MICHIGAN PALACE 10/6/73
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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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.
The concert was performed at the Michigan Palace in Detroit about four months before the supposed “last live show” of the Stooges there on February 9, 1974; and this is the other concert that the Metallic K.O. albums are taken from. While some of this music has been included as bonus tracks on some European albums, this is the first time that these songs have been released in the U.S. The short liner notes call this the best of the tapes of Stooges concerts, as recorded by James Williamson (the famous February 9th concert was actually recorded by an audience member).
(December 2017)
