Iggy and The Stooges, "I Got A Right"

I finally got to see Jim Jarmusch's documentary about The Stooges this week (yay spring break), and it was interesting to see them in the context of their time. I've always thought about Iggy and the Stooges as being timeless, their music so unique and strange and exciting that it just doesn't exist in my mind as a cultural product of the 1969-1973 period when they put out their records. This is also because they set such an obvious template for punk, and that their music was so radically opposed to the trends at the time. It became clear to me that they were in some respects the most radically oppositional musical product of the counterculture more famous for producing hippie bullshit.

"I Got A Right" may be their one song that managed to seamlessly combine both their potential for catchy riffs and total rocknroll mayhem. At this stage in his life Iggy was rock's true Dionysus, making people like Jim Morrison look like Gene Pitney by comparison. The song is also the closest thing the Stooges had to a manifesto: "I got a right to move."

The sound is also appropriately grimy and immediate. It sounds like a caged wolverine being prodded by electric shocks, whirling and lashing but still not totally out of control. By this time James Williamson had replaced Ron Asheton on guitar. Asheton's style was even trashier (and the one I prefer), but Williamson could play with flashes of truly jaw-dropping dynamism, which you definitely hear on this song and classic ravers like "Search and Destroy." The craziest moment of the documentary for me was finding out that Williamson, who always looked super tough and scary in the Stooges, went on to be a computer engineer and corporate guy after the band broke up.

I doubt I will ever run for public office, but if I do, I will have two campaign songs ready for the moment I hit the stage: "(For God's Sake) Give More Power To The People" by the Chi-Lites, and this song.

Iggy Pop, "Sister Midnight"

This has been a hard week. I feel like I have lived a lifetime since Monday. Music has been one of the few things capable of me getting through my days, and I have been leaning hard on some old chestnuts. Today I listened to a ton of Berlin-era Bowie and Iggy Pop, my mourning for the nation intertwined with my mourning for Bowie. This music has always been perfect for me in my dark times past, since it comes from Bowie and Pop both recovering from addiction and getting their lives on track after some years in the spiritual wilderness.

"Sister Midnight" is the first song on The Idiot, the first of the Berlin albums (the others being Pop's Lust for Life and Bowie's trilogy of Low, "Heroes," and Lodger.)  It sets the tone perfectly with a rigid, robotically tight groove, an inspired combination of Kraftwerk and Funkadelic. The guitar, as on the rest of the album, buzzes with dread and fear. I imagine its otherworldly hum being the constant background noise in the heads of the replicants from Blade Runner. Iggy intones with his deep voice, "Calling sister midnight," which I interpret as a call for spiritual help in the midst of being consumed by darkness.

Iggy tells of his disturbing, Oedipal nightmares, asking Sister Midnight for help. He confesses that "I am a breakage inside." This is someone at the end of his tether, but oddly calm about it, as if he cannot imagine what it was ever like to be happy and normal. This is what it is like at the very pit of despair, abandoned by everyone.

Sometimes it feels good when I'm down to wallow a little in that feeling, to look into the abyss. So many dark cold nights I've spent with this song, and when those first spooky chords hit I'm able to turn inward and let get at the core of ill feelings. Tonight is no exception.

Track Of The Week: The Stooges, "Loose"

As we have unpacked our belongings in our new house, I have come across relics that I had long-ago packed up boxes and forgotten about.  One such box contained cassette tapes and mix CDs that I made over the years.  I brought one to the car to accompany me on a grocery run, and buried in it was a white-hot piece of pure rocknroll dynamite and one of my favorite songs to blast over the car stereo.

The song in question is "Loose" by The Stooges, from their Fun House album, which I consider to be their zenith.  Their preceeding debut is still rough and has a fair amount of filler, and their next and last record, Raw Power, is great but a little too refined.  "Loose" in many ways is the ultimate distillation of their attitude and approach.  It starts with some trashy guitar, wild drumming, and Iggy Pop's deep voice intoning "look out," and then the band lifts off into a loud, skanky riff with a primal yelp by Iggy setting them off.  He is at his best on this record, raw-voiced and animal-like, blatantly bragging that he'll "Stick it deep inside, 'cause I'm loose."  The wall of feedback behind the riff is seductive and overwhelming.

As much as I dig the riff, my favorite part comes at two minutes in, when Iggy drops out and there is one of the most brutal guitar solos of all time.  It is stupidly simple, a million miles away from Eddie Van Halen or Jimi Hendrix, just a few notes.  But the guitar sounds absolutely tortured, its pains and moans echoing the animal lust in Iggy's voice.  It makes all the hard rock male posturing of a song like "Hot Blooded" by Foreigner just sound all the more silly, even if it isn't musically complex.

Of course, complexity and skill can be deceptive.  While the Stooges might sound like they're tossing this song off, they did over twenty takes of it to get this gem of mayhem exactly right.  To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it takes a lot of work to sound this trashy.

David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin (a playlist)

Last Friday when we got eight inches of snow dumped on us I had to do my duty as a new homeowner and start shoveling.  Our extra-wide driveway suddenly began to look a lot less attractive.  I made a playlist to listen to while I worked consisting of the albums that David Bowie and Iggy Pop cut in Berlin in the late 1970s, and it was perfect.  I spent two hours busting my hump, but the time passed pretty fast due to re-immersing myself in music that I had let slip from my ears for far too long.

The albums in question are Low, Heroes, and Lodger by Bowie, and The Idiot and Lust for Life by Pop.  Each is a masterpiece in its own right, but together they form a distinctive corpus of work that sounds like nothing else.  Here, in my own idiosyncratic order, are five of my favorite tracks, one per album.

Iggy Pop, "Sister Midnight"
This is the first song on The Idiot, and a statement of purpose.  The old Iggy Pop rocking out in front of the proto-punk riffage and caveman beats of The Stooges is gone.  The rhythm is angular and robotic, like a funk song run through Kraftwerk's computers.  The guitars are droning textures devoid of hooks.  Pop sings in a kind of quietly deranged way about Oedipal dreams and heroin addiction.  This is a man who has been to the brink and managed to come back and talk about it, but the damage is impossible to ignore.  The sound is completely arresting no matter how unsettling it is, and I have been listening to "Sister Midnight" over and over again for the past few days.  It's an uncanny sound that will give birth to some great music. For example, without this song there would be no Joy Division, a sadly ironic fact since Ian Curtis is said to have killed himself after listening to The Idiot.

David Bowie, "Boys Keep Swinging"
Lodger is the least dark of Bowie's Berlin albums, and one that points to his future after his Berlin phase.  (It's good, but my least favorite of the trilogy.)  Robert Fripp's guitars signal the heroics he will unleash on Scary Monsters, and "Boys Keep Swinging" has seeds of the popper sound Bowie would ride to world conquest in the early 1980s on Let's Dance.  Here in '79 he still retains some of the edge on a song that is one of the weirdest things I've spent a weekend humming to myself.

David Bowie, "Joe The Lion"
Heroes is justly best known for the anthemic title track, which is one of the few songs that have ever stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it.  There's plenty of other good stuff on that record, however, with "Joe The Lion" running a close second in my book.  The guitars are overwhelming, putting the listener into the claustrophobic mind of the protagonist until they drop out and Bowie purrs irresistibly about the morning routine before the guitars jump back in with increased ferocity.  I've never been totally sure about what this song is about, but it replicates the feeling of going crazy from the boredom of daily like nothing else I've heard.

Iggy Pop, "Tonight"
Lust for Life is also best known for its stomping title track, but just about every song is killer.  My second favorite on the album is probably "Tonight," which starts with an operatic opening about a drug overdose that segues into a sweet mid tempo ballad backed by airy synthesizers.  It has the sophistication of art rock but drained of it pretensions, replaced by a hearty dose of Iggy's punk fervor.

David Bowie, "Warszawa"
The first side of Low is made up of electro-rock tracks reflecting the singer's state of mental breakdown.  The second side is something else entirely, a bunch of soundscapes midwifed by ambient master Brian Eno.  "Warszawa" is the best of them, and a song that to me is one of the most beautiful and haunting that I know.  Bowie is famously afraid of flying, and he spent some time on a train layover in a still war-damaged Warsaw , which generated the impressions that inspired this song.  I've always felt this song described a dark city where people are less living than waiting to die, and it speaks to the fear and dread often lingering just below the surface in our daily lives.  Not many rock songs ever speak to that.

Classic Albums: Iggy Pop, Lust for Life

As I mentioned in my last post, my friend Dave passed away on Friday, and over the course of our friendship, we shared a lot of musical affinities.  Today, as I was searching Spotify for some of this stuff, I found the album that we may have listened to the most together: Iggy Pop's Lust for Life.

I had already been a big fan of the album-opening title song through the film Trainspotting, which the both of us knew practically by heart, especially the "choose life" monologue.  Unlike Pop's work with the mighty Stooges, or his prior solo album (The Idiot), the rhythm is jaunty, the hooks catchy, and there's nary a distorted guitar to be heard.  Sadly, these attributes have lead to this poppier side of Pop being used in all kinds of television commercials.  (Hard to imagine something like "Loose" being used to sell toothpaste.)  Evidently the people at Carnival Cruises glossed over the lyrics about "liquor and drugs" and "striptease."  Regardless of its adulteration at the hands of international capital, "Lust for Life" is indeed a big-beated, big-hearted ode to finding one's will to live after surviving a death trip.

The album immediately switches gears from joyousness to the kind of sleazy kinkiness Iggy was known for with the Stooges.  "Sweet Sixteen" opens with Iggy howling "sweet sixteen in leather boots" to a jagged riff and gut-busting, stomping beat.  Now that he's told his tale of redemption with "Lust for Life," Iggy spends the rest of his time describing the hell he escaped from.  Much the same comes with the junk-sick moan of Carlos Alomar's guitar sound on "Some Weird Sin," an ode to casual sex as psychotherapy.  Iggy ends a kind of trilogy of decadence with the album's fifth song, "Tonight."  A beautiful post-punk ballad buoyed by an airy synthesizer line worthy of Kraftwerk, it begins with the tale of a groupie's overdose.  It's obvious that the triumph over self-destruction described by "Lust for Life" came only after a great deal of pain, struggle, and narcotics.

Sandwiched between "Some Weird Sin" and "Tonight" on the first side is "The Passenger," one of Iggy's most enduring songs.  The deadpan narration and dark sound add up to a brilliant commentary on the modern condition.  The main character spends his life spectating, watching, looking but never actually participating.  In a strange way, it's a prediction of our current online world, where everyone's a consumer and a reviewer and a rater, flowing along to the next stimulation, drained of any real human connections or emotions.

It's pretty hard to match a side one this magnificent, and side two of Lust for Life is not up to the task.  If side one is an intense blast from a man who narrowly survived life on the edge, side two is a more light-hearted, goofy take on existence.  "Success," for example, starts pretty serious, but then gets silly with its call and response format.  The soulful ballad "Turn Blue," goes on too long, but has a funny aside where Pop intones "Jesus?  This is Iggy."  Dave actually did a pretty dead on impression of that line, one that would really crack me up.  Things get more rocking on "Neighborhood Threat," but not nearly as menacing as on side one.  The funky, skanky "Fall in Love With Me" closes out the affair with a much cooler version of the type of music that the Rolling Stones were trying to make at that point in their career.

Listening to this album since I left Chicago back in 2000 has always meant happy memories of Dave and I's adventures, including the glorious night we saw Iggy live in the flesh at the Metro.  Our hero turned in an absolutely awe-inspiring performance, every inch the rock and roll shaman we idolized.  Now, with his sudden passing, those happy memories are leavened with the bitter tears of loss.  It's a paradox of the kind presented on this album's cover, which has long obsessed me.  Iggy's eyes sparkle, and he smiles the kind of wide smile I associate with high school yearbook photos.  Yet the brightness of his smile and eyes are kind of creepy, almost psychopathic.  In our lives pleasure and pain are more mixed than they are opposed to each other, and this album supports that hypothesis more than any other.