ARCTIC MONKEYS, Favourite Worst Nightmare (Domino)
Uncut, 2007
Once upon a time, a band from the North came with a sound so fresh and vigorous it took the nation by storm. The sound was rock (the bog-standard indie-schmindie format of guitars/ bass/ drums) but crucially it was pop too: concise, punchy, murderously melodic, shiny without being “plastic”. The singer was a true original, delivering a mixture of sensitivity and strength, defiance and tenderness, via a regionally-inflected voice that stood out amid the fake-American accents of the era. The young man’s lips spilled forth words that were realistic without being dour, full of sly, salty humour and beautifully observed detail, plangent with poignancy. Oh, the debut faced quibbles from some who felt the earlier versions--those that had incited the monster buzz in the first place--were definitive and superior. But most recognized the album as a landmark, an instant classic. And then came the doubt: how can they possibly follow it?
I’m talking about the Smiths, of course. But the narrative totally fits a more recent group from the other side of the Pennines. Okay, it was Radio One evening show sessions rather than Myspace that built the Mozz buzz, but otherwise the parallels are striking, right down to the mad flurry of non-album singles and EPs and brill B-sides, scattered with heedless generosity as if to say “aren’t we the fecund fuckers, eh?” The similarity extends to my initial encounter with Favourite Worst Nightmare, which gave me an eerie flashback to the disappointment of first hearing Meat Is Murder (hardly a song from which made Uncut’s recent Best of the Smiths poll). Nightmare’s sound is bright, brash, brimming with vim, but hardly any of the tunes hit the bulls-eye, either melodically or emotionally. As for the words, they felt like “Rusholme Ruffians” and “Nowhere Fast” all over again--that same impression of a writer who shot his wad--a lifetime’s worth of feeling and watching--copiously the first time around and was now coming up empty.
A couple more plays put paid to any worries on the songfulness front: these tunes will dog your every waking hour. Stronger still is the sheer élan and force of the playing. Even with the loss of their original bassist, Arctic Monkeys still possess the most dynamic and supple UK rhythm section since Stone Roses. The band’s power and agility at times resembles an Oasis fixated on Led Zeppelin rather Beatles. “Indie” is an inadequate and misleading term for this band, probably the only one of their peer group(s) capable of making a decent fist of “Black Dog.” Sometimes you even get the slight sense that these twisty-turny, multi-segmented songs, full of stop-and-starts and lane-switches, are actually designed to show off their musicianship. They are also showcases for Alex Turner’s voice, as instrument as nimble, verve-full and blastingly potent as the guitar, bass and drums. What comes across even clearer on Nightmare than the debut is the sheer groove power of this band--the lithe swagger of “Teddy Picker”, the swinging hi-hats and low-rider bass of “D Is For Dangerous”-- which goes back to the funk outfit Judan Suki that Turner and drummer Matt Helders operated in parallel with the fledgling Arctics.
Four plays convinced me that Favourite Worst Nightmare was a near-triumph, a far superior Album #2 than Meat Is Murder, The Libertines, or Second Coming. Yet doubts nagged. The songs are often hard to connect with emotionally, partly because the lyrics are more oblique and clotted with Costello-like cleverness than last time but partly because of the subject matter. There’s a slight suspicion that a fair few of the tunes are inspired by the (yaaaaawn) travails of instant megafame. Take opener “Brianstorm”: over riffs that whir like the rotating blades of an abbatoir, Turner fires off glib and flashy (if funny) lines taking the piss out of some cooler-than-thou rockstar type they’ve evidently rubbed shoulders with these last 18 months--“top marks for not trying”, “bless us with your effortlessness” “we can’t take our eyes/off your T-shirts and ties/ combination”, climaxing with the terrific kiss-off “see you later, innovator”. Next up is “Teddy Picker”, mining a similar grinding bluesy feel to “Fake Tales of San Francisco” and a similar tone of derision, except this time round the butt seems to be rock journalists: “Dya reckon they mek ‘em tek an oath that says ‘we are defenders/of any poseurs or professional pretenders around’?”, ponders Turner before letting rip with another deliciously snarled killer-blow, “already thick and yer getting thicker.” I’m not totally sure who or what is the “dirty little herbert” in song #3 “D Is For Dangerous” but after this third-song-in-a-row delivered at the same pitch of scorn and sarcasm, it’s hard to care. On the album’s “second side” “If You Were There, Beware” provokes similar ennui: a chip off the same block as “Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong,” it lambasts “ambitiously vicious” muck-raking hacks grubbing for a kiss-and-tell story and harassing the star’s old sweethearts (“can’t you sense she was never meant to fill column inches?”). But here at least your interest is sustained by the inventive song-structure, which runs through around half-a-dozen distinct sections and twice as many guitar timbres, and again recalls “Vampires” with its heavy-rock feel.
Other songs suffer from being opaque. It’s hard to grasp the scenario in “Balaclava,” which might be about a rapist or someone pretending to be a rapist as part of a kinky sex-game. The tune does flit nicely however between bittersweet-Smiths and big-and-bashy Zep modes. “Fluorescent Adolescent” tells of that “very common crisis,” the spice going out of your sex life (“the Bloody Mary’s lacking the Tabasco”, as Turner puts it), which in this case causes the frustrated girl to pine for some hit-and-run lover from her past (“the boy’s a slag… the best you ever had”) as an escape from drab coupledom/dreary coupling. The Smiths are overwhelming present here (the melody-pang of the line “you took a left off Last Laugh lane” is virtually a sample from “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”) and on the next song “Only One Who Knows,” whose luminous guitar-tone recalls “Back to the Old House,” while Turner’s pre-rock’n’roll croon is only inches from Tommy Steele smarm.
The best things on Nightmare are the most lyrically direct. Like “Do Me A Favour,” a break-up song set--as with the first album’s best tune, “Red Light…”--in a car, Turner’s eye for vivid detail (“tears on the steering wheel, dripping on the seat”) in full effect. “This House Is A Circus” switches from the thrilling assonance of “this house is a circus/berserk as fuck” to the yearning chorus “we’re forever unfulfilled/and can’t think why”. Finally the home stretch sees Nightmare open up with the emotional clarity of “The Bad Thing”, “Old Yellow Bricks” and “505”. The first is a song about infidelity riding a galloping sound of Beatles-like ebullience, with Turner as the sorely tempted lad struggling to resist offers from a girl who promises that her boyfriend’s “not the jealous type”. “Old Yellow Bricks” bounces on a marvelously stubby and stompy funk riff and depicts a slacker type who’s wasting his life, a “fugitive” who doesn’t know what he’s “running away from”. It’s a scathing yet sympathetic portrait, especially at the plangent chorus “he wants to sleep in a city that never wakes up/blinded by nostalgia”. “505” is about Turner’s own homesickness, the number referring perhaps to a post code or a street address, an internal summons to hearth and sweetheart that must be heeded whether “it’s a seven hour flight or a 45 minute drive” away.
Expertly executed and supremely assured, albeit tinged here and there with a hint of hollow, Favourite Worst Nightmare isn’t going to make Arctic Monkeys any smaller in the scheme of things. They remain the best ensemble of guitar-toting tunesmiths to emerge from the UK this decade. While I’d be surprised if anyone, five years on, cared about this record as much as the first one, I await their Queen Is Dead keenly.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
THOM YORKE, The Eraser (XL)
Uncut, 2006
The Solo Album is a peculiar pop institution. Making one makes perfect sense for band members who are attention-starved in terms of the stage/media spotlight and who don’t get enough creative input. You can see why John Entwhistle, for instance, recorded four solo LPs between 1971 and ’75. But what about the Pete Townsend types, the de facto band leaders whose aesthetic vision dominates? Why do they feel the need to strike out on their own? Trailed with a press statement terse and low-key almost to the point of being cagey, The Eraser offers scant indication as to Thom Yorke’s motivations for this solitary excursion. It’s not like the album represents a detour from the Radiohead path into vastly unfamiliar territory. Essentially, it’s an extension to the Radiohead house of sound: less majestic, perhaps, with a half-finished and rough-around-the-edges demo-like feel. But you could easily hear it as seventh Radiohead album, even though only Yorke and longstanding producer Nigel Godrich are involved.
Solo albums emerged as a phenomenon in the dying days of the 1960s, mirroring the fractured feel of the times: bands splitting up or losing focus in a welter of side projects. Arriving at a similarly entropic moment in rock history, The Eraser’s downbeat mood flashes back to that same era of self-absorbed singer-songwriters and troubled troubadours. Sonically it collides a certain style of post-psychedelic soft-rock with textures and rhythms drawn from across the span of Nineties electronica. So the ghosts of Roy Harper, Shawn Philips, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, jostle with glitchy clicks and blippy blurts straight out of the Aphex Twin/Autechre/Boards of Canada vocabulary.
Out of all those minstrels, Harper is the closest analogy, because for much of The Eraser Yorke plays the part of jeremiah, scowlingly surveying a world fucked up beyond all repair. Throughout the album there’s moments when a Yorke moan-tone uncannily resembles Harper’s folk-blues cadences; the layered wordless harmonies of “Cymbal Rush” recall the multitracked vocal lattices on Stormcock’s’ “The Same Old Rock” while the glistening blistered guitar riff on “Black Swan” could be straight off that album’s “One Man Rock and Roll Band”. The most instantly powerful song on the album, “Black Swan” kicks off its panorama of political-is-deeply-personal despair with a vague gesture at escape (“do yourself a favour and pack your bags/buy a ticket and get on a train”), proceeds through imagery of powerlessness (“people get crushed like biscuit crumbs) and pointlessness (“you cannot kickstart a dead horse/you just crush yourself and walk away”), before going out on a ringing note of non-catharsis with the chorus “this is fucked up/fucked up/we are black swans/ and for spare parts, we’ll be broken up.” Likewise sounding a note of ecological and geopolitical doom, “The Clock” entreats the world to wake up because “time is running out.” Propelled by a tripping-over-itself beat partially built out of fingerclicks, gasps, and vocal noises, “The Clock” isn’t really a protest song, though. It’s too disempowered, too prone, to actually claw its way up onto the soapbox of denunciation.
“Analyse” conjures a mood of washed-up/washed-out dejection and pastel-toned passivity that recalls a little-known early Pink Floyd B-side called “Paintbox.” With its imagery of anomie and mental disarray--“sentences that do not rhyme… fences that you cannot climb”--and its mewling chorus of “its gets you down,” the song would slump into a marshmallow slough of supine numbness altogether if not for its kickin’ beat (not so much jungle as privet hedge). The title track, opening the album, is fey and faint to the point of fading away altogether. Imagine Andrew Gold’s “Lonely Boy” fused with The Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey” and remixed by Royskopp (a subdued, miniaturized version of a classic rave riff, staccato and Morse Code-like, materialises towards the end). The lyric seems to bear an inverted relationship to “How to Disappear Completely” off Kid A: “the more you try to erase me/the more, the more, the more that I appear.”
What makes The Eraser great is Yorke’s singing--for all the well-executed electronics and tasty guitar-work, his voice is by far the most arresting instrument on the record (and occasionally the most avant-garde too), proving yet again that he’s the Miles Davis of mope-rock, the maestro of a thousand exquisitely subtle shades of blue. What makes the album grate, though, are Yorke’s lyrics, not because they’re bad but because they’re so unrelievedly monotone and monochrome. There’s a single moment of pure joy: “Atoms for Peace”, a love-alone-can-banish-the-shadows song, Yorke’s voice all hovering tenderness and grace as he vows “no more going to the darkside” and pleads “peel off all your layers/I want to eat your artichoke heart… take me in your arms.”
After this Vespertine-like epiphany of intimacy, it’s straight back into the black with “And It Rained All Night”: musically impressive (it practically invents a new genre, electro-blues), but otherwise oppressive in its gloom (rain here figures not as a cleansing, redemptive force, but a pitiless elemental battering, ““relentless” and “indefatigable”). The wilting, eroded synth on “Harrowdown Hill” recalls Joy Division’s “Decades”, the closing track on Closer, the one about the young men with the weight of the world on their shoulder. Yorke’s imagery is Curtis-like too, alluding to pressure beyond withstanding and “slippery, slippery slopes”. “Cymbal Rush” is a song sonically divided against itself, the superfast bassline (which resembles a just-held-in-check panic attack) opposed by glutinous washes of gloomy synth teleported from Side Two of Bowie’s Low. The last song on The Eraser, it seemingly represents a low point of absolute existential prostration, Yorke barely managing to enunciate his imagery of retreat ( “try to build a wall that is high enough”) and futility. Finally the song picks up energy (the cymbals of the title appear) as if trying to make a break(beat) for it, only to sputter out abruptly.
So, The Eraser: a great slab of experimental misery, a document of quiet desperation and uncomfortable numbness. Strangely, it’s a record that’s easy to love, but hard to admire.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Uncut, 2006
The Solo Album is a peculiar pop institution. Making one makes perfect sense for band members who are attention-starved in terms of the stage/media spotlight and who don’t get enough creative input. You can see why John Entwhistle, for instance, recorded four solo LPs between 1971 and ’75. But what about the Pete Townsend types, the de facto band leaders whose aesthetic vision dominates? Why do they feel the need to strike out on their own? Trailed with a press statement terse and low-key almost to the point of being cagey, The Eraser offers scant indication as to Thom Yorke’s motivations for this solitary excursion. It’s not like the album represents a detour from the Radiohead path into vastly unfamiliar territory. Essentially, it’s an extension to the Radiohead house of sound: less majestic, perhaps, with a half-finished and rough-around-the-edges demo-like feel. But you could easily hear it as seventh Radiohead album, even though only Yorke and longstanding producer Nigel Godrich are involved.
Solo albums emerged as a phenomenon in the dying days of the 1960s, mirroring the fractured feel of the times: bands splitting up or losing focus in a welter of side projects. Arriving at a similarly entropic moment in rock history, The Eraser’s downbeat mood flashes back to that same era of self-absorbed singer-songwriters and troubled troubadours. Sonically it collides a certain style of post-psychedelic soft-rock with textures and rhythms drawn from across the span of Nineties electronica. So the ghosts of Roy Harper, Shawn Philips, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, jostle with glitchy clicks and blippy blurts straight out of the Aphex Twin/Autechre/Boards of Canada vocabulary.
Out of all those minstrels, Harper is the closest analogy, because for much of The Eraser Yorke plays the part of jeremiah, scowlingly surveying a world fucked up beyond all repair. Throughout the album there’s moments when a Yorke moan-tone uncannily resembles Harper’s folk-blues cadences; the layered wordless harmonies of “Cymbal Rush” recall the multitracked vocal lattices on Stormcock’s’ “The Same Old Rock” while the glistening blistered guitar riff on “Black Swan” could be straight off that album’s “One Man Rock and Roll Band”. The most instantly powerful song on the album, “Black Swan” kicks off its panorama of political-is-deeply-personal despair with a vague gesture at escape (“do yourself a favour and pack your bags/buy a ticket and get on a train”), proceeds through imagery of powerlessness (“people get crushed like biscuit crumbs) and pointlessness (“you cannot kickstart a dead horse/you just crush yourself and walk away”), before going out on a ringing note of non-catharsis with the chorus “this is fucked up/fucked up/we are black swans/ and for spare parts, we’ll be broken up.” Likewise sounding a note of ecological and geopolitical doom, “The Clock” entreats the world to wake up because “time is running out.” Propelled by a tripping-over-itself beat partially built out of fingerclicks, gasps, and vocal noises, “The Clock” isn’t really a protest song, though. It’s too disempowered, too prone, to actually claw its way up onto the soapbox of denunciation.
“Analyse” conjures a mood of washed-up/washed-out dejection and pastel-toned passivity that recalls a little-known early Pink Floyd B-side called “Paintbox.” With its imagery of anomie and mental disarray--“sentences that do not rhyme… fences that you cannot climb”--and its mewling chorus of “its gets you down,” the song would slump into a marshmallow slough of supine numbness altogether if not for its kickin’ beat (not so much jungle as privet hedge). The title track, opening the album, is fey and faint to the point of fading away altogether. Imagine Andrew Gold’s “Lonely Boy” fused with The Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey” and remixed by Royskopp (a subdued, miniaturized version of a classic rave riff, staccato and Morse Code-like, materialises towards the end). The lyric seems to bear an inverted relationship to “How to Disappear Completely” off Kid A: “the more you try to erase me/the more, the more, the more that I appear.”
What makes The Eraser great is Yorke’s singing--for all the well-executed electronics and tasty guitar-work, his voice is by far the most arresting instrument on the record (and occasionally the most avant-garde too), proving yet again that he’s the Miles Davis of mope-rock, the maestro of a thousand exquisitely subtle shades of blue. What makes the album grate, though, are Yorke’s lyrics, not because they’re bad but because they’re so unrelievedly monotone and monochrome. There’s a single moment of pure joy: “Atoms for Peace”, a love-alone-can-banish-the-shadows song, Yorke’s voice all hovering tenderness and grace as he vows “no more going to the darkside” and pleads “peel off all your layers/I want to eat your artichoke heart… take me in your arms.”
After this Vespertine-like epiphany of intimacy, it’s straight back into the black with “And It Rained All Night”: musically impressive (it practically invents a new genre, electro-blues), but otherwise oppressive in its gloom (rain here figures not as a cleansing, redemptive force, but a pitiless elemental battering, ““relentless” and “indefatigable”). The wilting, eroded synth on “Harrowdown Hill” recalls Joy Division’s “Decades”, the closing track on Closer, the one about the young men with the weight of the world on their shoulder. Yorke’s imagery is Curtis-like too, alluding to pressure beyond withstanding and “slippery, slippery slopes”. “Cymbal Rush” is a song sonically divided against itself, the superfast bassline (which resembles a just-held-in-check panic attack) opposed by glutinous washes of gloomy synth teleported from Side Two of Bowie’s Low. The last song on The Eraser, it seemingly represents a low point of absolute existential prostration, Yorke barely managing to enunciate his imagery of retreat ( “try to build a wall that is high enough”) and futility. Finally the song picks up energy (the cymbals of the title appear) as if trying to make a break(beat) for it, only to sputter out abruptly.
So, The Eraser: a great slab of experimental misery, a document of quiet desperation and uncomfortable numbness. Strangely, it’s a record that’s easy to love, but hard to admire.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Sunday, July 22, 2007
THE STOOGES, The Stooges (Deluxe Edition) (Rhino/Elektra)
THE STOOGES, Fun House (Deluxe Edition) (Rhino/Elektra)
Uncut, 2005
There’s no point in revisiting The Stooges’ first two albums as monuments in rock’s heritage landscape. This music demands to be taken purely as a now-thing: a dynamo coiled with electric essence, something you can use to recharge your existence today, tomorrow, forever. So let’s bypass history and context as much as possible and instead get under the skin of the Stooges music. Let’s skip the facts and aim for truth--what this sound feels like as a drama of energy.
Which means talking about cocks. You hear an awful lot about “rockism” these days, but The Stooges aren’t just rockist, they’re cockist. Like their obvious forebears, The Stones and The Doors, the Stooges surge and swing with a particular phallic energy. Iggy spells it out in later songs like “Penetration” and “Cock In My Pocket”, but you catch the drift early on, with the debut’s “Real Cool Time” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, anthems of penile delinquency. Side One of Fun House is actually structured to mirror the male sexual trajectory, from the predatorial gaze of “Down On the Streets” (Iggy the man-missile cruising for action), through penetration and orgasm (“Loose” and “TV Eye,” the latter climaxing with Iggy’s holler “now ram it”) to the tingling, tristesse-tinged afterglow of “Dirt”. Throughout Iggy wields it like a weapon, but the “it” is less a prong of gristle between his legs than his whole being, engorged with will and burning with lack. One side of The Stooges music incarnates the dream of being perpetually on fire. But there’s a contradictory impulse too, a quest for absolute satiation, the grail of Norman Mailer’s “Apocalyptic Orgasm,” the bliss-blast that will snuff the flames of desire and achieve a deathly serenity.
Side one of The Stooges starts with unrest and restlessness (“1969” contrasts “war across the USA” with the boredom of Iggy as suburban Everykid faced by “another year of nothin’ to do”) but ends with the nirvana trance of “We Will Fall.” Oft-maligned as John Cale-damaged raga-wank, its ten minutes of “Venus In Furs” drones and Buddhist chanting is soporific, true, but that’s the point: Iggy links love with surrender (“I won’t fight… I’ll be weak”), conflates happiness and sleep, and equates sleep with death. Usually Ron Asheton’s wah-wah guitar ejaculates napalm, but on “We Will Fall” it glistens wetly, inky-black ripples in a viscous, slow-motion whirlpool. The same narcotic shimmer reappears on “Ann”, an equally under-celebrated ballad that starts where “End of The Night” by The Doors left off. In a Quaalude-foggy Sinatra-croon, Iggy sings again of love as a detumescence of the spirit: “you took my arm and you broke my will”. Entranced, he’s floating in the amniotic “swimming pools” of his lover’s eyes: “I felt so weak, I felt so blue”. But at the chorus, Iggy’s agonized, somehow humiliated “I looooove you” is unexpectedly completed with the war-cry “RIGHT NOW!!!!”. Amorous lassitude abruptly shifts to aggressive lust; Asheton’s limpid guitar instantly hardens into a rampaging riff. An evil humming rises up from the depths of the mix, and it’s a shock to realize that it’s actually Iggy, a low moan-drone of gaseous malevolence that seems to emanate not from his mouth but from every pore in his body.
The debut, great as it is, feels a little leashed in its energy initially. Towards the end, though, with “Not Right” and “Little Doll,” The Stooges loosen up rhythmically, Scott Asheton’s drums resembling The Troggs-as-free-jazz, Dave Alexander’s bass sidling like a rattlesnake about to strike. It’s as though the band gradually find their groove in preparation for Fun House. If The Stooges is a teenager--randy-fit-to-explode, but still awkward-- there’s a cocksure swagger to Fun House, as though the music’s got conquests under its belt now. The taut on-the-beat drums of “Down on the Street” stomp, as Lester Bangs put it, like a gang clicking its heels on the sidewalk. They’re on the prowl for sweet young thang. Iggy hits the ignition on “Loose” with war-whoops and the warning “LOOK OUT!!,” then gloats “I stuck it/Deep inside”. Later in the song, this chorus sounds closer to “I’m stoopid/Deep inside”--a pretty-vacant boast, perhaps, referencing the Stooges’ ideal of the O-Mind, a paradoxical state of hyper-alert oblivion reached through drugs and noise.
“TV Eye” is The Stooges’ “Whole Lotta Love”. Structurally the songs are almost identical, with a bulldozing prime-evil riff giving way to an eerie ambient-abstract mid-section (where Percy shrieks, Iggy emits subhuman gnashings and whooshing gusts of flamethrower breath). In both songs, there’s a pause of appalled silence before the riff magically re-erects and goes on the warpath once more. Led Zeppelin always came across as overlords, though (which is why they’re heavy metal), whereas the Stooges were obviously underdogs (and therefore punk). You can’t really imagine Zep doing a song like “Dirt,” on which Iggy preaches spiritual education through abasement (“oooh I been hurt… oooh I been dirt/But I don’t care/Cos I’m learning/Inside”), while Asheton rains down silverflicker guitar from the same pained-but-ecstastic place as the intro to “Gimme Shelter”.
Zep were also hippie-boys, but Fun House the album and “Funhouse” the song turn Sixties dreams of generational unity and pleasure-as-insurrection inside out. “We’ve been separated, baby, far too long… Living in division/In the shifting sands,” intones Iggy, beckoning the “baby girls” and “baby boys” into the funhouse. But this “come together” anthem is closer to National Lampoon’s Lemmings than Woodstock, liberation through regression rather than higher states. “Funhouse” is an orgy of debased sound, an electric mudbath mixing primal soup and primal scream (the acrid honk of Steve Mackay’s sax). On this and the preceding “1970”, Iggy keeps screaming “I feel all right” but he doesn’t sound it; he seems wracked by the pleasure grind. The final “LA Blues” reaches the howling void at the heart of hedonism. It’s a spasm of writhing feedback, freeform sax, and Iggy throat-noise, a glimpse ahead to Metal Machine Music and “Radio Ethiopia,” as well as 1000 long-hair retro-bands in the late Eighties lamely leaning guitars against amps and exiting the stage to a wall of screech.
I almost forgot: each of these glorious-sounding reissues comes with a bonus CD (“Deluxe” isn’t exactly a Stooges word, is it?) of alternate takes. The Fun House disc sifts the “cream” from that absurd, fan-fleecing seven-CD Fun House sessions box, but The Stooges disc is all hitherto unreleased, the peach being an “Ann” twice as long as the album version. Everything is worth hearing if only to note just how tight the Stooges were, how honed their on-the-surface sloppy frenzy actually was (in other words, the takes don’t vary that much). In the end, though, they’re superfluous because without exception the definitive version is the one that made the final cut.
SIMON REYNOLDS
INTERVIEW WITH RON ASHETON
SR: The Stooges sold spectacularly small amounts compared to the MegaBands of their day. But it’s hard to imagine Blood, Sweat & Tears, say, being able to reform and tour the world, like The Stooges have done. Do you feel vindicated?
RA: I don’t feel a revenge, I just feel grateful. My brother Scott and I always hoped the band would get it together again. We weren’t commercially successful at the time, but I guess over the years other groups would mention us an influence, and people would pick up on that, and it just built. I turned on a “classic rock” radio station recently and the voiceover said, “next we’ll be playing Led Zeppelin and Stooges”. It wasn’t like that back in the day! With reforming, I’m really just enjoying hanging with my friends. It’s great touring now, because it’s like a family vacation. We’re not scrambling looking for women or a party. We go sightseeing, check out the aquarium in Lisbon!
Although Sixties garage bands like Count Five may have the prior claim, The Stooges are generally regarded as the dawn of punk rock. Historians often talk about how you guys hated “love beads” and flower power. Were you really anti-hippie or did you participate a bit in the Summer of Love?
Some of it was kinda corny. But we didn’t have any great animosity towards hippies. We certainly had a lot of sex with hippie women! And we listened to the San Francisco bands. It could get a little too earthy and pious. But there was a great divide in America and we were on the same side as the hippies. You don’t shit on an ally! The difference was, some hippies were so anti-war they were anti-soldiers, calling them baby-killers. We hated the Vietnam war but we supported the soldiers. We said, ‘they’re your age and our age; they’re us’.
Indeed Detroit rock has this cult of the military, from MC5 and their whole White Panther/ “guitar army” shtick to the running thread of ballistic imagery in Iggy’s lyrics.
I wrote a song with Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman called “Rock’n’Roll Soldiers”. I always felt that being in a band was a military operation. You get your transport to the area and you carry out the mission. I’m like the medic on our tour, I’ve got all the vitamins, the sinutis pills, the anti-diarrhoea medicine! When we play London this year I’m looking forward to visiting the Imperial War Museum. I used to go there all the time when we lived there, recording Raw Power. There’s all these things that aren’t on display that you can only see on appointment--like Herman Goering’s uniform. I’d put my name down but never managed to see them. Maybe this time.
THE STOOGES, Fun House (Deluxe Edition) (Rhino/Elektra)
Uncut, 2005
There’s no point in revisiting The Stooges’ first two albums as monuments in rock’s heritage landscape. This music demands to be taken purely as a now-thing: a dynamo coiled with electric essence, something you can use to recharge your existence today, tomorrow, forever. So let’s bypass history and context as much as possible and instead get under the skin of the Stooges music. Let’s skip the facts and aim for truth--what this sound feels like as a drama of energy.
Which means talking about cocks. You hear an awful lot about “rockism” these days, but The Stooges aren’t just rockist, they’re cockist. Like their obvious forebears, The Stones and The Doors, the Stooges surge and swing with a particular phallic energy. Iggy spells it out in later songs like “Penetration” and “Cock In My Pocket”, but you catch the drift early on, with the debut’s “Real Cool Time” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, anthems of penile delinquency. Side One of Fun House is actually structured to mirror the male sexual trajectory, from the predatorial gaze of “Down On the Streets” (Iggy the man-missile cruising for action), through penetration and orgasm (“Loose” and “TV Eye,” the latter climaxing with Iggy’s holler “now ram it”) to the tingling, tristesse-tinged afterglow of “Dirt”. Throughout Iggy wields it like a weapon, but the “it” is less a prong of gristle between his legs than his whole being, engorged with will and burning with lack. One side of The Stooges music incarnates the dream of being perpetually on fire. But there’s a contradictory impulse too, a quest for absolute satiation, the grail of Norman Mailer’s “Apocalyptic Orgasm,” the bliss-blast that will snuff the flames of desire and achieve a deathly serenity.
Side one of The Stooges starts with unrest and restlessness (“1969” contrasts “war across the USA” with the boredom of Iggy as suburban Everykid faced by “another year of nothin’ to do”) but ends with the nirvana trance of “We Will Fall.” Oft-maligned as John Cale-damaged raga-wank, its ten minutes of “Venus In Furs” drones and Buddhist chanting is soporific, true, but that’s the point: Iggy links love with surrender (“I won’t fight… I’ll be weak”), conflates happiness and sleep, and equates sleep with death. Usually Ron Asheton’s wah-wah guitar ejaculates napalm, but on “We Will Fall” it glistens wetly, inky-black ripples in a viscous, slow-motion whirlpool. The same narcotic shimmer reappears on “Ann”, an equally under-celebrated ballad that starts where “End of The Night” by The Doors left off. In a Quaalude-foggy Sinatra-croon, Iggy sings again of love as a detumescence of the spirit: “you took my arm and you broke my will”. Entranced, he’s floating in the amniotic “swimming pools” of his lover’s eyes: “I felt so weak, I felt so blue”. But at the chorus, Iggy’s agonized, somehow humiliated “I looooove you” is unexpectedly completed with the war-cry “RIGHT NOW!!!!”. Amorous lassitude abruptly shifts to aggressive lust; Asheton’s limpid guitar instantly hardens into a rampaging riff. An evil humming rises up from the depths of the mix, and it’s a shock to realize that it’s actually Iggy, a low moan-drone of gaseous malevolence that seems to emanate not from his mouth but from every pore in his body.
The debut, great as it is, feels a little leashed in its energy initially. Towards the end, though, with “Not Right” and “Little Doll,” The Stooges loosen up rhythmically, Scott Asheton’s drums resembling The Troggs-as-free-jazz, Dave Alexander’s bass sidling like a rattlesnake about to strike. It’s as though the band gradually find their groove in preparation for Fun House. If The Stooges is a teenager--randy-fit-to-explode, but still awkward-- there’s a cocksure swagger to Fun House, as though the music’s got conquests under its belt now. The taut on-the-beat drums of “Down on the Street” stomp, as Lester Bangs put it, like a gang clicking its heels on the sidewalk. They’re on the prowl for sweet young thang. Iggy hits the ignition on “Loose” with war-whoops and the warning “LOOK OUT!!,” then gloats “I stuck it/Deep inside”. Later in the song, this chorus sounds closer to “I’m stoopid/Deep inside”--a pretty-vacant boast, perhaps, referencing the Stooges’ ideal of the O-Mind, a paradoxical state of hyper-alert oblivion reached through drugs and noise.
“TV Eye” is The Stooges’ “Whole Lotta Love”. Structurally the songs are almost identical, with a bulldozing prime-evil riff giving way to an eerie ambient-abstract mid-section (where Percy shrieks, Iggy emits subhuman gnashings and whooshing gusts of flamethrower breath). In both songs, there’s a pause of appalled silence before the riff magically re-erects and goes on the warpath once more. Led Zeppelin always came across as overlords, though (which is why they’re heavy metal), whereas the Stooges were obviously underdogs (and therefore punk). You can’t really imagine Zep doing a song like “Dirt,” on which Iggy preaches spiritual education through abasement (“oooh I been hurt… oooh I been dirt/But I don’t care/Cos I’m learning/Inside”), while Asheton rains down silverflicker guitar from the same pained-but-ecstastic place as the intro to “Gimme Shelter”.
Zep were also hippie-boys, but Fun House the album and “Funhouse” the song turn Sixties dreams of generational unity and pleasure-as-insurrection inside out. “We’ve been separated, baby, far too long… Living in division/In the shifting sands,” intones Iggy, beckoning the “baby girls” and “baby boys” into the funhouse. But this “come together” anthem is closer to National Lampoon’s Lemmings than Woodstock, liberation through regression rather than higher states. “Funhouse” is an orgy of debased sound, an electric mudbath mixing primal soup and primal scream (the acrid honk of Steve Mackay’s sax). On this and the preceding “1970”, Iggy keeps screaming “I feel all right” but he doesn’t sound it; he seems wracked by the pleasure grind. The final “LA Blues” reaches the howling void at the heart of hedonism. It’s a spasm of writhing feedback, freeform sax, and Iggy throat-noise, a glimpse ahead to Metal Machine Music and “Radio Ethiopia,” as well as 1000 long-hair retro-bands in the late Eighties lamely leaning guitars against amps and exiting the stage to a wall of screech.
I almost forgot: each of these glorious-sounding reissues comes with a bonus CD (“Deluxe” isn’t exactly a Stooges word, is it?) of alternate takes. The Fun House disc sifts the “cream” from that absurd, fan-fleecing seven-CD Fun House sessions box, but The Stooges disc is all hitherto unreleased, the peach being an “Ann” twice as long as the album version. Everything is worth hearing if only to note just how tight the Stooges were, how honed their on-the-surface sloppy frenzy actually was (in other words, the takes don’t vary that much). In the end, though, they’re superfluous because without exception the definitive version is the one that made the final cut.
SIMON REYNOLDS
INTERVIEW WITH RON ASHETON
SR: The Stooges sold spectacularly small amounts compared to the MegaBands of their day. But it’s hard to imagine Blood, Sweat & Tears, say, being able to reform and tour the world, like The Stooges have done. Do you feel vindicated?
RA: I don’t feel a revenge, I just feel grateful. My brother Scott and I always hoped the band would get it together again. We weren’t commercially successful at the time, but I guess over the years other groups would mention us an influence, and people would pick up on that, and it just built. I turned on a “classic rock” radio station recently and the voiceover said, “next we’ll be playing Led Zeppelin and Stooges”. It wasn’t like that back in the day! With reforming, I’m really just enjoying hanging with my friends. It’s great touring now, because it’s like a family vacation. We’re not scrambling looking for women or a party. We go sightseeing, check out the aquarium in Lisbon!
Although Sixties garage bands like Count Five may have the prior claim, The Stooges are generally regarded as the dawn of punk rock. Historians often talk about how you guys hated “love beads” and flower power. Were you really anti-hippie or did you participate a bit in the Summer of Love?
Some of it was kinda corny. But we didn’t have any great animosity towards hippies. We certainly had a lot of sex with hippie women! And we listened to the San Francisco bands. It could get a little too earthy and pious. But there was a great divide in America and we were on the same side as the hippies. You don’t shit on an ally! The difference was, some hippies were so anti-war they were anti-soldiers, calling them baby-killers. We hated the Vietnam war but we supported the soldiers. We said, ‘they’re your age and our age; they’re us’.
Indeed Detroit rock has this cult of the military, from MC5 and their whole White Panther/ “guitar army” shtick to the running thread of ballistic imagery in Iggy’s lyrics.
I wrote a song with Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman called “Rock’n’Roll Soldiers”. I always felt that being in a band was a military operation. You get your transport to the area and you carry out the mission. I’m like the medic on our tour, I’ve got all the vitamins, the sinutis pills, the anti-diarrhoea medicine! When we play London this year I’m looking forward to visiting the Imperial War Museum. I used to go there all the time when we lived there, recording Raw Power. There’s all these things that aren’t on display that you can only see on appointment--like Herman Goering’s uniform. I’d put my name down but never managed to see them. Maybe this time.
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