“I had very sophisticated tastes but my skills were very simple and the skills of the guys in the band were even more simple than mine. I thought that gave us a good ‘in’ for disaffected youth… I was going more for high school drop-outs, troubled drug kids, kids who were so totally into music that it wasn’t just a part of a lifestyle. I knew anybody who was really into music would find it interesting what we were doing.”

- Iggy Pop, from the liner notes to the 1997 Raw Power reissue.

Do you live in a small town? If the answer is yes, what are you doing reading this?? Go start a freakin’ band! The best thing to happen to music EVER is boredom; and not just any boredom – inescapable boredom. Boredom is the great instigator of creativity, and in small towns, where there’s nothing to do but drink underage behind the 7-11, get jumped by the football team, and not be able to find a job, Rock & Roll has long been the best out. The Stooges, Detroit street urchins who took their drop-out frustrations out on unsuspecting audiences for 5 years or so, were the perfect example of turning to Rock & Roll for escape, and against all odds, that shit fucking worked. They started as a noisy art-mess, playing vacuum cleaners and oil drums on stage, and what little musicianship there was in the beginning devolved into a wall of feedback. But again, it doesn’t matter if you can’t play guitar or drums, cuz you have to try first. By the end of their run though, The Stooges were perhaps the most vicious band on the planet, tight as a cat’s asshole, with lead stooge Iggy Pop among the most infamous frontmen in Rock history, an icon of great and unpredictable live presence. Oh, and they had basically claimed the right to be referred to forever as the first Punk band.

The Stooges’ 1969 debut album starts with a song named after that year, and its key lyric is, “Another year with nothing to do”. That says it all really, the entire thought process of The Stooges in the early days. The fact that they even got signed seemed a miracle to all that had seen their early shows in Michigan. On the songs from the debut, Iggy sounded like a brain-dead zombie, horny and zonked out on whatever drugs he could get his hands on; he wants to come over tonight, he wants to be your dog, etc. Iggy singing “no fun” is just a dumb way of saying “I can’t get no satisfaction”. In retrospect, the album is a bit weak in comparison to what followed - the lyrics were virtually non-existent – but the emotions came through: fuck this life, there’s nothing for me in this wasteland of a town. It’s ironic that the album was released the week of Woodstock – as all those bands in upstate New York desperately tried to keep the peace & love movement alive, The Stooges’ snapshots of Neanderthal unrest were showing the world the future; six months later, after murder at Altamont, the dream was dead, but The Stooges were writing more songs.

Despite whatever amount of shockwaves the debut sent through the Rock world, it was barely a tremor compared to the sound of the follow-up, Fun House. The band felt “emasculated” by the record company and producer John Cale on the first album, and Iggy and the band were determined to not let this happen again; the result is one of the greatest documents of pure Rock muscle ever committed to tape. The sinister slither of “Down On The Street” opens the album deceptively, slightly low key for these wild boys, but a few seconds in Iggy starts to bark and grunt and growl into the mic, surrounded in natural room echo, and even if you haven’t read about the creation of this LP, you know this was recorded live’ they basically set up in a studio and hit the record button. It’s a live album without an audience, and The Stooges came prepared to make the most of the set up. Ron Asheton’s guitar grows more rabid as the song progresses, dancing around Iggy’s voice, while bassist Dave Alexander and drummer Scott Asheton show off their improved chemistry.

It’s obvious right from the start – the most important thing about the music on Fun House is the devotion to the groove of the songs. It was something that figured prominently in the early days of the group, but again, Elektra Records pushed for more concise structures on the debut. The Stooges took back their locked-in rhythm for this album, and by playing the songs live and sharpening their attack prior to recording, they became second nature to a band that was routinely derided as inept. When “Loose” crashes in, it knocks your head clean off your shoulders, like The Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” times a thousand. If the music of The Stooges is called reductive, well then this is the best that reductive gets; the rhythm section bashes out a 4/4 for Ron to dump his filthy riffs on and Iggy to get buckwild over. In that way, you could look at The Stooges (who at the time were immersing themselves in the very non-reductive, exploratory jazz of John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman) as the white boy mirror image to what James Brown was developing with his new monster funk band, which included Bobby Byrd and the Collins brothers (see: “Sex Machine”). Maybe it wasn’t necessarily reductive, it was instead lean and focused and the essence of popular music at that very moment, the beginning of a new decade and a new post-hippie, post-Beatles age, a time when acts as diverse as Al Green, James Taylor, and Black Sabbath would be elbowing each other to get into the top ten. While so many Rock bands were writing more and more complex and “progressive” tunes, 10-minute song-suites and shit, The Stooges were saying fuck that, the riff and the rhythm is still king.

And that’s all you need on “T.V. Eye” and “1970”, probably the band’s most violent songs up to that point. Iggy is making every sound he could conjure with his mouth, sounding like an exorcism over masterful riffs by Ron. Yes, Iggy Pop is the white James Brown, no doubt the hardest working man in tight ripped jeans, silver gloves, and peanut butter smeared on his bare chest, seething “Do you feel it when you CUT me??!?” on the slow, methodical blues “Dirt”. Scott Asheton rocks the fuck out of the beat on this song, knocking that snare upside your head with stiff-arm precision. The groove keeps getting deeper and deeper because Scott is holding on holding on holding on, and then something happens. About two-thirds of the way through the bassline shifts and the guitars take on this glistening quality; Scott’s beat starts to stutter, hopping like an anxious insect, and there’s Iggy, mumbling and cooing. It’s not quite pretty, and it’s never soothing – they still sound like they could beat your ass – but it’s like the beast has gotten sleepy and needs to take a rest.

The album ends in just the opposite fashion – with absolute chaos. The title track, featuring saxophone from Steve MacKay front and center, sounds like a soundtrack to a riot, pure incendiary menace. Alexander’s bass is the track that the song rides on, with Scott skittering his beat along the third rail. Iggy plays bandleader like James while MacKay and guitarist Ron trade lead runs for almost eight minutes. It’s followed by the album’s closing track, “L.A. Blues”, which can hardly be called a song as there isn’t anything really written to play. If the title track is a riot, then this song is the tipping point where it goes from a riot as protest, with meaning, to a riot as crime, and then to tragedy. It’s essentially recording chaos, all five musicians wailing away for five straight minutes. It’s not even remotely listenable, but just the fact that it exists is important and bold enough. Fun House is an album of escalation, and listening to such exhilarating, cathartic, passionate racket, you have to know how it must end.

What happened next was unfortunate: it looked like The Stooges, a band that needed to go until they burned out, was going to instead fade away. They were dropped when Elektra didn’t like what they were working on for album number three, now with new guitarist James Williamson (Ron Asheton moved to bass after Dave Alexander was fired for being too much of an addict in a band full of them). The band broke up briefly, until Iggy hooked up with David Bowie and his management team; they were bent on turning Iggy into this glam-pop freak with Bowie-penned tunes and an anonymous backing band, but Iggy, now free from the nowhere that was Detroit, was playing them to get The Stooges back together. There were issues with not touring and not seeing money, but despite that, Iggy and the band decided to just keep molding the new album as their biggest middle finger yet.

Raw Power is every bit as good as Fun House, but surrounded with infinitely more drama and myth. When it was finished, the management team and record company hated Iggy’s mix, and so David Bowie and Iggy were thrown into a studio to remix it in one day, effectively neutering some of its bite. After years of bootlegs of varying mixes and qualities, and luckily for the whole world, Iggy remixed the album in 1997, pushing all the levels way to the top where everything sounds hot and bleeds together and distorts in all the best ways. It’s the loudest CD I’ve ever heard by a mile, and I think it might remain that way because no other band could ever sound this good with their mix this fuzzed-out and aggressive. This is the only way to ever hear the album now, which is fucking perfect if you ask me. Each song is like the rush of going over that first big drop on a roller coaster. You’ve never heard anything like “Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell”, Williamson’s guitars screaming over everything, destroying anything in their path while the Asheton brothers, now even more synchronized as the rhythm section, rumble like hot rods at full speed. The band is like this on every track, the Asheton brothers firing on all cylinders and Williamson’s addition being priceless. His leads are among the best air-guitar fodder you’ll ever hear.

Iggy had become a chameleon, changing from song to song, ominous on the midnight chug of “Penetration”, excited on the unbridled party of the title track, desperate on the slow roll of “I Need Somebody”, unhinged and guttural on the runaway locomotive that is “Shake Appeal”. If Fun House was played live in the studio at a point when the band was used to clubs and small auditoriums, then Iggy sounded positively ready for the big venues on Raw Power, screaming and hollering for the back row. His lyrics were even getting better, crafting memorably odd imagery like “Dance to the beat of the living dead” or “There’s nothing left alive but a pair of glassy eyes”. Also, if Fun House was the band’s best album as a whole statement, Raw Power is by far their best collection of songs, each one a classic in the album’s context or on their own, and none more classic than “Search And Destroy”. Everything about the song is perfect, a rocketship of proto-punk; the first time you hear the song, you see your God, and he looks like Iggy. What does he say? “I’m a street-walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm”? What the fuck does that even mean??!!? Who cares – it’s fucking awesome! “I’m the runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb”, he says! Cool, dude, whatever you want to be, I’m behind it 100%, because you are clearly the unequivocal shit. He’s not apologizing for using technology, he’s radiating souls in the dead of night, and he’s fucking in the middle of fire-fights.

Don’t mess with this Iggy Pop character cuz he will singe your facial hair off. And still, with Williamson setting his fretboard on fire (probably got some napalm on him) and the Asheton brothers pounding the beat into your facial area (ya know, to aid in the searching and destroying), the street-walkin’ cheetah remains humble, like the bored drop-out kid with a secondhand drumkit in a garage in Detroit is still somewhere inside that iconic glam-banshee on the album’s cover. “I am the world’s forgotten boy”, he sings because that’s how he still sees himself, or at least who he knows he represents, the forgotten and overlooked. But we say no way, man. We’re not forgetting you ever, and then we go start bands to prove it.

- The Stooges [1969]: 7/10
Download: "1969", "I Wanna Be Your Dog", "No Fun"
- Fun House [1970]: 10/10
Download: "Loose", "TV Eye", "Dirt", "1970"
- Raw Power [1973]: 10/10
Download: "Search & Destroy", "Gimme Danger", "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell", "Raw Power"

Please visit Raz at: http://cutshallowradio.blogspot.com