Wild Love

When I read the description of The Iguana Chronicles in the liner notes for Destination: Bomp!, the first album that I ordered was Wild Love, since it really sounds like it was taken from “mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward”.  In the best bootleg tradition, the other albums that I have not yet mentioned are all or mostly taken from live performances.

 

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!. 

 

 

 

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.”

 

Most of the 13 songs on Wild Love had never previously been released in the U.S. even as bootlegs; most of the Stooges bootleg albums and unofficial releases were made in Europe.  According to the song listing, more than half of the songs – “Wild Love”, “I Come from Nowhere”, “Delta Blues Shuffle”, “Old King Live Forever”, “Look So Sweet”, “Mellow Down Easy”, and “Move Ass Baby” – are “never before released in any form, anywhere!”   This is a bit over-stated; the album’s liner notes mention other versions of some of these songs that have been bootlegged elsewhere.

Charles Spano writing for Allmusic says of Wild Love:  “Though lacking the teenage venom of cuts like ‘1969’ and ‘I Wanna be Your Dog’ off of The Stooges and the unadulterated raw power of, well, Raw Power, Wild Love is still essential for die-hard fans.  The album, culled from rehearsals in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York for the band’s 1973 tour, runs the gamut from full-fledged, ready-to-record tunes to the types of swampy jams that the band has claimed indicative of their studio songwriting process.  Gems like the three minutes of rock & roll bliss dubbed ‘Wild Love’, the rambling, grinding ‘Pinpoint Eyes’, the Stonesy ‘I Came From Nowhere’, and the eerie, sprawling ‘Til the End of the Night’ could have given Iggy Pop the material for a stunning solo debut as early as 1973.” 

 

 

 

Wild Love is a great CD.  If this was the only album by the Stooges that I owned – or even if it was the only Stooges album that existed – they would still be one of my favorite bands.  People talk about “deep album cuts”, but those songs are sitting on albums for anyone to pick up and play.  These are “deep archive cuts”, buried on rehearsal tapes that in the normal course of events for any musicians would never have seen the light of day, on an album that runs for well over 60 minutes.  The thrill that I felt when I found an unknown 1960’s Bob Dylan song on a new bootleg album purchase is only matched by what I felt the first several times that I played this album.

 

As a hardcore Dylan fan, naturally I am delighted to have the remarkable cover by the Stooges of “Ballad of Hollis Brown”.  Not surprisingly, it is much different from Dylan’s own acoustical rendition of “Ballad of Hollis Brown”; the hard rock performance backing Iggy Pop’s passionate vocals has a metronomic feel to it that suits the grim subject matter well.

 

Some of the songs on Wild Love are familiar, such as the Skip James song “I’m So Glad” that Cream covered so memorably; and the Bo Diddley classic “I’m a Man” – both versions by the Stooges are terrific and unconventional, almost needless to say.  As I have said before, I have never heard a performance of “I'm a Man” that I didn’t love. 

 

 

 

 

Some of the cuts on Wild Love are jams by the Stooges (with or without vocals).  The sketchiest ones, shown on the song listing as “Delta Blues Shuffle” and “Old King Live Forever”, were extracted from a 30-minute jam by the band with Iggy Pop beginning to mumble ideas as James Williamson tried to follow them on the guitar.  “Old King Live Forever” really isn’t a song yet, though it could have become one if the band had given it more attention.

 

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”.

 

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”. 

 

 

 

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?).” 

 

 

 

 

Buying Wild Love first is certainly not the route most people would follow if they wanted to start buying albums in The Iguana Chronicles series.  I imagine that Rough Power would be the best album to start with for most people, since it features the original mix by the Stooges on the Raw Power album; and/or Open Up and Bleed!, a presentation of a potential fourth album by the Stooges.  Then one or more of the live albums – California Bleeding, Double Danger, and Michigan Palace 10/6/73 – would likely follow.  As noted above, Year of the Iguana serves as sort of a greatest-hits set of the Iguana Chronicles albums.  Perhaps someone whose interest had been piqued would then check out the more in-depth examination of the Stooges demos that were rejected by MainMan Management on I Got a Right and I’m Sick of You.  If you already have Kill City, you wouldn’t even need Jesus Loves the Stooges unless you just wanted to hear what a song called “Jesus Loves the Stooges” sounds like.

 

After all of those purchases or selected ones, only people who would be referred to by rock critics as “Stooges completists” or “diehard fans” would likely go for Wild Love.  Unless the idea of getting Stooges songs that have hardly been heard at all by anyone is appealing to you, like it was for me. 

 

(December 2017)