As the great P.G. Wodehouse once wrote explaining how it was that the fictional lion hunter A.B. Spottsworth came to find himself in the obituaries, “He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.” Like that lion, the Baader Meinhof Group—which quixotically set out in the early seventies, all 25 or so of them, to overthrow the West German State, only to end up in prison or dead—lives on in feature films, documentaries, and numerous books, thanks largely to its fascinating mix of characters, Bonnie and Clyde-like antics, and sheer youthful sex appeal.
But my favorite piece of Baader Meinhof-inspired art is the 1996 LP Baader Meinhof, by the band of the same name. A one-off project by Luke Haines of The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder fame, Baader Meinhof is a strange hybrid of Haine’s usual brainy pop, Blaxploitation film soundtrack music, and Middle Eastern influences. Forget about Cabaret Voltaire’s unlistenable “Baader Meinhof”—this baby is the real deal, both a history lesson and one very dark but catchy LP in one. You’ll have to look hard to find a copy, but like I always say, if it’s not impossible, it’s not worth doing.
But first, some brief background. The name Baader Meinhof Group was actually a creation of the press—the members called themselves The Red Army Faction. Baader Meinhof focuses on the tiny band’s suicidal daring-do—they once robbed three banks in 10 minutes—and the events of 1977’s German Autumn, during which the Red Army Faction’s so-called “second generation” committed murders and kidnappings to pressure the West German government into releasing jailed Baader Meinhof leaders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe. The trio ultimately committed collective suicide—or, as copious evidence exists to suggest, were assassinated in cold blood—in October 1977, following a failed PLO plane hijacking intended to force West Germany to free them.
Such an album could only have come from Haines, the brilliant musical gadfly and memoirist who claims to have accidentally invented Britpop. His four very smart and catchy albums as leader of The Auteurs—from 1993’s New Wave to 1999’s How I Learned to Love the Bootboys—won mucho critical acclaim but never sold particularly well. He then went on to found Black Box Recorder with Sarah Nixey and former Jesus and Mary Chain drummer John Moore, which in turn released three studio albums of sleek and erudite electronica between 1999 and 2003, and scored Haines his only hit single in “The Facts of Life.”
Since then Haines has released a plethora of stellar solo albums, including 2006’s glamtastic Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop, which includes the wonderful Mott-Lou Reed pastiche “The Heritage Rock Revolution” and “Bad Reputation (The Glitter Band),” and 2011’s alternately lovely and bizarre 9 ½ Pschedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early ‘80s, which includes such mind-blowing tracks as “Rock Opera—In the Key of Existential Misery” and “Haystack’s in Heaven (Parts 1-3).”
As for Baader Meinhof, it’s one dark and murky slab of vinyl, which is appropriate given Baader Meinhof’s underground and shadowy existence. The LP’s turbid and subterranean tones—which make Exile on Main Street sound like it was recorded by Donald Fagan and Walter Becker—are the result of some of the lowest-pitched keyboards I’ve ever heard and Haines’ heavily distorted guitar. Baader Meinhof has the feel of an LP recorded in a dank chamber deep beneath the earth, in Hitler’s bunker perhaps, except they filled it in a while back and built a playground over it—an amusing and disquieting irony if ever I’ve heard one.
LP opener “Baader Meinhof” starts at the beginning, describing the radicalization of the group’s members with its references to the prominent student activist Rudi Dutschke (who nearly died after being shot by a right-wing extremist) and the Fox News-like Springer Press, which did everything in its power to incite violence against students protesting a 1967 visit to West Berlin by the execrable Shah of Iran. Sure enough, the protests ended with pro-Shah and police forces attacking the students, one of whom, Benno Ohnesorg, died after being shot in the head by a policeman.
Anyway, “Baader Meinhof” is a very catchy tune that opens with some funky tablas and handclaps, after which Haines sings, “Made the cops look dumb on the borderline/Springer said ‘must be the mood of the times’/Rudi says ‘We’ve got to get wise and we’ve got to get armed.’” By this time a blurting keyboard and acoustic guitar have also come in, along with some soaring cellos and violin, all leading up to a guitar solo by Haines that sounds like it was recorded underwater. Forget the history if you want—“Baader Meinhof” is so funky and irresistible you needn’t give a damn about Andreas Baader or Ulrike Meinhof to enjoy it.
The crawling “Meet Me at the Airport” opens with some more great dark keyboard blurt, then Haines sings cryptically in a hushed and conspiratorial tone, “I met a man/He was a trader/And he did a cargo at 10,000 feet over Jordan.” I’m not certain if that means he blew the plane up or what, but what really matters is how that great farting keyboard and some Middle Eastern strings lead up to one of the most distortion-tweeked guitar solos I’ve ever heard. The guitar returns again at the end, and while I’m not sure what the song’s about, it doesn’t really matter because like opener “Baader Meinhof,” “Meet Me at the Airport” is one fantastic tune.
“There’s Gonna Be an Accident” opens with some cool kick-drums followed by a super-funky keyboard riff that could have come straight from 1975’s Dolemite. It’s another very catchy number, thanks to its wonderful melody and that Blaktacular keyboard. To say nothing of the tablas and strings, or the way Haines sings, “Maybe Friday rob a bank” followed by back-up singers going, “Yeah yeah yeah.” The stream of consciousness lyrics meander from hairdresser-turned-terrorist Petra Schelm, whose death shocked many Germans, who considered her a young innocent (“She was 19 when she got gunned down”) to memories of taking acid (“I remember when I was sixteen/The acid was dangerous/Fire magic in my head.”) And the ending is great, what with that Foxy Brown keyboard taking it to fadeout, only to come back and play one last ecstatically funked-up riff.
“Mogadishu”—which is where the plane hijacked by a PLO commando under the command of one “Captain Mahmud” was stormed by a West German GSG-9 counter-terrorism unit—is a very pretty number and largely played on the acoustic guitar, accompanied by chiming keyboards and drums. It also features that big muddy keyboard, strings, and a great song-ending solo that is so distorted I can’t tell whether it’s Haines’ guitar or a keyboard. Meanwhile, Haines sings the beautiful chorus, “Captain Martyr Mahmoud says/It’s a 24-hour flight/When the fireworks hit you at Mogadishu/On a beautiful Saturday night.”
“Theme From ‘Burn Warehouse Burn’” is a short, staccato number with understated keyboards and vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding strings. A declaration of pure anarchy, presumably delivered by hustler and sociopath turned terrorist Andreas Baader, it features Haines singing, “Some of the dumb ones just don’t understand/There’s no manifesto/There’s no formal plan.” It’s just, “Burn warehouse burn” as Haines sings over and over, and it’s a cool tune as well as an apt description of Baader’s ideas on revolution, which had less to do with Marxist rhetoric than raising hell for the sheer fun of it.
Meanwhile, “GSG 29”—why Haines amends the “9” in GSG-9 to “29” is unclear—is a muddy, mid-tempo instrumental that opens with some strange blips and is kept moving by some exotic strings and tablas. It grows increasingly frenzied as it goes along, especially when Haines plays some very loud and heavily distorted riffs on his guitar, accompanied by some big drum pound and one dissonant violin. The song closes with Haines’ twisted guitar, and just as you wouldn’t want the GSG-9 on your ass you wouldn’t want this tune on your ass either—it’s one ominous mofo.
Both melodically and vocally, “… It’s a Moral Issue” brings to mind classic Marc Bolan. But that’s where the resemblance ends, because instead of Mr. T. Rex’s stripped-down sound “…It’s a Moral Issue” is busy, busy, busy. Haines takes what is basically an acoustic guitar-driven slow burner and piles on the instrumentation, including several different keyboards and some perky strings, then tosses in several long bursts of dark and murky keyboard, some menacing guitar riffs, and a guitar solo played to the very limits of fuzzed-up distortion.
“Back on the Farm” is, I suspect, about the Baader Meinhof’s trip to a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) camp in Amman, Jordan to receive insurgency training. There they managed to so vex their hosts with their rude antics that they were finally given the bum’s rush. A quiet, acoustic-guitar-driven number punctuated by loud blasts of drumming, murky keyboard blurts, strings, and some very distorted guitar, it has Haines singing, “This is the hate socialist collective—all mental health corrected,” and “This is the Holger Meins Commando/He was my brother/I’ll do anything for him.” (Meins, who was imprisoned at the same time as Baader and Meinhof, died from a hunger strike in 1974.)
“Kill Ramirez” refers to the infamous Venezuelan terrorist Ilich “Carlos the Jackal” Ramirez Sanchez, although I don’t quite understand why in this tune the narrator wants him killed, especially as they were loose allies in the same struggle. Anyway, “Kill Ramirez” opens with Haines singing “He’s just not one of the brothers” to the accompaniment of handclaps and a syncopated guitar riff, after which a heavily distorted guitar comes in with some mutant keyboard funk. And both guitar and keyboards accompany Haines through the rest of the song, during which he compares Ramirez to the famous 19th Century Puerto Rican buccaneer “El Pirate Cofrisi” (who invented the pina colada!) and sings, “We will make him kiss the ground/Down at our feet.” I tried to contact Haines to grill him about the meaning of some of these songs, but he’s about as hard to contact as Friederike Krabbe, one of the few RAFers still at large.
The album closes in classic Neil Young fashion with a second take on opening cut “Baader Meinhof.” This one is faster paced and lighter in tone, thanks to the front-and-center prominence of Haines’ acoustic guitar. And while the tablas and handclaps are still there the strings have largely been replaced by one bad mother (shut your mouth!) of a keyboard, which is cool as Shaft and provides a nice contrast to Haines’ happy, “Hi kids, it’s a beautiful night.” Haines sings the album’s defiant closing lyrics (which name drop good-natured RAF bomb maker Michael “Bommi” Baumann): “Rudi said “We’ve got to get wise”/But I can’t wait/It’s a tyre slash night/Michael Baumann—Summer of hate,” before closing the song with the chorus, “Baader Meinhof/Baader Meinhof/Mein, Mein, Mein…”
And so concludes an album that blessedly takes no stand on the Baader Meinhof Group, pro or con, but simply presents a series of vignettes from their tragic and ultimately futile history. Was Baader Meinhof’s violence justified given that the West German government was lousy with ex-Nazis, actively assisted the United States in its immoral war against Vietnam, and boasted a corrupt judiciary and a brutal police force? As for me, I’m as torn as John Lennon on the album version of “Revolution,” who sings, “But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know you can count me out—in.” None of which has anything to do, really, with Baader Meinhof, which when all is said and done is simply a great and unjustly ignored album by one of the finest songwriters around. Find it. Give it a listen.
Then go rob a bank.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
