vinyl 3: not larry, moe, and curly
lately i'm just pleased as punch because for the first time in, um, over 30 yrs, i own all three stooges albums on vinyl. it wasn't even my idea: my _wife_ made me do it. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
what else is there to write about the stooges? lord (or iggy) knows i've written reams and reams of blather about 'em, starting with my 11th grade english journal (which moved my cute little blonde english teacher mrs. kaufman to ask me, "is everything all right?"), culminating in a night of marathon excess reviewing the rhino handmade complete funhouse sessions box (which i no longer own and now deem unlistenable; you _can_ get too much of a good thing, thanks for asking) for the i-94 bar (strapped to my computer, contemplating the day of acute sleep deprivation that awaited me at my soul-destroying tech writing job while a mad australian egged me on via e-mail, "spin another disc why doncha?!?!?" as yet another take of "i'm loose" blared away in the background).
between 1997 and 2002, i musta listened to a thousand records that tried to sound like these three, and they just weren't as good. the lessons of the stooges are many: that less _is_ more; that bands can develop from stumblebum chaos to assured mastery in a relatively short time if they play a lot, regardless of their substance abuse patterns; that the no-talent losers you're laughing at now could, in the fullness of time, become cultural icons and their horrible noise could become _part of the lexicon_ (i mean, back in 1970, who'd a thunk that 30+ years down the line, black sabbath would be as-if-not-_more_ influential on the rawk-as-it-is than the beatles?!?!?). that it's, um, better to burn out than it is to rust.
in 1967, in ann arbor (mellow-down-easy collegetown about as far from the festering open sewer of detroit as denton is from fort worth or dallas), the psychedelic stooges were a joke, the band ppl used to laugh at or walk around getting a beer to when they opened for touring heavyweights like the cream (uh, that's eric clapton's old band...who's he? y'know the old guy that did the song for that john travolta movie...oh, nevermind). as chronicled in please kill me and elsewhere, elektra records "house hipi" danny fields got 'em signed when label boss jac holzman came to town to sign the mc5 (big hype in rolling stone and they worked real hard, but wound up being totally eclipsed by their "little brother" band) and they went into the studio with ex-velvet underground founder john cale as their producer. sure, they could hardly play their instruments, but that was almost the point: they showed just how much you could accomplish with near-zero technical ability, which proved in their case to be quite a lot.
if you wanna wallow in welters of amplified and distorted primitive noise, you just can't beat the first stooges alb (cleverly entitled the stooges), even though half of the first side is taken up by 10 seemingly interminable minutes of "we will fall," which sounds like the velvets' "venus in furs" stretched to mind-numbing length and performed by nepalese monks (albeit nepalese monks with wah-wah gtr). actually, it reminds me of the music that's playing during the scene in conan the barbarian where james earl jones turns into a snake during the orgy and then aaah-nold tips over the cauldron full of skull soup. but i digress. some of the songs on side two kinda suck, too, but then again ron asheton had to dash 'em off in a big hurry when they arrived in nyc to record with exactly three songs written. but the good stuff is rill, _rill_ good: the blaring fuzz-wah apocalypse of "1969," the ur-punk anthem "i wanna be your dog" (with its velvet-inspahrd one-note piano and _sleigh bells_) and maybe best of all, "little doll," which deconstructs bo diddley into something _really_ primal. and am i hallucinating, or do the handclaps on "no fun" (which iggy claims was modeled on johnny cash's "i walk the line;" can you hear it?) make it sound almost like, um, a _pop_ record or something?
then they went on the road, and a funny thing happened: they learned how to play, and not just almost. ron asheton might only have known two licks on gtr (he subsequently learned a third, around 1981, which australian fans refer to as "_the lick_"), but he made 'em sound absolutely lethal every time out the box, and his brother scott showed a grasp of groove and dynamics rare in a rawk drummer that made it seem as though he had swallowed the entire detroit r&b tradition whole and now the motor city's throbbing pulse was his pulse, too. and iggy...from the acid-addled jester of his earliest performances, he'd evolved into something downright _scary_ (although deniz tek, who saw the stooges a bunch of times as a teen in ann arbor, says there was always a fair amount of humor in iggy's shtick). fuck mick jagger and jim morrison; this cat looked like he was right out there on the edge (of what? madness? transcendence? as iggy his own self would say, "you pays your money so you takes your choice") and sounded like a psychotic trailer-park james brown.
it's all there in the vid of the 1970 cincinnati pop festival, where iggy jumps offstage and winds up walking on the audience's hands, smearing himself with peanut butter. he's pure animal; beautiful, unbridled id. (when i made my last g-f watch it with me, she said incredulously, "you'd like to _be like him_, wouldn't you?" "who wouldn't?" i said.) all of that is on funhouse, my choice for the greatest record ever made, which sounds a lot less dated 35 yrs down the road than most music that's 20 or 10 or five or two years old. it was produced by don gallucci, a veteran of the pacific northwest scene that spawned battalions of killer white hard-rock bands like the wailers, the sonics, the raiders, and his own don & the goodtimes long before the beatles ever played on ed sullivan. cutting live in the studio, with iggy singing through a p.a., little donnie had the sense to let the stooges turn up and do their thang, naked and without embellishment. on the second side, steve mackay blows some anarchic r&b-flavored tenor sax, culminating in "l.a. blues," an echo of the high-energy free-form meltdowns on late-period coltrane sides like meditations.
after that, things began to unravel rather quickly. it didn't help that around the time funhouse was released, a plague of heroin afflicted the cohesive and highly politicized detroit-ann arbor scene (coincidence? _you_ decide!!!), including iggy and scott asheton. then original bassist dave alexander was summarily shitcanned after he forgot how to play all the songs while drunk and stoned onstage in front of 30,000 ppl at the goose lake pop festival and was replaced by a succession of non-musicians. somewhere along the line a second gtrist, james williamson, was recruited, and he quickly subsumed ron asheton's role as iggy's co-writer. the wheels had just off the band when along came david bowie, then in his first flush of fame stateside, who picked up iggy and james and whisked 'em off to england, where they auditioned legions of bassplayers and drummers before finally putting out the call for the asheton bros. to come save the day.
now, there's no doubt that bowie idolized iggy, but that didn't keep his management from using the stooges as a kind of cash cow to get the ziggy stardust train on the rails. they took the stooges' $60,000 advance from columbia and used it to bankroll bowie's ventures, while recording raw power on the quick-and-cheap (when i interviewed ron asheton, he said that the guy who engineered the record didn't even bother to get _levels_ on the bass and drums). the result, as mixed by bowie, is kind of like having somebody stick a knife in your ear: the bowie mix is _shrill_. that said, i'll still take it over the one iggy did for the remastered cd version back in '97, which actually sounds a lot like what a loud rawk band hears onstage in a club where the soundman has a cloth ear: a wall of rhythm gtr. on vinyl, at least you can hear what low-frequency sounds there are to be heard in the bowie mix. the music, however, is beyond criticism. three words: "search and destroy." hard to believe anyone was playing this hard and fast in the early '70s, but they were -- for awhile, anyway.
i got funhouse when i was 14, and played the shit out of it until my then-best friend puked purloined gin all over it _and_ my record player (_not_ stereo). that was during the coupla yrs that my father was in germany on a fellowship and in his absence, my best buddy and i made liberal and indiscriminate use of the contents of his liquor cabinet. by that time, the record was cut-out, so replacing it wasn't an option. (thanks, jon.) it took me a few months of working weekends at the hipi record store to earn enough money to buy a stereo. i got raw power the day it was released, along with, um, beck, bogert & appice and the new johnny winter record. back in those days, it's instructive to remember, the stooges were the _antithesis_ of cool; "hip" people usedta laugh and look at you funny when you said you liked 'em.
by the early '80s, that had changed; punk had hit and stooges rekkids even got re-released. on my first "date" with my future ex-wife (we went to austin to see, um, broooce springsteen _on the bus_ because my driver's license was suspended, and stayed with a guy i'd come down from new york with), i found a weird canadian release that had most of the good songs from the stooges and funhouse. since then, i've been without 'em for spells, a condition i hope not to repeat (my sweetie even approves my desire to cop an extra copy of funhouse to keep in pristine condition for our dotage).
of course, the labels (rhino, the euros) keep re-re-repackaging this stuff, but screw them; for my money, you can't beat the original pristine artifacts. it always makes me laugh when i hear rekkid collectors talking about "upgrading" their fave old gooduns; how can you improve on something that's already perfect?
what else is there to write about the stooges? lord (or iggy) knows i've written reams and reams of blather about 'em, starting with my 11th grade english journal (which moved my cute little blonde english teacher mrs. kaufman to ask me, "is everything all right?"), culminating in a night of marathon excess reviewing the rhino handmade complete funhouse sessions box (which i no longer own and now deem unlistenable; you _can_ get too much of a good thing, thanks for asking) for the i-94 bar (strapped to my computer, contemplating the day of acute sleep deprivation that awaited me at my soul-destroying tech writing job while a mad australian egged me on via e-mail, "spin another disc why doncha?!?!?" as yet another take of "i'm loose" blared away in the background).
between 1997 and 2002, i musta listened to a thousand records that tried to sound like these three, and they just weren't as good. the lessons of the stooges are many: that less _is_ more; that bands can develop from stumblebum chaos to assured mastery in a relatively short time if they play a lot, regardless of their substance abuse patterns; that the no-talent losers you're laughing at now could, in the fullness of time, become cultural icons and their horrible noise could become _part of the lexicon_ (i mean, back in 1970, who'd a thunk that 30+ years down the line, black sabbath would be as-if-not-_more_ influential on the rawk-as-it-is than the beatles?!?!?). that it's, um, better to burn out than it is to rust.
in 1967, in ann arbor (mellow-down-easy collegetown about as far from the festering open sewer of detroit as denton is from fort worth or dallas), the psychedelic stooges were a joke, the band ppl used to laugh at or walk around getting a beer to when they opened for touring heavyweights like the cream (uh, that's eric clapton's old band...who's he? y'know the old guy that did the song for that john travolta movie...oh, nevermind). as chronicled in please kill me and elsewhere, elektra records "house hipi" danny fields got 'em signed when label boss jac holzman came to town to sign the mc5 (big hype in rolling stone and they worked real hard, but wound up being totally eclipsed by their "little brother" band) and they went into the studio with ex-velvet underground founder john cale as their producer. sure, they could hardly play their instruments, but that was almost the point: they showed just how much you could accomplish with near-zero technical ability, which proved in their case to be quite a lot.
if you wanna wallow in welters of amplified and distorted primitive noise, you just can't beat the first stooges alb (cleverly entitled the stooges), even though half of the first side is taken up by 10 seemingly interminable minutes of "we will fall," which sounds like the velvets' "venus in furs" stretched to mind-numbing length and performed by nepalese monks (albeit nepalese monks with wah-wah gtr). actually, it reminds me of the music that's playing during the scene in conan the barbarian where james earl jones turns into a snake during the orgy and then aaah-nold tips over the cauldron full of skull soup. but i digress. some of the songs on side two kinda suck, too, but then again ron asheton had to dash 'em off in a big hurry when they arrived in nyc to record with exactly three songs written. but the good stuff is rill, _rill_ good: the blaring fuzz-wah apocalypse of "1969," the ur-punk anthem "i wanna be your dog" (with its velvet-inspahrd one-note piano and _sleigh bells_) and maybe best of all, "little doll," which deconstructs bo diddley into something _really_ primal. and am i hallucinating, or do the handclaps on "no fun" (which iggy claims was modeled on johnny cash's "i walk the line;" can you hear it?) make it sound almost like, um, a _pop_ record or something?
then they went on the road, and a funny thing happened: they learned how to play, and not just almost. ron asheton might only have known two licks on gtr (he subsequently learned a third, around 1981, which australian fans refer to as "_the lick_"), but he made 'em sound absolutely lethal every time out the box, and his brother scott showed a grasp of groove and dynamics rare in a rawk drummer that made it seem as though he had swallowed the entire detroit r&b tradition whole and now the motor city's throbbing pulse was his pulse, too. and iggy...from the acid-addled jester of his earliest performances, he'd evolved into something downright _scary_ (although deniz tek, who saw the stooges a bunch of times as a teen in ann arbor, says there was always a fair amount of humor in iggy's shtick). fuck mick jagger and jim morrison; this cat looked like he was right out there on the edge (of what? madness? transcendence? as iggy his own self would say, "you pays your money so you takes your choice") and sounded like a psychotic trailer-park james brown.
it's all there in the vid of the 1970 cincinnati pop festival, where iggy jumps offstage and winds up walking on the audience's hands, smearing himself with peanut butter. he's pure animal; beautiful, unbridled id. (when i made my last g-f watch it with me, she said incredulously, "you'd like to _be like him_, wouldn't you?" "who wouldn't?" i said.) all of that is on funhouse, my choice for the greatest record ever made, which sounds a lot less dated 35 yrs down the road than most music that's 20 or 10 or five or two years old. it was produced by don gallucci, a veteran of the pacific northwest scene that spawned battalions of killer white hard-rock bands like the wailers, the sonics, the raiders, and his own don & the goodtimes long before the beatles ever played on ed sullivan. cutting live in the studio, with iggy singing through a p.a., little donnie had the sense to let the stooges turn up and do their thang, naked and without embellishment. on the second side, steve mackay blows some anarchic r&b-flavored tenor sax, culminating in "l.a. blues," an echo of the high-energy free-form meltdowns on late-period coltrane sides like meditations.
after that, things began to unravel rather quickly. it didn't help that around the time funhouse was released, a plague of heroin afflicted the cohesive and highly politicized detroit-ann arbor scene (coincidence? _you_ decide!!!), including iggy and scott asheton. then original bassist dave alexander was summarily shitcanned after he forgot how to play all the songs while drunk and stoned onstage in front of 30,000 ppl at the goose lake pop festival and was replaced by a succession of non-musicians. somewhere along the line a second gtrist, james williamson, was recruited, and he quickly subsumed ron asheton's role as iggy's co-writer. the wheels had just off the band when along came david bowie, then in his first flush of fame stateside, who picked up iggy and james and whisked 'em off to england, where they auditioned legions of bassplayers and drummers before finally putting out the call for the asheton bros. to come save the day.
now, there's no doubt that bowie idolized iggy, but that didn't keep his management from using the stooges as a kind of cash cow to get the ziggy stardust train on the rails. they took the stooges' $60,000 advance from columbia and used it to bankroll bowie's ventures, while recording raw power on the quick-and-cheap (when i interviewed ron asheton, he said that the guy who engineered the record didn't even bother to get _levels_ on the bass and drums). the result, as mixed by bowie, is kind of like having somebody stick a knife in your ear: the bowie mix is _shrill_. that said, i'll still take it over the one iggy did for the remastered cd version back in '97, which actually sounds a lot like what a loud rawk band hears onstage in a club where the soundman has a cloth ear: a wall of rhythm gtr. on vinyl, at least you can hear what low-frequency sounds there are to be heard in the bowie mix. the music, however, is beyond criticism. three words: "search and destroy." hard to believe anyone was playing this hard and fast in the early '70s, but they were -- for awhile, anyway.
i got funhouse when i was 14, and played the shit out of it until my then-best friend puked purloined gin all over it _and_ my record player (_not_ stereo). that was during the coupla yrs that my father was in germany on a fellowship and in his absence, my best buddy and i made liberal and indiscriminate use of the contents of his liquor cabinet. by that time, the record was cut-out, so replacing it wasn't an option. (thanks, jon.) it took me a few months of working weekends at the hipi record store to earn enough money to buy a stereo. i got raw power the day it was released, along with, um, beck, bogert & appice and the new johnny winter record. back in those days, it's instructive to remember, the stooges were the _antithesis_ of cool; "hip" people usedta laugh and look at you funny when you said you liked 'em.
by the early '80s, that had changed; punk had hit and stooges rekkids even got re-released. on my first "date" with my future ex-wife (we went to austin to see, um, broooce springsteen _on the bus_ because my driver's license was suspended, and stayed with a guy i'd come down from new york with), i found a weird canadian release that had most of the good songs from the stooges and funhouse. since then, i've been without 'em for spells, a condition i hope not to repeat (my sweetie even approves my desire to cop an extra copy of funhouse to keep in pristine condition for our dotage).
of course, the labels (rhino, the euros) keep re-re-repackaging this stuff, but screw them; for my money, you can't beat the original pristine artifacts. it always makes me laugh when i hear rekkid collectors talking about "upgrading" their fave old gooduns; how can you improve on something that's already perfect?
posted by stashdauber at 5:52 PM
2 Comments:
awesome and mucho well-written, as well as being a subject that deserves such passionate attention. for me, "fun house" is the end all/be all of what a great rock record is. it's dark, pensive, and hopelessly aggressive with an overall funk-laden groove that just hits me dead-center and makes the toes wanna tap through the shoes and go buck-wild apeshit! i'm proud to say that when me and the misses tie the knot in late oct., the tune "fun house" will be blasted from the pa and i dare anyone in attendance to deny themselves the pleasure of getting down to one of the salmmingest tracks in rock's brief history. sonics too, gotta love the sonics - especially "boss hoss."
sounds like you and i both lucked out, andrew. who knew there were wimmin like this?!?!?
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