The Stooges
The Stooges (50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) RHINO Download-only expansion of milestone first album, with sped-up John Cale mixes.
Here’s a track from a new album coming soon on Elektra,” announced John Peel’s dulcet tones one August 1969 Sunday afternoon, as he brought in the slavering wallop of Little Doll, the first time The Stooges are heard in the UK.
Bludgeoning, nihilistic and horny, these four Ann Arbor degenerates stripped rock to its bare chassis like ghetto car-jackers denuding a high-end motor and hot-wired the engine. Iggy let the dirty dog out to dump on music’s inhibitions, while guitarist Ron Asheton channelled Whofuelled aggression into a merciless, scabrous churn as brother Scott pummelled drums alongside Dave Alexander’s malevolent bass rumble.
If Led Zep were touting the sprawling blues-rock that would dominate the early 70s, The Stooges’ primal nihilism, welcomed by the underground but ignored by the mainstream, predicted the punk revolution to come.
Entering New York’s Hit Factory with John Cale on his first assignment as Elektra’s staff producer, the band had forged songs from the stage mayhem that enticed Danny Fields to sign them. Cale loved the band’s anarchic avant-garde edge as Iggy mounted speakers and Asheton cranked overkill volume savaging I Wanna Be Your Dog, 1969, Ann,
No Fun and epic hallucino-drone mantra We Will Fall, built on an Indian guru’s chant. Needing more songs, they knocked up Real Cool Time, Not Right and Little Doll. Adding sleigh bells and viola, Cale then found his druggy, reverb-swamped mix rejected by Elektra’s Jac Holzman, who remixed it back upfront with Iggy.
Unusually, Rhino mark The Stooges’ half century with a digital reissue of its 40th-anniversary edition, the original album joined by Cale’s mixes (remastered at the right speed after appearing slow before), alternative versions (including extended Ann and No Fun) and Asthma Attack’s free-form wheeze-up, adding Little Doll and Real Cool Time takes plus another We Will Fall.
Half a century on, The Stooges sounds more brutally simplistic than ever, particularly Iggy’s blank-generation lyrics of teenage lust and terminal boredom inspired by observing the behaviour of kids in a burger bar.
Imagine if The Stooges had played Woodstock after their album was released. They could have changed rock’n’roll history a few years earlier instead of influencing Bowie to ignite glam. By the time, punk caught up with their 1969, they were gone. ■■■■■■■■■■