Posted February 25, 2002
NOW LET US PRAISE FAMOUS STOOGES
The Stooges were one of the archetypes (Greg Shaw's term) for
most of the music I've been listening to since I was 13 (the others are the
Who and the Velvet Underground).
Sure, man for man, the MC5 were probably a better band (with the exception
of the crucial frontman position), but the Stooges sounded more DANGEROUS.
Compare the two Detroit dynamos album-to-album and the Stooges come out ahead
every time. While the Five's live-at-the-Grande debut "Kick Out the Jams"
coupled one side of the most exciting music ever committed to tape with a
string of "embarrassing duds" (the Village Voice's term) on the
flip, the Stooges' eponymous debut, produced by ex-Velvet Underground noise
baron John Cale, highlighted the young band's inexperience (songs of moronic
simplicity, Iggy's vocalismo a hybrid of Jagger and Jim Morrison mannerisms)
and similarity to the Velvets (drones, fuzzed-out guitar blast), contained
three bona fide classics (that'd be "1969," "I Wanna Be Your
Dog," and "No Fun"), an equal number of also-rans ("Not
Right," "Real Cool Time," "Little Doll"), and one
interminable piece of filler (bassist Dave Alexander's stoner mantra "We
Will Fall") that still had its charms (especially for VU fans).
The Five's Jon Landau-produced sophomore outing, "Back In the U.S.A.,"
was too fast, too thin-sounding, and too short (except for the decidedly sub-par
fuck-me ballad "Let Me Try," which only SEEMED to last as long as
"We Will Fall"), while the Stooges' second, "Funhouse,"
was produced by Dick Clark protÈgÈ Don Gallucci (a bona fide
"Louie Louie" Kingsman, he knew from basic rock), contained nothing
short of THE UNDILUTED ESSENCE OF ROCK AND ROLL and surely qualifies as one
of the two or three (if not THE) greatest albums of all time. The bands split
the difference on their third albums: "High Time" is generally acknowledged
as the best Five album MUSICALLY, but its recorded sound is murky and indistinct
when it should be in-your-face (loyal fans had to wait for Wayne Kramer's
nineties solo work on Epitaph to hear the Five's sonic promise fulfilled on
record), while Iggy & the Stooges' "Raw Power" was even more
intense than "Funhouse" (although people could scarcely believe
it at the time), but David Bowie's treble-happy mix eviscerated the sound
(although in fairness to the Thin White Duke, it probably woulda been a good
idea for the engineer to get some levels from the bass and drums before they
started recording...oh well).
But those were just the official releases. Like the MC5, the Stooges made
loads of music which wasn't released during their existence, but has surfaced
in the last decade or so. Part of this has to do with the fact that throughout
said existence, as Real O Mind Records (itself a "Funhouse"
reference) honcho and occasional All Music Guide scribe Geoff Ginsberg points
out, "The Stooges NEVER played old stuff" - they were constantly
reinventing themselves with new sets of material (at most, they MIGHT play
stuff from the current album), and prided themselves on not using anyone else's
(even turning down an offer from Lou Reed to write a song for them) - and
they were even more adept at pissing off record labels than the Five were.
By the time their first album was released, they were already developing the
material that would appear on "Funhouse," which they honed by playing
live on the road for six months before recording. "Funhouse" was
a sublime rock'n'roll Moment, and like all Moments, it wasn't destined to
last; by the time the album was released in August 1970, Dave Alexander was
ignominiously shitcanned from the band after he forgot all the songs in a
drunken haze onstage at the Goose Lake (MI) Pop Festival. (A coupla years
ago, Ben Edmonds thankfully unearthed, and Rhino Handmade released,
the complete "Funhouse" sessions, for many of us the Holy Grail
of Rawkdom.) With a succession of non-musicians (mainly roadies) drafted to
fill in on bass and the eventual addition of a second guitarist, James Williamson,
to augment Ron Asheton's primal fury, the band developed a new repertoire
of songs which were never officially recorded, although versions of some,
including "I Got a Right," exist on a bootleg (released on the Starfighter
label) which Clinton Heylin correctly characterized as "excruciating."
The Starfighter "Live 1971" CD purports to present a performance
from the Kiel Auditorium, St. Louis, featuring both Ron Asheton and James
Williamson on guitars. That may well be, but you couldn't tell from the murky
recording - it sounds as if it was taped from across the street; Iggy's vocals
are totally unintelligible (most of his stage patter appears to be delivered
in a shrill Butterfly McQueen "I don't know NOTHIN' 'bout birthin' babies"
voice), and the recording of the band rivals the MC5's abysmal "Phun
City" for sheer horrendousness. Today, Williamson himself states that
they "weren't exactly a professional rock'n'roll band at that point,"
which is putting it mildly. The listenable portion of the disc consists of
four tracks featuring the original band, starting with the audio portion of
the Stooges' summer '70 appearance at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, famously
broadcast live nation-wide on NBC TV with sports announcer commentary and
commercial interruptions, which is a must-see in any of the numerous circulating
video versions. You get intriguing fragments of "TV Eye" and "1970,"
the latter including the sound of an hysterical girl asking the Ig "Are
you alright?" and "Can I take a picture? PLEEEASE?" while he's
out in the audience preparing to do his immortal audience-hand-walking and
peanut butter smearage. The last two tracks are from 1968 and provide a tantalizing
glimpse of Ron Asheton and Dave Alexander in full pre-discovery flight.
Post-Alexander, as every good Stoogefan knows, the band entered a downward
spiral, fueled by certain members' escalating substance-abuse patterns and
their dismissal from their Elektra recording contract after the label declined
to pick up their option on a third album. Finally the wheels came off the
cart and after timely pause, Iggy decamped for London with James in tow, only
summoning the Ashetons (and demoting Ron to bass) when it became clear that
no suitable substitutes were available in the U.K. Signed to Bowie's MainMan
management and Columbia, the band, rechristened "IGGY & THE Stooges,"
started preparing to record an album.
Iggy
& the Stooges were, as Craig "The Barman" Regan of the I-94
Bar points out, a completely different animal than the Stooges that preceded
them.. The difference was primarily down to the men on guitar and bass. Drummer
Scott "Rock Action" Asheton was a hard-hitting powerhouse and, at
least in his youth, a supple, dare I say FUNKY drummer; his work on the song
"Funhouse" is nothing if not the most twisted fatback soul groove
imaginable. To say nothing of the Well-Mannered Boy up front. Besides being
a fallen high school preppy/class president type guy, ex-record store clerk
(what high school geeks 'n' freaks become when they want to increase their
coolness factor), and drug-addled Everybody's Id gone wild (when I forced
her to watch the Stooges on video, my ex-girlfriend asked, "You'd like
to act like him, wouldn't you?" and I responded, "Who WOULDN'T?"),
I'll bet Iggy was a good drummer back in his Iguanas/Prime Movers daze. A
good drummer knows all about musical structure, tension, release, kinetics,
dynamics, all that stuff it takes to power a band and MOVE a crowd, and Iggy
is clearly a master of all of the above. On the "Funhouse" box and
some of the rehearsal tapes, you can hear him teaching the band the material.
Crazy like a fox, I'm thinking. But I digress.
Technically limited though it might have been, Ron Asheton's guitar work in
the first incarnation of the Stooges was PURE FIRE. He might have only done
one thing, but it was the BEST thing. (Later, back on guitar with New Order,
Destroy All Monsters, New Race, and Dark Carnival, he'd learn a few new tricks,
including one signature gambit, a descending/ascending tonic-seventh-fifth-seventh-with-a-full-step-bend,
that's referred to in Australia as "The Lick," but he'd never surpass
his "Funhouse" masterwork....nor would he need to.) James Williamson
was something else again, starting from the launching pads of Jeff Beck and
Keith Richards as well as Ron's Stoogestyle, but adding a dimension of mania
previously unheard anywhere. Williamson's aggression was a little more CHANNELED
and FOCUSED than Ron's, though - that is to say, he wrote more fully-developed
songs with actual DYNAMIC SHIFTS and a tendency to use lotsa chords that was
atypical in this kind of music; his guitar style was all jagged edges where
Ron's was fluid. Similarly, while the hapless Dave Alexander had been a vastly
underrated contributor to the band, serving as a kind of catalyst as well
as composing the basslines that underpinned "Dirt" and the title
track on "Funhouse," Ron's superior technique allowed him to play
busier lines with a harder attack.
From a discographer's perspective, there were four sets of Iggy & the
Stooges "sessions":
1) 1972 pre-"Raw Power" demos
2) 1972 "Raw Power" LP sessions
3) 1973 tour rehearsals
4) 1973-74 live shows
Of these, the "Raw Power" demos are pretty well covered on a couple
of Bomp EPs, which include several versions of the astonishing "I Got
a Right," along with "Gimme Some Skin," "Sick of You,"
"Scene of the Crime," and "Tight Pants," a song which
appeared on "Raw Power" with different lyrics as "Shake Appeal."
Considering this material was recorded in 1972, its impact is staggering.
At the time, no one had ever heard rock music as thunderous as "I Got
a Right" (is it any wonder that the Columbia A&R department didn't
know what to do with it?), and the rest of the songs were of the same stripe,
if not quite equal in intensity. In a way, you could view the new Stoogesound
as a mere exaggeration of the more aggressive aspects of the Stones/Yardbirds/Them/Who/Kinks/Pretty
Things axis of R&B-based Britbands, but in reality it was much more -
a lot more kinetic and hard-edged than any of the above at their wildest.
The template for seventies punk was drawn. Williamson's blasting block chords
and explosive solo interjections over the Asheton's pummeling engine room
gave Iggy the strongest foundation he'd ever have to emote over, and he took
full advantage. "Sick of You" was the first in a line of Pop/Williamson
compositions (others include "Gimme Danger," "Till the End
of the Night," and "I Got Nothing") that combined "soft"
and "hard" sections (in the case of "Sick of You," incorporating
the four-note descending riff from the Yardbirds' "Happenings Ten Years
Time Ago").
While "I Got a Right" inexplicably missed the cut for inclusion
on "Raw Power," the album Columbia wound up releasing, the lead-off
track from that record actually surpassed it - "Search and Destroy."
Singing "I'm a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm,"
Iggy defined the high-energy aesthetic, and for the next 30 years, nothing
else would even come close (with the possible exception of "City Slang,"
the sole release by Sonic's Rendezvous Band, the late-seventies aggregation
led by the MC5's Fred "Sonic" Smith and powered by Scott Asheton).
"Raw Power" in all its blasted magnificence has appeared in both
David Bowie (1973) and Iggy (1997) mixes, as well as Bomp's silly "Rough
Power" release - a bunch of rough mixes recorded off radio - so take
your pick. While I initially favored the original crappy Bowie mix over Iggy's
"all-needles-on-red" revisionism, the remix - surely the funniest
thing ever to happen to digital remastering - finally won me over once I learned
from James that the reason for the Ashetons' relative inaudibility was inadequate
recording levels, not intraband politics. Where the Bowie mix emphasized treble
frequencies and lead guitar, the Igmix highlights vocals (no big surprise)
and a wall of rhythm guitar noise that actually approximates better than any
other record I know of the way a band sounds onstage playing at volume (and
is mastered louder than any other record you can name to boot). Besides rockers
"Search and Destroy," "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell"
(AKA "Hard to Beat"), the title track (which saw the return of the
Velvet Underground "Waiting for the Man" one-note piano that had
driven "I Wanna Be Your Dog") and "Death Trip," "Raw
Power" also introduced a new, uh, SENSITIVE side to the Stooges (the
aforementioned "Gimme Danger," which actually featured ACOUSTIC
GUITAR, and the shattered "St. James Infirmary" rewrite "I
Need Somebody," which contains the immortal and very revealing line,
"I need somebody, baby/I need some money too") - or was it just
a continuation of the dark, moody strain present in "Ann" on the
first album and "Dirt" on "Funhouse?"
Following the release of "Raw Power," the band was dumped first
by MainMain (who had used their Columbia advance to finance some of Bowie's
"Ziggy Stardust" tours), then by Columbia. Undaunted, they rehearsed
in Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York, then toured relentlessly through the
fall and winter of 1973-74. For the Detroit and New York rehearsals, they
added Bob Sheff on piano, Iggy's former bandmate in Ann Arbor blues band the
Prime Movers, later to attain notoriety in avant-garde music circles as "Blue"
Gene Tyranny. The Detroit rehearsals include a couple of interesting song
ideas that were never fully developed ("Wild Love" and "Till
the End of the Night"), as well as a smattering of covers and some jams
that didn't really coalesce. They've been released innumerable times in Europe
and were anthologized by Bomp in 2001 as "Wild Love." While interesting
from an historical perspective, they make less-than-compelling listening.
The New York rehearsals have been released in numerous configurations, most
effectively on the French Fan Club label's "Rubber Legs" and Bomp's
"Open Up and Bleed." These include the songs that formed a sizable
chunk of the '73-'74 live set, and presumably would have appeared on a fourth
Stooges studio LP: "Rubber Legs," "Open Up and Bleed,"
"Johanna," "Cock In My Pocket," "Head On" (AKA
"Head On Curve" or "Head On Curb," which starts out with
the declaration, "Buttfuckers wanna rule my world"), "She Creatures
of the Hollywood Hills," and some jam material - "Cry for Me,"
"Pin Point Eyes" (a minor blues that sounds like a littermate of
"I Need Somebody"), "Jesus Loves the Stooges."
These songs show Williamson pushing the band to become "better musicians"
and write "better songs," moving in an almost Stones-like mainstream
direction (although the band's performances remained white-hot and vitriolic
in a way the Stones' had never been). While "Rubber Legs" and "Cock
In My Pocket" were rockers in the style of those on "Raw Power"
(think Chuck Berry on strychnine), the slower songs ("Johanna,"
"Head On," and especially "Open Up and Bleed," which starts
out with a surprise - a bleating harmonica; was Scotty Thurston deliberately
trying to evoke the Stones or Dylan? - and tended to evolve in live performance
into an "L.A. Blues"-like free-form freakout, as did the pulsing
jam-tune "She Creatures") had almost Big Rock dynamics, wielding
a power and drama that the band had only hinted at earlier, even at their
most emotionally devastated. If this was the way Iggy really felt, how long
could he continue? The next few months on the road would tell the story.
Of the '73-'74 live shows, material has been released from a number of sources:
1) Whisky-a-Go-Go. Los Angeles, September 1973 (5 shows)
2) Michigan Palace, Detroit, 6 October 1973
3) Latin Casino, Baltimore, November 1973
4) Academy of Music, New York, New Year's Eve 1973
5) Bimbo's, San Francisco, January 1974
6) Michigan Palace, Detroit, 9 February 1974 ("last-ever show")
For the tour, keyboardist Sheff was replaced by Scott Thurston, who later
played guitar on Iggy's 1979 "New Values" album and even later was
a mainstay of, uh, Jackson Brown and Tom Petty's touring bands. Sets typically
included two or three selections from "Raw Power" (the title track,
"Search and Destroy," "Gimme Danger"), the rehearsal material
(except for "Rubber Legs" and the jam tunes), plus "Heavy Liquid"
(AKA "New Orleans," a bastardization of the Freddie Cannon hit),
"Rich Bitch," "I Got Nothing," "Wet My Bed,"
and Richard Berry's immortal "Louie Louie." Of these, "I Got
Nothing" was one of the best songs from the period, while "Rich
Bitch" carried contemptuous lyrics that were even more scabrous than
"Head On" ("When your cunt's so big you could drive through
a truck/And every boy you meet's/Gonna know that you've sure been fucked").
Most of the released live material is from low-fidelity but fascinating audience
tapes (although the October '73 Michigan Palace show released by Skydog/Jungle
on the second disc of "Metallic K.O. 2xCD" and by Bomp on "Michigan
Palace" is from an onstage recording by Williamson; Bomp's version has
the edge in sound quality, coming from the master rather than a cassette dub).
The greatest and most notorious is, of course, "Metallic K.O.."
itself in its many forms, as much for the "ambience" (rabid audience-baiting
by Iggy, response in the form of shattering beer bottles from the surly Detroit
claque) as for the music, although the music is fine - compare Iggy's impassioned
vocal and the arrangement (with added verses) on the "Metallic K.O."
version of "Gimme Danger" with the "Raw Power" original
and decide which one is boss. The Latin Casino show released in its entirety
on Bomp's 2000 "Double Danger" documents the most complete performance
- over an hour, featuring the band's whole repertoire from that time except
"She Creatures" and "Louie Louie." The second disc of
that release is an audience recording of the New Year's Eve show at New York's
Academy of Music (where the Stooges appeared sandwiched in between Kiss and
Blue Oyster Cult) which was supposedly pro-recorded by Columbia for an aborted
live album, although the whereabouts of that tape remain unknown (would it
be too much to hope that they still exist somewhere in CBS/Sony's vaults?).
Bomp's sumptuously-packaged (lotsa cool photos) "California Bleeding"
compiles some good performances from the Whisky and Bimbo's in okay fidelity,
interspersed with some interview snippets that some find annoying but seem
to these ears to make it a neat little "audio verite" documentary,
and is probably the only "quasi-official" Stooges release NOT to
include a version of "Raw Power." Snapper Music's "Live in
L.A. '73" is notable for what just might be the best version of "She
Creatures" extant, as well as a cataclysmic 13-minute "Open Up and
Bleed."
It's regrettable (to say the least) that the Stooges scared the bejeezus out
of every A&R exec in the record business during this last, supernova-like
explosion of creativity. Their image as some kind of novelty act (albeit the
most malignant, twisted one ever to tread the boards) rather than "real"
musicians probably contributed to this, but in retrospect, they now seem to
have been light years ahead of their time and a likely candidate for the title
(as Dave Laing suggested in Perfect Sound Forever) "the greatest rock'n'roll
band of all time." Iggy and James would collaborate again on the demos
that Bomp released as "Kill City" in 1977, and James would produce
Iggy's last good album "New Values" in 1979 (although the guitar
playing on that album, save one song, was by Scott Thurston, not James as
many of us supposed for years). An original Stooges reunion was rumored in
1997, but Iggy's lack of interest (and his snide putdown of the Ashetons in
his liner notes to the remixed "Raw Power" CD) queered the deal.
Over the years, Scott Asheton has worked sporadically with his ex-Sonic's
Rendezvous bandmates Scott Morgan and Gary Rasmussen, and toured Europe with
New York rocker Sonny Vincent (with whom his brother has also recorded). While
none of Ron Asheton's subsequent musical endeavors have quite measured up
to the Stooge standard (although the 1981 New Race tour of Australia with
the MC5's Dennis Thompson and three ex-Radio Birdmen came close), his place
in the punk pantheon is secure. Ron spent much of 2001 touring America and
the U.K. with Stooge disciples J. Mascis and Mike Watt, playing all the great
Stoogesongs from the first two albums. When the tour hit L.A., there were
rumors that Iggy and Williamson would show. No dice. Williamson holds a responsible
position in the electronics industry and has seemingly put down the guitar
for good.
As for the World's Forgotten Boy, Nike ads and film appearances notwithstanding,
none of his solo records have approached the magnificence of "Funhouse"
or "Raw Power," but I've been told he still has the goods to deliver
in live performance.. The one time I caught him solo (way, way back in 1981),
Joan Jett & the Blackhearts blew him off the stage; his best song was
the ancient Stones chestnut "I'm Alright."
"Thanks a lot to the person who threw this glass bottle at my head. You
nearly killed me, but you missed again. Keep trying next week." Sic transit
Gloria Iggy? I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.
- Ken Shimamoto
