The Stooges

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  • Fun House
    Fun House
    Fun House

    If you ever take the eight or so hours required to listen to the sessions for The Stooges’ second album—collected on the box set 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions—one thing you’ll notice is its repetition. There are no alternate arrangements or variations in approach, no experiments or added instrumentation. There’s just take after take of the same simple songs, at roughly the same tempo, played one after the other in punishing, glorious succession. It doesn’t necessarily make for a varied listening experience, but it does give you a clue to what makes Fun House so great. While 1969’s The Stooges connected the dots between the inspired primitivism of garage pop and the eventual rupture of punk, Fun House went further, mixing free jazz and noise (“L.A. Blues”) with Chicago blues (“1970”), and combining the rhythmic drive of Motown (“T.V. Eye”) and James Brown (“Fun House”) into a sound that had the force of punk, but the hypnotic quality of minimalist composition. This is music whose apparent simplicity is complicated by the feats of lockstep endurance that drive it. The Stooges had captured the sound of bored teenagers lighting the fringes of carpet on fire in the basement; Fun House found the same kids having an internal meltdown on the factory line, and being egged on by the screaming, moaning caveman named Iggy Pop. At a moment when the hippie era was dissipating into the fussiness and sentimentality of prog and arena rock, Fun House was a reminder of the intuitive quality that made rock so appealing in the first place. From here unfolds an entire history of underground music, from the brute elegance of The White Stripes to the psychedelic ugliness of Wolf Eyes to the high- and low-culture obliterations of Sonic Youth and Nirvana. Whether you listen to the original 36-minute Fun House or wade into the hours’ worth of sessions that birthed the album in the first pace, you’ll hear power, purpose and singular presence in every note.

  • The Stooges
    The Stooges
    The Stooges

    About a week after The Stooges put out their first album in August 1969, they played a show in Boston, opening for a feel-good blues-rock band called Ten Years After. It was so loud, so crude, so contrary to the pervasive optimism of the moment that nobody knew quite what to make of it. After all, Ten Years After had just come from playing Woodstock, and here were a bunch of creeps from the Midwest pushing out a wall of noise, their singer writhing on the ground, cutting himself. So, the audience—roughly 3,000 people—just sat in silence. About a decade later, when asked what he thought his legacy was, Iggy Pop said he wasn't sure, but he thinks he helped wipe out the ’60s. Even after the thousands of albums it helped inspire, <I>The Stooges</I> sounds mean. They’re bored (“1969”). They’re frustrated (“No Fun”). They’re so wild with lust, they hate themselves (“I Wanna Be Your Dog”). Whereas the rebellion of early rock ’n’ roll was fun and pro-social, <I>The Stooges</I> is inward and nihilistic, a perfect reflection of the reptilian poison lurking in the teenage id. They’d been inspired by the noisiness of The Velvet Underground, but in transposing that noise from New York to sleepy Ann Arbor, Michigan, it takes on an ominous cast: These are sweet neighbourhood boys down in the rec room, and they’re going out of their minds. That sense of liberation is in the album’s honesty. Iggy felt that rock music had been co-opted by business interests—tamed, streamlined and market-tested to the point that no new ground could be gained with it. It was a doubly sinister accusation at a moment when rock was being cast as a countercultural force. But in the absence of anything they could trust, The Stooges built their reality from the ground up.

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About The Stooges

There are many theories as to when the ’60s hippie dream ended, but certainly the arrival of The Stooges provided a doomy death knell. Formed in 1967, the Ann Arbor quartet—guitarist Ron Asheton, his drummer brother Scott, bassist Dave Alexander and a freaky frontman who christened himself Iggy Pop—answered the era’s peace and love with nihilism and noise, investing the snarl of ’60s garage rock with a more sinister, apocalyptic aura. Produced by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, the band’s 1969 self-titled debut cast Iggy’s feral fantasies (“I Wanna Be Your Dog”) and anti-social mission statements (“No Fun”) in skull-splitting wah-wah guitars and rumbling caveman rhythms; the following year’s Fun House presented an even more fearsome collision of murderous acid rock and free-jazz fury. The commercial failure of those records nearly deep-sixed the group, before a retooled version of The Stooges—with Ron switching to bass to accommodate new guitarist James Williamson—emerged for 1973’s blistering Raw Power, produced by superfan David Bowie. That record also scared off the public, but it wouldn’t be long before the first generation of punks and alt-rockers elevated The Stooges from cult curio to eternally influential institution. Their legacy secure, Iggy and the Ashetons reunited in 2007 to release The Weirdness, which allowed The Stooges to play for the adoring festival crowds they were denied the first time around. Following Ron’s death in 2009, Williamson re-entered the fold for 2013’s Ready to Die, a surprisingly reflective effort that had the feel of a swan song—a fate sealed by the 2014 passing of Scott Asheton.

FROM
Ann Arbor, MI, United States
FORMED
1967
GENRE
Rock

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