Now I regret all the times I've used words like "power" and "energy" to describe rock and roll, because this is what such rhetoric should have been saved for. Shall I compare it to an atom bomb? a wrecker's ball? a hydroelectric plant? Language wasn't designed for the job. Yet despite its sonic impact I find that the primary appeal of the music isn't physical--I have to be in a certain mood of desperate abandon before it reaches my body. It always interests me intellectually, though--with its repetiveness beyond the call of incompetence and its solitary new-thing saxophone, this is genuinely "avant-garde" rock. The proof is the old avant-garde fallacy of "L.A. Blues"--trying to make art about chaos by reproducing same. A- -- R. ChristgauBy contrast, Fun House knowingly sucks the listener into its raucous vortex. This ingeniously constructed album starts out menacingly ("Down on the Street") and builds relentlessly to its apocalyptic conclusion ("L.A. Blues"). Iggy's singing — which is much more expressive than on The Stooges — veers from sullen petulance to primal scream on songs of adolescent solipsism. Fun House comes as close as any one record ever will to encapsulating what rock is, was and always will be about. Inspired touch: Steven Mackay's tenor saxophone.
Three decades later, in a rare approach to historic rock (as opposed to jazz, where such notions are common), Rhino Records saw fit to release 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions. As advertised, the limited-edition boxed set — six full discs plus a CD single — contains every single inch of tape, down to false starts and between-song chatter, recorded for the album at Elektra's LA studio in May 1970. You want 22 takes of "Loose"? How about listening to "T.V. Eye" 14 times? How about 45 minutes of "Down on the Street"? Yes, it sounds nightmarish, but here's the amazing thing — despite the image they intentionally conveyed, these anarchic drug fiends were well-rehearsed and highly disciplined musicians, capable of playing what ultimately came out sounding like a raw blurt of id over and over in precisely the same way, working out the nuance of songs, not haphazardly jamming over set chord changes. (Recently asked to explain the great lengths to which the band went to sound so casual, Iggy attributed it to a search for just the right vocal performance. One supposes they could have simply cut acceptable backing tracks and then let him sing over them until he was satisfied, but this is all full-band live-in-the-studio.) It's a grueling, often funny, and ultimately extraordinary document that obliterates most presumptions about Iggy's creative ethos. -- Trouser Press
Ah, good evening my good friend. Good evening and welcome to the Stooges' Funhouse. We are so glad you could come. Oh, do not be alarmed, dear one, if things should seem a trifle unusual...or, as the natives say, "oh-mind"...at first. You'll doubtless get used to it. Perhaps, you may even begin to...like things you see.
Why do you look so pale, my friend? Why, that's only tenor saxophonist Steve Mackay vigorously f***ing drummer Scott Asheton, dog-style. Steve is a new member of the band, you know, but like Iggy and the rest of the boys were saying, he really fits in, n'est-ce pas? How smart he looks in his new black leather jacket. And that swastika on Scott's lapel. How killer...how terribly, terribly killer.
And that man over there? The one being slowly whipped with long, curly tendrils of that young lass' hair? Why, that's none other than Don Galucci, who produced the Stooges' last album. He was the producer of the song "Louie, Louie" by the Kingsmen, you know. Here. I have the original words to it written on this piece of paper. Perhaps you would like to read them.
Oh, thank you, Mr. Galucci. Please do put on the new Stooges record. It would be so nice for our guest to hear.
Mercy! "Down On the Street," what a super killer jam! That is why Iove the Stooges so, you know, and why I have stayed here at the Funhouse with the boys for so very long. They are so exquisitely horrible and down and out that they are the ultimate psychedelic rock band in 1970. Don't you agree?
Don't laugh. You mustn't laugh. The new record is much more sophisticated than their first. And you cannot deny that they are the best Detroit area rock band. Why, Iggy was just telling me that when he plays with other Detroit and Michigan area bands, that he feels, not like King of the Mountain, but King of the Slag Heap! Can you imagine that? King of the Slag Heap! How super oh-mind, no?
Do you think you might like to...see Iggy? Well, all right. But you must take care not to disturb him. When Pop is really "Jonesed," there's really no telling what could happen. His scars do take so long to heal, you know, and he is so slight, sometimes I can't help worry about him, but can you blame me?
He should be behind that door, in that room. Perhaps, if we're lucky, he might be spreading peanut butter upon his phallus. Why, sometimes, he'll lock himself in there for days screaming, "I feel all right!" at the top of his lungs until he passes out. And then, it is said, before he can arise again, an 18-year-old female must perform oral intercourse upon his comatose body. Oh! He has heard us! Do be quick, my friend, before he can get it together to react! Heavens! What a close shave, eh, mon ami?
Ah, no, you mustn't be leaving so soon. There is yet so much you have not yet seen, so many things strange, killer, and oh-mind. Well, if you must, then I suppose you must. Sometime soon you will pay us a return visit, all right, dear one? Thank you for stopping by ever so much.
You. Out there. What are you doing? Do you long to have your mind blown open so wide that it will take weeks for you to pick up the little, bitty pieces? Do you yearn for the oh-mind? Do you ache to feel all right?
Then by all means, you simply must come visit us at the Stooges' Funhouse. I know the boys would look forward to seeing you. In fact...they'd be...simply delighted. -- Charlie Burton, RS
Like most authentic originals, the Stooges have endured more than their share of abuse, derision, critical condescension and even outright hostility. Their stage act is good copy but easy grist for instant wag putdowns. At first glance their music appears to be so simple that it seems like anyone with rudimentary training should be able to play it (that so few can produce any reasonable facsimile, whatever their abilities, is overlooked). While critics have a ball crediting John Cale with the success of their first album (as I did) and relegating them to the status of a more than slightly humorous teenage phenomenon, theme music for suburban high school kids freaked out on reds and puberty and fantasies of nihilistic apocalypses, the majority of the listening public seems to view them with almost equal scorn as just one more blaring group whose gimmick (Iggy) still leaves them leagues behind such get-it-on frontrunners in the Heavy sets as Grand Funk, whose songs at least make sense, whose act shows real showmanship (i.e., inducing vast hordes of ecstatically wasted freaks to charge the stage waving those thousands of hands in the air in a display of marginally political unity ‘nuff to warm the heart of any Movement stumper), and who never make fools of themselves the way that Stooge punk does, what with his clawing at himself, smashing the mike in this chops, jumping into the crowd to wallow around a forest of legs and ankles and godknows what else while screaming those sickening songs about TV eyes and feeling like dirt and not having no fun ‘cause you’re a fucked up adolescent, horny but neurotic, sitting around bored and lonesome and unable to communicate with yourself or anybody else. Shit. Who needs songs like that, that give off such bad vibes? We got a groovy, beautifully insular hip community, maybe a nation, budding here, and our art is a celebration of ourselves as liberated individuals and masses of such—the People, dig? And antisocial art simply don’t fit in, brothers and sisters. Who wants to be depressed, anyway?
Well, a lot of changes have gone down since Hip first hit the heartland. There’s a new culture shaping up, and while it’s certainly an improvement on the repressive society now nervously aging, there is a strong element of sickness in our new, amorphous institutions. The cure bears viruses of its own. The Stooges also carry a strong element of sickness in their music, a crazed quaking uncertainty and errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times, but I believe that they also carry a strong element of cure, of post-derangement sanity. And I also believe that their music is as important as the product of any rock group working today, although you better never call it art or you may wind up with a deluxe pie in the face. What it is, instead, is what rock and roll at heart is and always has been, beneath the stylistic distortions the last few years have wrought. The Stooges are not for the ages—nothing created now is—but they are most implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.
To approach Fun House (Elektra EKS-74071) we’ve got to go back to the beginning, to all the blather and arbitration left in the wake of notoriety and a first album. Because there is a lot of bad air around, and we’ve got to clear away the mundane murk of ignorance and incomprehension if we’re going to let the true, immaculate murk of the Stooges shine forth in all its chaotic prisms like those funhouse mirrors which distract so pointedly. I don’t want to have to be an apologist for the Stooges. I would like it if we lived in sanity, where every clear eye could just look and each whole mind appreciate the Stooges on their own obvious merits (even though, granted, in such an environment the Stooges would no longer be necessary—as William Burroughs counseled in one of his lucider epigrams, they really do work to make themselves obsolete). However, since conditions are in the present nigh irremediable mess, with innocent listeners led and hyped and duped and doped, taught to grovel before drug-addled effeminate Limeys who once collected blues 78s and a few guitar lessons and think that that makes them torch-bearers; a hapless public, finally, of tender boys and girls pavlov’d into salivating greenbacks and stoking reds at the mere utterance of certain magic incantations like “supergroup” and “superstar,” well, is it any wonder your poor average kid, cruisin’ addled down the street in vague pursuit of snatch or reds or rock mag newsstands, ain’t got no truck with the Stooges?
So, to facilitate the mass psychic liberation necessary, it’s imperative that we start with the eye of the hurricane, the center of all the confusion, contention and plain badmouthing, Iggy Stooge himself. Now, I’ve never met Iggy but from what I’ve gathered listening to his records and digging the stage act and all, he’s basically a nice sensitive Amerikan boy growing up amid a thicket of some of the worst personal, interpersonal and national confusion we’ve seen. I mean, nowhere else but in Amerika would you find a phenomenon like Iggy Stooge, right? I was at one time going to write a letter to Malcolm Muggeridge over in England telling him all about Iggy and the Stooges, but I didn’t because I finally decided that he’d just mark it up as one more symptom of the decline of Western Civilization. Which it’s not. Not finally, that is—it may be now, in some of its grosser, semi-pathological trappings, but then look what it came out of. There’s always hope for a brighter tomorrow because today’s mess spawned stalwart crusaders for something better like Iggy. And presumably, the rest of the Stooges.
So, Iggy: a preeminently Amerikan kid, singing songs about growing up in Amerika, about being hung up lotsa the time (as who hasn’t been?), about confusion and doubt and uncertainty, about inertia and boredom and suburban pubescent darkness because “I’m not right/ to want somethin’/ to want somethin’/ tonight…” Sitting around, underaged, narcissistic, masochistic, deep in gloom cuz we could have a real cool time but I’m not right, whether from dope or day drudgery or just plain neurotic donothing misanthropy, can’t get through (“You don’t know me/ Little Doll/ And I don’t know you…”)—ah well, wait awhile, maybe some fine rosy-fleshed little doll with real eyes will come along and marry you and then you’ll get some. Until then, though, it shore ain’t no fun, so swagger with your buddies, brag, leer at passing legs, whack your doodle at home at night gaping at polyethylene bunnies hugging teddy bears, go back the next day and dope out with the gang, grass, speed, reds, Romilar, who cares, some frat bull’s gonna buy us beer, and after that you go home and stare at the wall all cold and stupid inside and think, what the fuck, what the fuck. I hate myself. Same damn thing last year, this year, on and on till I’m an old fart if I live that long. Shit. Think I’ll rape my wank-fantasy cunt dog-style tonight.
Pretty depressing, eh? Sheer adolescent drive. Banal, too. Who needs music with a theme like that? What does it have to do with reality, with the new social systems the Panthers and Yips are cookin’ up, with the fact that I took acid four days ago and since then everything is smooth with no hang-ups like it always is for about a week after a trip. Feel good, benevolent. So what the fuck does all that Holden Caulfield garbage Iggy Stooge is always prattling about have to do with me? Or with art or rock ‘n’ roll or anything? Sure, we all know about adolescence, why belabor it, why burden “art” (or whatever the Stooges claim that caterwauling is) with something better left in the recesses of immature brains who’ll eventually grow out of it themselves? And how, in the name of all these obvious logical realities, can any intelligent person take Iggy Stooge for anything but a blatant fool, wild-eyed, sweaty and loud though he may be?
Well, I’ll tell ya why and how. I’ve been building up through lots of questions and postulations and fantasies, so not one dullard reading this and owning a stack of dated, boring “rock” albums but no Stooge music can fail to comprehend, at which time I will be able to get on to the business of describing the new Stooges album. So here comes the payload. Now, to answer the last question first, because the final conclusion of all Stooge-mockers is definitely true and central to the Stooges: you’re goddam right Iggy Stooge is a damn fool. He does a lot better job of making a fool of himself on stage and vinyl than almost any other performer I’ve ever seen. That is one of his genius’ central facets.
What we need are more rock “stars” willing to make fools of themselves, absolutely jump off the deep end and make the audience embarrassed for them if necessary, so long as they have not one shred of dignity or mythic corona left. Because then the whole damn pompous edifice of this supremely ridiculous rock ‘n’ roll industry, set up to grab by conning youth and encouraging fantasies of a puissant “youth culture,” would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off of it. Can you imagine Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant conning the audience: “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love”—he really gives them nothing, not even a good-natured grinful “Howdy-do”—Or Jimmy Page’s arch scowl of super-musician ennui?
A friend and I were getting stoned and watching the TV eye’s broadcast of the Cincinnati Pop Festival the other night, when a great (i.e., useless) idea struck us. Most of the show was boring, concentrating on groups like Grand Funk (endless plodding version of “Inside Looking Out” with lead singer writhing and barking and making up new lyrics like “Oh little honey I need your love so bad… c’mon, give it to me… oh little mama” etc.) and Mountain (Felix Pappalardi spinning off endless dull solos in a flat distillation of the most overworked elements of Cream’s and Creedence’s sounds, while fat buckskinned Leslie West thumped bass and reacted to Pappalardi’s piddle with broad, joyously-agonized mugging, grimacing and grinning and nodding as if each and every note out of Papa’s guitar was just blowing his mind like no music he’d ever heard before). Well, I watched all this monkey business with one eye scanning the bookshelf for a likely volume to pass the time till Iggy hit the tube, and when he did it was fine—not as good as watching Carlos Santana squint and Cunt Joe spell out “FUCK” in Woodstock, mind you, but a fine video spread anyhow—but the part of the show that intrigued us the most came in Alice Cooper’s set (who, however gratingly shrill their amphetamine-queen hysteria, certainly can’t be accused of taking themselves seriously—come the revolution, they don’t get offed with Pappalardi and West and George Harrison and all them other cats), when Alice crouched, threw his billowy cape over his stringy mop like a monk’s cowl, exposing his hormone-plasticized torso, and crept duckwalking like some Chuck Berry from a henbane nightmare to the apron of the stage, where he produced a pocketwatch, set it hypnotically in motion, and started chanting in a calm conversational tone: “Bodies… need… rest…”—repeating it at same tempo till finally some (genuinely wise) wiseacre a few bodies into the crowd piped up, “So what?” Good question. What if somebody said “So what?” when Richie Havens started into his righteous “Freedom” number? Of course, the question is stupid since three dozen devout Richie Havens fans would promptly clobber the boorish loudmouth, if not off him completely (in line with the temper of the times, in which case he’d be post-mortemed a pig). But nobody gives a shit what anybody sez to A.C. least of all A.C. who was probably disappointed at not soliciting more razzberries from the peanut gallery, except that a moment later he got his crowd reaction in spades when some accomplished marksman in the mob lobbed a whole cake (or maybe it was a pie—yeah, let’s say it was a pie just for the sake of the fantasy I’m about to promulgate) which hit him square in the face. So there he was: Alice Cooper, rock star, crouched frontstage in the middle of his act with a faceful of pie and cream with clots dripping from his ears and chin. So what did he do? How did he recoup the sacred time-honored dignity of the performing artist which claims the stage as his magic force field from which to bedazzle and entertain the helpless audience? Well, he pulled a handful of pie gook out of his face and slapped it right back again, smearing it into his pores and eyes and sneaking the odd little fingerlicking taste. Again and again he repeated this gesture, smearing it in good. The audience said not another word.
The point of all this is not to elicit sympathy for Alice Cooper, but rather to point out that in a way Alice Cooper is better than Richie Havens (even though both make dull music) because at least with Alice Cooper you have the prerogative to express your reaction to his show in a creative way. Most rock stars have their audiences so cowed it’s nauseating. What blessed justice it would be if all rock stars had to contend with what A.C. elicits, if it became a common practice and method of passing judgment for audiences to regularly fling pies in the faces of performers whom they thought were coming on with a load of bullshit. Because the top rockers have a mythic aura around them, the “superstar,” and that’s a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact it’s the very virus that’s fucking up rock, a subspecies of the virus I spoke of earlier which infests “our” culture from popstars to politics (imagine throwing a pie in the face of Eldridge Cleaver! Joan Baez!), and which the Stooges uncategorically oppose as an advance platoon in the nearing war to clear conned narcoleptic mindscreens of the earth, eventually liberating us all from basically uncreative lifestyles in which people often lacking half the talent or personality or charisma of you or I are elevated into godlike positions. Pure pomp and circumstance.
So now you see what I’m driving at, why the Stooges are vital, aside from being good musicians, which I’ll prove just as tangentially later. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself, to say, “See, this is all a sham, this whole show and all its floodlit drug-jacked realer-than-life trappings, and the fact that you are out there and I am up here means not the slightest thing.” Because it doesn’t. The Stooges have that kind of courage, but few other performers do. Jim Morrison, of late—how inspiring to see the onetime atropine-eyed Byronic S&M Lizard King come clean stumbling around the stage with a Colt 45 in hand and finally wave his dong at the teeny minions who came there to see him hold both it and his gut in and give them some more vivid production which communicated nothing real but suggested everything a fertile pube brain could dredge up! Morrison def, does not get a pie in the face! He ‘fessed up! And even old John Lennon, who for awhile qualified for the first and biggest pie (to drown him and Yoko both in slush as ersatz as that which they originally excreted on the entire Western world), has set such a consistent record for absurd self-parody above and beyond the needs of the revolution (like saying “I gave back the MBE also because ‘Cold Turkey’ was slipping down the charts”—a fine gesture. We won’t forget it later, either.) that he too qualifies for at least a year’s moratorium from the creem guerillas. But then there’s all those other people—Delaney and Bonnie (through no fault of their own—after all, a man and his woman are known by the company they keep) and George Harrison (a giant pie stuffed with the complete works of Manly P. Hall) and that infernal snob McCartney and those radical dilettante capitalist pigs the Jefferson Airplane (it’s all right to be a honkey, in fact all the Marxists are due for some pies in pronto priority, but to wit on all that bread singin’ bout bein’ and outlaw when yer most scurrilous illegal set is ripping off lyrics from poor old A.A. Milne and struggling Sci-Fi hacks, wa’al, the Creem Committee don’t cotton to that, neighbor.)
Similarily, Mick Jagger gets immediately pie-ority as a fake moneybags revolutionary, and in general for acting smarter and hipper and like more of a cultural and fashion arbiter than he really is. If Jesus had been at Altamont, they would have crucified him, but if Mick Jagger makes me wait 45 minutes while he primps and stones up in his dressing room one more time and then blames it on some poor menial instrument mover, then me and the corps are goin’ stageward with both tins blazing when he does show his fish-eyed mug. And he’s far from the worst offender—in fact, as a performing artist, he’s one of the least offensive around—his show, with its leers and minces has always been outrageous and foolish and absurd and transcendentally arrogant, yet pretentious only in the best possible way, a spastic flap-lipped tornado writhing from here to a million streaming snatches and beyond in one undifferentiated erogenous mass, a mess and a spectacle all at the same time. You won’t catch Mick Jagger lost in solemn grimaces of artistic angst, no sir! So he really is almost as good as the Stooges, in fact anticipated them, but I’d still hate to think of his tantrum if some grinning geek from down in the street tried to commandeer the sacred stage where he jerks out and rips off his rushes. In that sense his whole show is another anachronism, though nowhere near as fossilized as most other rock acts, who will drown in creem and crust before we’re through. The plain fact is that 99% of popstars do not have the true charisma, style of stature to hold their bastion (bastille) stage without the artificial support they’ve traditionally enjoyed. Most of them, were they splat in the kisser with a pie or confronted with an audience composed of sane people demanding calmly (crude militant bullshit is out): “What the fuck do you think you are doing? Just what is all this shit?”—most of your current “phenomenons”, “heroes” and “artists” would just fold up a stupefied loss, tempermentally incapable (by virtue of the debilitating spoiled-brat life they’ve been living, even if they ever had any real pazazz in the first place—the oppressor is fat and weak, brothers!) of dealing with their constituency of wised-up marks on a one-to-one basis. They simply don’t have enough personality, enough brains or enough guts, your average popstar being neither very bright nor very aware of much that goes on outside his own glittering substratum, half lodged in fantasy, where ego and preening vanity are overfed and corrode substance like a constant diet of cocaine.
But the Stooges are one band that does have the strength to meet any audience on its own terms, no matter what manner of devilish bullshit that audience might think up (although they are usually too cowed by Ig’s psychically pugnacious assertiveness to do anything but gape and cringe slightly, snickering later on the drive home). Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront him—he enters the audience frequently to see what’s what and even from the stage his eyes reach out searingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled strangers who’re seldom able to stare him down. It’s your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him why, welcome to it. But the Kind of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and the authority, and few can. In this sense Ig is a true star of the most incredible kind—he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.
Here’s this smug post-hippie audience, supposedly so loose, liberated, righteous and ravenous, the anarchic terror of middle Amerikan insomnia. These are the folks that’re always saying: “Someday, somebody’s gonna just bust that fucked up punk right in the chops!” And how many times have you heard people say of bands: “Man, what a shuck! I could get up there and cut that shit.”
Well, here’s your chance. The Stooge act is wide open. Do your worst, People, falsify Iggy and the Stooges, get your kicks and biffs. It’s your night!
No takers. They sit there, wide-eyed vegetative Wowers or sullen in a carapae carapace of Cool, unafraid or unable to react, to get out there in that arena which is nothing more than life, most often too cowed to even hurl a disappointing hoot stageward. And that is why most rock bands are so soporifically lazy these days, and also why the Stooges, and any other band that challenges its audience, is the answer. Power doesn’t go to the people, it comes from them, and when the people have gotten this passive nothing short of electroshock and personal exorcism will jolt them and rock them into some kind of fiercely healthy interaction.
Alice Cooper experiments along similar lines, but their routines are really just as old-hat as everybody else’s. Fling dead chickens and carting around props of every size and shape, utilizing splintery deluges of screaming feedback (Velvet Underground, 1965) to attack the nervous systems of the presumably uptight, latent or whatever section of the audience whilst raping their libidos with an outrageous blitz of shifting sexual identities and “perversions”—that’s just the old epater le bourgeois riff again, and for all the talk of Artaud and audiences convulsed with certain unstable souls in frothing fits, it still and f’rever will remain that A.C. is putting on a show in the hoary DC manner, and with fewer and fewer people game for sprained sexual sensibilities, since nobody gives a fuck anymore anyway, a seemingly futuristic band like this must fall back on its music, which is too bad, because there’s not much happening there outside the context of the act, as their records bear out. So Alice Cooper’s slithering around and doing methedrine somersaults in drag, so Jim Morrison finally showed the fans his cock, so what. It’s gonna get to the point where Mick Jagger can turn tinkling mandalas across the stage in troilist hubbub with three groupies performing simultaneous services at all his orifices while the Rolling Stones play on a “seemingly” (although the Deep Meaning contingent in each audience will still whisper desperate stabs at what it all Signifies—and the Stones will go on letting it bleed cross the decades into Sun City) unrelated stream of Chuck Berry riffs and Mick comes and the groupies groan and wet sparks fly everywhere like tickertape and no one in the crotch-jaded audience blinks an eye. Mark my words.
So gimmicks have had their day. Where does that leave us now? Where else: with Ig and the Stooges, whom it is finally my pleasure to return to. Because beside the mawkish posturings and nickelodeon emotings of _’s of the duds foisted on today’s public, the earthy brilliance, power and clarity of the Stooge music, though its basic components may resemble those ready-made musical materials lying around in the public domain like Tinkertoys for experimentation by every jerkoff group from Stockholm to San Diego—it will nevertheless shine in the dark carnivorous glow of its own genius.
The first thing to remember about Stooge music is that it is monotonous and simplistic on purpose, and that within the seemingly circumscribed confines of this fuzz-feedback territory the Stooges work deftly with musical ideas that may not be highly sophisticated (God forbid) but are certainly advanced. The stunningly simple two-chord guitar line mechanically reiterated all through “1969” on their first album, for instance, is nothing by itself, but within the context of the song it takes on a muted but very compelling power as an ominous, and yes, in the words of Ed Ward which were more perceptive (and more of an accolade) than he ever suspected, “mindless” rhythmic pulsation repeating itself into infinity and providing effective hypnotic counterpoint to the sullen plaint of Iggy’s words (and incidentally, Ig writes some of the best throwaway lines in rock, meaning some of the best lines in rock, which is basically a music meant to be tossed over the shoulder and off the wall: “Now I’m gonna be 22/I say My-my and-a Boo-hoo”—that’s classic—he couldn’t’ve picked a better line to complete the rhyme if he’d labored into 1970 and threw the I Ching into the bargain—Thank god somebody making rock ‘n’ roll records still has the good sense, understood by our zoot-jive forefathers but few bloated current bands, to know when to just throw down a line and let it lie).
And the fine guitar solo which followed also bears mention, counterposing as it did some distinctively non-excessive wah-wah against the technique of playing the tuning twigs instead of the frets, which was introduced to far-out rock by Lou Reed.
Now there’s a song just packed with ideas for you, simplistic and “stupid” though it may seem and well be. A trained monkey could probably learn to play that two-chord line underneath, but no monkey and very few indeed of their cousins half a dozen rungs up on the evolutionary ladder, the “heavy” white rock bands, could think of utilizing it in the vivid way it is here, with a simplicity so basic it’s almost pristine. Seemingly the most obvious thing in the world, I would call it a stroke of genius at least equal to Question Mark and the Mysterians’ endless one-finger one-key organ drone behind the choruses of “96 Tears,” which is one of the greatest rock and roll songs of all time and the real beginning of my story, for it was indeed a complex chronology, the peculiar machinations of rock ‘n’ roll history from about 1965 on, which ultimately made the Stooges imperative..(Rambles on for another 15,000 words) -- Lester Bangs, CREEM
The Stooges perfected moronic metal, stripped to its most elementary components and elevated to the level of aesthetic nihilism. Spurred on by Iggy Pop's bestial growls and onstage antics, the band stumbled through some
of the dumbest, most abusive rock ever waxed. The titles suggest the content: "Dirt," "TV Eye." -- Jim Miller, "The Heavy Metal Hall of Fame", RS
When they say it's the greatest rock'n'roll record of all time, they really mean Side One. The first album's morose, moribund entropy (a compliment) (honestly!) EXPLODES with "Wild On The Streets", "Loose", "TV Eye", a triptych of controlled abandon that's never been equalled. The delirium of subhuman snarls and sucking sounds emitted by Iggy at the climax of "TV Eye" is the living end, a nether limit even the Birthday Party (for whom Funhouse was bible) underpassed. After immolation, burn-out: "Dirt", a hymn to transcendence thru abjection, with Ron Asheton alternating between piteous blues and silvered cascades. The Bowie-fied Raw Power probably had more to do with spawning punk, but Funhouse is the real animal: progeny include Black Flag, Pixies, the wah-wah mantras of Loop and Spacement 3, and the SubPop/Nirvana crowd. -- Simon Reynolds, THE WIRE's THE HUNDRED BEST RECORDS OF ALL TIME
...While The Doors can be heard as an influence, they’ve never been this hypnotic. And Jim Morrison could never match the pure Dionysian id that Iggy naturally embodied. No wonder Iggy was asked to front The Doors a couple years later. With Fun House, he created the perfect rock album. Writing songs around Ron Asheton’s amazing riffs, The Stooges assembled the live set that would become Fun House. Balancing their love of John Cage, Sun Ra, John Coltrane and Harry Partch with dumb rock, they fine tuned their performances with military precision. Appropriately, the label assigned Don Galluci, organist on The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” to attempt to get the live sound on tape. At first he didn’t think it could be done. But he stripped the L.A. studio of its carpet and drapes, hotwired Iggy’s vocals live, and let rip a song a day, in the order they’d appear on the album. It’s fascinating to hear some of the early mixes on disc two. Despite being on various substances, the band was incredibly focused. It’s amazing to hear how they went from the rough takes to the perfect cuts used on the album within a single day. The predatory bass-and-drums riff of “Down On The Street” gives the impression of a coiled panther ready to pounce, while “Loose” breaks the damn and lets the floods roar, reaching its first peak in the maelstrom that is “T.V. Eye,” which is much more successful at an orgiastic money shot than “Whole Lotta Love.” “Dirt” slows down to roll about in gutter poetry, and damn if it isn’t sensual. “1970,” a classic covered by the likes of The Damned and Mission of Burma, brings the energy level back to mayhem, while “Fun House” is the aqueous portal to the album’s heart of darkness. It’s an even more hedonistic “Sister Ray,” pretzel-knotted with ecstatic jazz and primal screams. “L.A. Blues” takes it to even further, ridiculous extremes. Which is what great rock ‘n’ roll should do -- push beyond the comfort level, astound with its audacity and insanity, leaving you exhausted and purged.
35 years later, hundreds of bands have been influenced by these two albums, worshipped them, and attempted to match the live power of Fun House. Everyone failed, including The Stooges themselves. -- Fastnbulbous