Damo Suzuki

A rare, intuitive talent who wandered momentarily into the world of rock music

Damo Suzuki was a rare, intuitive talent who wandered momentarily into the world of rock music at one of its most innovative moments, then moved on while many forgot about him. His life seems both extraordinary and ordinary: he was born, he gathered experiences, he found something that he did extraordinarily well and he did it. He found religion and marriage. He became ill and fought that illness successfully for many years. He returned to performing and became the embodiment of  improvisation and the rebellious and restless nature of rock music and of artistic endeavor as a whole. On February 9, 2024, he died, leaving behind a legacy both artistic and human.

For Suzuki, music became the universal communication tool he used in his travels to meet people. "Music, to me, is not so interesting" he has said, meaning not that he doesn't enjoy music but that the real goal for him is to meet people where they are and interact with them in the moment. Playing music, improvising with these people, is simply the way that they interact. Suzuki's Never Ending Tour involved him traveling around the world and performing with a local group of musicians ('sound carriers'). Some of these were old friends, others were newcomers who he was meeting for the first time.

Mike Barnes writes of how, interviewing Suzuki for The Wire in 2004 he mentioned that he was a drummer: "Damo’s eyes lit up and he immediately invited me to play with him when he was next in town." Two months later Suzuki contacted him with particulars of when and where the gig would take place, and told Barnes to bring some musician friends. "I was keen to avoid assembling some kind of ersatz Can, this gave the ensemble a good yin-yang balance and the gig was a success. I can still vividly recall sitting behind the kit onstage, thinking: Bloody hell, I’m playing with Damo Suzuki!"

Suzuki wanted the performance to be an exchange of energy and really just a cultural palate cleanser so that our senses would once again be open to the world.

"What I like to offer with music is the creation of positive energy, not merely stopping at the music itself. I don't force anyone to believe in my words, but, with the energy that we create on the stage, each person in the audience may go away with an open mind, to find him/herself and to go his/her way. (We're already manipulated and pushed around by the system enough anyway). Just to be as free as God created a human being. Free to walk, and to breathe, free to eventually find one's own path...free to decide: Who am I? Where do I go?"

As a youngster, Kenji (his given name) Suzuki grew up in post-empire Japan, when the country was developing a new, modern culture, creating the figure of the corporate salaryman and putting its future into the development of new technologies that could be sold back to the tech-obsessed West. This led to exposure with Western, particularly American, culture in the form of the occasional pop song and television programs like Route 66. In his autobiography, I Am Damo Suzuki, he recalls the pop hit "Sukiyaki" by Kyu Sakamoto as the first time he was aware of hearing popular Western-influenced music created by Japanese artists rather than Anglo-American pop hits merely sung in Japanese.

Kenji left Japan in 1968, immediately after his 18th birthday, and spent the next couple of years knocking around Europe. In 1970 he turned up in Munich, where he spent time as a street performer and caught the attention of Can's Holgar Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. They invited him to perform with the band; he stayed through 1973 and helped the group record three of their most influential records.

After Kenji (now Damo) left the band he didn't like to talk about it that much, and he refused to allow it to be the focus of interviews and other encounters he had. He was the rare guy who could walk in and out of the music business. His sense of self was not tied up with his musical career, on the contrary  it was as though his career was an inconsequential sideshow.

Suzuki joins a line of artists for whom the only thing is to move forward; looking back becomes a kind of death in life. From Lester Young, who didn't want to go over what he'd already done with 'a repeater pencil' to Miles Davis, who jettisoned previous parts of his musical career as he hurtled ever forward, jazz and improvisational artists seem to be driven to look only in one direction: forward.

Still, it is necessary to address, at least a little, the importance of Suzuki's contribution to a band that seemed to always be percolating in the background, influencing other artists and, a few years later, the post punk crowd. The idea of the vocalist as another sound, another musician who uses pitch and sound but also words--real words, English words, Japanese words, words of magic. Because words are, in the end, an incantation, a kind of spell. When we invest words with our beliefs, they take on a life of their own. They can move mountains. MLK's most famous speeches are examples of that. The U.S. Constitution is another. Words form spells and incantations that can be manifested in the world.

It's not capricious to say that there are similarities between the vocals of Damo Suzuki and Yoko Ono. Both explore the sounds that their voices can make using not only standard vocal techniques but ideas like screaming, humming, and whispering. Another source of similarity is their cultural background:

"What words he was singing, or what language they were in, were secondary considerations to the impact they made at any particular moment. In his book Japrocksampler (2007), Julian Cope described the Japanese fondness for bilingual “Japanglish” phrases “as evidenced by the singing style of Damo Suzuki … who successfully inspired a whole generation of punk and post-punk singers to follow him, myself included”. 

(https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/12/damo-suzuki-obituary)

I think, as well, of early REM, when Michael Stipe's lyrics were frequently indecipherable, relying on emotion and texture to convey meaning beyond words. I also think of many bands described as shoegaze, with the vocals often deep in the mix behind the squall of guitar effect boxes.

Though other members of Can took over vocals after Suzuki left, the band moved away from using vocals as much, resulting in a change to their sound and approach. Meanwhile, Damo spent a decade completely outside of the music business, taking a variety of jobs to support himself and his family.

After being successfully treated for colon cancer in 1983, he resumed his musical career, embarking on his Never Ending Tour and performing spontaneously with musicians across the planet. These performances were one of a kind, so it's doubtful that all of them would appeal to any one listener. Many are seemingly lost to time, but there are a number of recordings released of various collaborations by Damo Suzuki and his network of musicians available to hear and purchase on Bandcamp. The one thing that comes through loud and clear in these performances is the commitment and uniqueness of Damo Suzuki's talent and the creative energy that he put out into the world.

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