DOUBLE DANGER
Buying Wild Love first is certainly not the route most people would follow if they wanted to start buying albums in The Iguana Chronicles series. I imagine that Rough Power would be the best album to start with for most people, since it features the original mix by the Stooges on the Raw Power album; and/or Open Up and Bleed!, a presentation of a potential fourth album by the Stooges. Then one or more of the live albums – California Bleeding, Double Danger, and Michigan Palace 10/6/73 – would likely follow. As noted above, Year of the Iguana serves as sort of a greatest-hits set of the Iguana Chronicles albums. Perhaps someone whose interest had been piqued would then check out the more in-depth examination of the Stooges demos that were rejected by MainMan Management on I Got a Right and I’m Sick of You. If you already have Kill City, you wouldn’t even need Jesus Loves the Stooges unless you just wanted to hear what a song called “Jesus Loves the Stooges” sounds like.
After all of those purchases or selected ones, only people who would be referred to by rock critics as “Stooges completists” or “diehard fans” would likely go for Wild Love. Unless the idea of getting Stooges songs that have hardly been heard at all by anyone is appealing to you, like it was for me.
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Frankly, the three live albums by the Stooges in The Iguana Chronicles series – California Bleeding, Double Danger (which is a double-CD album), and Michigan Palace 10/6/73 – run together in my head. I am replaying some of the albums as I am writing this, and they sound amazing – by the second cut on California Bleeding, I was saying to myself that it has been way too long since I played these records. But naturally, the same songs appear over and over, and it is the same band performing them, so there can’t be but so much variation.
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Double Danger includes two other full-length concert tapes by the Stooges. Disc One is the November 1973 performance at the Latin Casino in Baltimore; three of the songs from Open Up and Bleed! – “Rich Bitch”, “Wet My Bed” and “I Got Nothing” (and in the same order) – are taken from this concert. The liner notes call this “perhaps the best Stooges live show captured on tape so far”.
Disc Two is a concert on New Years Eve 1973 at the Academy of Music in New York City. Also on the bill that night, according to the liner notes, are “KISS (supposedly their first gig), Teenage Lust, and Blue Öyster Cult.” While the concert was professionally recorded by Columbia Records, this tape was made by someone in the audience, though the liner notes say: “Although in the world of Stooges live tapes, this is certainly among the best.” The concert is notable for including several comparatively rare post-Raw Power songs – “Rich Bitch”, “Wet My Bed”, “I Got Nothing”, and “Cock in My Pocket”. It should be noted that all of the songs on Disc Two of Double Danger also appear on Disc One.
(December 2017)
