardians baseball games by myself—or at least I’ve broken the seal on this as an option—and when I am alone in the park, I’ve been in the habit of playing Tangerine Dream over my headphones. That said, it was sheer happenstance that as the last margins of the sun lapsed into shadow, “Fly and Collision” was playing, and not only that, I was passing into that final, climactic phase of the song when Christopher Franke makes a sustained, powerful run at the drums and cymbals.
Thus and so, as the sun’s orange crescent was reduced to a thumbnail, then a sliver, then a line, and finally nothing, the unmitigated darkness signaling to me that I could now lift my cardboard eclipse glasses into an awkward perch on my forehead and look out at a boiling hole in the sky, shedding licks of radiation and a curled solar flare cedilla at 7:00 on the dial … well, for that stretch of time I was absolutely rocking out.
Fellow Guardians fans all around me stood and gawped, minds blown, prompting me to consider whether we might all react the same way if the team ever won the World Series. Somebody struck up an ironic chant of U-S-A! U-S-A!, which was a crack-up. Over the course of three days, the gods had taken away first Shane Bieber and then the sun, and in the time since, we’ve only had one of them come back. Even so, I have to believe that a total solar eclipse over the 216 on the day of the Guardians’ home opener has to signal an upward swing in the team’s fortunes. Cynics in The Readership will point out that over the centuries our historical forerunners have regarded eclipses as omens of bad luck. But honestly: could this franchise’s run of luck over the past 76 years get any worse? Certainly if totality in the CLE promises anything at all to Stephen Vogt’s Fightin’ Guardos, it has to mean we’ve bottomed out and are on the way up.
But let’s do some more digging into the phenomenon of Phutatorius hanging alone at ballgames jamming early 1970s German kosmische Musik through his Bose earbuds. It’s not that old a tradition, dating from only May 31, 2022. These days you can pin down precise dates for minutiae like The First Time I Listened to Tangerine Dream at a Baseball Game, because the Cleveland Guardians will have emailed you a receipt for your game ticket. I flew into town on a Tuesday, with a plan to see the ballgame that night and the Getaway Day game the following afternoon. My parents were to drive up from Warren on Wednesday, but I couldn’t get a bite from any fellow Guardos fans for Tuesday night. So I was on my own.
I splurged for a seat behind home plate, fourteen rows back. Expert tip: if you go to a game alone, you can snare that single seat five or six rows ahead of the best available pair. I felt a little sheepish walking through the gate, expecting I’d spend the next two-three hours alone in a setting where most every other attendee had family or friends with them. It triggered that teenage self-conscious flight syndrome, kinda sorta. But for someone of my advanced age and could-give-a-shit-ness, this trauma passes quickly. And given that I didn’t have anyone with me to entertain, I could enjoy the game, the park, and some piped-in music all at the same time.
I had plans to record with Carla the following night—another of our Carla and Brad Talk About Krautrock podcasts, this one about Tangerine Dream’s first record, Electronic Meditation (Apple Music, Spotify). If you listen to the resulting episode (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), you’ll hear that at least as of June 1, 2022, neither of us cared much for Tangerine Dream, as a general matter. We dismissed it as deep-fried New Age electro-twaddle, which is what TD’s output most certainly became, as they advanced deeper into their—no joke—half-century-long career.
But man, that first record was [chef’s kiss]. It was rock ‘n’ roll. Played by a proto-supergroup, if that can be a thing, comprised of:
Leonine surrealist Edgar Froese on guitar and organ. Froese would stick it out with Tangerine Dream for another forty-six years, until his death in 2015. Lineups came and went, with some twenty-one musicians passing through the band. The one constant was Froese.
Conrad Schnitzler on cello, violin, and general noisemaking. Schnitzler, who founded the rabble-rousing avant-garde Zodiac Free Arts Lab in Berlin, would leave T. Dream after this record to form Kluster with Moebius and Roedelius. Kluster would become Cluster upon his departure two years later.1
Klaus Schulze on drums. Klaus parted ways with Froese and joined Ash Ra Tempel for its rocking first record, before establishing himself as a solo electronic artist every bit as innovative, and almost as productive, as Tangerine Dream.
The Electronic Meditation record these three cooked up together is awesome. It’s experimental acid rock, played by at least two master musicians—that is, Froese and Schulze—with Schnitzler elbowing into the room to play Coyote Trickster Demon with found sounds and jarring Dadaist contributions. Oh, hell: I’m gonna put a Spotify embed here to make it even easier for you to play it … and to admire the bad-ass album cover.
Froese and Schulze honed their craft playing five-hour shows around Berlin. You can hear that on the record, not just because their guitar and drums sound so goddam good and effortless, but also because there’s no obvious compositional structure to most of these songs. Or put more precisely, the tracks uniformly have beginnings and middles, but the endings are flubbed and fudged—sometimes cut off completely, like the final scene of The Sopranos. Now and again they’ll throw in a production effect—like the sound of someone breathing—to jerk you out of the moment and distract you from the fact that there was no denouement, fadeout, or conception of an ending on the track that came before. This is the sound of a band adapting itself to the work of cabining its ambitions within the sides of a vinyl disc.
But it’s that raw, pick-up-and-play bad-assness that makes me love this record so much. It’s not jam-band jamming. It’s DIY rock jamming, with Schnitzler shaking peas in a sieve and crackling parchment paper into an open mic, just to sear the edges.
Anyway, I played Electronic Meditation extensively in the ballpark that evening—Guards over the Royals 8-3, thanks for asking—to make sure I had all its tracks fresh in my mind when we recorded the next day. I also crammed a little of Alpha Centauri, the next record, so I could comment on that when Carla and I talked, on a Where They Went Next basis. I was out of my seat, walking a loop around the park playing Alpha Centauri, because I remember having “Fly and Collision” in my cans as I stepped out of the left-field end of the lower concourse, rounding toward the home run porch.
I have to say, I didn’t love it. With Schulze gone, here was jazz drummer Chris Franke stepping up in his place. You can hear the difference in the style of play. There’s a rollicking feel to the beats. Not fully syncopated, but maybe halfway there and obviously jazz-informed. It felt like a big band brass ensemble could break out into “Sing Sing Sing” (Apple Music, Spotify) at any minute. And not just that: the guitars were in retreat. Why oh why oh why were they pulling back from the guitars?
Alpha Centauri is just one small step down the road away from the guitar- and drums-forward acid rock ethos of Electronic Meditation, toward where Tangerine Dream would land three years later with Phaedra (YouTube), their Moog-and-Mellotron magnum opus, with nary a stringed instrument in sight. But on that afternoon, that one step was a step too far. In the podcast episode we recorded the next day, you’ll hear that Earlier Iteration of Me mourning the passing of Froese-Schulze-Schnitzler Tangerine Dream.
Nowadays I’m kinda in love with Alpha Centauri. I bought a gorgeous clear-vinyl copy of the LP last January. It was heavily discounted at Newbury Comics. The sales racks there are jam-packed with dreck, but still an occasional gem can be found there, if you dig deep enough.2 I remember buying it, walking out into snow flurries, and having a burger at Mr. Bartley’s with Kate. A month later I was raving about “Ultima Thule, Part I” (Apple Music, Spotify) in my very first post here. See “You Spin Me Round.” That song isn’t on the album, but it was recorded by the same lineup and released as a single around the same time. My reissue of Alpha Centauri had that single packaged into it as a bonus disc.
The Ultima Thule single certainly softened me up for the greater Alpha Centauri LP, much as it probably did for listeners at the time of their respective releases: in February 1971 for the single, with the LP to follow in March. I just learned that “Fly and Collision” uses the same chord progression as “Ultima Thule, Part I”—something I might have picked up on my own, if I had enough of a background in musical structures—so of course loving the latter put me on a flight path to discovering and appreciating the former. It was a siren song.
I do feel a bit in danger here. Not like I did listening to Depeche Mode at age fourteen (see “Black Celebration”), but more like I’m parked three hundred yards outside the event horizon of a discographic vortex—108 records!—from which there may be no escape.
I mean, look: I already have a copy of Phaedra. I bought the first vintage copy I saw in a record store, because it’s one of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. For its part, Electronic Meditation is permissible Tangerine Dream. Julian Cope wrote about it, “If you think you’ve heard rock ‘n’ roll without hearing this LP, you are crazy.” But I haven’t been able to draw a line under it. Alpha Centauri got a hold of me, and lately I’ve been flirting with the next record, Zeit—which, notably, carries an image of a total solar eclipse on its cover. I’m concerned that if I’m not careful I’ll find myself owning and liking the first five T. Dream records through Phaedra, and I’ll be on the skids a quarter of the way down the slippery slope to dropping thirty bucks on their Risky Business soundtrack.
Because let’s be clear: they suck in the 1980s, and a mortal man with limited hours available to him to listen to music has to maintain a certain discipline and steer clear of black holes. I’m not faulting Froese here, or any of the others. You want to put the guitars down? Go ahead. It’s your life, and whatever twists and turns follow, we’ll always have these early records. Before Jefferson Starship sucked, they were Jefferson goddam Airplane. Nobody can take that away from them. I’m just mindful that two years ago I didn’t have room in my life for Alpha Centauri, and now I’m playing “Fly and Collision” on repeat on the turntable all weekend long. I could be the proverbial frog in the pot here with the burner on.
So let this be my solemn pledge today: from now through to the End of Days, my Tangerine Dream listening will be contained and confined to Electronic Meditation, the Ultima Thule single, Alpha Centauri, Zeit, and Phaedra. And maybe Atem, because I like what I’m reading about it. I’ve got a lot of baseball ahead of me, after all. Speaking of getting sucked deeper and deeper into Something That’s Not Good For You …
On that subject, let’s get back to the ballpark. Through the 2023 Guardians season, this year’s spring training, and now the home opener, I’ve had multiple occasions to check out my hapless and beloved baseball team in person and unaccompanied. Last June I had seats with Bob and his son. Son wolfed down too much ballpark food and got sick early on; Bob and son went home. That game went deep into extras, and I spent many of the middle innings jamming Electronic Meditation and Alpha Centauri. Last month I spent three days in Arizona watching Cactus League baseball. Stayed at a Super 8 in Goodyear, steps away from a McDonald’s and a transmission repair shop, worked full days starting at 6 AM and then went alone to Guardos’ exhibition games. Just like at Progressive Field, something about the combination of alone and in a ballpark cued me to plug into T. Dream. And then again during the eclipse, at the home opener.
I’m not sure what ties neurons together in this way. There’s nothing about a Cleveland baseball experience that fits with kosmische rock. There’s usually a point where I pull out of the Tangerine Dream vibe and toggle over to the Guardians Radio Network for the game broadcast. The climbdown from the firing synths, regal organ smears, and flute-forward mix to Tom Hamilton’s cries of STRIKE! THREE! CALLED! is pretty stark. For that matter, baseball and T. Dream are an odd juxtaposition even when I have the music on. Early Tangerine Dream is music for interstellar travel—for enjoying the silence of deep space and for steeling your nerves for a singeing nebular transit and the rumble and burn of atmospheric reentry. So yeah: a bit incongruous to be playing this stuff while anthropomorphic hot dog figures are slingshotting wadded-up T-shirts into the crowd, grown men are chicken-dancing on the Jumbotron over left field, and volunteers are passing by behind me shouting out a 50-50 raffle.
But for all that, T. Dream is right where my brain goes when I step up to the gates at Progressive Field, or for that matter Goodyear Ballpark, and I present my bar code for scanning. (Remember when they tore tickets? We may not be in space per se, but we’re surely in the Space Age.) So it went last Monday, except that on this particular occasion, it so happened that baseball, “Fly and Collision of Comas Sola,” and a generationally rare astronomical event came together for three minutes at the Corner of Carnegie and Ontario. And in this moment, “Fly and Collision” didn’t mean a ball was dropped in the outfield. Mercifully, there’s no Comas Sola on the Guardians roster.
Rather, for three minutes Nature and Artifice worked together to deliver a convergence of sight and sound that stirred and reached into the brain of this this 50-year-old man and stirred and swelled his stale spirits. That was pretty darned cool, and after the sun came back, the Guardians won 4-0 in front of a sellout crowd of 35,735. What did I say about their luck changing?
Moe and Roe lost their K when Schnitzler left, but they never lost their luster. Heh heh.
Just last Christmas I found the Neu! box set banished to the discount section: a beacon of coral orange screaming RESCUE ME, for UNDER $100. In the moment, I failed to act. One way or the other, box sets present a conundrum: either you have none or very few of the records contained inside, in which case you’re taking a big risk buying it, or you’ve already bought most or all of them separately, so that re-buying them in new packaging feels like an extravagance. In this case, it was the latter: I couldn’t justify buying these records all over again, when children were starving somewhere.
After spending most of my holiday vacation knocked flat by influenza (see “Saturday Night in the City of the Dead”), I changed my mind. You deserve this, I said to myself. Now get right back into Harvard Square and buy yourself that Neu! box set. By the time I arrived, on New Year’s Eve, it had sold. [shakes fist] But at least I know it wasn’t sitting there, marked down and stigmatized, for very long.