KILL CITY – The Iguana Chronicles I
The Iguana Chronicles is not really a series of bootleg albums; as related by Greg Shaw, James Williamson brought a box full of tapes of music by the Stooges for him to do whatever he wanted with, in exchange for his agreeing to release his new album with Iggy Pop, Kill City on Bomp! Records, when major-label record companies would not. The name The Iguana Chronicles is taken from Iggy Pop’s first band, past UARB the Iguanas (I doubt that I will ever get used to the idea of the Iguanas being in the UARB roster).
As given in Discogs, there are 20 records listed in The Iguana Chronicles (all dating from the 1990’s up to 2000), starting with Kill City – though the original LP releases are not shown, with Kill City being the first LP released (in 1977) on Bomp! Records; previously they had pressed only 45’s.
As Greg Shaw put it in the liner notes for the label’s retrospective double-CD Destination: Bomp! (1994): “To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalog; 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.”
Iggy Pop had moved on and had previously released two solo albums in 1977, The Idiot and Lust for Life; but Kill City was the music that Iggy had created right after the third Stooges album came out, Raw Power. As it happened, James Williamson stayed until the end; besides being in the 21st-Century tour with the Stooges, he was in the line-up when the band created its last album, Ready to Die (2013).
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According to Greg Shaw, James Williamson was instrumental in saving the Stooges’ musical history; besides the treasure trove given to Shaw as part of the Kill City release deal, he had saved the tapes that became Metallic K.O. (1976), from live performances by the Stooges at Michigan Palace in Detroit on October 6, 1973 and February 9, 1974 – the album originally purported to be entirely from the 1974 show, which was purportedly the Stooges’ last live performance until reforming in 2003, but later releases of Metallic K.O. cleared up the confusion on the dates. The same thing said about Metallic K.O. in Wikipedia – “Considering [James] Williamson’s involvement, and the endorsement of Iggy, it was considered a ‘semi-official’ bootleg, when released on the Skydog label in 1976” – would apply to the albums in The Iguana Chronicles as well.
(September 2017)
