I was just listening to this, and since it's a big favorite of mine I thought I'd post about it. I don't think you can find anywhere a more dramatic example of an ahead-of-its-time song. I'm convinced that it had a profound impact on the techno craze that came along many years later.
Autobahn, a musical interpretation of a trip down the famous German superhighway, began life as a 22-minute album track in 1974. It was severely cut to a 3-minute single (which reminds me of Iron Butterfly's
Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida, edited from about 20 minutes down to 2 for a single) and became a hit both here and in Europe. Years later, the album version was much more reasonably condensed into a 10-minute version for inclusion on a Kraftwerk Greatest Hits album. It is the 10-minute version that I now prefer, since the full-length track gets a bit tiring before it ends.
Check out the
allmusic review:
History has not recorded whose idea it was to edit the original, 22 minute title track to the fourth Kraftwerk album down to a snappy three minutes. Nor does it recall the look on the faces of the sales reps who were handed advance copies of it, and told to do their job. But few records have ever seemed so unlikely, so unsuitable, so unsingle-like as "Autobahn". And few have turned all those presumptions so thoroughly on their heads. Top 30 in America, Top 20 in the UK, "Autobahn" (and in its wake, not only its parent album, but also a rush-reissued Ralf And Florian) became the surprise hit of 1975.
In Britain, the record was popularly known as Dr Who music, out of deference to Ron Grainer's pioneering electronic soundtracks to the long-running sci- fi TV series. And elsewhere, a surprisingly popular misinterpretation of the record's lyric left armies of schoolkids under the impression that the group were singing "fun fun fun on the autobahn," like a bunch of grinning Teutonic Beach Boys. But band member Wolfgang Flur is unequivocal. "No! Someone else told me that they thought the way we speak in German, 'Fahren,' which means driving, sounds like the English word, 'fun.' 'Fahren fahren fahren,' 'fun fun fun.' That is wrong. But it works. Driving is fun. We had no speed limit on the autobahn, we could race through the highways, through the Alps, so yes, fahren fahren fahren, fun fun fun. But it wasn't anything to do with the Beach Boys! We used to drive a lot, we used to listen to the sound of driving, the wind, passing cars and lorries, the rain, every moment the sounds around you are changing, and the idea was to rebuild those sounds on the synth."
"Autobahn" completely rewrote the rock rulebook. There was simply nothing to relate it to. Nothing except - it really did sound like a roadtrip. Trucks race by, horns honk, there's the windshield wipers and splash through a puddle. If you really thought about it, it was almost frighteningly mundane. But it was also exquisitely exciting, a fact which two continents' worth of record buyers were fast to pick up on. Some of the American radio stations were playing the short version, Flur continued. But some were playing the whole track. It sounded really good on car radios, I was told."
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