The title of Can’s 1975 album Landed proved highly prophetic. Over the preceding six-album stretch from 1969’s Monster Movie to 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma, the German band had used the standard vernacular of rock music—guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums—to develop an entirely new language, one that embraced the hypnotic properties, intricate edits, and limitless textural possibilities of electronic music, long before such concepts became popularized. But with Landed, Can came back down to Earth and started to behave like a more typical ’70s-rock band (albeit still a highly idiosyncratic one). It marked the moment where these trailblazers became trendspotters, loading their subsequent records with au courant influences like disco and reggae, before they unceremoniously petered out in 1979. Or at least that’s the narrative told by their studio albums. The story was always different on stage.
The old cliche that albums represent a snapshot in time was especially true of Can, whose records functioned like frames placed atop a canvas that stretches into infinity. Listening to their most totemic works—“Yoo Doo Right,” “Mother Sky,” “Halleluwah”—always felt like you were joining a program already in progress, as if the band had been searching for the perfect groove for hours and would continue for several more after the track faded out. Live, Can didn’t so much draw upon a repertoire of songs as an arsenal of motifs, riffs, and melodies that they could drop into their largely improvised concerts at will, like logs consumed by a raging fire pit. And as the first instalment of Mute’s new series of Can live albums attests, the band was still flying high without a map onstage, even as its records had begun to take a more predictable course.
Amazingly, for a band with a reputation for never playing a song the same way twice, Can never issued a proper live album (aside from a bonus compilation of concert recordings included in the long out-of-print Can box set). As legend has it, any time Can set out to make a professionally recorded concert document, various technical snafus would scuttle the results. As such, Live in Stuttgart 1975 was pulled from the personal archive of super-fan Andrew Hall, who surreptitiously recorded several shows throughout the ’70s by concealing his gear in bulky oversized clothing, like piggybacking kids in a trench coat trying to sneak into an R-rated movie. The Stuttgart show has made the bootleg rounds for years, but under the curation of keyboardist Irmin Schmidt—Can’s lone surviving co-founder—the tapes have been greatly enhanced, displacing the surface hiss and tinny fidelity with a fuller sound that emphasizes the incomparable rhythmic thrust of bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit.
Recorded on Halloween night in 1975, the set captured on Live in Stuttgart 1975 took place not long after Landed’s release, but you would never know that without the date in the title. Not only is that record unrepresented here, Can also avoid the more cosmic and meditative sounds that defined Landed’s immediate predecessors, 1973’s Future Days and 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma. Still readjusting to life as a four-piece following the departure of vocalist Damo Suzuki, the Can we hear on Live in Stuttgart 1975 seem intent on reconnecting with the psych-funk fury that powered their primordial ’69-to-’72 phase. Doing away with vocals or recognizable songs of any kind, the five pieces here—demarcated numerically as “Eins,” “Zwei,” “Drei,” “Vier,” and “Funf”—provide exhilarating extended views of rock’s most forward-thinking band at their most unrestrained.
Live in Stuttgart 1975 makes the case that Can weren’t so much a jam band as an expedition team: Each member was given the complete freedom to explore his own path, but everyone was heading toward the same horizon, unified in their effort to breach the great beyond. That leads to some thrilling moments of intersection along the way, like when, nine and a half minutes into the warm-up exercise “Eins,” Czukay and Liebezeit lock into a taut groove that evokes Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” while Michael Karoli’s bluesy guitar jangle and Schmidt’s honking keyboards playfully joust overtop. Even when it seems like one player is seizing the reins, that only serves to egg on the others: “Zwei” plays out like a mash-up of Tago Mago’s “Oh Yeah” and Future Days’ “Bel Air,” before Karoli’s stargazing solo freezes the song dead in its tracks, only for Liebezeit to bring it back to life, roaring at double the speed.
Liebezeit has long been the sort of drummer that can send you down YouTube wormholes in search of any footage that might prove such loose yet powerfully precise backbeats came from an actual human being. You’ll want to take another deep dive after getting swept up in the cyclonic undertow of “Drei,” which is loosely based on Ege Bamyasi’s opening jam, “Pinch,” but carries on for 35 glorious minutes of relentless, fleet-footed funk and carnivalesque clamor, with the players displaying the kind of superhuman physical exertion that makes you want to hand them towels and cups of Gatorade. And just when it seems like Liebezeit is running out of gas around the half-hour mark, he uses the cooling-off period to his advantage, relaxing in the pocket and transforming Can into the world’s freakiest boogie band for the home stretch.
“Drei” is obviously Live in Stuttgart 1975’s unbeatable peak, but the comedown carries its own rewards: “Vier” is a spectacular showcase for Karoli’s deeply emotive playing, which, when combined with Liebezeit’s accelerated thwack, reinvents Can as the motorik Santana. And while the closing “Funf” occasionally gives way to aimlessness, Liebezeit’s militaristic drum patterns and Czukay’s bug-eyed basslines can invest even the most shapeless track with a dramatic intensity. Sure, 90 minutes of free-flowing instrumental workouts may seem daunting to more casual Can fans who prefer their kosmische musik spiked with more digestible doses of “Vitamin C.” But devoted heads who surrender to the tide will no doubt emerge from Live in Stuttgart 1975 with another Can maxim in mind: I want more.
Buy: Rough Trade
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