Stooges
A seven-CD box set chronicling the making of a 36-minute album–was this really necessary? Back in 1970, with Elektra footing the bill for the casual slaughter of oxide particles and brain cells alike, it’s not shocking that they recorded everything and taped over nothing, but it’s still freak weather that every scrap from those sessions survived, not to mention that someone actually put this out. You know before you put your money down that 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions isn’t going to be a study in delicate studio science, like the four-CD Pet Sounds set from 1997. My first guess, which turned out to be way off, was that it would be more like the first disc of the 1995 Velvet Underground box set, which to hard-core VU geeks is one of the funniest comedy records ever made and to anyone else is mostly unlistenable.
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It turns out that 3,000 was an overguesstimation–the set is still available–but among the diehards word spread quickly. Not long after it came out, I was chatting with someone at a local record label, and he said that one of the heads of said label had been playing it incessantly in the office–in fact, it was going right then, as we spoke. A filmmaker friend told me that disc two, with its 17 takes of “Loose,” was quickly becoming one of his favorite records ever. When my copy finally arrived, I took it to my editor’s office. She snatched it out of my hand, put disc four, which includes 14 takes of “T.V. Eye,” into her tinny boombox, and pointed her browser to www.rhinohandmade.com. As she typed in her credit card number and shipping address, I watched powerlessly, feeling like an enabler. A week or two later, during a visit to New York, over the vaguely Stoogey shriek and clatter of the subway, a friend asked me, “So is that Fun House box really any good?” In the tone I reserve for breaking bad news, I said, “I’m afraid so,” and he sighed with briar-patch resignation.
But the second album, Fun House, is the pure, uncut zenith of cocky, hairy, sticky Stoogeness, the product of extraordinary Detroit delinquents under the influence of Chicago blues, free jazz, Antonin Artaud, ultraviolent cartoons, horny women, and the kind of drugs they just don’t make anymore. For these seven songs, Iggy played the id-savant better than any other closet intellectual before or since, and he and the band spurred each other to reach that perfect climactic confluence of sex-lust, power-crave, and violence-terror that rock ‘n’ roll has to work its way through before coming out of Chapel Perilous to nab its Holy Grail. “I feel aw-rahht!” he howls and yowls and barks, over and over and over and over, until he can’t possibly feel all right at all and the words lose meaning and Ron Asheton worries the riff like a dog with a dead bird and Steve Mackay on sax is ululating and squawking overtime just to catch up.
Actually, for the most part the tracks don’t differ significantly from the ones that made the final cut. The variations are there, but they’re usually a matter of refining a tempo, timing a break perfectly, landing a syllable in just the right spot, trying out one lyric over another. In many cases it seems like an alternate take would’ve sufficed as well as the one that ended up on the original release. But it’s the creative process you couldn’t hear until now that makes the record a life-affirming masterpiece: OK, now put your head through that wall one more time. Fun House is a perfect articulation of the inarticulate, of that frustrating point where our most urgent needs and desires ram up against the language barrier and reel with heavenly dizzy idiocy. You can’t put that into words, but you can put it into rock ‘n’ roll. i
