Another Year With Nothing To Do: The Stooges LP

I've heard this story at least a half a dozen different ways, so please don't quote me on any of this, for the record, I've never ever meant to suggest that the fifth-hand accounts of The Greatest Band of All Time are beacons of any kind of accuracy I, for one, haven't even heard of three-fourths of the bands we've written about.

Anyway, back to the story: It's been about a year since Jim Osterberg began playing music with the street thug Asheton brothers. Besides changing his name to "Pop", not much had really happened for Osterberg in that time just like nothing had ever really happened for him in Detroit, but for his friends in the local powerhouse MC5, things were really beginning to look up. Shows at the Local Grande Ballroom were selling out. People were starting to pay attention. Some hipster talent scout named Danny Fields from Elektra Records was even calling them--I mean, this label was putting out Doors records, for godssakes--this was the big time!

So this New York dilettante Fields shows up fresh from hob-knobbing with the Warhol set to check out the MC5's scene (a family that deserves their own GBoAT, to be sure)--and is, of course, blown away. So when the MC5 suggests that Fields check out their "little brother" band while he's in town, the guy listens. Now, despite being something of an effete New York prick, Danny Fields has impeccable taste, and leaves the student union building of the University of Michigan with a clear mission: Elektra signs the MC5, Elektra signs the Stooges. the next night, in the kitchen of the MC5's sprawling commune, he makes the call to the label heads back in New York to break the news. "See if you can get the big group for twenty grand and the little group for five." And the Stooges went to make a record.

Iggy Pop, Dave Alexander, and Scott & Ron Asheton arrived in New York at the end of the year to record their debut with John Cale (former of Velvet Underground, then Elektra staff producer). Meeting with label heads, the band assured them that they had enough material for a full-length, in reality only having about three actual songs. Ron Asheton got scared, and after the meeting, went back to his hotel room, writing three new songs in the span of an hour.

Through a difficult time in the studio (in which John Cale was unable to convince the band that they actually had to turn down their amps to record), the band produced what is inarguably their definitive statement, their amazing self-titled debut. Redundant, thuggish guitar bliss beneath Iggy's meat-headed drivel ("Ig writes some of the best throwaway lines in rock, meaning some of the best lines in rock," Lester Bangs so famously wrote of the album's lead-off track, "'Now I'm gonna be 22/I say My-my and-a Boo-hoo' that's classic--he couldn'tve picked a better line to complete the rhyme if he'd labored into 1970 and threw the I Ching into the bargain") carries the album through seven admittedly trite compositions--tacking on a 10 minute Cale dirge to fill it out a bit. add a few hand claps, and that's it. And it's still so powerful.

Divorced from its legacy and all other peripherals, the unique article of The Stooges is completely bare of purpose. These weren't the poetry-studied college kids in the Velvet Underground. These weren't the "revolutionaries" in the MC5. These were just some thug creeps with nothing--nothing at all--better to do with their time. Stripped of pretense or intention, the record is, more than any other "proto-punk" album, a framework for the basic tenants of a punk rock ethos. it was bored. it was listless. it was adolescent. it was confused. it didn't know what it wanted, but it was dying for something.

The purists might tell you that--much like Bowie's later mistreatment of the band's Raw Power record--John Cale screwed it all up. That he added viola and and made it all too weak and listenable. but that's just another amazing element of The Stooges: unlike a lot of their contemporaries, it really is (for the most part) very accessible. The purists might also tell you that Funhouse, the band's incredibly under-focused sophomore effort, is the real deal. But I defy you to dance to a single song on that record. I rest my case.

It should be said that many people have tried to apply the term "brilliant" to the music of the Stooges--an accolade that acts as something of a disservice to their unique legacy. the greatness of the Stooges has nothing to do with subversive intelligence--in fact, quite the opposite. They were the lowest common denominator. True dregs. and because of this, not in spite of it, they recorded the album of their career right out of the gate; an album that would become that became the Greatest Band of All Time.