“It’s another year for me and you
Another year with nothin’ to do.”
There’s a version of rock history that holds 1977 as punk’s “first year.” Anything prior to that is proto-punk, they say. What about the Ramones’ debut, then, from 1976? Whatever. If we jump back to 1969, baby, the proto-punk rockers were doing some pretty great stuff that I quite often prefer to the stuff of punk proper.
Case in point: the Stooges 1969 self-titled album. Iggy Pop and his band were not exactly peeved or protesting anything—which seems to be key to get the punk label—but neither were they intellectual artists posing as bohemians. They were, in fact, impoverished dropouts who were, judging by the music coming out of the speakers, simply bored, horny, and raucous, not to mention musically inclined. With the music of The Doors and MC5 swirling in the air, James Osterberg, Dave Alexander, and Ron and Scott Asheton concluded that they could take that style and crank it up to 11, as it were.
‘1969’ opens the album with a barbarous Bo Diddley riff and lyrics that more or less admit there’s nothing worth doing and nothing worth doing it for, so might as well play loud music, goof off, and get laid. (But Richard Hell’s Blank Generation wasn’t released until 1977!) It’s upon the shoulders of this punchy rocker and the second track, ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog,’ that the album’s reputation largely rests. The first is angsty adolescent ennui; the second is something much more disturbed and abrasive, wearing its self-degradation proudly as it barely musters up a chord progression or lyrics to hang around its lustful chants. John Cale, musical mastermind, simply hammers the same piano key ad infinitum. To be sure, ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ has lost none of its vulgar effect in the half century since its debut.
A glaring departure from the general schtick, however, is ‘We Will Fall,’ a ten-minute dirge that producer John Cale (having recently departed from The Velvet Underground) thought would lend the album some arthouse gravitas when Elektra studio head Jac Holzman asked for more “legitimate” songs. It’s an avant-garde composition built around a Gregorian chant and a droning viola that contrasts harshly with the rest of the material and adds a sense of apocalyptic mystique to the record and therefore the band. But, to be quite honest, I don’t like it and I think it is way too long. Alas, it constitutes about ⅓ of the entire album.
Immediately after that downer, we have ‘No Fun,’ in my opinion an undersung high-water mark that lives in the shadow of the one-two punch of the openers. It’s another rendition of the same basic three-chord formula with wah pedal freakouts and handclaps and whatnot, but with Iggy gradually growing more guttural and gritty as the song goes on. Everything after that is mediocre-to-good but inessential, the same blueprint recycled into midtempo rockers with diminishing returns, with lyrics mostly about having sex, or being denied sex, and wanting drugs instead, and not getting those and then feeling messed up a different way, and a sonic grime that makes the sex Iggy Pop is listlessly crooning and sullenly growling about sound gross and degrading.
I remember back in the LimeWire days I read about the Stooges on some message board or another and decided to check them out. I’m pretty sure the first thing I heard was ‘Search and Destroy’ from Raw Power (1973). It sounded so raw and rough to ears attuned to the polished sounds of modern pop music that I thought I had accidentally downloaded a bootleg live recording or something. Finding th comparatively tame ‘1969’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ didn’t exactly quash that notion. Indeed, having now spread roots deep and wide and listened to a healthy helping of 1960s psychedelic and garage rock, these songs still strike me as incredibly unpolished, but competently and purposefully so, like a studio-recorded live album. But these guys could play and the mix is exceptional. Ron Asheton’s guitar work has a real elegance beneath its layers of filth and the basic arrangements only clash by intention.
And that’s the album’s rough edge that catches the listener skimming over the historical record crate: “professional” bands of the time would have sanded off all those rough edges to make their sound more palatable. But the Stooges intuited that raw and rowdy could be the essence of their craft a decade before it became voguish to do so. In fact, the attitudes were so out of step with the times that the album was released the same month as the Woodstock festival.
Just a few years on, Iggy Pop would go full wildman punk rocker, inventing the stage dive, smearing peanut butter on his torso, wearing a dog collar, flashing his bare member, and slicing his chest with a piece of broken glass on stage. Compared to that infamous persona, the antics of The Stooges do seem tame and mild, but the record remains essential to the canon of rock music and should not be overlooked.
Favorite Tracks: 1969; I Wanna Be Your Dog; No Fun.