OPEN UP AND BLEED!
Open Up and Bleed! is a live album by Iggy and the Stooges that was released in 1995. The copy on the CD cover shows a subtitle – “The Great Lost Stooges Album?” – and suggests a line-up of songs that the band had been performing in their live shows, which might have been collected into a fourth studio album by the band that was never released. (More from Wikipedia)
Coming next in the catalogue number sequence is the best of the albums in The Iguana Chronicles, Open Up and Bleed!. I have mentioned this album before, first because it happened to show up in my CD rack bookended by the CD’s for two of my favorite past UARB’s, the Invisible Eyes (Laugh in the Dark) and Les Hell on Heels (Les Hell on Heels). The CD player on one of my turntables can take three at a time, so I played that trio of albums many times.
For Open Up and Bleed!, which has a subtitle “The Great Lost Stooges Album?”, Bomp! Records collected available recordings of songs that were written and developed by the Stooges after the release of Raw Power in February 1973. The first six songs – “Rubber Legs”, “Open up and Bleed”, “Johanna”, “Cock in My Pocket”, “Head On”, and “Cry for Me” – were made during practice sessions at CBS Records in New York in 1973 and are taken from the only tape that has surfaced from these rehearsals. The liner notes for Open Up and Bleed! by Frank Meyer state that “Head On” is also known as “Head on the Curve”, but not “Head on the Curb”, as the song is called on the Metallic K.O. albums.
The next three songs on Open Up and Bleed! – “Rich Bitch”, “Wet My Bed” and “I Got Nothing” – were recorded at the Latin Casino in Baltimore in November 1973. “Heavy Liquid” / “New Orleans” is another live performance that was made at the Whisky a-Go-Go in Los Angeles in September 1973.
Two other songs from rehearsals close the Open Up and Bleed! CD. “She Creatures of the Hollywood Hills” was laid down in Detroit and is the only known rehearsal version of the song. A second rehearsal of “Rubber Legs” is also given and has never been previously released.
There is also an LP release of Open Up and Bleed!, but it has fewer songs, with “I Got Nothing”, “Heavy Liquid” / “New Orleans”, and the second version of “Rubber Legs” being omitted.
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I am not near through with describing The Iguana Chronicles, but it is not hard to tell that this is a mountain of music – much more even than in the six-CD box set by the Stooges, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions. While there is some repetition on these albums that is probably unavoidable, as I have played my way through the records, I have gotten to know these songs pretty intimately in a variety of contexts.
And what keeps coming back to me is that the new songs on Open Up and Bleed! (and on other Iguana Chronicles albums; this CD does not have all of them) sound better to me than the songs from the Raw Power era – both the official album and the rejected demos alike. We will never know for sure whether the Stooges would have released an album with all or most of these songs had sales of their first three albums gone better, but there is no question that this is the closest thing to what could have been the fourth Stooges album.
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Naturally, the material would have been arranged and polished and mixed and mastered, and the songs might have sounded completely different from the way they do on Open Up and Bleed!. That is certainly true of “Johanna” and “I Got Nothin’” as they are presented on the Kill City album. I have said before that this could have been the best Stooges album of them all, and I mean it.
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Open Up and Bleed! is still available from Bomp! Mailorder for a bargain price of $5.00: www.bompstore.com/iggy-pop-the-stooges-open-up-and-bleed-1973-w-liners-cd/. Truly, I cannot recommend this album highly enough. With the release of Ready to Die in 2013, the Stooges are well and truly finished, even though Iggy Pop is still around. To my mind, there is no better document of this band’s legacy than Open Up and Bleed!.
(December 2017)
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