The Stooges – 10 of the best

1. I Wanna Be Your Dog

It was after smoking his first joint, while hanging out at a Detroit sewage works one night that Iggy Pop (formerly Jim Osterberg – the “Iggy” was a tribute to his old garage band the Iguanas, the Pop a reference to a friend, Jim Pop, with a nervous condition that gave him alopecia) experienced a revelation: he could write his own blues songs, and describe his own situation in song just as the original bluesman had. “I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase – either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs.” I Wanna Be Your Dog, he said, was inspired by his mishearing of a lyric from the blues standard Baby Please Don’t Go. He called up his friends, Dave Alexander and brothers Ron and Scott Asheton, who Pop later described as “the laziest, delinquent sort of slobs ever born”. They formed a band, the Stooges – Scott on drums, Alexander on bass, Ron on oily wasp-buzz guitar – in whose unschooled hands Pop’s first blues became a doomy rumble, wrapped around dark descending chords, death-rattle drums and, when recorded by John Cale in 1969, the genius of sleigh bells and a piano incessantly trilling out the same note. The subject of Pop’s blues was a common one in pop: lust and longing, though Pop gilded the lily with the submissive subtext of his imagery, closing his eyes, feeling a hand, and wanting to be his lover’s dog, servile and ready to please. Pop was tapping a vein coined by Lou Reed’s Venus in Furs in 1967, and coining an anthem much-covered by the generations that followed.

2. 1969

By the time they found themselves in New York’s Hit Factory studio with Cale recording their debut album, the Stooges had already survived a debut gig at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom where Iggy shaved off his eyebrows, daubed himself in white face-paint and glitter and sported a tin-foil afro; passed through a period of performing with home-made noise-makers including a blender and a vacuum cleaner; and got signed to Elektra Records – home of the Doors, whose Jim Morrison was an early influence on Ig – for $5,000, on the insistence of fellow Detroit misfits and new Elektra signings MC5. 1969, the opening track of the album, served up a mean Bo Diddley tattoo, a menacing two-chord riff, stinging bolts of acid-fried guitar (they’d once been called the Psychedelic Stooges for a reason), and Pop’s snotty drawl, yowling a bone-simple anthem to boredom, nihilism and disaffection, key ingredients in what would later be known as “punk rock”. Iggy penned the lyrics after he spent his 21st birthday playing a disastrous support slot to Cream, tripping on two tabs of orange acid and screaming “Fuck you!” at the audience, who were loudly demanding the arrival of Clapton, Bruce and Baker. “It was one of our worst gigs ever,” remembered Pop to Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, years later. “I was heartbroken. I thought, my God, this is 21. This is it. Things are not going well.” In 1969’s tribal stomp, Pop sensed the Stooges weren’t alone in their funk, however; he saw this blues descending “all across the USA”, as the fag-end of the psychedelic era offered little beyond “another year for me and you / Another year with nothing to do”. Millions would later answer the Stooges’ call to apathy; the group, however, would implode years before this affirmation arrived.

3. No Fun

The alliance of the avant Cale with the errant Stooges should have been a match made in heaven, but while his influence can be heard in the Stooges’ darker moments (and his viola heard on the bad trip of We Will Fall), Pop – a Velvets fan – refused to be cowed by working with one of his heroes, and the band sat out an early stand-off when Cale demanded they turn down their Marshalls (the band ultimately acceded, dialing their amps down from 10 to 9). A taste of how the two sides conflicted during the sessions for the Stooges can be heard in the original John Cale mix of No Fun, appended to the 2005 reissue of the album; the producer slows down the tape a smidge, pitching Ig’s howl and Asheton’s acerbic guitar squall lower and, crucially, losing the street-smart clip of Scott “Rock Action” Asheton’s drums. Because even though it was, as title suggests, an expression of a colossal bummer (specifically, “to be alone, in love with nobody else”), No Fun was the Stooges’ surest fist yet at cutting a pop song, a white blues worthy of Eddie Cochran, from the skipping, stumbling pelt of that drum lick (bolstered by judicious finger-snaps and hand-claps), to the riff’s growling rasp, to Pop’s Jagger-but-younger-cooler-and-smarter sneer. The needling, curdling guitar solo Ron introduces at 2:49, and which sticks around till the fadeout at 5:14, didn’t exactly represent a radio-friendly cut, however, and the promotions guys at Elektra had no idea how to market the Stooges or their singular debut album, responding with a curt “What the hell is this? It’s just a bunch of noise!” And thus, the Stooges stiffed on release.

4. Down on the Street

Elektra had enough faith to finance a second Stooges album, this time hooking the group up with producer Don Gallucci. Whereas Cale’s roots lay in avant garde composition, having worked with John Cage and La Monte Young before forming the Velvets, Gallucci’s qualifications for the job of wrangling the Stooges came in the form of his time as keyboardist with garage-rock pioneers the Kingsmen during the era when they recorded the ur-punk anthem Louie Louie. Gallucci wanted to keep things simple, to play to the Stooges’ strengths, so he simply had the group recreate the live show they’d been honing on the road since releasing their debut. And much of the magic of Fun House – which is the greatest rock’n’roll album of all time – lies in the power of this band, who sound lean, muscular and agile. Just savour the metallic thrill of this opening track, the lithe economy of Rock Action’s metronomic, almost motorik beat, the threatening growl of Ron’s riff and the way Alexander’s bass lines swell up to almost swallow the choruses, and listen close to Iggy, vocal treated with just the right degree of reverb so his every grunt and animal noise sounds demonic, incantatory, beckoning the listener to join him “lost in love”. Piercing, spaced-out lead guitar strafes the track, Iggy reverts to his animal self, and the track collapses, spent, at 3:44. Perfection.

5. TV Eye

Fun House was named for the group’s home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Iggy brought his many romantic conquests. Nico lived there for a time, while she was Iggy’s lover (she introduced him to the joys of alcohol, and also gave him an STD), and Iggy was living there with his first wife when he awoke in the middle of the night with Down on the Street forming in his head, waking her rudely with a deafening power-chord as he tried to figure out the tune on his electric guitar. The marriage only lasted a month; perhaps the writing had been on the wall when Pop seemed more interested in the Asheton brothers’ younger sister Kathy than his bride on their wedding day. Kathy says it was she who coined the phrase “TV Eye”, a bit of slang between her and her friends to signal some dude leering at them; “It meant ‘Twat Vibe Eye’,” she explained. The phrase wriggled its way into this carnal rocker, which opens with a holler of “Looooord!”, a blood-curdling scream, and a lethal riff that’s both darkly psychedelic and brilliantly no-nonsense, Ron occasionally spinning off into diesel-huffing ragas over that relentless see-sawing bass line. It was on these wild freak-outs, as the band rose and ebbed and Iggy abused his microphone to evoke all manner of bacchanal, that Gallucci’s decision to record the band live was proved a genius stroke, capturing their on-the-hoof inventiveness, their lightning-in-a-bottle brilliance, as they jammed on the song, making it feel like rock’n’roll’s most loose, dangerous and alive four or so minutes.

6. 1970

Another year had come and gone, and as the Stooges’ second album opened its second side, Iggy Pop decided it was time to ring the changes, “1970 rolling in sight,” and all that. On this sequel to 1969, riding a two-chord riff that bounced back and forth like a drunken slam-dancer, Iggy’s out of his mind and celebrating his beautiful baby. It seems a pretty fucked-up love affair, though, burning his heart and falling apart in his hands, consuming Iggy as he writhes all night. The riff gets stuck like a scratched record, the Stooges retracing its three notes endlessly, like cavemen caught in a loop, Iggy barking “I feel all right!” again and again, and over the top the newest introduction to the group – saxophonist Steve Mackay, who sadly died this week, and who’d joined the group two days before the sessions for Fun Hous began – bleated and raged and blew, infesting the song’s priapic stomp with seething free-jazz skronk. It’s debauchery pushed to a psychosis some way beyond excess, beyond enervation, beyond exhaustion. Indeed, if you find yourself repeating the phrase “I feel all right” this many times, with such strangled passion, over a rusticated, circular riff caught in an ever-decaying orbit, then the chances are you don’t feel very all right, actually. In fact, you’re probably pretty far from all right, which is exactly where the Stooges found themselves at the dawn of the new decade.

7. Fun House

Picking up where 1970 left off, Fun House opens with more Mackay and Ron duelling, the saxophonist laying down some seamy gutbucket spiel, the guitarist squalling around a primal riff. “Blow, Steve!” barks Pop, for the first and not the last time, reassuring us again that he feels all right. But again that’s a lie, and Fun House is a moment of clarity amid the derangement of life at the Stooges’ clubhouse, an invocation of the unhinged goings-on in Ann Arbor that’s darkly dramatic, and equally alluring and troubling. Pop’s calling his girl from the heart of the party, telling her he’s been alone too long, signing off one last time before losing himself in hedonistic pansexual excess. “I came to play, and I mean to play real good,” he snarls. “Do I dare to whup ya with my love?” But as sure as we can imagine Pop cruising on a surfeit of indulgence, we also can’t shake the sense that he’s trapped inside it, inside the fun house, that indulgence has now become an addiction he can’t escape. Pop’s performance is chilling, brilliant, whooping and hollering, commanding his band to tighten up and bring it down, and at one point screaming “Shamalamalama rah rah rah rah” like some PCP-dusted cheerleader; his Stooges play at their absolute finest as well, Mackay and Ron Asheton trading lines in one of the most desperate, deathly duets rock has ever hosted. “The fun house, boy, will steal your heart away,” Pop screams in the track’s dying minutes, and he didn’t even know how truly he spoke. Shortly after the group returned from the LA recording studio to Detroit, Pop, Rock Action and Mackay began a swift descent into junkiedom, with only Ron Asheton resisting the drug’s allure. Bassist Dave Alexander, meanwhile, was sacked later in 1970 after turning up to a festival date too drunk to play; he’d be dead within five years, of alcoholism-related causes. The Stooges’ tale was taking an inexorable turn for the bleak.

8. Sick of You

For all its mercurial, desperate brilliance, and despite (or because of) their unforgettable televised performance at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, where Pop smeared himself in peanut butter and writhed in the audience, Fun House stiffed in the charts, and Elektra soon bade farewell to their wayward charges. A second guitarist, James Williamson, was added to the ranks, and a series of bassists passed through the group before the Stooges dissolved in the summer of 1971. And that might have been the end of the story, had David Bowie – who was so enamoured of the Stooges that he named his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust in Iggy’s image – not met and befriended Pop shortly afterwards. Pop signed with Bowie’s manager Tony DeFries and got a two-album contract for the Stooges with CBS Records, decamping with Williamson to London, where he intended to form a new line-up, though he later relented, beckoning the Asheton brothers across the Atlantic, with Ron now playing bass. Stationed at Olympic Studios in the suburbs of south west London, they thrashed out a set of new songs, many of which wouldn’t make it to their third album but later surfaced on releases of varying legality, including the hard-charging libertarian anthem I Got a Right, the lusty hurtle of Gimme Some Skin, and this smouldering, sulphurous hate-song. Pondering his soon-to-be-ex-lover Betsy over watery guitars and a snail’s pace creep, Pop brews up a slow head of steam before letting his ire take over at 2:35, as the fuse ignites and Ron Asheton hammers out a glorious, fearsomely heavy and plummeting bass-line, Williamson firing off harsh, hectic lead lines over the top. There was little love lost between the former guitarist and his replacement, at least in the heat of this moment, but together, on Sick of You, they made a fearsome force.

9. Search & Destroy

Produced by David Bowie, the Stooges’ third album Raw Power (credited to Iggy and the Stooges) opened with what might have been Iggy’s surest fist at writing a blues song thus far. Just take in that opening couplet: “I’m a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm / I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb.” The imagery is unforgettable, outrageous, fevered, this “forgotten boy” pulling himself from the wreckage of the Fun House to make what must have seemed like a final stab for glory, one last roll of the dice. Williamson’s power-chords played simpler and straighter than Asheton’s dark, tricky riffing, and the songs of Raw Power possessed a neanderthal quality that begged head-banging along, even if Bowie’s thin final mix seemed to work against this model of Stooges’ essential brawn. These songs were also more accessible than anything Iggy had yet committed to wax and yet still, even with the patronage of Bowie, Raw Power ascended no higher than No 52 on the US Billboard charts. Since then, however, like much of the Stooges catalogue, Search & Destroy has been recognised as an essential punk-rock text.

10. Death Trip

For the Stooges, it never seemed worth doing a thing unless you did it to death. And just as Fun House closed with the enervating, exhausting one-two punch of 1970 and the title track (before the excoriating noise-out of LA Blues, a wordless, ruthless, scourging coda), so the non-stop ramalama party of Raw Power drew to a finish with Death Trip. Death Trip was pure aural excess, its stop-start riff rolling on and on, seemingly endlessly, Iggy screaming at earbleed level and duelling Williamson for space in the dense mix (especially so on Iggy’s controversial 1997 remix of the album, which turned the volume up at the expense of any subtlety; to these ears at least, the brutishness of this mix suits these songs particularly well), as he barks that he’s on a death trip, and tells of a twisted and sick love affair, where his lover is his enemy, where cruelty is erotic, and where a bite is sweeter than a kiss. That riff just keeps rolling on, and Iggy keeps on howling, begging his lover to save him, and then to “stick” him, promising to give the same in return, until, after six or so minutes of this rutting and strutting, the song collapses as swiftly as it began. The same pretty much happened to the Stooges in the wake of Raw Power’s failure; they welcomed pianist Scott Thurston (later of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers) aboard and toured the album, their gigs as confrontational as ever, Iggy rolling in broken glass and, on the infamous bootleg Metallic KO (a recording of their last-ever gig), goading an audience of Hell’s Angels to pelt them with beer bottles and ice cubes (“You can throw every goddam thing in the world,” he gloated, “and you’re girlfriend will still love me, you jealous cocksuckers!”). But Iggy became further engulfed by his heroin addiction, the lyrics to Death Trip seeming premonitory, until he entered rehab shortly after the Stooges’ final split in 1974 and recorded a pair of albums with Bowie in Berlin – The Idiot and Lust For Life – that would make this punk pioneer an actual pop star, of sorts. For the remaining Stooges, meanwhile, obscurity beckoned; Scott Asheton Joined the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith in his cult band Sonic’s Rendezvous, Ron Asheton joined disparate punk-rock arkestra Destroy All Monsters, falling in love with singer Niagara, then joining Dennis Thompson of the MC5 and three members of the Detroit-worshipping Australians Radio Birdman in the short-lived New Race. James Williamson worked with Pop some more before quitting music for a career in Silicon Valley. Subsequent generations of punk-rockers, meanwhile, came to recognise the unalloyed genius of the Stooges, and early in the 21st century the ageless Iggy reconnected with the Asheton brothers, touring the world and enjoying the recognition they were denied in their first incarnation. Upon Ron Asheton’s untimely death in 2009, James Williamson again returned to tour with the Stooges, until Scott Asheton’s 2014 death signalled that the Stooges’ story had finally come to a close. It had been a messy, occasionally tragic, often glorious trip; certainly, Iggy had gotten it right on Raw Power’s brutal closer, growling presciently, “Honey, we are going down in history.”