I WANNA BE YOUR DOG
“I Wanna Be Your Dog” is a 1969 song by the American rock band The Stooges. The song is included on their self-titled debut album. The 3-minute-and-9-second-long song, with its raucous, distortion-heavy guitar intro, pounding, single-note piano riff played by producer John Cale of The Velvet Underground, and steady, driving beat, established The Stooges at the cutting edge example of the heavy metal and punk sound. The song notably uses sleigh bells throughout. In 2004, the song was ranked number 438 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Pitchfork Media placed it at number 16 on its list of “The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s”. (More from Wikipedia)
The Stooges’ debut album, The Stooges came out at the same time as MC5’s Kick out the Jams; it features their classic song “I Wanna be Your Dog”. The producer was John Cale of the Velvet Underground, who later produced the classic 1975 album Horses by Patti Smith Group, and also several songs by another proto-punk band, the Modern Lovers.
(December 2016)
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Charles Spano writing for Allmusic says of Wild Love: “Though lacking the teenage venom of cuts like ‘1969’ and ‘I Wanna be Your Dog’ off of The Stooges and the unadulterated raw power of, well, Raw Power, Wild Love is still essential for die-hard fans. The album, culled from rehearsals in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York for the band’s 1973 tour, runs the gamut from full-fledged, ready-to-record tunes to the types of swampy jams that the band has claimed indicative of their studio songwriting process. Gems like the three minutes of rock & roll bliss dubbed ‘Wild Love’, the rambling, grinding ‘Pinpoint Eyes’, the Stonesy ‘I Came From Nowhere’, and the eerie, sprawling ‘Til the End of the Night’ could have given Iggy Pop the material for a stunning solo debut as early as 1973.”
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The other live album by the Stooges where I have both the CD and the LP is Michigan Palace 10/6/73. A shot of the actual tape and also the box that the tape came in are given in the booklet for the CD, and the photo of the tape is used as the LP labels. The entire tape is evidently included on the album, and for a change, the music is the same on both the LP and the CD. Despite what is shown on the tape box, “I Wanna be Your Dog” is not included; in fact, Iggy Pop specifically says in “Rant #3” that they were not going to be playing that song, though he does read some of the lyrics.
(December 2017)
