How I Got On / To the Autobahn

This is a short recollection of one of my journeys across the vast oceans of music, with a comment on the matter of the application of this technology we're currently using, in support of recollections like this. From the book CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For, by Marylu Walters, I have confirmed my recollection (and where appropriate corrected it) as follows:

• Bob Chelmick landed a job at CKUA Radio while a student at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, in 1968.
• Ed Kilpatrick replaced Tony Cashman as Program Director at CKUA in 1969.
• Chelmick had invited Holger Petersen to his show, to talk about blues. In 1969, Kilpatrick invited Petersen to start his Natch'l Blues show, at CKUA. By 2002, it was the longest-running blues show in Canada.
• In 1970, Kilpatrick invited Mark Vasey, a student who had listened to Kilpatrick's late-night jazz show, to do a program on the emerging field of popular electronic music. That show was called: Postmodern Music.

By about that time I had already heard and liked Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine, from their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967, and Iron Butterfly's In a Gadda da Vida, from 1968, so I started listening to Vasey's new show at 16:00 on Saturday, which came on after listening to Petersen's Natch'l Blues.

The theme song for Vasey's show was the beginning of Charles Wuorinen's Pulitzer-Prize winning album entitled Time's Encomium, from 1969. So, of course, I ordered and purchased a copy of it. That album's not available on the web yet (I suspect it's quite a rare item), so from my copy:

Here's Vasey's Theme Music Clip

As you might now imagine, by the time I happened to discover a black & white version of this back-cover art, on an album by Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, in the stacks at A&M Records in the basement of Edmonton Center in 1973, I simply had to try a copy:

Surprise, surprise, I liked it! And the front cover of my copy of that album looks like this:

Eventually I ended up with these five Kraftwerk discs:

Ralf und Florian

Autobahn

Radio-Activity

Man-Machine

Numbers

Wikipedia says that Kraftwerk influenced, amongst many others: Gary Numan, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Human League, Depeche Mode, Visage, Soft Cell, Yazoo, and Simple Minds. I have vinyl by all of them; multiple albums for many of them.

Which brings me to the seminal point of this essay. It turns out that one can now, using this technology, listen to the two Kraftwerk albums that were issued before my Ralf und Florian, and not only that, one can listen to the one album that Ralf and Florian worked on before Kraftwerk, which was entitled Tone Float, when they were members of the quintet known as Organization, in 1970. I had never heard those before.

In summary then, here are all the available early works up to and including Kraftwerk's early commercial successes:

1. Tone Float (1967)

   Tone Float I, II, III
   Milk Rock
   Noitasinagro
   Silver forest
   Rhythm salad

2. Kraftwerk (1971)

   Ruckzuck
   Stratovarius
   Megaherz
   Vom Himmel Hoch
   

3. Kraftwerk 2 (1972)

   Klingklang
   Atem
   Strom
   Spule 4
   Wellenlänge
   Harmonika
   

4. Ralf und Florian (1973)

5. Autobahn (1974)

6. Radio-Activity (1975)

7. Man Machine (1978)

So that's how I got on / to the Autobahn. Ultimately, then, this essay shows a simple example of how one can, for one's own entertainment and to one's own delight, not only revisit some of the early history of some of one's journeys using this new Interwebish technology, but also even delve further into the foundations of that history.