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Class 6(66)
The Stooges: Fun house
02/03/10 || Khlysty
Introduction
Look, let me start this thing by telling you that if you don’t own a copy of “Fun House”, you should immediately stop reading this, grab some money, go to the nearest record shop, buy the fucker, listen to it at least ten times and then come back and read what I have to say about one of the cornerstones of heavy music. This is, not only one of the bestest records ever made, but one record that influenced heavy music in equal measure as “Black Sabbath”, “Led Zeppelin II” and whatever other record anyone wants to point at as originator of the style we enjoy so much here at GD.
And, maybe I’ll sound pretty extreme here, but I think that “Fun House” is much more impressive than any other of those records that we hold dear, because it’s so much more far out and intense than them. See, The Stooges were a band that went far beyond any convention of what “rock” was supposed to be at their time, creating a volatile mix of aggression, experimentalism and pure dementia and dropping it like an atomic bomb on the heads of anyone fool enough to consider them as “just a garage band”. That’s exactly why their influence can be found from metal to punk to krautrock and a gajillion other styles of rock music.
“Fun House” came one year after their first watershed release, “The Stooges” and, instead of a caveman-garage band, showed the world that Iggy, Ron, Scott and Dave had lots and lots of bizarre ideas of what constituted rock music. Instead of memorable, fuzzy, blunt three-chord garage songs, the band displayed a quantum-leap evolution as songwriters, performers and, most of all, visionary idiots-savants of the age that was coming, fast and ready to wilt the flower-power of the ‘60s and introduce the much darker, much uglier ‘70s. And they did all that and more with just one record: this one. How? Well, read on…
Songwriting
9,5. This is were The Stooges found their voice. The band had already under its collective belt one record and many miles of touring and performing in the most intense way possible or imaginable (their shows were infamous for their incredible noise and Iggy’s self-destructive on-stage, off-stage antics). So, they used this experience to turn in seven deadly bursts of fury, despair and uncontainable swagger. From the opening line of “Down On The Street” to the cataclysmic ending of “L.A. Blues” (the song has nothing to do with blues…), this is a band that turned its primitive blunt force into something much more sophisticated and much deadlier.
The songs give off a sense of barely-contained violence, as if they’re just one hair from totally losing it and fucking up everything around them. Tempo-wise, the songs move from stomp (“Down On The Street”, “Loose”, “TV Eye”, “Fun House”) to slow grind (the magnificently chilling grit-and-bone blues of “Dirt”) to fast (the hyper-aggressive “1970”, where Iggy’s mantra “I feel awright” sounds more like a threat than anything else) to total fuck-up (the aforementioned “L.A. Blues”, which sounds as if the band members are fighting among themselves on the drumset, while someone’s strangling a sax).
The point, though, is that these songs are fully-formed and performed with total conviction by a band that fucking KNOWS what it wants to do and how to do it. So, everything here sounds JUST AS IT SHOULD. The song lengths, the sound of each song, the solos, the instrumentation… everything sounds just perfect and the overall ambiance of the record is uniformly heavy, aggressive and menacing, just like a hopped-up mugger with a tyre-iron in his hand and murder in his mind. I may be wrong, but I think that the music of this record is what lots of guys listened to, before deciding to form a noisy, heavy, intentionally ugly band.
Production
10. Don Gallucci of The Kingsmen fame decided that The Stooges HAD to be recorded as if they were playing live. So, he did just that. The sound of the record is extremely diffused and reverbed, as if we’re listening the band performing live. Actually, the songs were recorded live in the studio, so that the power of the band could be captured as close as it could get to a “live performance”. The guitars are bleeding all over the place, the bass is a rock on which the songs latch themselves so as to avoid being sucked into the noisy maelstrom, the drums sound crisp and powerful, the sax is as piercing as it gets and Iggy… well, Iggy’s captured in his most harrowing performance ever. So, to wrap it up, THIS is how you produce a great record.
Guitars
9. Ron Asheton is no guitar god, like, say, Jimmy Page or Richie Blackmore. Instead, he wields his axe as a weapon of mass destruction. Using as much distortion as he could find back in 1970, Ron Asheton’s proto-metal riffing is ugly, nasty, barbed, and insane. His solos, while not flashy, rip ragged holes into the songs’ fabric and rape the listener’s ears. Whether just pounding molten chords, doing fingerwork that is amazing, or barely controlling feedback, he lays the groundwork for what would later develop into what we call today heavy metal. His untimely death in 2009 was a real tragedy and a great loss for heavy music.
Vocals
10. Instead of almost-atonal singing, here Iggy gives the performance of a lifetime. He sings, he emotes, he snarls, he screams, he howls, he screeches, he growls… Most of the time, he sounds like a guy who totally lost it and is out in the streets, raving-and-drooling mad, screaming omens and threats to innocent passersby. His maturing as a performer from “The Stooges” to “Fun House” is so huge that one cannot but wonder what mixture of drugs, mania and inspiration turned him, from the sneering post-adolescent of “I wanna be your dog” to the screaming beast of, say, “TV Eye” or “1970”. Never before had rock music been inflicted with such manic vocal performance, so is it any wonder that it was so influential? I think not.
Bass
9. Dave Alexander, at the time, was supposedly hooked on junk and alcohol. Well, I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but I’ll tell you this: if I had a band and I was looking for a steady, metronomic, no-frills, totally dependable bassist, who would anchor my songs down, give them shake-yer-booty rhythmic presence and hold them together like superglue, then Dave Alexander would have been my first choice. The production let us clearly appreciate his steadiness, his dependable playing and his great chops. Dave died in 1975 from complications of pancreatitis, due to his heavy drinking. He was 27.
Drums
9,5. Scotty Asheton’s characteristic caveman-hitting-the-skins-with-human-femurs drumming style is present here, as it was on the record that preceded “Fun House”. Well, this time around, the production allows us to actually hear him and admire his power, metronomic steadiness and swagger. He’s no Dave Witte, to be sure, but his playing is hard-hitting, powerhouse-clear and greatly accented without being flashy or show-offy. Great drummer.
Saxophone
9. Steven Mackay was at the time an official fifth member of The Stooges and his sax commands and conquers the b’ side of “Fun House”, sharing lead work with the guitar. His playing is instrumental to making the record the beast it is, as he sounds like he’s trying to strangle his instrument, just to make it sound more piercing and desperate than it probably should. His work is amazing and I think that lots of musicians were influenced by the sax-guitar interplay, especially during the noise-athon of “L.A. Blues”.
Lyrics
8. “Now look out / I took a record of pretty music / I went down and baby you can tell / I took a record of pretty music / Now I’m putting it to you straight from hell / I’ll stick it deep inside / I’ll stick it deep inside / ‘Cause I’m loose”. What more can I say…
Cover art
8. The members of the band “bleeding” into one another in a swirl of reds and yellows. Great cover.
Logo
7. Just the band name in a ‘60s font.
Booklet
2. Very little info, very poor, nothing to really talk about.
Overall and ending rant
While writing this paragraph, I’m listening to “Raw Power” the third and last record of vintage Stooges and I really stand amazed at how great it still sounds, how fresh, how dangerous. To me, more than any other band, The Stooges represent an early apex of what would later become known as “heavy music”. I know that before them there were other bands that dabbled into the heavier sides of rock –from Jimmy Hendrix, to Blue Cheer, to Iron Butterfly, to Steppenwolf, there were bands during the ‘60s that sounded “heavy”, at least in comparison with what was the “mainstream” back then. Well, The Stooges came and kicked them all to hell and back, making them sound lame and popish in comparison. “Fun House” was a holistic paradigm shift of what constituted “heavy music”: its total immersion in menace, ugliness, noise, unbridled power, monolithic devotion in making something completely out of place and time sowed the seeds of what would later develop into heavy metal, punk and their different misshapen, exciting off-shots.
Of course, I can understand why Electra dropped The Stooges after “Fun House”: music of such depth of aggression and darkness would’ve been a very bitter pill for the great unwashed to shallow back then (initially the record sold poorly and faced open hostility by the media) and a record company bent on making money would’ve surely saw this band of freaks as a clear “casualty” for it. The fact, though, remains that The Stooges and especially “Fun House” foretold the advent of a much darker, heavier and more aggressive style in rock music. This is one record that, if one’s even in the least interested in heavy music, should adorn one’s record collection. ‘Nuff said.
- Information
- Released: 1970
- Label: Electra Records
- Website: www.iggypop.com
- Band
- Iggy Pop: vocals
- Ron Asheton: guitars
- Dave Alexander: bass
- Scott Asheton: drums
- Steven Mackay: tenor sax
- Tracklist
- 01. Down on the street
- 02. Loose
- 03. TV eye
- 04. Dirt
- 05. 1970
- 06. Fun house
- 07. L.A. blues
