It's rare that a band whose most celebrated recordings were originally released almost 40 years ago can generate excitement among classic-rock fans, prog-hating punks and musicians whose parents were still in elementary school at the time — but then Can were no ordinary band.

The release last week of Can's "The Lost Tapes," a box set of unreleased recordings by the celebrated German experimental band, sent a flutter through several generations of musicians and fans. So, now seems to be an ideal moment to take a look at the legacy of Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt and vocalists Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki (Mooney left in 1970 to be replaced by Kanagawa Prefecture native Suzuki) and the diverse musical movement they created, dubbed with a characteristically uncouth sense of humor by the British music press as "krautrock."

Part of what made krautrock so important was the pretentiousness of the U.K. punk movement. With their fundamentalist "year-zero" approach that forbade the appreciation of the country's rock scene in the 1970s — and progressive rock in particular — they shot themselves in the foot, denying themselves the delights of brilliant but long-haired and hippy-tainted art-rock luminaries such as Canterbury scenesters Gong and Soft Machine in favor of a dead-end obsession with Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry.