Before punk, before musicians started revering them as one of the greatest bands of all time, indeed even before vacuous models started wearing their t-shirts on the catwalk; they were The Stooges – one of the dirtiest, sleaziest, drug fucked bunches of alcoholic petty criminals to grace stages in the US and UK. Once loathed for being too weird and dangerous for the mainstream music scene, and beloved of only a few small pockets of music fans, 43 years after they formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan and began playing around Detroit; The Stooges were last night inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Reforming for live gigs in 2003, the band now features a line-up which is as close to the Raw Power line-up of 1973 as living band members permit.
Here’s Tone Deaf’s salute to the seminal recordings of The Stooges – everyone must own these albums.
The Stooges – 1969
Released in August 1969 after they had signed to Elektra Records, the band originally only recorded five songs for it with producer John Cale of The Velvet Underground. Staples of their live set at the time, when the band handed in I Wanna Be Your Dog, 1969, No Fun, Ann and We Will Fall to Elektra, the band were asked where the remaining tracks were. Naturally, they lied and told the label they had more songs and promptly went and wrote Real Cool Time, Not Right, and Little Doll overnight. Only reaching 106 on the American charts, this progenitor of punk is a visceral blast of attitude, the rampant nihilism of the lyrics chronicling the rat infested, lice ridden, drug and booze addled existence of the band. It defined being bored, broke and 21, where you’ve got your whole life ahead of you but the very notion of continuing it is just no fun.
Fun House – 1970
Recorded live in the studio and in track listing sequence, The Stooges weren’t any more generous with the number of tracks they gave their few fans, with eight tracks clocking in at almost 35 minutes. With songs like Dirt and Funhouse clocking in at over seven minutes, this album best represented the band’s live sound and the long jams their live shows frequently descended in to. As the band became renowned for Iggy Pop’s explosive live performance, the band increasingly baited crowds with performances ending in riots. The album bombed more than their debut in the charts, yet has since been cited by a diverse crowd music royalty such as Nick Cave, Joey Ramone, Steve Albini and Jack White as their favourite album of all time.
Raw Power – 1973
The band effectively broke up in 1971 after being dropped by Elektra, with most of the band incapable of performing due to their chronic heroin addictions. No-one, least of all the band, had reckoned on Iggy Pop meeting David Bowie, however. Then riding high on the success of Ziggy Stardust, Dame David took Iggy under his wing and checked him in to rehab. After Bowie landed the band – now called Iggy &The Stooges – a contract with Columbia in the UK, new guitarist James Williamson joined the rhythm section of Ron & Scott Asheton. Recorded in London with Bowie producing, Raw Power is thought by some people to even eclipse Fun House as being one of the greatest albums of all time. Featuring sharper guitar lines in comparison to the brute force barre chords of the previous albums – courtesy of Williamson’s unique guitar playing – the whole album drips pure unadulterated evil. When Iggy sings ‘I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm’ as the opening line of Search & Destroy, you just KNOW that he means it. The Stooges never left you in doubt. Finally acquiescing to record demands and including a ballad on the record, Iggy Pop gave them the malevolence of Gimme Danger – surely the darkest approximation of a ballad committed to vinyl. Naturally, this being a Stooges record, it barely scraped into the US Top 200 and the band toured it for a year before being dropped by Columbia and then breaking up in February 1974.
Further Releases
Although it started out from a small base, Stooges fans were rabid collectors of Stooges recordings and bootlegs. You could literally write a PhD thesis on the plethora of bootlegs, remixes and compilations available, although several stand out. Metallic KO is a legendary recording of the second half of band’s final performance at the Michigan Palace in Detroit on February 9th 1974, where you can actually hear the audience pelting the band with ice, beer bottles and eggs as Iggy continues to berate and bait them. Legendary rock critic Lester Bangs described the semi-official bootleg as being ‘is the only rock album I know where you can actually hear hurled beer bottles breaking against guitar strings’.
It would be remiss to not mention The Weirdness, the band’s fourth studio album released in 2007 which was recorded by a reformed line-up of Iggy, Ron and Scott Asheton and Mike Watt of The Minutemen on bass. While a perfunctory facsimile of The Stooges as fans have worshipped for decades, it didn’t offer much beyond being a new recording. While the band showed they were still capable of sounding like The Stooges, it pales in comparison to the first three studio albums.
