Vitamin C

Vitamin C opens the second side of Ege Bamyasi. Like everything on the album it is credited to all five members, and it was recorded at the Inner Space studio in Weilerswist as a follow-up to Spoon. Can had been commissioned to score Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße (Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street), an episode of the crime series Tatort directed by Samuel Fuller, and they offered this piece because they felt it suited the film. It plays over the final scene of the episode, which first aired on 7 January 1973. United Artists asked for it as a single, backed with I'm So Green, and the sleeve billed it as the title theme of the Tatort thriller. A longer piece worked up for the same film, Dead Pigeon Suite, surfaced on The Lost Tapes in 2012, and Rolling Stone heard it as a blueprint for the song.

Suzuki never explained the words, which like most of his lyrics were largely improvised, and the refrain keeps telling someone that they are losing. With its food title it sits beside Soup, I'm So Green and Spoon under the album's okra-tin cover. Schmidt said in 2017 that over forty years it had become Can's most successful and most famous piece, even though it never rose high in the charts, and that he could not explain why.

Live and after

On stage it became a launch pad. At L'Olympia in Paris on 12 May 1973, one of Suzuki's last shows with the band, it grew into a thirteen-minute improvisation that closed the night, issued in 2024 on Live in Paris 1973. setlist.fm logs Can playing it 42 times, more than any of their songs except Dizzy Dizzy and their open improvisations, and The Can Project played it at the Barbican in London in 2017.

Nicole Atkins recorded it for a B-side in 2010, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Weyes Blood have played it live, and Stephen Malkmus and Von Spar performed the whole album in Cologne in December 2012. U.N.K.L.E. made an eight-minute remix for Sacrilege. It has been used in Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, on Jonny Greenwood's Inherent Vice soundtrack, as Dizzee's theme in The Get Down, and in Euphoria and The Gentlemen. Both uploads in the hypersongs web are the same 1972 studio recording from Ege Bamyasi: one is Mute's official audio, the other is the track as it appears on the 2017 compilation The Singles.