Dec 14

The Stooges

THE STOOGES
 
 
The Stooges,  also known as Iggy and the Stooges, are an American proto-punk band from Ann Arbor, Michigan, first active from 1967 to 1974, and later reformed in 2003.  Although they sold few records in their original incarnation, and often performed for indifferent or hostile audiences, the Stooges are widely regarded as instrumental in the rise of punk rock, as well as influential to alternative rock, heavy metal and rock music at large.  The Stooges were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.  In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked them 78th on their list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
The last two cuts on the compilation CD Disorder by the Ugly come from their final performance in the winter of 1978, “Hey Little Girl” and “Lust for Life”.  “Lust for Life” is the most accessible Iggy Pop song – sometimes misidentified as a Stooges song – and was co-written by Iggy Pop and David Bowie; remarkably, the song was used for several years as the theme song for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, starting right after Peggy and I had our honeymoon aboard one of their big ships. 
 
(November 2011)
 
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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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Many of the seminal bands in these rock movements released albums on the Bomp!, Voxx, Alive or Total Energy labels; most of them are not household names by any means, but they are recognized by those in the know as being important bands that shaped the history of rock and roll.  Some of these better-known bands and artists are the Romantics, the Modern Lovers, the Dead Boys (and Stiv Bators individually), the Plimsouls (and Peter Case individually), the Beat (and Paul Collins individually), the Stooges (and Iggy Pop individually), Devo, Nikki Sudden, the Black Keys, and Soledad Brothers. 

 
(May 2013)
 
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Writing for the Rolling Stone Record Guide, David McGee states:  “To get an idea of his indelible contribution to rock & roll, consider the critic Lester Bangs’ citation of [Ritchie] Valens as the prototypical punk guitarist whose signature ‘La Bamba’ riff links Valens to a hard-edged, no-frills style of rock & roll later advanced by the Kingsmen, the Kinks, the Stooges, and the Ramones.”  The thrilling Ramones call “Hey Ho, Let’s Go” – from the opening song “Blitzkrieg Bop” on their first album, Ramones – might have been lifted directly from Ritchie Valens’ “Come On, Let’s Go”. 

 
(June 2013/1) 
 
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John Cale has also had an important impact on music following his time with the Velvet Underground, though mostly behind the scenes.  John Cale produced several proto-punk albums, including the first album by the Stooges, The Stooges (1969), and the first album by the Modern Lovers that Reprise Records refused to release; it was later released on Beserkley Records.   

  

(December 2013)

 

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As related in Wikipedia, Mick Farren has stated that the Deviants were originally a community band which “did things every now and then – it was a total assault thing with a great deal of inter-relation and interdependence”.  Musically, Farren described their sound as “teeth-grinding, psychedelic rock” somewhere between the Stooges and the Mothers of Invention. 

 
(March 2014/1)
 
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In 1965, Michael Erlewine and his brother formed a blues band called the Prime Movers; original bandmembers were Michael Erlewine (lead singer, harmonica), Dan Erlewine (lead guitar), Robert Sheff (keyboards), Robert Vinopal (bass), and Michael “Spider” Wynn (drums).  After Wynn left the band, he was replaced by James Osterberg.  A few years later, Osterberg began performing as Iggy Pop; and under this name, he founded the proto-punk band the Stooges.  His nickname was due to Osterberg’s serving as the drummer for another Michigan band called the Iguanas.  

 

(March 2014/2)

 

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The Richmond Sluts were founded by Chris B (Chris Beltran, on bass guitar) and Shea Roberts (guitar and vocals) in 1998; they shared similar tastes in music, such as the Clash, the Rolling Stones, New York Dolls, and the Stooges.  After adding Justin Lynn (keyboards), the Richmond Sluts developed a distinctive sound and began performing with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.  

 

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Big Midnight also has released only one album, Everything for the First Time, which came out on Alive Records in 2003.  Allmusic immediately notes in their review by Brian O’Neill, “Actually, there is nothing here that you will be hearing for the first time” and continues:  “Everything for the First Time could have as easily came out in 1973 as it did in 2003.  Call ’em ‘the Rolling Stooges’ and the band will have to plead guilty, as Big Midnight combines the nihilism of Iggy Pop (‘Love for Sin’ could have been a [David] Bowie or [Lou] Reed side written specifically with Ig in mind) with the bloozey, boozy swagger of Keith Richards’ crew.” 

 

(June 2014)

 

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In 1972, Kim Fowley recorded some songs by the proto-punk band the Modern Lovers, building on previous recordings that had been produced by John Cale.  As Wikipedia reports:  “These included re-recordings of ‘She Cracked’, ‘Astral Plane’, ‘I’m Straight’, ‘Girlfriend’ and two versions of ‘Roadrunner’, as well as the songs ‘Walk Up The Street’, ‘Dance With Me’ and the a capella ‘Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste’.  [Bandleader Jonathan] Richman also credited James Osterberg (Iggy Pop) as co-writer on ‘I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms’ as a way of acknowledging that the song borrows a Stooges guitar riff.” 

 

The recordings were first released on Kim Fowley’s short-lived Mohawk Records (a subsidiary of Bomp! Records) in 1981 under the title The Original Modern Lovers.   

 

(January 2015/1)

 

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Marilyn Records was a European label that was founded by French musician Patrick Boissel in the mid-1980’s.  After a number of French and Spanish releases, Marilyn began handling the sort of musicians and bands that gravitate to Bomp! Records.  Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records met Boissel at a record convention, and Marilyn Records became their distributor in Europe.  One result was a great compilation album that I have of previous Bomp! Records releases called From L.A. with Love (1992) that features the Plimsouls, the Flamin’ Groovies, Stiv Bators, Jeff Dahl, the Stooges, and the Zeros. 

 

(March 2015)

 

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Writing for the Detroit Metro Times website, Ben Blackwell writes of the Gimme Some Action CD: “The Ramrods are the name of Detroit frontline punk warriors. . . . Ramrods lead howler Mark J. Norton barks like a bored kid with an armload of bulldogs while guitarist Peter James’s scarred-yet-smooth soloing informs us that [the Stooges album] Raw Power was safely tucked under his pillow. While the ’Rods studio output is brief, the highlight of the disc is easily their 1977 live medley: ‘Helter Skelter’ [by the Beatles] catapults into a punk-painted ‘My Generation’ [by the Who] and declares the obvious in ‘Search and Destroy’ [by the Stooges] and cements its place in rock lore by adding the archetypical ‘I’m a Ramrod’.”

 
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Dark Carnival was sort of a Detroit punk supergroup that was assembled by Detroit music promoter Colonel Galaxy, whose name was a nod to Elvis Presley’s longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Bootsey X was the first bandmember to be recruited; others included his bandmate in the Ramrods, Mark Norton, plus (as listed in Wikipedia): “Gary Adams from the Cubes [who was also a sometime bandmember in the Lovemasters], Mike McFeaters from What Jane Shared, Jerry Vile from the Boners, Sarana VerLin from Natasha, Greasy Carlisi from Motor City Bad Boys, Robert Gordon and Art Lyzak from the Mutants, Joe Hayden from Bugs Bedow, Pete Bankert from Weapons, [and] Larry Steel from the Cult Heroes.
 
“Later, Dark Carnival saw some turnover, with the ‘big’ names signing on: Niagara from Destroy All Monsters, Ron [Asheton] and Scott Asheton from the Stooges, Cheetah Chrome from the Dead Boys, Jim Carroll even came in from New York.”
(March 2016)
 

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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.”  
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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.”  
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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.
 
(December 2016)
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Not long after I put up my last post on (among others) punk icon Iggy Pop and his first band the Iguanas as the Under Appreciated Rock Band that month, CBS Sunday Morning had a profile of Iggy Pop in early January 2017, mentioning the Stooges and other career highlights.  I was surprised enough when the show had a piece on the Black Keys, but this really blew me away.  At one point, he was asked about how the Stooges became so popular decades after their music was recorded, and Iggy said with a big grin that he thinks the world finally caught up with him after all that time.
 
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In his September 2000 appreciation for the Chicago Sun-Times of this film and the rest of the Cameron Crowe oeuvre – Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jerry Maguire, and Say Anything – Jim DeRogatis allows that his favorite “music-movie pairing” in Almost Famous is:  “Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs doing the chicken dance to ‘Search and Destroy’ by the Stooges.”  While not taking away anything from the excellent music choices made during the film Almost Famous, the contrast could hardly be more stark between this thunderous song and the genteel sounds by the more popular 1970’s bands.  This was true not just in the film but in the time period when Raw Power was released in 1973.  Jim DeRogatis also wrote a biography in 2000 called Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic. 
 
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After the Stooges broke up in early 1974, and before his first post-Stooges tracks were finally released by Bomp! Records as Kill City under the name Iggy Pop and James Williamson, Iggy Pop continued the collaboration with David Bowie that he had begun on Raw Power with his first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life.  Both are ranked 5 stars by Allmusic; the latter album includes what is probably Iggy Pop’s best known song, “Lust for Life” (it is sometimes mistaken for a Stooges song).  He was working fast, with all three of these albums released in 1977; all told, Allmusic lists a remarkable 26 solo albums in the Iggy Pop name, not counting the Stooges albums or Kill City. 
 
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In his Allmusic review of Lust for Life – featuring a smiling Iggy Pop on the front cover (unlike the fierce persona he presented on the Stooges album covers) – Mark Deming writes:  “On The Idiot, Iggy Pop looked deep inside himself, trying to figure out how his life and his art had gone wrong in the past.  But on Lust for Life, released less than a year later, Iggy decided it was time to kick up his heels, as he traded in the midtempo introspection of his first album and began rocking hard again.  Musically, Lust for Life is a more aggressive set than The Idiot, largely thanks to drummer Hunt Sales and his bassist brother Tony Sales.  The Sales [brothers] proved they were a world-class rhythm section, laying out power and spirit on the rollicking title cut [‘Lust for Life’], the tough groove of ‘Tonight’, and the lean neo-punk assault of ‘Neighborhood Threat’; and with guitarists Ricky Gardiner and Carlos Alomar at their side, they made for a tough, wiry rock & roll band – a far cry from the primal stomp of the Stooges, but capable of kicking Iggy back into high gear. . . .  On Lust for Life, Iggy Pop managed to channel the aggressive power of his work with the Stooges with the intelligence and perception of The Idiot, and the result was the best of both worlds; smart, funny, edgy, and hard-rocking, Lust for Life is the best album of Iggy Pop's solo career.” 
 
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I have written already of several of the first-wave punk rock bands that were formed in the wake of the proto-punk bands that I wrote about in my last post:  the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, the Modern Lovers, MC5, and others.  In fact, one of my early UARB’s was the Eyes; they were one of the first punk bands in Los Angeles and included in their line-up future stars Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go’s and DJ Bonebrake of X. 
 
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I recently picked up a 2007 retrospective album called Destroy All Music by the Weirdos, one of the earliest Southern California punk bands, having formed in late 1975.  Cliff Roman (guitar and bass) recalls:  “I saw the [New York] Dolls at the Whisky and got their autographs.  I saw the Stooges at the Whisky, and Iggy [Pop] got on my shoulders.  When he was lying on the floor, I drew a red ‘X’ on his chest, and we watched his sweat melt it as the band finished their set.  Walking out of the show, I told my friend David Trout (guitar) that we should start our own band.” 
 
(March 2017)
 
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This is taken from the write-up by Greg Shaw in Destination: Bomp! for the SS-20 song “Arnold Layne”:  “Once in a while I get enthusiasms that few others seem to share, and this was one of those.  I was in awe of Bruce Wagner’s ability to squeeze original ideas out of the boneyard of rock guitar cliché, and I particularly love what he did with old songs.  We cut stuff by people including the Seeds, the Stooges, Love, and the Doors, in each case adding something new to songs I thought had already been done to perfection.  Against this, SS-20 had Madeleine Ridley’s morbid, gothic poetry, a blend I found intriguing.” 
 
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Two of the trademark covers by SS-20 are given on the Dream Life album.  Side 2 opens with “My Eyes Have Seen You” that had appeared on the second album by the Doors, Strange Days, which incorporates the usual Doors flourishes; and the album closes with a fine, extended interpretation (running nearly 10 minutes) of “Penetration” that had appeared on the third album by the Stooges, Raw Power.  Both songs are basically performed in the same style as the rest of the album, but the individual character of each of the two songs comes in quite clearly.  I must say that I would have a hard time coming up with the name of another band who performs convincing covers of such a wide variety of rock songs. 
 
(December 2017)
 
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Anyway, here is what and who I talked about last year:
December 2016 – 1960’s garage rock band THE IGUANAS; Story of the Month on the Muddy Waters song “Rollin’ Stone”; also, 1970’s music and proto-punk music, Ramones, Nuggets, Pebbles Series, the Sonics, New York Dolls, the Modern Lovers, MC5, the Stooges, Iggy Pop.
 
March 2017 – 1980’s/1990’s punk rock band THE LAZY COWGIRLS; Story of the Month on Ringo Starr’s pre-Beatles career; also, first-wave punk rock, Iggy Pop, the Stooges, the Avengers, Penelope Houston, the Weirdos, the Dickies, Pat Todd and the Rankoutsiders. 
(Year 8 Review)
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These annual posts normally summarize what I have written about in the past year, but in this case, there has only been one of them; and even that one is dated December 2017.  But it is a good one, one of my best I think; Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records gave me some really nice compliments on it.  I had been writing about the Stooges and Iggy Pop over several previous posts, and I undertook a detailed examination of the long series of CD’s and LP’s of unreleased Stooges material called The Iguana Chronicles.  I also took the opportunity of writing up descriptions of many early releases by Bomp! Records, as well as other peripheral info as I usually do. 
 
(Year 9 Review)
 
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I might yet write some more posts, but not until I secure my website in a safe place. No other bands or topics come immediately to mind though. I have already written 13 “stories” about various aspects of Bob Dylan’s musical life, and I don’t know what else I have left to add. As it turned out, a lot of my posts have revolved around artists on Bomp! Records and their affiliated labels, like Alive Records. When I was preparing the last of my posts, on The Iguana Chronicles (a long series of albums of unreleased material by the Stooges that was put together by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records) – which was named after the least likely UARB of them all, the Iguanas – I went through all of the Bomp! Records artists that I could locate before I finally found one without a Wikipedia article that wasn’t already a UARB: SS-20, whose first album came out in 1986 – 12 years after Bomp! Records was founded.
 
(Year 10 Review)
Last edited: April 7, 2021