The Stooges – The Stooges

.the first stooges LP is a brilliant forward looking entity which at the time was derided as amateur playing with delinquent theatrics, a going nowhere disc that would soon be forgotten about was how the record business saw the stooges, a lost cause that had no right in existing as a musical 'pop group'...this first outing is raw and untutored, two things that make it a singular waxing any way its viewed, as complete garbage or as a saviour to the very future of teenage rocking mayhem and unearthly noise...they kick things off with a gigantic rush, their first anthem to boredom, 1969, a year that on the surface seemed turbulent enough with manson family antics / fake moon landing / vietnam / nixon / black panther slayings all getting the 'news'hounds attention and therefore the great unwashed will see it on the TEEVEE and act appropriately, ie; scared beyond belief / moral outrage being but two responses that will issue forth from patriots everywhere across the land, but the stooges had a different perspective on the state of democracy, they saw utter frustration at the lack of 'life' in the surrounding towns, cities, country, everyone accepting their fate as drones for the empire and living in a state of corporate obedience...when blue cheer played at the grande ballroom with their shatter bomb amped up sound the stooges weren't slow in making some mental notes that loud for its own sake is GOOD and should be practised at every opportunity...when the doors played detroit the stooges checked out the theatrical aspects of morrisons 'act of revolution' lizard king routine and decide that it was alright as far as it went but was too slow and arty for any use in real rocking noise...the LP is in all respects the marriage of blue cheer punk attack with street poetry of a bare minimalism, the riff, the phrase is ripe for repetition without any hesitancy to think otherwise, the stooge mentality dictates that 'less is more' when the right ingredients are mixed at the correct temperature a mayhemic disturbance of the individual thought patterns will realign and see things as they really are, a shuck and jive to keep the citizens amused while the atrocities in inner cities and vietnam continue unabated...other magnificent creations of straight ahead rock blasting come forth with titles such as 'now i wanna be your dog' / 'real cool time' / 'little doll' 'no fun', every one of them a grinder, a pulverisation of sweet excess for real 'dogs and dolls', not really hippy floatation type of sounds (except the filler track at the end of side one 'we will fall' which is a nice street level trance groove where the stooges gather round the bong and get REAL GONE), this is some heavy duty punked up riff mongery with disted haiku inflections...this is the remaster album and bonus john cale mix on the second disk all showing the LP off to be what its always been, the first of three great LPs by one of the great gutter rocking combos, an LP of considerable fire power, more straight ahead rock racket than the second, funhouse which showed their art / jazz entanglement which had always been there live but didn't come to fruition in the studio until after the first release...listening through both disks in this reissue one is struck by the thought that this is no less than the yanquee equivalent of the rolling stones during the satanic majesties exercise, but this is satanic as a rock'n'roll album, an album built on the foundation that was birthed by the stones earlier single 'satisfaction' (of note here may be the fact that blue cheer groove on a version of 'satisfaction' on their second LP, the psychedelic acid bubbler 'outsideinside'), 'satisfaction' is year zero for the stooge cats, nothing before and nothing since, its the be all and end all for iggys stooges, at least until the funhouse sessions got underway, then they become the mirror of post industrial blight, the war machine in sharp focus as seen by the very cannon fodder the machine needs for survival...the political nature of their early work, both studio and live cannot be underestimated, the art of seeing the truth and being able to express it for the good of all for decades is worthy of high acclaim, the sonic mastery that allows the records to stand apart from the slag heap of hippie rock is something equating to a genius appraisal of prescience, how could this disk fail to be anything other than the most forward moving rocking platter in 1969 (or later as we now can confirm)...