DOWN ON THE STREET
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”.
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.”
(December 2016)
