Gimme Danger (2016)

All Stooges fans will want to report immediately to this Jim Jarmusch documentary. Iggy Pop (nee James Osterberg, and "Jim" to a few of his old friends here) is featured prominently, of course, but there's very little about his solo career—David Bowie is just a glancing figure around the time of Raw Power, for example. Gimme Danger may contain a key clip from Velvet Goldmine, but it's a Stooges movie. And it's not bad. It's a reasonably thorough-going history of the band, going back to their origins as the Psychedelic Stooges and even before. It plumbs all their musical sources and influences—Harry Partsch was important, along with the Velvet Underground, John Coltrane, and others. Many of the people associated with the band have passed on now, some even while the film was being made: Dave Alexander, the original bassist, in 1975, both Asheton brothers more recently, and Steve Mackay too. Gimme Danger thus often feels like an elegy, and sad. I was hoping for more uninterrupted music, but even the steady nervous barrage of clips and images in and around talking heads interviews was often satisfying. I love these people and am interested in all they have to say. I had a feeling that the agenda of director and writer Jarmusch included making a case for Raw Power as the pinnacle. That's an argument I'm open to, though I'm more of a Fun House partisan. And I thought the shrift for Fun House was a little short overall here. But the famous scene of Iggy stair-stepping across the hands of fans at a show from that era is included, an iconic moment I always enjoy seeing. There's a long leap in the picture from Kill City, which came out circa '77, to the Stooges reunification (a term Iggy prefers to "reunion") in 2003 at Coachella. Fun fact you might know already: razor-sharp guitar player and producer James Williamson, Iggy's late Stooges collaborator, went on to make a career for himself in software in Silicon Valley after leaving the band. Stepping in for Ron Asheton at reunification appearances after Ron died in 2009 involved Williamson picking up a guitar for the first time in decades. This movie is full of great anecdotes, great pictures, and great music. It may possibly only be for Iggy and/or Stooges fans, but I liked it a lot in spite of my grumbling. I'm only grumbling because I want more. Do things like this ever come in "long" versions, with, like, extended concert footage? Fingers crossed for the DVD.

The New Classic (2014)

Things seem to happen so fast now—just the other day I caught an item on Facebook about Iggy Azalea's comeback. What? I know she's had her troubles in the celebrity ecosystem, predictable problems of fame, talent, and wealth, of a white Australian woman rapper and cultural appropriations and objectifying, plus a reputation for displays of bad attitude. You know, all those things that happen on Twitter and are reported as news. Her debut LP is only two years old, but it's righteously haunted by an evocative fragment, "No money, no family, 16 in the middle of Miami," which wafts all through the stew of beats and hooks and keeps it compelling. There's a couple of big hits you probably know and maybe over-know—"Fancy" feat. Charli XCX (#1) and "Black Widow" feat. Rita Ora (#3). They're a good preview, they pop and sizzle and flash a charming confidence, but they aren't my favorites here. As usual, the terms of the product we accept now apply to The New Classic. It's too long—the songs are too long by a minute or two and the album is too long by 15 or 20 minutes. That's the way most albums are now, and it's probably better to have too much than too little, for the sake of the true believers. What  I like best is when Iggy Azalea indulges herself and settles into exactly that overweening confidence she wears like armor. The vulgar "New Bitch," for example, which among other things exults in its vulgarity, promotes the social satisfactions of an ego that has just got what it wanted. "I'm his new bitch," she declares to no one and everyone (and probably to someone in particular), leaning hard into the hissing churchy "ch" sound, which tells everything. Or "Goddess," which is one of the biggest tracks here, with a monster guitar solo erupting in the middle of it, and which seems to be in the service of more or less modestly declaring herself. Judging by the persona on this album, and not Twitter, it looks to me like a healthy ego working stuff out as it comes. Anyone with no family and no money, in the middle of Miami, at 16, has something raging inside. She survived and she's proud and she's here to tell about it, even if she's still a little immature. She has a right. This is a mixed bag, but some great stuff.

Fun House (1970)

(Previous "Complete Sessions" review here, sufficient preamble.)

I was vaguely aware of the Stooges in high school, but my general understanding at the time, from hippie contemporaries, was that they were very bad and scary music that only demented people would be interested in. Already the legends of Iggy suffering injuries in performance were circulating. Naturally I accepted the solemn word of mouth. So I did not actually catch up to the Stooges proper until many years later, in the late '70s, backtracking from an infatuation with Iggy Pop caught in the reflection of David Bowie. At first I thought The Stooges was the better album of the two (with Raw Power crowding both hard) because the sound seemed simpler and more direct and because the year song ("1969" vs. "1970") was so much stronger and anthemic. Come to find out how wrong I was about this assessment during a crucial period in the early '80s.

Iggy & the Stooges, "Death Trip" (1973)

(listen)

Mythology time. There's an easy case to make for Raw Power as one of the great cursed smoldering monuments in rock 'n' roll, saturated in self-loathing, debilitating drug usage, disillusionment, and incompetent engineering. One more great band poised for a joint swan dive into the cement of an empty Los Angeles swimming pool. Even the titles point to troubles—"Search and Destroy," "Gimme Danger," and "Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell" is how it starts. It ends on the loud, crunching, irresistible, semi-groove "Death Trip," which attacks with a squall that sets nerves on edge even after 30 minutes of this and continues for six more minutes. David Bowie had no idea how to record it in 1972, and Iggy Pop little better how to remix it in 1996. Ultimately neither version may serve the music, but they both serve the mood. What is essential to the Stooges survives well. It's only rock 'n' roll but they like it. None of the well-documented disadvantages diminish that. Indeed, many claim it as the best Stooges album. It's the rawest and most powerful, little question. But it's also occluded, dark, overshadowed by the suspicion that the intimations are all too authentic. It's not fun, and that is core to the set, full of rage and pain and yet for that a minimum of grandstanding. In the moment, by all accounts, they were just trying to make a hit album that seemed more elusive than ever and then go cop in peace. So it is efficiently executed and in many ways that's what counts. Iggy's word association games well up out of a state of near total distraction, the band verges on the pro forma but stays ahead of it because they're just too good, and the finish line is exhaustion and exhilaration. Etch that legend in stone.

Iggy Pop, "I'm Bored" (1979)

(listen)

This is not the first song I've written about from the album New Values, let alone the first time I've written about New Values. I think it's a good one, its stuffy, airless atmosphere has somehow aged well, standing as a fine setting for a memorably tight unit: James Williamson on a punchy, delicate, reeling guitar, Scott Thurston doing a little bit of everything, including horn arrangements, and rhythm section drummer Klaus Kruger and bass player Jackie Clark. Recorded in Hollywood, produced by Williamson. Iggy is about 32 years old and fit as a fiddle. The best songs are rife with throbbing guitar chords and a powerful propulsion, artfully detailed by the horns—talking about "Five Foot One" and the title song mainly, maybe "Tell Me a Story" and "Billy Is a Runaway" and some others—but this takes a page out of the loose and playful Iggy I last showcased with "Success." This one also has a precious turning-point moment, and that is what I love about it, as it seems to me to be the real Iggy id, as it were. For the most part it's all Iggy the peacock, strutting and preening about in exuberant clown-like fashion, pouting and declaiming his disaffection even as he sounds anything but: "I'm bored / I'm the chairman of the bored / I'm a lengthy monologue / I'm livin' like a dog," etc. It's a bit monotonous perhaps, to tell the truth. Then comes the guitar break, ushered in with, "Awright, doll-face, come out and bore me." And that's it. That's the moment I'm talking about. Williamson eats it up alive, and then back to the verse/chorus at a slightly higher pitch, over and done, 2:48. I have a theory that only old friends who know each very well and have been through a lot together can pull of a stunt like that. But I'm often wrong about these things.

Iggy Pop, "Success" (1977)

(listen)

This was the single (b/w "The Passenger") from the Lust for Life album, Iggy's second Bowie collaboration that year. If it's pretty clearly a case of comical wish fantasy to pick this for the radio—"Here comes success, over my hill ... here comes my car ... my Chinese rug"—it always did jump right off the album for its hilarious high spirits. It is a laugher, literally, and perhaps the point where the heavy-stomping exuberance of the album reaches its finest point. All these tracks, especially this, feel a lot more like Iggy music, slashing riffs and bellowing chants and the brothers Tony and Hunt Sales (sons of Soupy) hammering down the rhythm section with a good deal of power. It contrasts well with the doomy moody swoons of The Idiot, which are fine enough but feel more like Bowie music to me. "Success" is a great example of one of the best features of this session, when Iggy starts taking it off the top of his head in a call and response structure, finally reaching a point where he is improvising at the top of his lungs, with the chorus, chiefed by Bowie, sending it right back with dispatch, until they all crack up and almost certainly must have fallen about the place. Freeze frame. Golden memory. Now that "Lust for Life" is the better-known rocker, thanks to sports enthusiasts and/or the movie Trainspotting, that has become the better-known "choose life" option, and indeed, perhaps the better rocker too. But on this album, they are all pretty good rockers. And I haven't yet begun to get over the priceless moment at the end of "Success": "I'm gonna do the twist ... I'm gonna hop like a frog ... I'm gonna go out in the street and do anything I want ... oh shit!"

38. Iggy Pop, "Five Foot One" (1979)

(listen)

Iggy's 1979 New Values was way high on my list of favorites of that year even if it is somewhat uneven. With horns and the band tight as can be and Iggy's various improvs, whether they work or not, carefully preserved in the pristine rock amber of the precise, dusky production by James Williamson, it works a lot of the time. The title song avails of this aesthetic too and to varying degrees other songs here, "Tell Me a Story," "Girls," "I'm Bored" (a candidate at #138), "Billy Is a Runaway." But the sound is nowhere more put together than on this five-minute display of wanton modulated chamber-rock. Everything from the heartbeat bass to the tidy drumkit to the rolling waves of the horn charts and electric guitars and Iggy's goofs off all of it—studied, and thus vaguely abstracted and distanced, but compensating with a surprising good humor that is lusty and alive, and a band that is rocking, rocking. No one but Iggy Pop is capable of such stunts. Here he is out front making jokes about a short-guy complex; at an actual height of just a shade under 5'-8" it's something Iggy is not likely unfamiliar with, one of the reasons he can make it work so effectively. The scenario is funny too, a guy working at an amusement park and hot for some. "With a bottle of aspirin and a sackful of jokes / I wish I could go home with all the big folks," he declares outright. "I wish life could be Swedish magazines." At that point the song's about opened up wide and working on open cylinders like a mighty machine or intricate household appliance. You can dance to it if you want. "I won't grow any more any more any more," he finally concedes as the noise envelops him.

Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (2007)

It's hard to believe, this late in this game, that here we have what amounts to perhaps the first substantive, more or less "authorized," and well-received biography published of Iggy Pop, who turned 60 the year it came out (setting aside Iggy's own odd 1982 picture book, I Need More). Brit journalist Paul Trynka delivers an admirably workmanlike account, covering it all from grade school to the launch of the Stooges' reunion gigs of recent years. The organizing conceit—the psychic war between Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop—can grow tedious from getting banged on so frequently, but that doesn't mean it doesn't explain an awful lot of the mystifying goings-on. I came to the story with a fairly good sense of the general outlines: the fizzled catapult to fame out of Michigan, the subsequent drug addiction problems and institutionalization in Los Angeles for reasons of mental health, the return to form with the aid of David Bowie, and much of the turmoil that followed. But there was still a lot I didn't know, particularly about the bleak mid-'70s LA period. Or, the best part of this book, the details of the Berlin years and of Iggy's really you have to call it heartwarming friendship with David Bowie, which Trynka finally clarifies for those, like me, who have may have watched Velvet Goldmine too many times and generally picked up (and/or believed) too many urban legends to really understand the nature of it. Or even little fun facts like that Iggy (make that "Jim") was a student council member notched Most Likely to Succeed in junior high. Well, didn't he? This is as welcome as it is long overdue.

In case it's not at the library.

TV Eye Live 1977 (1978)

The story on this is that Iggy the Pop, at or nearing the peak of his post-LA/heroin comeback, released this as a throwaway to get out of a contract with RCA. With eight tracks from three midwestern venues on his 1977 travels, the whole thing clocking in at less than 40 minutes, it's routinely derided as possessed of less than bootleg quality. So caveat emptor and all that. Me, I think it's a bracing tonic and welcome sidebar to the Bowie-ized songsmithery of the first two RCA albums, also from 1977, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Heaven knows, I think they are both very fine albums, certainly among his best; unlike Raw Power, Bowie's input is purely beneficial. But they are missing the crucial elements of Iggy the Stooge, sludge driven slayer of planets, whose rhythm sections and guitars bludgeon all in their path. That's what you find here. Play very loud. (Or find actual bootlegs from his travels that year and do exactly the same. Word is that some have "better sound.")

The Contino Sessions (1999)

Death in Vegas—duo Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes + sidemen, following the departure of co-founder Steve Helier—muscled up for this follow-up to the debut. More rock, less electronica. More band, less studio. Old saying, however: you can take the Brit out of the electronica, but you can't take the electronica out of the Brit. Thus the boop-bip-bip meandering remains, but a nice variety of ominous, doomy texture more often make the various proceedings spooky, alluring, and occasionally thrilling. The all-star cavalcade of guest artists are due no small amount of credit: Dot Allison ("Dirge"), Bobby Gillespie ("Soul Auctioneer"), Jim Reid ("Broken Little Sister"), and Iggy Pop ("Aisha"). I could do without the serial killer shtick, but it's always nice to hear someone make good use of Iggy.

Soldier (1980)

Fairly called the first Iggy album only a fan could love – I think Kill City is the better candidate there – you could do a lot worse than this one (and may well have – think of all the choices). On an entirely different tip, anything you or I eat that goes into a bowl might fairly be called "dog food for humans," which to my mind is cereal and milk or casserole. I don't count soup. These are the kinds of conversations people have. I made the connection one night several decades ago with the above-mentioned song playing as I ate a bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese with hot dogs cut up into it. What followed was not pretty, but I have not eaten any such fare even once since. The life lessons come from the strangest places.

New Values (1979)

"I'm Bored" With all the throttled energies and pignose squalor, and the bright production slavered on top of that, plus the uneven songwriting, the sounds here enter into an interesting state of tempered mediation, a kind of chamber music. Rocks nicely in a small space, say at a gallery opening. For his first persona, Mr. Osterberg has selected the classic and durable loser w/ low self-esteem, who triumphs via rock 'n' roll, innate integrity, and sundry. He's only five foot one. He's got a pain in his neck. Nothing comes his way. Winning moment: [in front of a guitar solo] "All right doll face come out and bore me."

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Lust for Life (1977)

"Success" Whatever changed about the recording strategy between that last one and this got it just right. This feels like songwriters and a band liberated from a heavy burden. Maybe that was The Idiot? Dostoevsky to Irving Stone, metaphorically speaking, with all the attendant loosening corner-cutting and living the good high life. Entirely a blast of fresh energy, even the weirdly dour "Turn Blue." Go directly to the call and response at the end of "Success" if you don't believe me. And never has poetic justice ever been sweeter than when the title song became the theme for Carnival Cruises, and a sports anthem to boot, following its utterly perfect deployment in a trashy Scottish movie about heroin addiction. Trainspotting. Don't miss it if you can.

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The Idiot (1977)

"Dum Dum Boys" Iggy's country album, recorded in Berlin, and produced once again by David Bowie, who once again evidently can't help making the sound sludgy. Doesn't really matter. As with Rubber Soul/Revolver, Ramones/Leave Home/Rocket to Russia, or King of America/Blood and Chocolate, it comes with a companion album released closely in time over which the faithful disagree. I go with Rubber Soul, Leave Home, Blood and Chocolate, and Lust for Life. That said, there's nary a miscue here on the first (vinyl LP) side -- which includes both "China Girl" and "Funtime," a couple of snowcaps right there. Then comes "Dum Dum Boys." (But go ahead and skip "Mass Production.")

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Raw Power (1973)

"Death Trip" Aficionados will appreciate the decades-overdue remix supervised by the Ig himself over the weird (make that rank amateur) treatment from David Bowie the first time around. Me, I always appreciated the songs themselves more than anything. They remain ferocious even in Bowie's teacup. Of course the remix is going to bring that out bigger and badder than ever, and so it does. It can right pin you to the wall. I'd like to think that if the job had been done properly first time around, the Stooges might have started crowding Led Zeppelin in the arena megaspaces. But then I remember that this was also when the principals became heroin addicts.

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Complete Fun House Sessions (1970)

"1970 (Take 5)" For this mammoth and epic undertaking there are many people to thank. First, of course, the Stooges: Iggy Stooge (nee James "Jim" Osterberg, later Iggy Pop), vocals; brothers guitarist Ron and drummer Scott Asheton; Dave Alexander, bass; and Steve Mackay, tenor sax. Thank you. All of you. Then, to Rhino Records, who along about the turn of the century exhumed the tapes and went to work, putting it ALL together. Thank you. And, finally, to misha4music, who made it all possible -- for me to hear, that is (this and a lot more!). Thank you. Enjoy.

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