1969... the Stooges
Perhaps the only band ever to physically intimidate their audiences has recorded its first Elektra album.
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1969... the Stooges
Perhaps the only band ever to physically intimidate their audiences has recorded its first Elektra album. The perverse epitome of the emerging Detroit rock and roll culture, the dangerous psychedelic Stooges, manage to quickly get down to the nittygritty of sensual frustration for all of neo-American adolescent malehood. Chief Stooge Iggy. crazing thousands of teenage girls by shucking his teeshirt and freak groping them at the Grande for years, manages to incite a certain frenzy every young man knows well, be it from the Grande or the drive-in:
1969 the lead song on the disc is the perfect expression of the oldest complaint of rebellious anarcho/crazy youth. Iggy sounds a lot younger than twenty two, for the horny American youth whose fantasies he summarizes especially in the super-sex-dirge We Will Fall is often years younger.
One of the by-products of the Stooges in performance has always been to allow the audience to vent their hostilities on the group, especially iggy. As Iggy himself has said, “I suppose someday someone's going to get up there and punch me out”. The album carries that by-product to a different realm definitely one only the amazing Stooges have the energy and the balls to enter into.
/ Wanna Be Your Dog, the “A” side of the killer Stooge 45 with 1969 is reminiscent of early Velvet Underground music though carrying it into even more bizarre levels. Iggv's vocal is neo-Mick Jagger with overtones of Wild Man Fisher, especially on this track and Little Doll.
Wo Fun is a crazed song of repressed American boy/girl crazies, an anthem (or an excuse) for street mania. It epitomizes the reason why the Stooges, as much as MC-5 perhaps, deserve to be called “revolutionary”. They have the reasons for the revolutionary youth culture down cold. In a very real way their music thunders out of the smoke belching factories, pounds out of the industrial sewage producers that are Detroit. In Real Cool Dine Iggy intimidates the audience, challenging them not to have a real cool, superfine, fab, gear time tonight. But all the while you’re hip that it’s just a shuck and a fantasy. Iggy knows too with the killer repression on all levels any semblance to a real cool time is a hype. Even if occasionally the hype is an enjoyable one.
Although carrying their music to even more criminal energy levels, the lunatic Stooges definitely bear comparision to some of their more degenerate predecessors. Ann so'unds like Jim Morrison when Jim Morrison was still being Jim Morrison. When Iggy screams out "I want you right now” and the Stooges neo-sadistic music climbs to yet another ear piercing freak octave, the images one may of have of a Tyner, Morrison or Jagger screaming out the same phrase are shattered.
Rarely are true groups (not just people banded together to jam, but groups) as physically dominated by one person as Iggy dominates the Stooges. It is no coincidence that the album cover looks on the front like 12x5 and that the back resembles the Doors. This is not to imply that the Stooges will follow in the stops of either of these aggregations but that Iggy is a performer with the potential charisma that Jagger has and Morrison so blatantly squandered. Iggy is too bizarre to be said to be anything more or less than his own flipped out self.
Not Right features some physically abusive guitar playing by Stooge guitarist Ron Asheton. Throughout the album Asheton reveals himself as an insane master of the power the Stooges channel into their music, playing energy bursts rather than notes or chords. With super amplification techniques now available this is probably the guitar style of the future.
Asheton should be in the very forefront of the masters of that style.
Little Doll, while sounding remarkably similar to 1969, is a great exploration of rock’s energy level potential. Its an anthem to weirdo girlhood. Dave Alexander’s bass work is very physical, a key feature to Stooge music. It always assaults on a macabre, physical level, often painful but so is the environment the Stooges grew out of. , It may be the first truly “psychedelic” album ever available; that’s always been a Stooge trademark. Total assault on the culture and resensification of the music are becoming a reality not a cotton-candy catchplnase to excuse the use of 1958 songs without increasing the energy levels.
Cont, on Next Page
The mad Stooges are even more unrefined than their brother A-2 band the Five. Thus they allow us to see ourselves at an even more unrefined uncoated and undressed level of sophistication than we now assume ourselves to have reached. Dig it. we've all been just as horny as in No Fun. just as frustrated as in F)69; and just as belligerent as in Real Cool Time.
The weakness of the record is primarily the long slow We Will Fall which sounds tor) much like the Velvet Underground when producer John Cale was their organist. Its narcotizing effect may have worked for the Underground but most listeners would rather hear the Stooges and find it boring and pretentious.
Instrumentally the Stooges aren’t existential ego-trippers but there is not any attempt to be other than what they are. anyway. They hardly find it necessary to throw in a blues to show how hip they are. Except for We Will Fall (which resembles the old Stooges, just absolutely flipped out) the music is all 1969; Iggy and the boys doing Stooge music which is what we’re supposedly after here anyway. The Stooges haven’t tried to be anybody else because they don’t feel any need to justify themselves that way. Hell, what they’re about is mania anyway and if anyone can’t dig that, let 'em get a little crazier and they’ll figure it out.
