KILL CITY – Overview
They never went into the studio to record their fourth album; Iggy Pop decided to do something else since the Stooges’ records were not selling. Under the name Iggy Pop and James Williamson, these two ex-Stooges put together an album called Kill City in 1975. They brought a couple of the more mellow songs from the new Stooges material – “Johanna” and “I Got Nothin’” – but mostly this was new music and definitely a new direction.
But Iggy Pop and his compatriots could find no takers among the major labels that had so willingly released the Stooges albums, or anyone else. When James Williamson showed up at the Bomp! Records office one day with the Kill City tapes in hand, Greg Shaw jumped at the chance to get the album pressed and in the stores: “Even though I had to almost sell my soul to raise the needed cash, I wasn’t about to let this deal pass. To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalogue, but what made it extra nice is that James [Williamson] also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.” Elsewhere, Shaw describes the Stooges as “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band of the century”.
By the time Kill City was finally released, Iggy Pop had already collaborated with David Bowie on two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life. The title track of the latter album, “Lust for Life” was used as the theme song for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for several years, beginning not long after Peggy and I had our honeymoon on one of their ships.
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As to Kill City itself – included by Bomp! Records in The Iguana Chronicles, though not by Discogs – this album has an entirely different feel from the Stooges’ albums. Despite his trials in the previous few years, Iggy Pop has consciously and deliberately taken his music in a new direction – call it “post–proto-punk”.
Mark Deming, again from Allmusic: “Kill City never hits as hard as the manic roar of the Stooges’ Raw Power, but the songs are very good, and the album’s more measured approach suits the dark, honest tone of the material. The sense of defeat that runs through ‘Sell Your Love’, ‘I Got Nothin’’, and ‘No Sense of Crime’ was doubtless a mirror of Iggy’s state of mind; but he expressed his agony with blunt eloquence, and his sneering rejection of the Hollywood street scene in ‘Lucky Monkeys’ is all the more cutting coming from a man who had lived through the worst of it.’”
(December 2016)
