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)
Meanwhile, I have a 3-CD player in the same unit, so I started playing CD’s again, including several that had been sitting around unopened for so many months. One trio of CD’s that I put on started off with Laugh in the Dark, the first album by the Invisible Eyes; followed by Iggy and the Stooges’ Open Up and Bleed!, billed as “The Great Lost Stooges Album?” and the eponymous CD, Les Hell on Heels by Les Hell on Heels. That turned out to be an absolutely thunderous combination of albums that occurred quite by accident; I have played that set of CD’s (usually in the same order) a half dozen times at least in the week and a half ever since; I have put them on right now.
For people who, unlike me, don’t like really these particular styles of music, every punk-psychedelic band like the Invisible Eyes, every primitive proto-punk band like the Stooges, and every snotty all-girl rock band like Les Hell on Heels is going to sound pretty much the same I suppose. But it wasn’t like that for me at all for these three albums. The Invisible Eyes became an instant favorite; the Stooges album, Open Up and Bleed! is the first one in The Iguana Chronicles that really tore my head off; and, for my money, Les Hell on Heels beats the Donnas and the Pandoras at their own game – and I love both of those bands.
(December 2012)
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One year ago, this series of Facebook posts took a different turn as the discussions became more free-ranging and as the text was more liberally illustrated with photographs. The UARB in December 2012 was the Invisible Eyes – still one of my favorite bands of the bunch – and I remarked at the time that I first encountered them as the first of a trio of CD’s that also included probably the best of the Iguana Chronicles CD’s, Open Up and Bleed! by Iggy and the Stooges; and the CD Les Hell on Heels by this month’s UARB, Les Hell on Heels. This all-female hard rock band has been on the short list for UARB status ever since, and it is high time for me to get on with it.
(December 2013)
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The Stooges had actually put together enough songs for a fourth album that had become part of their live set (as collected in the 1995 Bomp! Records release, Open Up and Bleed!), with highlights being “Open up and Bleed”, “Johanna”, “Rich Bitch”, “Wet My Bed”, “I Got Nothing”, and a natural for any garage rock band’s repertoire, “Cock in My Pocket” (plus another winner that was omitted from this particular album, “Pin Point Eyes”). If you ask me, this could have been the best Stooges album of them all.
Open Up and Bleed! is just one of the many albums of Stooges material that have been released in The Iguana Chronicles series; Discogs lists 19 albums altogether, and I don’t think that is all of them (I have at least a dozen of the albums myself). This music is vital and, for my money, hasn’t aged a week since it was recorded 35 or 40 years ago. If I can keep this series up long enough, I will do a piece someday on The Iguana Chronicles.
(December 2016)
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The liner notes for Wild Love, which sound like they were written by Greg Shaw, lay out the process that Bomp! Records went through to sift through the box of tapes that James Williamson gave them. The box included rehearsal tapes from Detroit, CBS Records in New York, and probably Los Angeles that evidently date from 1973, plus others made in 1972 that included demos for some songs that wound up on Kill City. However, there was no way to know for certain when much of the music was recorded, since the tapes were mostly unlabeled or incorrectly labeled. Among the bandmembers in the Stooges, only Ron Asheton was forthcoming with information about the tapes, and he was unclear on many of the details or wasn’t present at all.
After pulling the finished studio masters that provided the songs on the Kill City, I’m Sick of You and I Got a Right albums, and also the live concert performances that make up a third to a half of the Iguana Chronicles releases, the remaining tapes were almost all post-Raw Power rehearsal sessions. Greg Shaw mentioned that songs like “Johanna” and “Head On” were practiced seven or eight times in a row, often with stops and starts. Many of these songs were taken out on the road after Raw Power was released and often show up on the Iguana Chronicles concert albums. The best of these rehearsal performances were pulled out and assembled, along with selected live versions of other songs, for the hypothetical fourth album by the Stooges that was released as Open Up and Bleed!.
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If I had to pick out my favorite song on Wild Love, it would be “Pin Point Eyes”; the couplet “She looked into my pin point eyes / and she cried” is hard to top in the Stooges oeuvre. It sure would have been nice to hear this one on Open Up and Bleed!, but maybe it was just too unfinished. Greg Shaw speaks of this song in the liner notes: “Never before released in the U.S., ‘Pin Point Eyes’ might well have evolved out of a jam on ‘St. James Infirmary’, until Iggy grafted his own graphic addiction story over it. Some great crazed piano on this one from Bob Sheff. Gotta love the lazy mood in which Iggy starts off urging them all to join in, then to take their solo parts. It’s almost the kind of party that Dylan threw on ‘Rainy Day Women’, set in perhaps-ironic contrast to the really harrowing story he’s telling. (Did he really say he traded his girl for a bag of snow?).”
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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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Double Danger includes two other full-length concert tapes by the Stooges. Disc One is the November 1973 performance at the Latin Casino in Baltimore; three of the songs from Open Up and Bleed! – “Rich Bitch”, “Wet My Bed” and “I Got Nothing” (and in the same order) – are taken from this concert. The liner notes call this “perhaps the best Stooges live show captured on tape so far”.
(December 2017)
