Stooges

The Stooges, the heart of darkness of Detroit. The Motor City, the industrial city par excellence, reveals to the world its rotten, nihilistic underground, rising up as the new Mecca for a generation of proto-punks thirsty for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Because that, ultimately, is what the Stooges offer. The pure elixir of rock, muddied though by a perverse, sordid aura, inherited from the most dissolute bacchanals of the Velvet Underground and from the most unsettling liturgies of Jim Morrison's Doors.

Iggy Pop and company (the two Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, plus bassist Dave Alexander) give voice to the malaise of a generation that, at that very moment, was celebrating itself at Woodstock. But behind their raw, sick music there is no hope, no utopia. It's an inexorable descent into the hell of boredom, decadence, perdition: a nihilistic sickness of living. "No Fun" - which the Sex Pistols would later pay tribute to, giving it pride of place on the B-side of "Pretty Vacant" - is its definitive manifesto.

It's August 1969 when Elektra releases the band's debut album, simply titled "The Stooges". Brought in to produce it is none other than John Cale, by then estranged from the Velvet Underground and ready to bet on the talent of this gang of misfits. The result is a record that's harsh, raw and "garage" in sound, but far less bare-bones and crude than one might imagine. Because beyond letting their saturated guitars detonate and raising their mighty rhythmic walls, the Stooges also know how to write songs. With terse, direct refrains that go straight for the jugular, evocative atmospheres, and a vocal performance that always adds morbidity and magnetism.

Off it goes, straight into a blow as sharp as "1969": a danceable boogie rhythm, a concise rock'n'roll chorus, a bass pumping blood, Iggy howling his boredom: "It's another year for me and you/ Another year with nothing to do". An anthem (which the Sisters Of Mercy would later turn into a dark-toned version), yet it's still, in a sense, "classic" - almost a filthy version of Bo Diddley. Leading the listener by the hand into the middle of the orgy is the following "I Wanna Be Your Dog". Three chords on guitar, to begin with. And three minutes of delirium, amid screams, scorching feedback and obscene sexual advances, sealed by Asheton's stinging solo. Iggy's cavernous howl invokes an animalistic, total love: "Now I'm ready to close my eyes/ And now I'm ready to close my mind/ And now I'm ready to feel your hand/ And lose my heart on the burning sands/ And now I wanna be your dog".

After stretching the tension to breaking point, the Stooges slow down. But "We Will Fall" is another room in the house of perdition - this time dark, suffocating, oppressive: a psychedelic sabbath drawn from an Indian ritual chant, dragging on for ten minutes, with John Cale's obsessive viola giving no respite, distant wah-wah guitars, Iggy's alienating spoken delivery and otherworldly chants in the background. It's perhaps the most Velvet-like moment on the record (though also very Doors-like), along with "Ann", another fine slow, dark and unsettling track: Iggy's murky voice drowns in a web of rough guitars, and this time his cry is strangled, the mournful swoon of an impossible love: "I looked into your cool cool eyes/ I felt so fine, I felt so fine/ I floated in your swimming pools/ I felt so weak, I felt so blue". Pure poetry of depravity. But then the drums pick up speed and the guitar explodes into one of the most searing distortions ever recorded.

The album's other proto-punk anthem is "No Fun". Namely, the nihilism of the Sex Pistols a decade early, shattering the dreams of Woodstock. Farewell flower-power and the Age of Aquarius. The party's over, there's only nothingness left. The alienated sound of America's industrial outskirts condensed into a handful of riffs, convulsions and handclaps, with Asheton's usual explosive solo sealing it all. Rotten & co. couldn't help but remember it, covering it on the B-side of the single "Pretty Vacant".

Even the album's seemingly minor tracks reveal a stunning power: "Real Cool Time" is a bacchanal of abrasive riffs and frenzied drumming, with the inevitable Asheton solo closing things out; the other adrenaline rush of "Not Right" and the red-light nightmare of "Little Doll" follow the same tried-and-tested formula - primal, distorted riffs, bass blasts, hammering drums - backing the vocal histrionics of an Iggy forever wrestling with his lustful, frustrated delusions.

Despite the buzz, though, the album doesn't break through: sales fall well short of expectations, even if those lucky thirty-five thousand buyers, to borrow Eno's words, probably all went on to become musicians themselves, just like those who bought "VU & Nico". And yet it's already clear that this is a "classic" in the making. The Stooges' sound, in fact, carries no trace of time. Iggy's voice recalls an even filthier, more depraved Mick Jagger. Ron Asheton's guitar tone is shattered, distorted, unmistakable.

Alongside their fellow Detroiters the MC5, Iggy & The Stooges would become the post-summer-of-love icons of a movement celebrating the moral and psychic decay of the human race, positioning themselves as the "borderliners" of a society devoted to consumerism and the extreme cult of well-being.

But it's above all musically that "The Stooges" would prove to be a pivotal turning point, fuelling the garage revival of the years to come and serving as the definitive cornerstone for the punk-wave generation.

The Stooges would strike again, with two more rock knockout blows ("Funhouse" and "Raw Power"). Then, once the band split, Iggy Pop would fall into an abyss of drugs, hospitalisations and psychic devastation. He'd be reborn at the court of Duke Bowie, who put his stamp on "The Idiot" and "Lust For Life", granting him a whole new season of glory.

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12/11/2006