Wednesday, February 21, 2024

The Craft Work of Kraftwerk [PT II]

In part 1 we looked at various quotes from members of the group Kraftwerk as well as friends/associates. We considered whether they are/were not just an "influential music group," but some sort of international cultural engineering vehicle. We observed that founders Ralf Hütter [RH] and Florian Schneider [FS] seemed to be the "gatekeepers" representing a publicly invisible think-tank, which I am calling "The Organization," behind Kraftwerk. Given the seemingly inpenetrable wall of secrecy surrounding The Organization, we can only hope to reach conclusions indirectly, by analyzing the group's music, image, statements to the press over the years, and other circumstantial evidence.

While some may find this exercise boring, pointless, or even offensive, nobody can deny the eccentric/secretive nature of the group's founders. Secrets naturally invite curiosity, even obsession. We are not robots, who simply follow the protocol or whatever narrative is fed to us. We are inquisitive, and want to know about our environment and where information comes from and who is producing it. We are self aware. We are HUMAN.

YOU ARE THE ROBOTS

[The Jackson 5 performs "the Robot" dance with Cher on Soul Train, circa 1973]

Michael Jackson came on the phone around 1985/6 during the Electric Cafe period. He wanted to have permission to use the original Man Machine multi track….Ralf and Florian refused... - Karl Bartos [KB]

David Bowie and Michael Jackson are just a couple of major pop icons who were famously "denied" a music collaboration with Kraftwerk. But were these just urban myths sensationalized by the press, designed to make the larger "robotic agenda" seem more organic and less intentionally manufactured? In a sense, these collaborations happened anyway, by way of influence.

[It is widely known that David Bowie fueled the popularity of Kraftwerk prior to and during his Berlin years 1976-77…He played the Radio-Activity album as a prelude to his own performances in a 1976 tour and even considered hiring Kraftwerk as his support group. - Pertti Grönholm]

Since Bowie could not obtain Kraftwerk as his back-up band, he went with British synthesizer legend Brian Eno, of Roxy Music fame. Together, they wrote 3 albums, dubbed Bowie's "Berlin trilogy," of which the song "Heroes" would probably be the most recognizable. The album "Heroes" contains a song called "V-2 Schneider" in homage to Florian Schneider, if the Kraftwerk influence was not obvious enough already.

The Maschinenmensch (literally 'machine-human' in German) is a fictional robot featured in Thea von Harbou's novel Metropolis and Fritz Lang's [1927] film adaption of the novel...Maschinenmensch was one of the first fictional robots ever depicted in cinema, and as a result popularized the concept worldwide. - wiki

You, the journalists, you will be amazed. One day, the robots will be the ones who will answer your questions, they will have an electronic brain and memories with all the possible questions. To get the answers, you will only have to press a button. - RH

The Robots were entirely appropriate to Computer World - thematically, at any rate - because, after all, home computers are nothing more than electronic servants, carrying out our orders and commands at the touch of a button, and this is happening in every office, in every household and in every child’s bedroom, day and night. - Wolfgang Flur [WF]

…What was significant for us [about the first Star Wars film], to my mind, was the 2 robots. C-3PO was clearly recognizable as the male version of the machine woman from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis…Even before Star Wars…The press too referred to us as human machines, robots, androids, or mannequins. These comparisons were by no means intended positively…a critic complained: “Kraftwerk has dehumanized its musicians into robots.”…A German journalist, exhausted from listening to Trans-Europe Express declared: “After 2 sides of Kraftwerk, I feel more like a robot myself.”…Star Wars and particularly C-3PO and R2-D2 changed that negative view. - KB

The image of the robot is very important to us, it’s very stimulating to people’s imaginations. We always found that many people are robots without knowing it…So, we have opened the curtains and said, “look, everyone can be robotic, controlled.” In Paris, the people go on the Metro, they move, they go to their offices, 8am in the morning - it’s like remote control. It’s strange…but at the same time it’s funny, full of humor….I think that the things speak for themselves. That’s one reason why I don’t like to explain so much what we do. - FS

I find that the robots are funny - let’s say between funny and…it’s like horror movies, it can be funny and it can be horrific or magical. It depends upon your point of view. - FS

It's always fascinating to look back and observe certain individuals accurately predicting what will occur in the near future. But in the case of RH and FS, do we give them too much credit concerning such predictions? What I mean to say, is that perhaps they were not merely geniuses who could see into the future. Perhaps they were privy to information via the Organization directly related to what they were doing. I'm talking about an actual PLAN to help dehumanize the culture through a mechanical type of music. To DELIBERATELY make their audience more robotic. Controlled. It is quite easy to "predict the future" when you are in possession of the playbook being implemented by the powers that be! And it is very easy to see the purpose of all this: to gain a greater level of control over the population.

Consider FS's quotation above noting the robotic nature of everyday people in their daily commute to work. Now think of New York city rush hour traffic. Los Angeles commuters...What we have here is modern urban work culture, which is robotic in nature. Now put your hands together and in your best Mr Burns impression, ask the question: How do we turn everyday leisure into the same controlled robotic dance? How do we turn people's socializing and even their sleep into a controlled robotic operation?

We humans are completely unimportant, interchangeable. That’s what we want to demonstrate with our dummies. We say what’s interesting about us through our music. We don’t consider ourselves rockstars just because we sell alot of records. We’re scientists. We experiment with our machines every day. We research and then we deliver the results - music. - RH, BRAVO teen magazine

We are told Michael Jackson invented "the robot," a dance routine which emulates a non-human machine trying to move like a human. It's quite an odd concept when you think about it! Why would you want to deliberately try and move like a machine incapable of the exact fluid motions of humans? From this perspective, MJ would seem like the ultimate "show room dummy" or trained animal. An embodiment of the glorification of self-dehumanization. Now think about what this does to an audience. Mesmerized, they feel compelled to learn and emulate these same movements. To behave more like...robots? You must imagine yourself inside the mind of an extremely evil power mongering individual to comprehend the larger implications here. You want to control people on a MASS scale. This is how you do it!

Talented as MJ was, are we again giving too much credit to someone for "inventing" something that was perhaps being done under instruction of an invisible organization? It may sound like an absurd suggestion, but consider how easy it is for people to accept that MJ was robbed of his childhood by his father and other shady industry types so that they could capitalize upon his raw talent. It's easy for people to visualize that, but for some reason it's much harder for people to grasp that a larger intellectual agenda may also have been driving MJ's exploitation, and his deliberate influence upon American culture and beyond.

THE GERMAN INVASION

One such episode occurred in 1982 with a certain Afrika Bambaataa, who released an album called Planet Rock…put together a hip-hop rap album on which they mixed parts of “Numbers” and “Trans Europe Express” for a single release…They didn’t even ask…this is the nastiest kind of theft! - WF

Up to the end of the 19th century, it was general practice in Western music to repeat rhythms in regularly accented patterns known as pulse groups…Exactly like in our modern pop music, the schematic repetition of these beats made listeners feel safe. We might describe it these days as “a groove.” We might compare it to the constitutions on which today’s societies are founded, which we tend to forget in daily life when everything is working well. But if they are overruled, or suspended anarchy breaks out. - KB

During the session, our polyglot Ralf remembered his basic Russian and pointed out to us that the word Robot - robots - originally has a slavic root, meaning work. Then he had the idea of having the robot add a line of Russian to our sound collage: Ya tvoi slugs, ya tvoi rabotnik” - I am your servant, I am your worker.” Ralf and Florian then brought a number of Russian visual artists into play…I think it was the very next day that we ended up poring over a book about the work of El Lissitzky, which Ralf had opened up on our mixing desk.

“Kraftwerk Members…are surprised at their success in the disco scene!” - Billboard full page ad, Oct 22 1977

…we decided to produce a few mixes in the Kling Klang Studio to test for danceability…we made regular trips to the Morocco disco in Cologne…we listened to our music under dance-floor conditions with a full house. - KB

Our ideas really come from our experience…everyday life. We are playing the machines, the machines play us, it is really the exchange and the friendship we have with the musical machines… RH

...as well as Mora’s Lover’s club, there were a few other night-clubs we would look into…This was where we carried out our “sociocultural studies” and felt close to the music of the day and the audience’s reactions. - KB

…In America, there was always a large part of the audience which was dancing, the black audience, hispanic, Hispano-American…Electronic music is really a world language, it is the music of a global village. RH

As we read these quotations, an image starts to appear in the mind. Not of a music group, but a social/cultural engineering team. Scientists, clearly using their extentive education in various areas of expertise and applying it to their musical movements and marketing. But to what end exactly? This never seems to be clearly stated by the group. Maybe that's because it is completely obvious and in your face already! "We are the Robots." The Man-Machine. Die Mensch-Maschine. Do they really need to spell it out any clearer? To do so outside of the music would spoil the mesmerizing spell.

Ralf Hutter articulates Kraftwerk's success within America's Black/Hispanic dance clubs as a positive thing, if somewhat vaguely. Who would have thought that a soft spoken, conservative, highly educated, classically trained white German musician would be most responsible for creating popular dance music dominated by American Blacks and Latinos? A type of music [hip-hop] that would more or less fuse itself with American black culture, and at times be used as a vehicle upon which to express black pride and specific distinction from white culture, whatever that is?

I don't think it's a coincidence that Kraftwerk's output slowed down substantially after their 1981 "Computer World" album and Afrika Bambaataa's sampling of their music the following year. The birth of Hip-Hop and all sorts of electronic pop dance music seemed to coincide with the "decline" of Kraftwerk. But I'm not so sure this is the most accurate description, popular as it tends to be. Perhaps what some viewed as a "decline" was actually the accomplishment of a monumantal goal: The perminent establishment of "robot-culture" through music! Once this goal was reached, the group had less purpose - hense their apparent lack of output since the 80s. After the immense success of "Computer World," the goal of the group seemed to be "now, just keep it going. Put out an album every so often, tour, re-issue the old catalog, and just drive home the same messaging. Keep the machine moving forward, like a cyclist training for the Tour De France..."

Apparently, Afrika Bambaataa settled with Kraftwerk in a legal ruling where the former must pay royalties to the latter for use of their music on the classic "Planet Rock" single. While most news articles on this topic tend to depict Kraftwerk as some assholes from Germany who won't let someone sample their music for free, no one ever considered the idea that Afrika Bambaataa may have had permission all along. There could have been a "secret" agreement that they would use the music, and Kraftwerk would get a cut, in order to introduce "Robot-Pop" to a wider American audience somewhat covertly. Meanwhile, the public would be told it was all done without permission and court hearings would be held to ensure the willful collaboration was not detected. Even the musicians themselves could be hidden from the truth, so that only those who "needed to know" would be aware of it.

ORIGINS AND PHILOSOPHY

The Essen Song Days were organized by a team led by the eccentric Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, a music journalist who later founded the krautrock labels Ohr and Kosmische Kuriere before suffering a mental breakdown and retreating from the scene. He was inspired by the Monterey Pop Festival of the previous year but wanted to mix pop and politics more overtly at Essen, invoking the New Left, quoting Herbert Marcuse in the booklet for the festival, and stating that "songs don't make a revolution but songs accompany revolutions." - 70s Krautrock in Germany

It put a lot of new ideas out to a much wider audience, firstly through attracting some 40,000 people to watch, listen and participate in events held across the city, and shortly afterwards, when the documentary Zwischen Pop and Politics was broadcast on German television.

The underground scene in Germany in 1968 really arose through the influence of flower power from San Francisco, the musical HAIR, and also somewhat through the politicized ’68 movement throughout Europe. - Konrad Mallison

One day, I got a surprising opportunity to see the Steve Reich Ensemble…The music put me into a kind of hypnosis…The music’s psychological effect is based on taking familiar-sounding musical material and subjecting it to constant repetition…this sound…leads to a new experience of time. If you engage with it, it develops a musical undertow that puts the listener into a trance like state. KB

They [Ralf and Florian] not only had a perfect knowledge of rock but also jazz. - Marc Zermati, French label Skydog

I'm not prepared to get into the early origins of Krautrock in any sort of detail, but it is important to touch upon it briefly and to observe the primitive mechanics that was theoretically behind it.

As I stated in part I, the birth of Krautrock seemed to evolve out of German exposure to 60s psychedelic rock. The Monterey Pop festival in America was the famous concert where Jimi Hendrix, endeavoring to top The Who, lit his guitar on fire. It is known that a CIA presence was there, and had copious amounts of LSD distributed to attendees. In retrospect, some view the Monterey Pop Festival as a contrived event who's purpose was to test LSD's military application, by dosing large numbers of people and taking note of the responses. Large scale mind control. From this perspective, we might view the "eccentric" Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and his motives behind The Essen Song Days a bit differently. It seems plain to me that this was just another international deep state operation designed to import the psychedelic mind control experiments to German Youth and to help shape the post war culture there. This seems to have spawned the "artistic" German culture from which Kraftwerk originally arose.

…there had just been a lot of noise, and their performance had sounded like stukka air raids - they obviously enjoyed imitating the sounds of war. It certainly wasn’t music and I was horrified…As I later learned, this was experimental music… - WF

Maybe the idea was to try to achieve a concept, it worked better later, of course. But today we don’t consider the first albums as important works… FS

The first 2 Kraftwerk albums utilized more traditional musical equipment, but experimented with a variety of rhythms, sounds, and beats. It wasn't "standard music" and would be regarded as unlistenable to some, because on a certain level, it really WASN'T music, but an actual experiment in sonic extremes. Various performances were carried out along side art shows in the German underground to an audience which seemed to be searching for a culture of their own in a post-war country that would probably prefer to delete the past 40 years and start from scratch. Or...were audiences being HERDED into a new culture, which was being cultivated for them?

Time-wise, the leap from Kraftwerk I to Autobahn was about 4 years. Sonically, it was a leap from traditional instruments to entirely electronic based ones. Everything in between was literally an experiment in how audiences would react to various forms of sound stimulation, and in many cases, mixed with visuals [This is more or less what early Pink Floyd was doing in England during their Syd Barrett era at places like the UFO Club. Germany had a similarly short lived club called the Zodiac]. Autobahn was the last of a 3-album record deal with Philips, and was clearly and deliberately crafted into something far more digestible and accessable, if still very experimental compared to most pop music of the day.

In technical terms, I would describe Autobahn as having far cleaner and distinct SOUND SEPARATION, in the same sense we might refer to COLOR SEPARATION in photo graphics terminology. With electric sounds, one could achieve a far greater level of sound separation, thus allowing for greater sonic control of the frequencies themselves. This took another great leap forward in the digital age, at which time Kraftwerk more or less abandoned the habit of releasing albums and proceeded to spend all of their time converting their catalog into a digital format, in order to continue their sonic experiments almost exclusively via live performances.

At the time of Autobahn, we adopted the “German” image at Florian’s suggestion...They [the Americans] thought we were singing “fun fun fun on the autobahn” , a homage to “fun fun fun,” the surfing anthem by The Beach Boys. WF

As Hutter and Schneider saw it, The Beach Boys represented an almost scientific pop perfection. Their music had succeeded in crystalizing certain essential features of American culture and lifestyle. Schneider noted that “When we reached California and Hollywood, we were able to say: yes, it’s exactly like that, like the songs of The Beach Boys.” This was the goal of Kraftwerk as well: to create a Genuine German sound…to re-define and popularize post-war Germany and its cultural past. - Littlejohn, 2009.

Ralf and Florian discussed the poster for the American [Autobahn] tour. They wanted it to pick up on the look of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, I remember - the city of the future, transport, electricity, and the movie’s main theme, the coexistence of man and machine. The Autobahn tour poster…already featured Ralf and Florian’s term “man-machine.” - KB

[Fritz Lang’s utopian cinematic versions of Machine Land is] “Where the scientists and artists are working hand in hand…We are the children of Werner Von Braun and Fritz Lang. We start from the 20s and just to the 70s and 80s. We’re not concerned with history lessons, we are concerned with today. I think that’s one of the basic faults of society, to look backwards and all this fool stuff…if you are driving a fast car and you look too much in the back mirror you might crash in front. We’d rather watch what we’re doing right now, what we could do today or tomorrow.” - RH, Christmas issue of NME [1977?]

We just came up with this concept: Let’s do a song like driving on the autobahn. Ralf specifically asked me to write some lyrics. - Emil Schult

I can’t say whether that 1964 track - part of the American pop canon - was the blueprint for the “Autobahn” lyrics, but wouldn’t it make sense if Emil had associated his “fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n” with “fun fun fun”? Both songs are about driving cars, after all. - KB

Later I found out the track we’d listened to was “You Doo Right” from the Can album “Monster Movie.” Just recently, so many decades later, I listened to it again and I was surprised by how much it reminds me of “Autobahn.” - KB

Their music is very smooth, very slack, a kind of long bewitchment… - Herve Picart, France’s “Best” magazine

It’s beyond me how they’re album broke into the US charts but here it is defying all trends and previous expectations. - Todd Telcos, Melody Maker

Most Americans, myself included, are probably too young or were not even alive in 1974 when Krautrock's first "hit" arrived on mainstream radio, Autobahn. The first time I heard it, it reminded me of music from primitive 80s home video games, such as those found on Commodore 64 and Atari. That is because these video game systems utilized the same synthesizers Kraftwerk was using in their music, a good 5-10 years earlier.

Reactions from American audiences during the Autobahn tour were mixed, according to what I have read. In some cases, they were not so well recieved and shows were not always so full. Although there were obviously plenty of Americans who appreciated what Kraftwerk was doing, it was regarded as experimental even to the prog-rock crowd, who's ears were attuned to music which was either rock, blues, jazz, or classical based in sound. Electricly filtered noises and computer generated sound was a much further stretch, and one would be justified in wondering if Autobahn wasn't FORCED onto American radio, in order to condition American audiences to such sounds. A soft sort of "force feeding" of Krautrock.

Although Ralf and Florian were often dismissive of the influence the Beach Boys [and probably their Krautrock peers, CAN] had upon Autobahn, I think it is quite clear that The Organization systematically took the music of Beach Boys apart, and rebuilt it within a German context, in order to tap into its' "mesmerizing" pop quality. In short, it is the sound of German culture being rebuilt by sonic architects.

[German News headlines]
German Pop Autobahn Conquers America
The New Conquerors of America

WF features the above news headlines from papers he kept from his time with Kraftwerk. Notice the language of the headlines above is similar in feel to the phrase "British invasion," in the sense that the music of a foreign country takes the audience of another "by storm." Of course they don't literally mean that Kraftwerk was "conquering America." How could music do that? But at the same time, there is a certain sinister truth to the headlines, if we think in terms of propaganda. This trend continues upon the group's signing with British based label EMI.

THE FINAL SOLUTION

…It is nonetheless still the radio that Joseph Goebbels commissioned for mass production. Hitler’s propaganda minister knew that communication between radio and listeners was key, but it wouldn’t happen with political messages alone. People were much easier to reach through emotive songs…By coincidence or intention, quite a few things with Kraftwerk seemed loaded with historical symbolism. - KB

…”Wenn’s um unsere Zukunft geht” (when it comes to our future) sounds like a 1970s advertising slogan for the nuclear power lobby…the line “In the air for you and me” could refer both to nuclear radioactivity and radio airplay. Years later the ambivalent lyrics became an anti-nuclear credo and the Third Reich Volksempfanger radio on the album cover was replaced by a radioactive pictogram. Back in 1975, however, the album’s main emphasis…was on communication. In my view, the other half of the concept…was intended to be absolutely neutral. How else could we have been photographed for the album promotion at a nuclear power station, decked out in white coats and protective shoe covers? - KB

It is fascinating how well educated, self aware, and well read some of the members of Kraftwerk are/were. Karl Bartos, for example, is very good at articulating something potentially sinister about The Organization's motives, but puts it in a perspective where it feels like it is comfortably on the other side of the room. But in reality, he seems to be describing what was going on within the brain of The Organization, and how the Craft Work would be applied to the public. Not only is the radio pictured upon the cover of the album "Radio-Activity" a genuine Nazi radio [with the swastika logo removed], but he's telling you what is being depicted by it, from the perspective of Hitler's propaganda minister! The music itself coming from this "radio" [your turntable speakers] would deliver propaganda through emotive songs. Bartos is even willing to consider that this was being done intentionally, which is quite a surprising admission from a member of the "classic" Kraftwerk line-up.

The most important aspect of mixing pop music is to work out a song’s “storyboard,” the narrative thread and dramatic structure running through the composition… - KB

Similar to how a movie script will be put to primitive story board images before attempting to film it, Kraftwerk clearly had a combination emotional/frequency "script" drawn out before attempting to record songs like "Radioactivity." In fact, this was something I detected before reading Karl Bartos' book, where he acknowledges this approach to songwriting. That's not to say there wasn't plenty of improvisation and genuine mastery of musical melody going on. But with a song like "Radioactivity," we can very clearly hear the shift from "scary" to "awe" to "catharsis," to "relief," and finally "safety." As if frequencies corresponding to specific human emotions have been charted out in order to provoke specific responses in listeners, to nearly hypnotic affect. But unlike classical music, which can be similarly dramatic, electronic sounds allow for a greater level of sound seperation and, therefore, a greater level of frequency control, and therefore a greater level of LISTENER EMOTIONAL RESPONSE.

After the moon landing, Wernher Von Braun [NASA] was an American National hero, the shining star of the rocket industry… “One of those rare engineers with charisma” wrote the New York Times…He never had to answer to his Nazi past, distancing himself from the crimes of National Socialism and denying any personal culpability…Depending on how one views it, the story of that dynamic German physicist plays a role in our song [Spacelab]. “In a way we feel related to Warner Von Braun; German scientific research is related to our music. We make acoustic rockets.” Ralf explained to Interview magazine rather bluntly. - KB

We are the children of Werner Von Braun and Fritz Lang... - RH, Christmas issue of NME [1977?]

Werner Von Braun was a rocket scientist for the German Nazi party. After WWII, he was brought over to America, probably under the Project Paperclip program, in order to continue his work with the newly formed NASA. His engineering skills would lead to the launching of Apollo 11 and alleged moon landings. This is all very interesting, but Von Braun was a Nazi! For members of Kraftwerk to so fearlessly cite him as an inspiration seems a bit bold, if they did not want to be percieved as having nefarious fascistic political motives. Something they would get accused of upon release of Man Machine.

Many people later misunderstood the cover shot, finding it too fascist. They were unable to understand that it was pure irony to us…Huge red posters were stuck up all over Paris showing the cover of our new album…and anyone who didn’t know us might actually have found them quite fascist…Everything in the room in which our presentation took place was decorated red, matching the Russian style album cover… - WF

While we were touring the UK, New Musical Express printed the interview in its 6 September issue, with the new headline: Kraftwerk: The Final Solution to the Music Problem?..The magazine also illustrated the interview with a photo montage, featuring the group shot of Kraftwerk copied into a historical photo of the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg..Was this the British sense of humor we’d heard so much about?

The German SOUNDS called the album [Man Machine] R2-D2’s favorite record. - KB

The perception of Man Machine as having a fascist/soviet communist sort of intent is not without merit. The key is, we are supposed to appreciate the irony and humor of it all, which I did upon first seeing the album cover and the accompanying video for "the Robots". But humor is a very interesting thing, which can sometimes deliver information which would otherwise be deemed "taboo." Because the fascistic imagery is delivered with humor and irony, we assume it is not to be taken seriously, and that only dumb people would. But supposing you are the author of the music, and you know full well how "dumb" people will percieve it. Is THAT your actual target audience?

TOUR DE FRANCE

After the successful "Computer World" tour, Kraftwerk came to a screeching halt. Whether it was Ralf getting into a bicycle accident, the band becoming overly perfectionistic about the new recordings, or they just got too caught up in converting their catalog into a digital format - something clearly changed productivity-wise. The single "Tour De France" was released in 1983 as a teaser for their new album, which never came out. It wasn't until 1986 that the somewhat underwelming "Electric Cafe" album was released.

It would be a good 17 years until Kraftwerk released the confusingly titled "Tour De France Soundtracks" album in 2003, which appears to be their last release of original music.

The bicycle is already a musical instrument on its own. The noise of the bicycle chain and pedal and gear mechanism, for example, the breathing of the cyclist, we have incorporated all of this in the Kraftwerk sound… RH

There is no doubt that RH became obsessed with bicycle riding. And although he got the rest of the group on board for a time, he was ultimately alone in his obsession. I have my theories regarding this, mainly that it was something he could talk about and refer to in interviews which humanized him to their audience, who were never sure what to make of the group's stand off-ish, cryptic interview answers. On a larger symbolic level, it represented their "Man Machine" concept, in combination with the idea of motion - which I think was all Kraftwerk had towards the end. A vessel in motion, which had already brought "Robot Pop" to the mainstream , and now had a life of it's own.

I remember I had an appointment with Ralf and Florian…I still remember the image of them, sitting there all dressed in black, with their precise haircuts, their made-to-measure suits. It was like an expressionists’ picture, a very stylized one, the dummies could have been there and it would have been the same. I tell you, the girl I was with was frightened. - Paul Alessanrini

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