UNDER APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR DECEMBER 2016 – THE IGUANAS
For some reason, over the years the 1970’s have gotten a reputation as a poor decade for music. (So do the 1950’s, for that matter, even though that is where rock and roll came from). It certainly cannot be because everything sounded the same. Most of the British Invasion bands were still active, from the Rolling Stones, to the Who, to the Kinks, to the Moody Blues, to the Hollies – to this day, even Herman’s Hermits has never broken up. Among the big English bands, only the Beatles and the Animals were gone by the end of the 1960’s. The top American acts were still going strong as well – Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Simon and Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt, the Beach Boys, the Band, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, etc. – and major stars who arrived in the 1970’s include Elton John, Michael Jackson, Queen, ABBA, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, Prince, James Taylor, and Tom Petty. Anyone who says they are a music fan has to be able to find someone, and probably several someones on that list that they like a lot.
Beyond established acts who survived into the decade, new kinds of popular music had their roots in the 1970’s – rap and hip hop (which I explored last time), punk rock (which I am writing about this time), new wave, power pop, heavy metal, progressive rock, space rock, disco, funk, and the list goes on and on.
* * *
People bought more albums in the 1970’s than at any time before or since. For what it’s worth, 6 of the 10 biggest selling albums of all time were released during the 1970’s – in order, they are The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd; Bat out of Hell by Meat Loaf; Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) by the Eagles; the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack (featuring the Bee Gees and others); Rumours by Fleetwood Mac; and Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin. However you might feel about these chestnuts, it is hard to imagine a more varied group of albums. Thriller by Michael Jackson (1983) remains Number One, but I was certainly surprised to see Back in Black (1980) by AC/DC in second place.
And for those of you who think that the album is dead, Adele’s hit album 21 from 2011 holds the 11th spot on the list and gives some hope that this basic musical format might yet survive. Interestingly, 21 was the largest selling album in both 2011 and 2012, and her third album, 25 was the biggest seller in 2015. For that matter, Adele’s debut album 19 (2008) went seven times Platinum.
* * *
The emergence of punk rock in the 1970’s was in large part a reaction to progressive rock and also the tamer musical styles of that time. Punkers felt that rock music had strayed far from its roots and wanted to bring back the energy and excitement of the earlier years of rock and roll. As quoted in Wikipedia, drummer Tommy Ramone of Ramones summarized these feelings in a January 2007 interview: “In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of [Jimi] Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bulls--t rock ’n’ roll.”
As with rap, a punk aesthetic developed along with the music, an attitude of defiantly and often grotesquely rejecting the status quo, combined with a do-it-yourself spirit that had bands self-producing their own music and then selling 45’s at independent record stores, outside of the rock industry and the major-label distribution system. Even bands having frankly minimal talent were embraced by their fans if they had something to say. The piercing craze and, to a lesser extent, the popularity of tattoos have their roots in the punk scene.
* * *
The debut Ramones by Ramones is a landmark album released in April 1976 that initially went nowhere, peaking at #111 on the Billboard album charts. In retrospect, all of the ingredients of punk rock were there, and its influence was enormous. Stephen Thomas Erlewine states flatly in his article on the band in Allmusic: “The Ramones were the first punk rock band. . . . By cutting rock & roll down to its bare essentials – four chords; a simple, catchy melody; and irresistibly inane lyrics – and speeding up the tempo considerably, the Ramones created something that was rooted in early ’60s, pre-Beatles rock & roll and pop but sounded revolutionary.” Rolling Stone lists Ramones as #26 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time; while in 2002, Spin magazine named them the second best band, behind only the Beatles.
In seemingly no time, the music scene was crowded with top bands and artists whose work has held up well over the decades since, among them Patti Smith Group (whose debut album, Horses came out before Ramones, in December 1975), Television, Richard Hell, the Heartbreakers (the punk band not Tom Petty’s group, though he was a part of the scene as well), Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, Blondie, the Clash, the Cars, Elvis Costello, Pat Benatar, Joy Division, the Specials, the Go-Go’s, the Police, etc., etc., etc. There were so many that rock critics and others began distinguishing bands in the safety-pin set as “punk” and others that were less confrontational as “new wave”.
* * *
Unlike rap music – which emerged fully formed in the 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang – hints of punk rock date back to some high-energy bands of the 1960’s and early 1970’s that have come to be known as “proto-punk”.
I have written of some of these bands already. The Velvet Underground is cited as one of the most important proto-punk bands; in fact, I will give the link this time to my earlier post about them: sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockvocalists/home/the-pantheon/greatly-appreciated-stories/the-velvet-underground .
* * *
The Nuggets album collected the garage rock and psychedelic rock hits and would-be hits from the mid-1960’s from bands like the Electric Prunes, Blues Magoos, the Standells, the Seeds, etc. There are some omissions, but Nuggets is as good an overview of this scene as there is. “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians is the missing song that always comes to mind for me (that song didn’t even make the Nuggets Box Set, though it was on the list for the Nuggets, Volume 2 album that was programmed but never released). Interestingly, Wikipedia notes: “One of the earliest written uses of the ‘punk’ term was by critic Dave Marsh who used it in 1970 to describe the group Question Mark and the Mysterians, who had scored a major hit with their song ‘96 Tears’ in 1966.” Here is what I have to say about this album: sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockvocalists/home/the-pantheon/greatly-appreciated-stories/nuggets-1 .
The Wikipedia article on the album starts out this way: “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 is a groundbreaking compilation album of American psychedelic and garage rock singles released in the mid-to-late 1960s. It was assembled by Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, and Lenny Kaye, later lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group. The original double album was released on LP by Elektra in 1972 with liner notes by Kaye that contained one of the first uses of the term ‘punk rock’. It was reissued with a new cover design by Sire Records in 1976 and expanded into a four-CD box set by Rhino Records in 1998.”
* * *
Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records started a long series of albums in 1978 called Pebbles that dug deeper into the mine than Nuggets for obscure garage rock and psychedelic rock songs. The initial album, the Pebbles, Volume 1 LP was subtitled “Original Artyfacts from the First Punk Era”, in a takeoff on the full name of the Nuggets album, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. The Wikipedia article on this album is largely my work, and there are dozens more articles on the albums in this series that I put together as well, in my first major Wikipedia project: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebbles,_Volume_1 .
* * *
As defined in Wikipedia: “Proto-punk (or protopunk) is the rock music from the 1960s and early 1970s that presaged the punk rock movement, although they were not labelled as such until after the fact. The musicians were not originally associated with each other, coming from a variety of backgrounds and styles, but they anticipated many of punk’s musical and thematic attributes. Proto-punk acts from the mid-1960s were deemed to be influential on later punk, particularly much garage rock.”
The Sonics are often cited as being among the earliest garage rock bands, having formed in 1960 in Tacoma, Washington with a raw, energetic sound from the get-go. They were a key part of the Pacific Northwest scene that also included the Wailers (not Bob Marley’s band) and Paul Revere and the Raiders; in later years, this part of the country was renowned for the grunge scene of Nirvana and others and the riot grrrl scene of Sleater-Kinney and others.
The Sonics were founded by guitarist Larry Parypa; he was introduced to the guitar by his uncle and encouraged in his musical interests by his parents. The Sonics started out as a family affair, with his older brother Andy Parypa, also on guitar, and another brother, Jerry Parypa, who played saxophone for a while; their mom often played bass guitar at rehearsals. They played tough instrumentals in the mold of Link Wray and Duane Eddy and quickly became a fixture in the local teen scene.
The line-up in the Sonics stabilized in late 1963 with the addition of three members from another local band called the Searchers (not to be confused with the British Invasion band, the Searchers); their frontman was future Moby Grape guitarist Jerry Miller. Larry Parypa remained on lead guitar, while Andy Parypa switched to bass guitar. The new bandmembers were Bob Bennett on drums, Rob Lind on sax, and Gerry Roslie on keyboards and, later, lead vocals.
Mark Deming in Allmusic states: “Although the band had been solid before, the new lineup evolved into a powerhouse; [Bob] Bennett wasn’t afraid to hit the drums hard, Larry [Parypa]’s guitar work had become sharper and more ferocious with time, and when [Gerry] Roslie was encouraged to sing, they discovered he could wail like a leather-lunged Little Richard, and the Sonics quickly became the most talked-about band in the Northwest.”
* * *
Following a series of searing 45’s, beginning with “The Witch” – a song originally about dancing, but rewritten about a treacherous woman – the Sonics released the seminal album Here Are the Sonics!!! in 1965; the album was reissued in mono on Norton Records in 1999. The band has never really broken up, having gone in and out of fashion as various musical waves ran through the Pacific Northwest. In May 2016, the Sonics announced that Larry Parypa and Gerry Roslie would no longer be part of the touring band, though they will remain involved with the group.
From Wikipedia: “The lyrics of the Sonics’ original material dealt with early 1960s teenage culture: cars, guitars, surfing, and girls (in songs like ‘The Hustler’, ‘Boss Hoss’ and ‘Maintaining My Cool’) alongside darker subject matter such as drinking strychnine for kicks, witches, psychopaths, and Satan (in the songs ‘Strychnine’, ‘The Witch’, ‘Psycho’, and ‘He’s Waitin’’, respectively).”
* * *
New York Dolls were a more recent proto-punk band that was formed in 1971. Their first two albums, New York Dolls (1973) and Too Much Too Soon (1974) slid in just ahead of the punk rock movement proper. The classic line-up was David Johansen (vocals), Johnny Thunders (guitar), Arthur Kane (bass), Sylvain Sylvain (guitar and piano), and Jerry Nolan (drums).
After New York Dolls broke up in 1977, David Johansen released the well regarded “Animals Medley” and later reinvented himself as Buster Poindexter. Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan left New York Dolls in the spring of 1975 and formed the punk rock band the Heartbreakers with future Voidoids frontman Richard Hell.
* * *
New York Dolls were famous for dressing in makeup, satin outfits, and high heels, quite a counterpoint to their hard-driving rock music. They got the idea from past UARB the Klubs, who cross-dressed back in the 1960’s.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine gives the band their due in his write-up for Allmusic: “The New York Dolls created punk rock before there was a term for it. Building on the Rolling Stones’ dirty rock & roll, Mick Jagger’s androgyny, girl group pop, the Stooges’ anarchic noise, and the glam rock of David Bowie and T. Rex, the New York Dolls created a new form of hard rock that presaged both punk rock and heavy metal. Their drug-fueled, shambolic performances influenced a generation of musicians in New York and London, who all went on to form punk bands. And although they self-destructed quickly, the band’s first two albums remain among the most popular cult records in rock & roll history.”
* * *
Another important band of the same time period, the Modern Lovers was formed in 1970 by guitarist and singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman with John Felice (guitar), David Robinson (drums), and Rolfe Anderson (bass). Richman had spent 9 months in New York City after becoming infatuated with the Velvet Underground before returning home to Boston and forming the band. The Modern Lovers played their first date in September 1970, barely a month after Richman’s return and became a hot live band. Anderson was later replaced by Ernie Brooks, and Jerry Harrison (a future member of Talking Heads) joined up on keyboards.
Getting their unique sound on record proved to be difficult, however, with John Cale, Kim Fowley and Allan Mason trying in various sessions to get some usable songs on tape in the early 1970’s. No recordings had been released until after the Modern Lovers broke up in December 1973; by the time Beserkley Records put out an album of their early recordings called simply The Modern Lovers (1976), Jonathan Richman had softened his sound and assembled a different band with a different style called Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Their debut album, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers came out in the same year on the same label, so it is not surprising that the original proto-punk band has largely dropped from sight.
The Modern Lovers is probably best known for their song “Pablo Picasso”. (Another of their tracks is “Roadrunner”; “Roadrunner” was covered by Sex Pistols on their little-known, sort-of second album, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle). I actually first heard the song on the Phranc album, Positively Phranc (1991), where (with Jonathan Richman’s blessing) she had rewritten the song as “Gertrude Stein” in honor of the famed Paris avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein who was the life partner of Alice B. Toklas – her 1954 recipe for marijuana brownies was celebrated in the Peter Sellers film, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968). An excerpt of “Pablo Picasso” (as performed by Burning Sensations) appears in the 1985 cult classic film, Repo Man that has been in heavy rotation on my TiVo for most of the year.
* * *
In 1969, I was in a record store somewhere and saw two debut albums with similar front and back covers, Three Dog Night by Three Dog Night and Kick out the Jams by MC5, both having a swirl of images of the bandmembers, mostly in concert. They are actually quite different bands. Three Dog Night, renowned for their harmony vocals and excellent material, had a succession of hit songs in the 1970’s, including 11 that made the Top Ten, along with 12 consecutive gold albums in a six year period. Not long after the release of Three Dog Night, the Nilsson song “One” became their first hit song, and “ONE” was added to the album cover. I searched for decades to find their album as I had originally seen it, without the song name on it. I finally found a copy, just in time for Hurricane Katrina to wash it away.
MC5 is a Detroit band and stands for “Motor City 5”. Jason Ankeny opens his article on the band in Allmusic: “Alongside their Detroit-area brethren the Stooges, MC5 essentially laid the foundations for the emergence of punk; deafeningly loud and uncompromisingly intense, the group’s politics were ultimately as crucial as their music, their revolutionary sloganeering and anti-establishment outrage crystallizing the counterculture movement at its most volatile and threatening. Under the guidance of svengali John Sinclair (the infamous founder of the radical White Panther Party), MC5 celebrated the holy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, their incendiary live sets offering a defiantly bacchanalian counterpoint to the peace-and-love reveries of their hippie contemporaries.”
* * *
MC5 was formed in 1964 by several high school friends, Rob Tyner (vocalist), Fred “Sonic” Smith (guitar), Wayne Kramer (guitar), Pat Burrows (bass), and Bob Gaspar (drums). The two guitarists began experimenting with feedback and distortion in their concerts in 1965, and a new rhythm section joined in 1966, Michael Davis (bass) and Dennis Thompson (drums). MC5 got a regular gig at the Grande Ballroom, where their album Kick out the Jams was recorded live in October 1968.
In his 5-star review of the MC5 album, Mark Deming raves in Allmusic: “Kick out the Jams is one of the most powerfully energetic live albums ever made; Wayne Kramer and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith were a lethal combination on tightly interlocked guitars, bassist Michael Davis and drummer Dennis Thompson were as strong a rhythm section as Detroit ever produced, and Rob Tyner’s vocals could actually match the soulful firepower of the musicians, no small accomplishment. Even on the relatively subdued numbers (such as the blues workout ‘Motor City Is Burning’), the band sounds like they’re locked in tight and cooking with gas; while the full-blown rockers (pretty much all of side one) are as gloriously thunderous as anything ever committed to tape. This is an album that refuses to be played quietly.”
Two more albums followed, Back in the U.S.A. (1970) and High Time (1971), with a more stripped down sound but no politics. The band broke up in 1972 but has only grown in influence over the years. I just picked up three more live CD’s by MC5 that were recorded in the 1960’s.
* * *
The Stooges (also known as Iggy and the Stooges) are the prototype of proto-punk. Like MC5, they are a Detroit band, or more properly an Ann Arbor band. As Stephen Thomas Erlewine observes in his Allmusic article: “Taking their cue from the over-amplified pounding of British blues, the primal raunch of American garage rock, and the psychedelic rock (as well as the audience-baiting) of the Doors, the Stooges were raw, immediate, and vulgar. Iggy Pop became notorious for performing smeared in blood or peanut butter and diving into the audience. Ron [Asheton] and Scott Asheton formed a ridiculously primitive rhythm section, pounding out chords with no finesse – in essence, the Stooges were the first rock & roll band completely stripped of the swinging beat that epitomized R&B and early rock & roll.”
After seeing a concert by the Doors, Iggy Pop (using the moniker Iggy Stooge) formed the Stooges in 1967 with Ron Asheton (guitar), Scott Asheton (drums), and Dave Alexander (bass). As an opening act for MC5, the Stooges lucked into a major label contract when the Elektra Records talent scout signed both acts.
* * *
The Stooges’ debut album, The Stooges came out at the same time as MC5’s Kick out the Jams; it features their classic song “I Wanna be Your Dog”. The producer was John Cale of the Velvet Underground, who later produced the classic 1975 album Horses by Patti Smith Group, and also several songs by another proto-punk band, the Modern Lovers. Writing for Allmusic, Mark Deming says: “[The Stooges] didn’t really sound like anyone else around when their first album hit the streets in 1969. It’s hard to say if Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, Dave Alexander, and the man then known as Iggy Stooge were capable of making anything more sophisticated than this; but if they were, they weren’t letting on, and the best moments of this record document the blithering inarticulate fury of the post-adolescent id. Ron Asheton’s guitar runs (fortified with bracing use of fuzztone and wah-wah) are so brutal and concise they achieve a naïve genius, while Scott Asheton’s proto-Bo Diddley drums and Dave Alexander’s solid bass stomp these tunes into submission with a force that inspires awe. And Iggy’s vividly blank vocals fill the ‘so what?’ shrug of a thousand teenagers with a wealth of palpable arrogance and wondrous confusion.”
* * *
By the time their second album, Fun House came along the following year (the first with the iconic Iggy Pop name), their anarchic excesses, particularly the drug use were beginning to catch up with the Stooges. The critics didn’t know what to make of it, often using rather lofty language to describe such a barebones barrage. Robert Christgau called the album “genuinely ‘avant-garde’ rock”; Greg Kot says it is “the Stooges’ punk jazz opus”; and the Rolling Stone review by Charles Burton says that the Stooges sounded “so exquisitely horrible and down and out that they are the ultimate psychedelic rock band in 1970”. The album was not a big seller, nor was the single “Down on the Street”.
There was some turnover in the band in 1971, with a key member joining at that time, James Williamson. Eventually the Stooges quit playing together and basically broke up.
* * *
In retrospect though, most rock scribes view Fun House as the peak album in the short, frantic life of the Stooges, with more than a few calling it the greatest album of all time. As an example, as quoted in Wikipedia: “In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Scott Seward claimed that, although saying so ‘risks hyperbole’, Fun House is ‘one of the greatest rock & roll records of all time’ and that, ‘as great as they were, the Stones never went so deep, the Beatles never sounded so alive, and anyone would have a hard time matching Iggy Pop’s ferocity as a vocalist’.”
As a measure of the popularity of the Stooges album Fun House, as reported in Wikipedia: “In 1999, Rhino Records released a limited edition box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, featuring every take of every song from every day of the recording sessions, plus the single versions of ‘Down on the Street’ and ‘1970’. On August 16, 2005, the album was reissued by Elektra [Records] and Rhino as a two-CD set featuring a newly remastered version of the album on disc one and a variety of outtakes (essentially highlights from The Complete Fun House Sessions box set) on disc two.”
* * *
Continuing in the Allmusic article, Stephen Thomas Erlewine talks about the genesis of the Stooges’ third album: “Early in 1972, [Iggy] Pop happened to run into David Bowie, then at the height of his Ziggy Stardust popularity and an avowed Stooges fan. Bowie made it his mission to resuscitate Iggy & the Stooges, as the band was then billed. Iggy and [James] Williamson were signed to a management deal with MainMan, the firm guiding Bowie’s career, and the new edition of the band scored a deal with Columbia Records. Temporarily based in London and unable to find a suitable rhythm section in the U.K., Iggy and Williamson invited the Asheton brothers to join the new group, with Scott [Asheton] on drums and Ron [Asheton] moved to bass. Iggy produced the third Stooges album, Raw Power, and Bowie handled the mix. Released in 1973 to surprisingly strong reviews, Raw Power had a weird, thin sound due to various technical problems . . . [with] many Stooges purists blam[ing] Bowie for the brittle mix.”
Raw Power features other classic Stooges songs, among them “Search and Destroy” (featured earlier this year in a series of ads for an Audi car), “Raw Power”, and a cocksure favorite of mine, “Penetration”. Like the other two Stooges albums, Raw Power flopped, and that was the end of the Stooges – at least until an acclaimed reunion tour in the 21st Century. In Allmusic, Raw Power and Fun House are given 5 stars, while The Stooges gets 4½ stars.
* * *
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.
They never went into the studio to record it; 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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.’”
* * *
Some months back, I included a story on the Prime Movers, yet another Michigan band, which numbered among its members Michael Erlewine, the man who started All Music Guide (now Allmusic), along with All Movie Guide and All Game Guide; and James Osterberg, better known today as Iggy Pop. He started out as a drummer, as he was for this band; and the other bandmembers started calling him “Iggy” because he had previously been the drummer for a band called THE IGUANAS, this month’s Under Appreciated Rock Band. The band name also gave Greg Shaw the name for his long series of Stooges albums, The Iguana Chronicles.
The Iguanas has taken first place among the least likely UARB or UARA of them all, even beating out the Rip Chords and Wendy Waldman, who was just the second rocker that I wrote about. One would think, with Iggy Pop’s unparalleled punk credentials, that every aspect of his musical life would have been examined in detail in Wikipedia long before now. But not even the band that gave him his name is there. Amazing. To cap it off, the Iguanas band that Iggy Pop was in is listed in Allmusic after another band called the Iguanas, from New Orleans; and they are the third Iguanas band in the Discogs list.
* * *
The Iguanas were formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan (home of the University of Michigan) in 1963 by James Osterberg (drums) and Jim McLaughlin (guitar); they were still in junior high when they first played together at a talent show. In an interview just before the release in early December 2016 of his new book, Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges, Iggy Pop told Rolling Stone: “We practiced playing ‘What’d I Say’ by Ray Charles and something called ‘Let There Be Drums’ by Sandy Nelson, which was my idea because it was a drum solo, right?”
* * *
A saxophonist named Sam Swisher was added next, just in time for their first paying performance, at a school dance. Jim McLaughlin’s father had a home studio, and the Iguanas recorded an instrumental there soon after.
After two more bandmembers joined up by 1964, Nick Kolokithas (guitar) and Don Swickerath (bass), the quintet became a popular local band, playing teen clubs, dances, and frat parties. Quoting from his book, Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges, Iggy Pop again told Rolling Stone: “A typical good weekend for us by the time I was a late junior or senior in high school, during when school was in, would be [the Iguanas would] play Friday afternoon at what they called the TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday). It’d be a keg of beer, a bunch of fraternity guys, four in the afternoon, one of the guys madly pumping the thing to get past the foam ’cause it’s a few sorority girls hanging around like, ‘What? Is this the party?’ Right? And we’d play for two hours and a standard rate was about eighty bucks. We had no living expenses. We lived at home. And no upkeep for anything, you know.”
* * *
In the spring of 1965, the Iguanas put out their first single, a cover of the Bo Diddley song “Mona” on their own Forte Records label. At the same recording session, the first ever James Osterberg original song was recorded, “Again and Again”.
During the summer of 1965, the Iguanas became the house band at the Club Ponytail; it was in a resort area called Harbor Springs, located well to the north of Ann Arbor, almost to the Upper Peninsula. While there, they opened for the Four Tops, the Shangri-Las, and the Kingsmen, often backing the headliner acts.
James Osterberg left the Iguanas in 1966 to join the Prime Movers; the Iguanas then hired a new drummer and played some dates in Boston and New York. When they were unable to land a record deal with Columbia Records, the band broke up in 1967.
* * *
The LP by the Iguanas that I have – at least I hope I still have it; it hasn’t shown up yet among the albums from the Katrina mud – The Iguanas came out in 1996 on Norton Records, showing the band posing in shades with matching hitchhiker thumbs. (I have had about a four-year hiatus from cleaning up those albums, but it is going to end by next month!). Norton has also reissued the Iguanas 45 “Mona” with the original b-side “I Don’t Know Why” and also the Iggy Pop original “Again and Again” that was planned to be on the second pressing of the single before he exited the band.
The copy advertising the album on the Norton Records website says: “Iggy Pop’s first band! Screamin’ eighteen song foot long slab o’ legendary Michigan garage punk bad attitude mayhem rounds up the sole Iguanas 45 ‘Mona’ / ‘I Don’t Know Why’ with Iggy’s first composition (the snarlin’ ‘Again and Again’), his first vocal (‘Louie Louie’) plus over a dozen crude demos 1963-64 in full color cover with liner notes.”
* * *
Another Iguanas album came out the same year, Jumpin’ with the Iguanas on Desirable Discs II. According to Allmusic, with the success of that album, Jim McLaughlin, Nick Kolokithas and Don Swickerath announced their intentions of putting the band back together.
* * *
Story of the Month: “Rollin’ Stone” (from March 2014)
The name of the Rolling Stones is taken from a truly great blues song that Muddy Waters recorded as early as 1948 called “Rollin’ Stone”; it is on almost everyone’s short list as one of the greatest popular songs ever. The lyrics (not to mention the music) echo through dozens of rock songs over the decades since: “Well, my mother told my father / Just before I was born / I got a boy child’s comin’ / He’s gonna be, he’s gonna be a rollin’ stone.”
Rolling Stone magazine is also named after “Rollin’ Stone”, as is Bob Dylan’s signature song, “Like a Rolling Stone”. The song is a bridge from the raw blues of Robert Johnson directly to rock and roll; while it is basically a straight blues song, there are startling changes in the beat and cadences over the course of “Rollin’ Stone”. Within the blues world, it is a direct antecedent to Muddy Waters’ 1954 recording of the Willie Dixon song “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” (Steppenwolf included “Hoochie Coochie Man” on their 1968 debut album Steppenwolf, among numerous other covers by various rock musicians), Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” (1955), and Waters’ answer “Mannish Boy” (also in 1955). I suppose that Bo and Muddy had a pretty good rivalry going back then, but on several occasions, I saw a performance of “I’m a Man” by Muddy Waters in later life on a series of films on TV called Living Legends of the Blues – that rendition even leaves the cover of “I’m a Man” by the Yardbirds in the dust.
