THE IGUANA CHRONICLES
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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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”.
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”.
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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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Before I get into The Iguana Chronicles – the series of albums of Stooges music put out by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records – I’ll take some time to relate my early acquisitions of albums of this kind. There are records out there which are not authorized that can include recordings that fans cannot get any other way. They are usually referred to as “bootleg” records and consist of music that was never officially released. “Pirated” records are illegal copies of major-label releases, and they are a different thing altogether. That is what got Napster into so much trouble many years ago. Bootlegs exist in a grey area and are generally (if grudgingly) tolerated by the music industry. In the same way, the major record labels almost never try to retake possession of the early promo copies of albums that are supplied to DJ’s and rock critics ahead of the official releases, even though they are typically marked with something like: “Licensed for promotional use only. Sale is prohibited.”
(September 2017)
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Even with having only a quarterly rather than a monthly schedule, I almost blew off my last post for September 2017 (which didn’t actually come out until mid-November). I was starting to run out of stuff to talk about, or so it seemed to me; and even though I really loved the Tell-Tale Hearts (not to mention the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Tell-Tale Heart” that the band was named after), coming up with yet a third post about Iggy and the Stooges was just not frying my bacon. Once I decided to talk about my early bootleg record acquisitions, however, the words flowed forth like old times. But I am dragging my feet again since I still have not discussed The Iguana Chronicles that I had intended to get into last time.
(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.
The name The Iguana Chronicles is taken from Iggy Pop’s first band, the Iguanas; once again, as with past UARB the Rip Chords (who had a big surf rock hit in 1964, “Hey Little Cobra”), I started my UARB post on the Iguanas during the month before someone finally wrote a Wikipedia article on the band. As I said before in one of my recent posts, I don’t think I will ever get used to the idea of the Iguanas being among the UARB’s.
(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)
