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The latest in a series of live albums by the German band Can has been foreshadowed by the death of their totemic singer Damo Suzuki. He died earlier this month aged 74. Disdainful of nostalgia, he wouldn’t have cared for this archival release. But it makes for a vivid tribute to his role in one of the best improvisational groups in rock’s history.
Live in Paris 1973 documents Can at the height of their powers. The wind was in their sails following their 1971 breakthrough album, Tago Mago, and its successor, 1972’s Ege Bamyasi. Suzuki sang on both. He had been recruited to the band after being encountered busking outside a Munich café, doing eccentric vocal improvisations for the entertainment or bemusement of passers-by. His liberated approach to singing chimed with Can’s desire to stretch the format of the song as far as possible.
The album originates from bootleg recordings of a show at L’Olympia in Paris, re-engineered for official release. The audio quality is decent. Suzuki’s voice bleeds into the sounds of the instrumentation, but that fits with Can’s ethos. Formed by musicians with backgrounds in jazz and the avant-garde, they treated vocals and instruments as equal elements of a whole. Sung words were part of the musical texture, like scatting, not the central text around which all else was subordinate.
Songs from Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi are spun into long jams over the course of the album’s 91 minutes. What might have been stoned hippy noodling in lesser hands is mesmerising. Michael Karoli’s trippy guitar-playing is insistent and needling. On keyboards, Irmin Schmidt pounds out contrapuntal rhythms and catchy vamps. Holger Czukay’s basslines and Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming are gripping.
Suzuki often resembles an instrumentalist himself, wailing with the guitar or barking chopped-up phrases in time to the rhythms. Lyrics are chanted until they lose meaning. He and his bandmates lock into a groove and build towards the heightened frenzies that they called “Godzillas”. The recording ends with jarring suddenness as they wind down from one such peak, as though intuiting the singer’s abrupt departure from the group.
A few months after this gig, following the release of the album Future Days, he walked out on his bandmates. Suzuki was too free-spirited for the constraints of life in a band, even one as expansive as Can. He didn’t like to look back. But Live in Paris 1973 allows us to do so, with gratitude.
★★★★☆
‘Live in Paris 1973’ is released by Mute/Future Days
