Top 102 Albums⁺ No 42
The Stooges - The Stooges
When I found copies of the first two Stooges albums in 1987 in a record shop in København I knew I'd come to the right place. The summer abroad had paid off. I had Raw Power and had heard some of the first two records but boy were they hard to come by. I still think their first three records are almost unmatched in their consistent brilliance and game changing nature.
A delinquent stone age jazz quartet, The Stooges mixed droning guitars, drawled lyrics and pulsing drums into a heady and potent mix that managed to sound like a rampage and a seduction at the same time. They were Brando and his gang on Harleys; leaving a trail of damp knickers, and a cadre of leather jacketed disciples growing like maggots in the wholesome apples that would never now make Apple Pie.
Like The Sonics and The Monks before them The Stooges said NO, this world is Not Right. WE are Not Right. No tickets to fake utopias of love & peace just their own path OUTSIDE any consensus. Loud, angry, disturbed but still having a Real Cool Time.
The only submission was sexual. Now I Wanna Be Your Dog. Outsiders have always circled this music. Although their long improvisations were kept to a minimum on the record the music still has the urgent feel of being emotionally immediate. And the sound is HUGE.
New Stooges track out today - https://soundcloud.com/fatpossum/iggy-and-the-stooges-burn
ReplyDeleteSince you had Captain Beefheart and the Stooges back to back, Séamus, I'm SHOCKED that you didn't add '80s Aussie swamp blues/noise kingpins the Scientists to your unholy trilogy. Saving them for your Top 10, I hope. Speaking of which, I think the Stooges are the first band I've seen on your list so far who would have definitely made my own Top 10. "A delinquent stone age jazz quartet"? Sounds about right. We have a ton of similar albums and bands in our Top 100, too. I'm going to count them out after you're done with your list, in fact. Just warning you and all.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to seeing your Top 100. I had totally forgotten about Scientists. Haven't listened to them since the early eighties. I'm listening now and they sound really great.
DeleteIt has also made me notice that I lost The Gun Club somewhere in my deliberations. And The Saints. Bugger. This is why I'm going to keep going onwards into the negative numbers. I didn't actually choose 102, just kept picking whatever felt right and then had 70 or 80 albums to fit into 40 places, and that's without even looking through my record collection to remind me of albums that I'd forgotten.
Anyway, I'm enjoying listening back to all this music. Maybe next I can start filling in some of the gaps in my back catalogue.