iggy pop

Jack White’s Third Man Records will issue a soundboard recording of the last show by the original line-up of The Stooges in August, a day short of 50 years after the performance.

"Live At Goose Lake: August 8, 1970" is a previously-unheard, high-quality recording of the Stooges, recorded just before the release of their earthshaking 1970 album "Fun House", and will be available on vinyl, CD and digital on August 7.

The Truth Is In The Sound We Make 
by Carlton Sandercock and Per Nilsen
Wintergarden Books 

It is The Last Word in illustrated Stooges books.

Big statement, and the competition has been stiff. 

Change my mind. 

First there was 2009’s lavish “Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story” by Robert Matheu (R.I.P.) and Jeffrey Morgan that chronicled the band’s two careers in pictures and essays. 

Ten years later, photographer Ed Caraeff’s “Iggy & the Stooges: One Night at the Whisky” was a beautiful visual document of a 1970 Los Angeles show during the recording. of “Fun House”. It was limited in scope but evocative in execution.  

A few years later, “Iggy & The Stooges: Raw Power” by the late Mick Rock followed. Rock not only captured the memorable image on the cover of “Raw Power”, taken at the Stooges’ only UK show, but a slew of images of the boys during downtime.

“Total Chaos” by Iggy and Jeff Gold contained rare documents and handbills, but was mainly text and most of the live photos were familiar.  

So Wintergarden Books (publishing arm of Easy Action Records), has scooped the pool with this 300-page, hard cover behemoth. 

Iggy Pop
Sydney Opera House
Monday, April 15, 2019
Lisa Doust photo

Firstly, you have probably all heard that Iggy still has it and he does. But the damage is there. You can see how fucked his leg is. And when rugby prop forward size fans manhandle him, you see that he's actually a five-foot-one man* in his 70's who may have shrunk an inch or two.

Stage security takes much greater care of him. Iggy also takes more care of himself, adapting the old poses into well timed rest breaks. Once or twice, he lives on his back. He feigns leaps into the crowd only to step back. He has learnt how not to be dragged off stage. He makes robot like motions to cover the limp. He uses the stairs.

We're hopping back into the Time Tunnel...this time to dig up a late-'90s interview with late Stooges guitarist RON ASHETON by KEN SHIMAMOTO.

It was November 1998. Ron was at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was talking up the prospects of a release and possible tour by supergroup Wylde Ratzz, off the back of the movie "Velvet Goldmine" for which they'd supplied some of the soundtrack. It failed to materialise and the J Mascis collaboration that helped ignite the Stooges reunion was also in the future. 

The interview is one of the most revealing Ron Asheton pieces up until then, laying to rest some misconceptions about his attitude towards fellow Stooge James Williamson, and showing him to be a musician who fervently wanted to not only express his own music as much as reclaim some of his old band's legend. 

Dunno what all the online backlash is all about. Jim Jarmusch called his film “a love letter to the Stooges” and that’s precisely what he delivered when “Gimme Danger” made its Australian debut at the Sydney International Film Festival on June 17.

“Gimme Danger” was never going to be a deep dissertation about what made the Stooges tick. Read Paul Trynka’s magnificent “Open Up and Bleed” for that.  It was more like a shallow duck dive into the broad history of the band. Or bobbing for apples.

I enjoyed "Gimme Danger" but this was the Stooges, dumbed-down for beginners. Or “Stooges 101” as someone later said.

Despite an increasing lack of consistency with his official album releases, it's fair to say Iggy Pop continued to reign supreme in the live setting throughout the eighties.  You could always guarantee he wouldn't actually sound like the horror that was "Blah, Blah, Blah" in the flesh.

This disc emerges from around the period of the equally undigestable "Party" LP.   Fortunately, despite sharing two guitarists, it sounds nothing like that.

Along with other companies, Easy Action has recently all but flooded the market with a seemingly endless slew of concert releases from this period.  The "Where the Faces Shine" box sets proved more than worthy but they alone bought us more than 12 hours of live Pop music.

Seismic changes in music don’t occur spontaneously. They’re usually a result of people unwittingly being in the right place at the right time, running into a catalyst and stumbling over a big stockpile of serendipity.

Does anyone think CBGB would have been anything more than the source of dogshit on the soles of a few Bowery bums’ shoes if Hilly Krystal hadn’t been conned by a supposed bluegrass band into giving live music a try?

How quickly would the Sex Pistols have fizzled out if Queen hadn’t cancelled on Bill Grundy at the last minute, presumably so Freddy could get his nails done? McLaren had no more planned the TV outburst that propelled his band to infamy as Steve Jones had sworn off the booze.

In 1966, a former dance hall on the shady side of Detroit called The Grande Ballroom became both a focal point for the counter culture and a scene. It attracted and generated a strain of high-energy, blue collar rock and roll, the likes of which have been seen rarely anywhere else. It came into being through good management, but also through incredible luck.

Nobody loves a band more than a diehard follower of the Stooges. Through thick and thin, they cling to whatever recording detritus or tidbit of lore is handed down, like a drowning man clutches a life preserver in an ocean liner sinking.

They chase every bootleg with the fervour of a pre-urban renewal Cass Corridor junkie hustling a hit. They celebrate the band’s posthumous legend status and annoy non-believers with trivia, simultaneously living vicariously through the stories of the Stooges' addled (pre-reunion) stumbles and falls.

All this and more is why the news that broke in June this year about a high-quality desk tape concert recording of the original line-up materialising, a full five decades after the event, hit the faithful like a phalanx of neighbourhood leaf blowers at 7am on a hungover, suburban Saturday morning.

Million Reasons - RGD (Serious Machines Records)

You know what? Right now there are probably more music bands than at any other time. I could be wrong, of course. But I doubt it.

The music industry isn't as interested as it used to be. More fool them.

I recall hearing REM's first LP, "Murmur", back in 1983.

God, what an old coot I am.

We used to wear an onion on our belt back then, it was one of those things you did, like riding a chopped bicycle decorated with annoying plastic things.

The Golden Age of the Stooges is upon us and the onetime "biggest joke in SW Michigan" (so described by more than one person who saw them in their original incarnation) now has almost universal critical respect. From derided to celebrated and the latest news is that Easy Action's latest offering, "Popped", does them justice.

There are two reviews already here, each definitive in their own right. Beaten to the punch with little to argue about, all I can offer are some additional observations.

A quote in a pre-release interview has led many to believe that this is Iggy’s recording swansong. The neat closure of the record’s final song “Paraguay” supports the proposition…and don’t writers love that sort of shit. If “Post Pop Depression” is Iggy’s “LA Woman” - and a shambolic Jim Morrison performance with the Doors in Detroit had a big impact on Teenage Jim – then it’s a shutting of the creative loop.

At this stage of his storied life he’s probably entitled to put out any damn thing he likes, but that doesn’t mean glued-on Stooges fans have to buy it. In fact why “Preliminaires” is billed as an Iggy record is beyond me. It should have come out under Jim Osterberg’s name.

Peter Whitfield photo

Tributes are flowing for Stooges saxman Steve Mackay who has passed away in hospital in California following complications from surgery.

MESSAGE FROM IGGY ON STEVE MACKAY'S PASSING: pic.twitter.com/haOUe7Wd7p

— Iggy Pop (@IggyPop) October 11, 2015

You probably know the back-story about the core package (the straight re-issue of the Bowie mix with live disc appended) so let’s cut to the chase and talk about the Deluxe Ediiton.

The last couple of years have been a bonusburger for Stooge aficionados who just have to own every last artifact (which presumably you are if you're reading this). Easy Action brought us live documentation of the original Pop-Asheton-Asheton-Alexander unit (the deluxe "Popped" and pristine "A Thousand Lights"), as well as the seldom-heard Pop-Asheton-Asheton-Williamson-Recca lineup ("You Want My Action") and even James Williamson's waters-testing stand with his guitar tech's y'allternative band the Careless Hearts. Rhino contributed recordings of the hitherto undocumented Pop-Asheton-Asheton-Cheatham-Zettner configuration "(Have Some Fun: Live At Ungano's"). "Kill City" got the whole reissue-and-revisionist-history treatment. Even Williamson's reform school band, the Coba Seas, have a release.

This one's just for the fans. By which I mean, if you're new to the Stooges, don't buy this record. Instead, buy "Fun House", then "The Stooges", then "Raw Power".

I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico – Various Artists (Verve)

Tribute albums usually have their fair share of lowlights bordering on the "what the fucks". Worst still, their highlights usually rank at a mere meh.  At best, someone will pull off a single worthy take of something and rescue the whole project from being a waste of time. 

The first Velvet Underground album is now an unquestioned classic seen as a cornerstone of modern rock.  It does this because of, not in spite of, its "dangerous" themes and avant-garde sound.  Even the "pretty" songs seem to arrive from another world, twisted by low-fi audio recording.

Sir George Martin was not at the mixing desk. And that is why the first Velvet Underground album rules.  Oh, that and genius players and songwriting.  That didn't hurt.

If 1977 was the year Iggy Pop presented his professional face to the American public, it was really by a matter of degrees. Think about what constituted Mainstream USA back then and ask if it was ready for Iggy, even in the guise of a clean-living and professional working stiff? The question’s rhetorical so don’t bother answering.

The Iggy that Americans saw (those who took notice) is captured on “Shot Myself Up”, a made-for-radio recording captured live in a studio on Pop’s ’77 tour of his homeland.

Ex-Stooge Jimmy Recca (picured at the left in the 1971 photo) continues his return to stages on Friday with a gig at Empire club (formerly JAXX) in Springfield, Virginia, with plans for more US touring and a European visit.

Talks are underway to team Recca with confrontational vocalist Texas Terri and her band in Germany later this year, and a US tour is in the works for October with an ex-member of The Doughboys.

A new album and this should send more than a ripple of excitement through the worldwide ranks of Stoogeaholics. It’s not the expected studio effort - have patience ‘cos the word is that’s still happening - but a presumably legitimate release of a 2004 show in Tokyo, courtesy of French label Skydog.