The band that once played twenty-minute acid freak-outs made a rock opera about German history. That is the plain fact of Made in Germany, and it is as strange as it sounds: a sprawling, satirical, self-mocking concept album that sweeps from national unification in the nineteenth century through the twentieth, name-checking Wagner and Kant and Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich and mad King Ludwig along the way, told in cabaret, country, funk, glam and pop. It failed commercially like everything they did. It is also, by a surprising number of accounts, the best of their post-freakout albums.

The short version

Released in 1975, issued in both a full double-LP version and an abridged single LP made for the US market — and everyone who loves it insists on the double. Chris Karrer plays guitar, violin and saxophone; John Weinzierl plays guitar; Renate Knaup sings and is the star of the record; Lothar Meid plays bass; Peter Leopold plays drums. As on Hijack, a battalion of session players fills in the elaborate arrangements. The overarching concept was devised by producer Juergen S. Korduletsch and it takes precedence over everything — twenty tracks alternating compact, accessible songs with short instrumental interludes, in as many styles as the band could reach.

The concept

By 1975 the moment had passed. Krautrock’s peak of attention was over, the world was turning toward new wave and disco, and Amon Duul II were widely written off as has-beens who would never touch Yeti or Tanz der Lemminge again. Their response was audacious: a Teutonic rock opera, often compared to The Who’s Tommy in ambition if not in tone, built entirely on the history of their own country and steeped in irony. Real and invented figures crowd the record — a character called Mr. Kraut, the Weimar years, the film director, the composer, the doomed Bavarian king — and the band treat the whole national story as material for satire and self-provocation, alternating German, English and French, sometimes in the same song. It was politically charged and deliberately self-mocking, and it courted a certain amount of mock outrage on purpose. Whether the concept lifts the music or smothers it is the question every listener ends up answering differently.

The sound

Pop music, essentially, and that word applied to Amon Duul II in 1975 is the whole story. Hummable singalong melodies, catchy swinging arrangements, and Renate Knaup given more room than on any other record they made — her voice has been called the Teutonic answer to Grace Slick, an icy beauty with a countercultural wink, and this is the album that uses her best. The styles change track to track: bouncy prog-pomp, cabaret in the Dietrich mode, a country song with a banjo, garage-rock stabs, space-rock washes, straight glam. The knock against it, made fairly, is that the double-LP format leaves room for filler and the psychedelic colour that lit even the lesser earlier albums is mostly gone. The defence is that no other Amon Duul II record is this much fun, or this well sung, or commits this completely to a joke it also means seriously.

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The songs

An Overture opens it, as a rock opera should. Wilhelm Wilhelm is the one everybody quotes — bouncy prog-pomp, a tongue-in-cheek call to bring back the Kaiser, lyrics ricocheting between German, French and English. The Emigrant Song has a banjo and is sung in deliberately, heavily accented English about the Krauts coming to the USA. Loosey Girls is the cabaret centrepiece, a haunting, melancholy nod to the Dietrich and Weimar tradition. Metropolis takes on the film director; another song takes on the Bavarian king; Blue Grotto is one of the sweetest melodies the band ever wrote. Across twenty tracks the interludes come and go, some of them closer to fragments than finished pieces, and the songs carry the weight. It is uneven by design and by length. When it lands, it lands hard.

Reception and legacy

It did nothing on the market, and the ongoing failure to break through eventually sent the band back toward their experimental roots — but not before the core unit went quiet for a while. Critical opinion since has been all over the map, which is appropriate for a record this deliberately unstable: some hear a band that had lost its spirit going through the motions of a producer’s concept, others hear the most skilful and enjoyable thing the group ever committed to tape. One argument worth repeating holds that you cannot understand Amon Duul II from Yeti alone — that the whole point of the band lives in the enormous distance between the hard psych of the early records and this silly, serious, beautifully sung rock opera, and that both are unmistakably the same people. Same band, opposite poles.

The verdict

For the curious, with two rules: get the double, not the US single, and do not start here. Come to Made in Germany after Yeti, because the album only makes full sense as the far end of the journey from it. If you want acid Krautrock you will be baffled; if you want to hear a legendary band make gorgeous, funny, wildly ambitious pop out of their own national history, this is the one. Play Wilhelm Wilhelm and Blue Grotto. Then Yeti and Tanz der Lemminge for the other Amon Duul II, and Hijack for the pop turn that led here. A commune, a country, and a rock opera nobody bought.

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