The workers handing out 3-D glasses were a clear sign that we were in for a very different kind of concert on Wednesday night (July 6) at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.
Very different, that is, for any band not named Kraftwerk, the pioneering German electronic music troupe that has been embracing 3-D technology for many years.
The Düsseldorf-born act — which currently consists of founding member Ralf Hütter as well as Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Falk Grieffenhagen — first wowed Bay Area fans with its 3-D tour during three nights at the Fox Theater in Oakland in 2014.
And it would do so again during its highly anticipated return trip to the Bay Area, playing more than two dozen songs and delivering some eye-popping visuals in its two-hour show on Wednesday.
The band members looked like characters from the movie “Tron” as they walked out onto the stage in jumpsuits decorated with glowing LED strips and took their places at their keyboard stands/podiums, where they would remain basically motionless — except for moving their hands and arms to work to the hi-tech machinery — for most of the night.
Kraftwerk kicked off the show with five straight numbers from “Computer World,” the great 1981 concept album that seems quite prophetic some 40 years down the road in the ways it addresses the rising importance of technology in the world.
The music sounded wildly futuristic, even though some of it had been originally recorded nearly a half century earlier, underscoring once again that Kraftwerk has to rank among the most-forward-thinking acts of all time.
The historical context is necessary to properly evaluate Kraftwerk’s nearly unparalleled impact on the pop music world. It’s hard to imagine what synth-pop, techno and club music might sound like today without these Rock and Roll Hall of Famers — if, indeed, those genres would even exist.
The band’s influence on dance pop, hip-hop, post-punk and other styles has also been monumental, as artists and producers continue to turn to Kraftwerk’s decades-old recordings for inspiration and, in some cases, actual grooves.
The latter is the reason why one can recognize Kraftwerk’s music without having ever listened to a Kraftwerk song, as the group has been sampled by so many other artists.
It made for a fun musical trivia game of sorts — listening to the group perform a number in concert and then trying to recall how that tune had been used in recordings by other acts. One offering that really stood out on Wednesday was “Trans-Europe Express,” which Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force famously borrowed from on the ground-breaking hip-hop cut “Planet Rock” and, in turn, inspired countless other artists.
The visuals were just as impactful as the music during the concert, with the 3-D effects working great — especially for those situated on the main floor near the front of the stage — as space-age imagery mixed with early ’80s computer game graphics and waves of coding. There were sizable gasps to be heard as a 3-D image — such as a flying saucer or a satellite — seemed to break free from the big screen behind the stage and actually make its way out into the crowd.
The band saved some of its best offerings for last, running through a number of “Tour de France”-titled cuts and then closing the main set with “Metal on Metal.” The four musicians then left the stage, only to be replaced by four funky robots who would dance to grooves while fans waited for their human counterparts to return.
They would eventually do so, of course, bringing the show to a triumphant conclusion with “Pocket Calculator,” “Music Non Stop” and other retro-futuristic blasts.
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