GREG SHAW – The Iguana Chronicles
In the liner notes for Destination: Bomp!, Greg Shaw says: “‘I Got a Right’ . . . remains one of Ig’s best songs ever, and one he still performs regularly.” Both “I Got a Right” and “Gimme Some Skin” are included on The Best of Bomp, Volume One (as is the flip side of the first Bomp single, “Him or Me” by the Flamin’ Groovies); that’s where I first heard them.
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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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Greg Shaw continues in the liner notes for the Wild Love album: “But there were other songs, also endlessly rehearsed, that never seemed to get beyond the practice stage, though some have every bit as much potential as the ones taken on the road. Among these I would include ‘Wild Love’, ‘Pin Point Eyes’, ‘Hey Baby’, and ‘How it Hurts’. Most interesting of all is ‘I Come from Nowhere’, a fairly well developed song with impassioned vocals and very personal lyrics, and some magnificent instrumental parts. It’s a pity that they never played this one in their live show (that I know of). Though several rehearsal versions exist, this is the only one that is complete.”
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As readers of these posts know, I love to find religious references in the most unlikely places; and I recognized the repeated lyric, “O King Live Forever” (and some of the other vocals as well) as coming from the Book of Daniel – the line was said several times during the Bible story, and once by Daniel while he was famously in the lions’ den. Greg Shaw didn’t know where the ideas had come from; he speculated that it could have been from something Jim Morrison of the Doors had written. Since Iggy Pop is clearly singing “O King” rather than “Old King”, I passed along what I knew to Suzy Shaw at Bomp! Records, saying that this Stooges song should really be named “O King Live Forever”.
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I should point out that many of the songs by the Stooges on Wild Love don’t have official names, so Greg Shaw was coming up with his own titles based on what he was hearing. The liner notes cite previous releases of some of the songs with very different names: “Wild Love” showed up on bootleg releases in both France and England as “My Girl Hates My Heroin”; a French bootleg referred to “I Come from Nowhere” as “Born in a Trailer”; and “Till the End of the Night” was on one previous release as “I Got a Problem”.
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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?).”
(December 2017)
