CREEM ONLINE: Stooges — Of Pop And Pies And Fun

CREEM—January 1971

A program for mass liberation in the
form of a Stooges review. Or, who's the fool?
by Lester Bangs

Well, maybe the gods were with us this time around, because sure enough it happened. On a small scale of course—the majority of people listening to and playing rock were still mired in blues and abortive "classical" hybrids and new shitkicker rock and every other conceivable manner of uninventively "artistic" jerkoff. But there were some bands coming up. Captain Beefheart burst upon us with the monolithic Trout Mask Replica, making history and distilling the best of both idioms into new styles and undreamed off, but somehow we still wanted something else, something closer to the mechanical, mindless heart of noise and the relentless piston rhythms which seemed to represent the essence both of American life and American rock ‘n’ roll.

Okay. Bands were sprouting and decaying like ragweed everywhere. The MC5 came on with a pre-records hype that promised the moon, failed to get off the launching pad. Black Pearl appeared with a promising first album—no real experiments, but a distinct Yardbirds echo in the metallic clanging cacophony of precisely distorted guitars. Their second LP fizzled out in bad soul music.

And, finally, the Stooges, The Stooges were the first young American group to acknowledge the influence of the Velvet Underground—and it shows heavily in their second album. There early Velvets had the good sense to realize that whatever your capabilities, music with a simple base was the best. Thus, "Sister Ray" evolved from a most basic funk riff 17 minutes into stark sound structures of incredible complexity. The Stooges started out not being able to do anything else but play rock-bottom simple—they formed the concept of the band before half of them knew how to play, which figures—probably just another bunch of disgruntled cats with ideas watching all the bullshit going down. Except that the Stooges decided to do something about it. None of them have been playing their instruments for more than two or three years, but that’s good—now they won’t have to unlearn any of the stuff which ruins so many other promising young musicians: flash blues, folk-pickin’, Wes Montgomery style jazz, etc. Fuck that, said Asheton and Alexander, we can’t play it anyway, so why bother trying to learn? Especially since even most of those styles’ virtuosos are so fucking boring you wonder how anyone with half a brain can listen to them.

Cecil Taylor, in A. B. Spellman’s moving book Four Lives in the Bebop Business, once told a story about an experience he had in the mid-fifties, when almost every clubowner, jazz writer and listener in New York was turned off to his music because it was still so new and so advanced that they could not begin to grasp it yet. Well, one night he was playing in one of these clubs when in walked this dude off the street with a double bass and asked if he could sit in. Why not, said Taylor, even though the cat seemed very freaked out. So they jammed, and it soon became apparent to Taylor that the man had never had any formal training on bass, knew almost nothing about it beyond the basic rudiments, and probably couldn’t play one known song or chord progression. Nothing. The guy had just picked up the bass, decided he was going to play it, and a very short time later walked cold into a New York jazz club and bluffed his way onto the bandstand. He didn’t even know how to hold the instrument, so he just explored as a child would, pursuing songs or evocative sounds through the tangles of his ignorance. And after awhile, Taylor said, he began to hear something coming out, something deeply felt and almost but never quite controlled, veering between a brand new type of song which cannot be taught because it comes from an unschooled innocence which cuts across known systems, and chaos, which playing the player and spilling garble, sometimes begins to write its own songs. Something was beginning to take shape which, though erratic, was unique in all this world. Quite abruptly, though, the man disappeared again, most likely to freak himself to oblivion, because Taylor never saw or heard of him again. But he added that if the cat had kept on playing, he would have been one of the first great free bassists.

The Stooges’ music is like that. It comes out of a primal illiterate chaos gradually taking shape as a uniquely personal style, emerges from a tradition of American music that runs from the primordial wooly rags of backwoods bands up to the magic promise eternally made and occasionally fulfilled by rock: that a band can start out bone-primitive, untutored and uncertain, and evolve into a powerful and eloquent ensemble. It’s happened again and again: the Beatles, Kinks, Velvets, etc. But the Stooges are probably the first name group to actually form before they even knew how to play. This is possibly the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll story, because rock is mainly about beginnings, about youth and uncertainty and growing through and out of them. And asserting yourself way before you know what the fuck you’re doing. Which answers the question raised earlier of what the early Stooges’ adolescent mopings had to do with rock ‘n’ roll. Rock is basically an adolescent music, reflecting the rhythms, concerns and aspirations of a very specialized age group. It can’t grow up—when it does, it turns into something else which may be just as valid but is still very different from the original. Personally I believe that real rock ‘n’ roll maybe on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworking of past idioms and a vast Sargasso sea of absolute garbage. And the Stooges’ songs may have some of the last great rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, because everybody else seems either too sophisticated at the outset or hopelessly poisoned by the effects of big ideas on little minds. A little knowledge is still a dangerous thing.

Now, however, that we have cleared up some of the misconceptions and established the Stooges’ place in the rock tradition, we can at long last get on to the joyous task of assessing Funhouse. The first thing you notice about it is that it is much rawer and seemingly more erratic than the first album. In fact, the precise clarity of that set would seem now to be a John Cale false alarm. His influence on it was always apparent: the viola, of course, in "We Will Fall," and the insistent, monotonous piano note piercing like weird sleighbells through "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is very reminiscent of the piano solo on the Velvets’ "I’m Waiting For the Man." It seems probable now that Cale both made the Stooges’ music more monotonous than it really was (although it’s still fairly monotonous—it’s just that the new monotony is so intensely sustained that you can’t get bored), and "cleaned it up" some to make the premiere disc a definite statement, with all of Iggy’s vocals absolutely intelligible and the instrumental sections precisely defined, if a bit restrained. The first set, on the whole, sounded almost more like a John Cale Production than whatever band the Stooges might be, and so we who had never heard them live looked forward to the second but nourished serious reservations about their musical abilities. They’d gotten very bad press—Chris Hodenfield had called them "stoned sloths" making "boring, repressed music [which] I suspect appeals to boring, repressed people" (hmmm, certainly would hate to be one of those—whaddaya hafta be, some sick creep to like the Stooges?—well, I guess Grand Funk is safer—but, on the other hand, might that not be the defensive reaction of people who’re afraid they might be sick creeps and read their own nightmares into the Stooge story—just like so many people just absolutely hated the Velvet Underground for so long, and still do, one prominent Rolling Stone critic asking me when I asked him whether he’d heard White Light/White Heat: "Are they still doing fag stuff?"—no, friend, not to worry—they’re doing MUSIC). And Robert Christgau wrote of fleeing a room where the Stooges were playing with a pounding headache, desperate to get away from them. Are they really that bad, or is so much critical revulsion an almost sure sign that there’s something important going on here? Just like reading about Mighty Quick raising a whole roomful of Movement people to nigh homicidal wrath ("Off the pig band!") at the Alternative Media Conference—anybody who can piss off that many people just be standing on a stage and going through an act, no matter how bad it might be, must have something going for ‘em.

The first time I played Funhouse I got very turned off. I had hoped that at least some of the clarity of the first LP would hang on. I put it on, turned it up, and listened through headphones because it was near midnight. Every song sounded exactly the same, the textures seemed mighty muddy, as if the instruments were just grinding on in separate universes, and Iggy’s vocals seemed much less distinctive than on the first—more like just any hollering kid. Also, I could make out almost none of the words. The last straw was the instrumental, "L.A. Blues," which closes side two—it just seemed to freakout.

"Dirt" is a specific ballad of the only stripe possible in this post-romantic era: terse personal assessment and flat-out proposition. "I’ve been hurt!/But I don’t care... I’ve been dirt!/But I don’t care…Cause I’m learnin’... Learrnin’..." And later: "It’s the fire/Do you feel it when you touch me..."

"Dirt’s" instrumental track is fine, bitter and somehow proud at the same time, and its thematic material seems to sum up all the adolescent moonings of The Stooges and file them away as past history. Iggy, having suffered the sorrows of Young Werther and every other type of freaking frustration, has finally stepped out of the night of inertia into his own strange madmanhood, schooled in blows and ready to take on the world. Right on. I wondered why, when the crowd in that TV show hoisted him on their arms and shoulders, he clenched his fists, puffed out his chest and flexed in the classic Charles Atlas manner (which looks pretty funny when the flexer is a skinny wildeyed kid pouring sweat)—he was rather pugnaciously asserting his newfound resilence and toughness: "Here I am, babies. I, Iggy, have conquered—do your worst!"

Side two, like the first, shapes up with steadily rising energies, but the emphasis and pacing is different. Only three songs, the introduction of a sax, and progressions (at least in the first two songs) which again seem directly or organically related. "I Feel Alright (1970)" is probably the set’s weakest song, not counting "L.A. Blues" which is ungradeable. Somehow the arrangement lacks the tight hysteria of the pieces on side one, and for once the sense of raving disorder seems closer to actual sloppiness than a swirling energy vector. The words echo Chuck Berry’s "You Can’t Catch Me, " but still make it fine as a Saturday night getloose party song, although the song’s general haziness and sense of disorientation make you wonder just what sort of party he’s going to. Certainly ain’t no whooping bash, because while on side one you always know exactly where you are through each electric storm, this one finds Ig and the whole band just sort of wandering around in the murk.

"Feel Alright’s" saving grace is the appearance of snazzy saxman Steve McKay, whose work through the whole of this side bears no slighting. For some reason very few young white "rock" sax players can handle jazz forms without getting into one sort of mawkish woodshed parody or another, and when they attempt the free music of the Shepp/Ayler fringe the results regularly sink even lower. Somehow they always seem to end up merely gargling out some most untogether flurry of notes, their fingers skittering carelessly over the keys as if that were all that free jazz, in reality a fierce taskmaster, required. That’s all it requires to blow shit, but playing the real shit takes a specialized imagination and sense of control. Steve, thank god, has enough of both to make his solos and ensemble fills interesting in their own right, and treads a fine though constantly zigzagging line between the post-Coltrane approach and a great old primitive rock ‘n’ roll honk.

The title track is next, longest cut, opens with same Ig vocal chorus as "Feel Alright," and features a stomping, slamming arrangement that charges right ahead in a blustery delirium. Early on the guitar starts meandering Lou Reed-style behind Iggy’s vocal, and MacKay maintains a gutty percussive blat, interspersed with occasional restless flurries of plaintive squawks. The set’s most gloriously "sloppy" piece, it creaks and cranks and crackles along like some peglegged Golem hobbling toward carny Bethlehem. The lyrics and Ig’s delivery are choice, a vision of delirious kids cascading through garish phantasmagorias of sideshow and steeplechase, with the Funhouse seemingly a sort of metaphor for the fully integrated, getloose life-style, all recited by Iggy with a kind of lunatic glee: "Little baby gurl and little/Bay-buh boy/Covered me with lovin’ in a/Bundle o’ joy/Do I care to show ya whut I’m/Dreamin’ of/Do I dare tuh fuck ya/With mah luve?" The "fuck" comes out as a high wheezing whoop, and then he adds: "evah little baby knows just/What I mean/Livin’ in a division, in the/Shiftin’ sands/I’m callin’ from the funhouse. . ."

And finally there’s "L.A. Blues," the searing arhythmic freak-out which drove me to distraction first hearing and which I’ve since come to kind of dig on its own level as more a steaming, stormy atmosphere than a piece of music. I prefer things that swing or rock or even shuffle—although I’ve heard many similar freakouts on both rock and jazz albums, and this one beats all of those from other rock bands and most of the jazz. Somehow after a couple of listenings it’s not grating, the way Yoko Ono or Archie Shepp’s angrier outings or even "European Son" gets grating. The Stooges seem to know what they’re doing—most times I rip such aural blitzes off the phonograph posthaste (even a Stooge fan’s ears take sensitive exception to some outer-edge tonalities—in fact, I would say that a true Stooge fan, like a true aficionado of Captain Beefheart or the Velvet Underground or Pharaoh Sanders, probably has a couple of the ten thousand or so most sensitive ears on the planet, since they are sufficiently developed to appreciate that Stooge magic which so escapes dullards). In fact, the other night I fell in well-stoked with ozone, listened to "L.A. Blues" and really got behind it in a big way—seemed like some vast network of golden metal pulleys rising infinitely into the sky—not that I expect any of the folks around the hearth to heed them kind of psychedelic testimonials. What I do notice through repeated playings is that Iggy is up to some of the album’s most abstract vocal tricks here—his voice at times takes on the timbre of one more distorted amplifier, later screams like a wildcat suffering the short end of a boxing match, and at one point sounds as if he is trying to sing through a mouthful of radiator coils. The fading feedback of the song’s last minute, however, finds him returning ever so briefly for a signoff reminiscent of Porky Pig’s in the old Warner Brothers cartoons: curled up atop the massed metal wreckage of the past five minutes, he’s once again the wildcat, considerably quieter now, emitting two low purring yawns, smiling, sleepy, sated.

Well, that’s just about it. My labors have been strenuous but thorough, and by rights every last bleary orb running down these last works should be satorized and sold on Pop & Co. Yet somehow I still hear a horde of sluggards out there whining: "Are you putting me on?" Or, more fundamentally, haven’t the Stooges been putting us all on from yelp One? And the answer, of course, is Yes. Because, as beautiful Pauline Kael put it in her characteristically epigrammatic way: "To be put on is to be put on the spot, put on the stage, made the stooge in a comedy act. People in the audience at Bonnie & Clyde are laughing, demonstrating that they’re not stooges—that they appreciate the joke—when they catch the first bullet right in the face.

Some of the most powerful "esthetic" experiences of our time, from Naked Lunch to Bonnie & Clyde, set their audiences up just this way, externalizing and magnifying their secret core of sickness which is reflected in the geeks they mock and the lurid fantasies they consume, just as our deepest fears and prejudices script the jokes we tell each other. This is where the Stooges work. They mean to put you on that stage, which is why they are supermodern, though nothing near to Art. In Desolation Row and Woodstock-Altamont Nation the switchblade is mightier and speaks more eloquently than the penknife. But this threat is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation.