The Stooges

Funhouse (1970)

C.M. Crockford

I was living in San Francisco, 19 years

old with little to no clue about how to get a summer job after

getting fired, living on zip in terms of money. After getting utterly

high at night I'd walk to the 7-Eleven for munchies and those seven

blocks would be soundtracked by “Dirt” by the Stooges. I was

pissed, sexually frustrated, and a bit spoiled lets face it, and as I

walked in those brooding Inner Richmond streets “Dirt” was my

song, a churning, droning

inferno (like that album cover) of impotence and scummy pride. I was

Dirt and proud like Iggy was – I knew I didn't belong, and while

I'm a different guy now (even if I'm still kind of a fuckup) that

sense of outsiderdom, of a wild darkness is still there.

That

madness, that cruel, lo-fi energy that I caught onto as a teen is

still there in Funhouse

– the demented yowling, squealing and thundering of “TV Eye”,

where Iggy Pop opens the song with an obscene shout of

“LOVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” before descending into commands, barks

and screams that can be wordless or only barely resemble English.

Funhouse is the processing of free jazz, garage rock, heavy R B and

live Detroit blues into its own form, a primordial soup of enormous

guitar lunkhead genius and raving drugged out malice. It's only a fun

album in the title – this is hell, glorious hell, especially

compared to the first album where Pop and Asheton are still chained

to sanity by John Cale's solid, stable production and avant garde

touches. Here the dogs are utterly unleashed – and given a sax to

play with.

Funhouse

is the closest we'll get in the studio to the Stooges' live sound and

thats what makes it arguably their best overall album – here is a

band allowed to go completely mad, the music of people rioting and

chugging beer and copulating in the streets all at the same time. The

pulsing, chug-a-lug openers “Down In The Street” and “Loose”

are the closest they get to straight ahead coherence, and it's still

Iggy bouncing, moaning “And I'll stick it – deep inside” like

you know exactly what that means and you love it. And from there the

album wildly careens from violent punk into repetitious, thrumming

drone guitar techniques and saxophone from the great late Steve

MacKay on “Funhouse” among others (his entrance on the ecstatic

“1970”, as if saluting Iggy Pop's hideous joy, is amazing). The

climax is thus of course downright harrowing - “L.A. Blues”, a

bloody, five minute pummeling of inhumanity and mayhem. It is The

Stooges totally disposing of the burdens of structure, only governed

by the shrieks of their lead singer, now a banshee from the devils

shape shifting at will as the drums of Scott Asheton pound and pound

into a pulp. We are only shown mercy when Iggy at last collapses,

sounding like a wild animal ready for sleep, as we'd be if we weren't

so goddamn excited.

I'm

almost 25 as I write this but here I am, listening to the Stooges

like I did when I was 17 not only because I'm writing about it but

because at a certain level some things just don't change, as they

don't for plenty of weird punk kids who needed Funhouse

as badly as I did. You're a little calmer, a little more

understanding maybe – hell you can pay your taxes. But you've still

got that excitement in you, that capacity for darkness and loserdom

that only you and select others can understand. And for that, for

that well you've got Iggy who tells you its okay, he's got that in

him too as he screams, the sound captured on tape for all time for

your pleasure.