Iggy Pop & The Stooges

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Iggy Pop & The Stooges

 

Iggy Pop & The Stooges 

Lies, legends, half-truths, tales of drug-fueled lunacy, and wax-museum amounts of after-the-fact nostalgia will never be able to mute the stunning, violent, visceral recorded legacy of a band that made jaws drop in both horror. The difference is striking from the get-go between The Stooges and almost everybody else at the time. "1969," the opening track, isn't a call to arms or a vision of an idyllic psychedelic future. It's about being bored. "I Wanna Be Your Dog" invents punk and then destroys it in three minutes by being both dumber and smarter than any punk could ever hope to be. Of the million-plus bands inspired by The Stooges later, the ones who were most successful realized that simplicity, volume, repetition, and primitivism could be a shortcut to transcendence, but that it also takes brains to get it just right. "No Fun" is so perfect it's breathtaking: Scott Asheton's metronomic drum-beat, brother Ron's inspired fuzz guitar solo- there isn't a note out of place. Credit producer John Cale with helping to create what in effect are Stooges miniatures: contained and light (unlike their already chaotic, anarchic live shows), yet oozing with menace underneath it all. To the Stooges, and unlike other bands of the era like the Doors, decadence was just another word for Friday night. No need for barque flourishes or bad poetry to describe their hearts of darkness. 

To say their second album, Fun House, is one of the greatest rock & roll records of all time risks hyperbole, but the evidence is inescapable. As great as they were, the Stones never went so deep, the Beatles never sounded so alive, and anyone would have a hard time matching Iggy Pop's ferocity as a vocalist. The dirt-simple riffs of "Loose" and "T.V. Eye" mask the quantum-physics-level complexities at play in songs that can elicit from the listener emotions of pure joy and the simultaneous impulse to tear shit up and bust skulls. Heightened emotion is an element in all great music, but few pieces or albums can summon the strength to keep reaching higher and higher until by the end everything crashes and crumbles under the weight of its own power and ambition. Optimally, after a spin of Fun House, the listener should be a little weary and a little bloody.

If Stooges albums don't sound dated, it's because the whimsy, wooziness, or strident agitprop of the day is absent from their music, being replaced instead with timeless constancy of lust, fear, and hate. They were white bluesmen making Detroit tribal music, and their last studio album, Raw Power, is no exception. Producer David Bowie still catches heat for the sound of the album. Described as "muddy," the in-and-out-of-clarity mix is actually the perfect approach for the last incarnation of the group. The Stooges sound like they are trapped in the bottom of a dark pit, and every minute or so Iggy and guitarist James Williamson reaches up and tries to drag you in with them. There aren't enough synonyms for the word "slashing" to describe Williamson's guitar tone on the album. And you know a group is communing with gods and monsters when even the acoustic guitars sound malevolent. "Raw Power," "Search and Destroy," "Gimme Danger," and "I Need Somebody" are required listening for students of epochal milestones, failed coup attempts, and the restorative powers of nihilism. 

The innumerable amount of shitty-sounding live and demo recordings of the Stooges can be overwhelming and less than illuminating for anyone but the most rabid fan. Open Up and Bleed, part of BOMP! Records' archival The Iguana Chronicles series, is notable for featuring only songs that would have presumably made it onto a fourth Stooges album had there been one. The live and rehearsal recordings of "Cock in My Pocket" and "Cry for Me/Pin Point Eyes" are worth hearing. The live Metallic K.O. was the first posthumous album to document the end of the road for the band, and it's worth getting just to hear Iggy's desperate attempts to be put out of his misery. The great thing about a Stooges show in 1974 was that everyone in the crowd was joined together in a mutual desire for oblivion. Half the audience wanted to get and high and have fun, put on their boogie shoes, and forget the whole thing.

"I'm just a modern guy/Of course I've had it in the ear before." That quote from "Lust for Life" sums up the former Stooge's solo attitude: a cutting, ironic distance replaces the self-lacerating edge of his legendary early-'70s performances. Producer David Bowie modernizes the dense psychedelic blare of the Stooges, substituting synth moans for guitar wails and keeping the jack-hammer beat largely intact. This stark, electronic sheen alienated more than a few old Pop fans, but the Bowie association and the advent of new wave brought Iggy to a much larger audience. A unique sensibility inhabits the crunching rockers and burnt-out torch songs on these two albums: brooding, sardonic, restless, outrage, perceptive, funny as hell, slightly bitter. The Idiot knowingly pokes through the residue of hedonism-run-amok on "Funtime" and "Nightclubbing," while Lust for Life highlights like the title cut and "The Passenger" portray Iggy Pop as a punk survivor. He's battle-scarred, but still searching. Reuniting with latter-day Stooges guitarist James Williamson, Iggy cooks up a lean, keyboard-enhanced hard-rock sound on New Values. If he doesn't quite consummate the title track's ambitious quest, Iggy does find strength in the old verities. "Endless Sea" perfects his post-Doors romantic doomsayer stance, and sets the stage for hundreds of mopey underground sensations to come. This initial stage of Iggy's career wielded a tremendous influence over the '80s; he translated the glittery innovations of Bowie and Roxy Music into a streetwise argot any art-school dropout could understand. After that, however, the dreaded could roadshow syndrome set in. Throughout the '80s, each successive Iggy album sounded more dispiriting and uninspired than the next. 

It's hard to decide which A&M album is worse: The slick Bowie reunion (Blah-Blah-Blah) mysteriously fails to spark either participant's batteries, while the numbing dinosaur-rock return (Instinct) stumbles into the tar pits. Every the phoenix, Iggy stumbles halfway back from artistic oblivion with the surprisingly consistent Brick by Brick. The self-consciously "mature" effort offends the faithful, but Iggy curls his lip and lets his delightfully twisted mind roam the contemporary media landscape.

 By 1993, Iggy had been lionized by the Seattle grunge scene, specifically with bands like Mudhoney & Nirvana. But his response to grunge was American Caesar, wherein producer Malcom Burn applies the same swampy, reverb-drenched glop that his colleague Daniel Lanois had dumped all over records for U2 and the Neville Brothers- an approach that suits Iggy not one whit. Conversely, Naughty Little Doggy sounds as if it had been recorded in the same time it takes to listen to it and for about 25 bucks, besides... This was a step too far in the other direction, but the strutting, leering "Pussy Walk," might just be his funniest tune ever. And then came Avenue B, a baffling if often amusing excursion into crooning and spoken word, accompanied largely by organ trio Medeski, Martin & Wood. If that record seemed ill-advised, at least it wasn't the same old scum rock retreated that Beat 'Em Up was. Finally, Iggy gave his fans the Stooges reunion they had salivated after for for three decades- Skull Ring includes four tunes recorded with his old comrades, as well as cuts with Green Day, Sum 41, and Canadian band Peaches. Sadly, each of the latter is far more energetic than the reconstituted Stooges' tracks.

 

The band would reunite for two more albums: 2007's The Weirdness & 2013's Ready to Die...

And that's without mentioning that the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

Not bad for a buncha' white-boys from Detroit.

Ya' foolz'.

It's...

Iggy Pop & The Stooges