James Osterburg was a man you might not look at twice on the street. Iggy Pop was his animal soul, and when Iggy got loose on a stage just about anything could happen. With the Stooges he was the mesmerizing center of a maelstrom that helped to invent a whole host of rock's musical clichés, a group that spun primal fury and young adult frustration into some of the ugliest, most brutal, most alive music of its era.
There were other subversive, confrontational rock acts before the Stooges—the cover of the band's eponymous debut even subtly references the Doors' own self-titled album—but nobody before them had the good sense to take it as far over the top as they did. Even the band's sturdiest compositions have a feeling of instability about them, like they might collapse or fly asunder at any moment, and there are moments when Iggy can't help screaming and grunting as if he's trying to challenge Ron Asheton's guitar to some nihilistic duel. In the middle of the hippie era, their grimy, depraved, and violent take on love and life had no natural place, which is perhaps why it holds up so well.
The Stooges' first two albums are a case study in a band marking its territory with a debut and then systematically destroying that territory and everything in it on their second. As rough and abrasive as The Stooges is, it sounds positively genteel next to the apocalyptic garage meltdown of Fun House. The debut was produced by the Velvet Underground's John Cale, an art-conscious violist who worked hard to get the Stooges a crisp, muscular sound that highlighted the bleakness of their vision but made them perhaps less threatening on record than they were on stage. For Fun House, the band got Don Gallucci, whose previous claim to rock trivia fame was as the guy going "duh duh duh, duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh" on the keyboards on the Kingsmen's epochal "Louie Louie". Gallucci essentially recorded Fun House as though it were a live album, letting the band simply attack the songs in take after exhausting take, and though the recording is less than perfect from a technical standpoint, it shoves the Stooges at the peak of their powers right in your face.
Rhino's reissues do a fine job of shoving them even further, benefitting from improved mastering that highlights the gut-punch rhythm section of Dave Alexander and Scott Asheton, who never get enough credit for being the band's pounding heart and tortured soul. Alexander's bass keeps things grounded in blues and psychedelia, rumbling low and solid in the mix as Ron Asheton's lava guitar flows around it and Dave Asheton pummels out the most basic and accordingly perfect beats possible. The raging caveman groove they lay down on "1969" to open the debut is still one of the greatest undercarriages a rock song has ever had.
The first album also contains the classic "I Wanna Be Your Dog", notable almost as much for its inclusion of piano and sleigh bell in a grinding rock arrangement as it is for its then-controversial refrain. The record also has two songs notable mostly for the fact that they show the band going in a direction they never again pursued: "We Will Fall", audaciously sequenced at track three, is a droning, 10-minute dirge featuring a backing chant and Iggy's harrowing narration of a night in a lonely hotel room. The way he sings, "Then I lay right down/ On my back/ On my bed/ In my hotel" makes what looks insanely mundane on paper sound like the last existential gasps of a dying mind. Less oppressive but no more upbeat is "Ann", which is sort of the album's ballad if you wanted to stretch and call it that. Iggy wails for a lost lover and Ron Asheton reels off a sickeningly fuzzed-out guitar solo that anticipates the most unhinged moments of Fun House.
Unhinged is too weak a word for the wildest moments of Fun House, especially closer "L.A. Blues", a fiery freakout that's more heroin than LSD and makes no pretense of song structure. Saxophonist Steven Mackay adds a nasty edge to the album's second side, blazing right along with the rest of the band to create a texture that sounds exactly like the album cover—Iggy tossed in a flaming sea, possibly hell. The record's first half is somewhat tamer, with the heavy boogie of "Down on the Street" and the paranoid snarl of "T.V. Eye", where the band plays with deadly efficiency behind Iggy's demented vocal. Iggy actually captures the feel of the whole record in the opening line of "1970": "Out of my mind on a Saturday night."
The reissues each add a whole disc of rarities, though hardcore fans will already know the Fun House extras from the 1970 boxed set, which is now out of print. On Stooges, it's basically alternate mixes and extended versions, while on Fun House it's primarily outtakes, but given the volatility of the material on that album, there's quite a bit of variation from version to version. That said, none of the out-takes are particularly revelatory outside a twisted, distended, sax-soaked version of "1970", and most casual listeners will probably not spin disc two of either set more than once or twice. Fun House does include two songs that didn't make the album, but it's hard to see where either the ravaged blues of "Slide (Slidin' the Blues)" or "Lost in the Future" would have fit without destroying the record's momentum. That said, both songs offer a chance to hear more of Mackay's sax playing and give a glimpse toward what the band might have sounded like if a lineup had solidified with him in it.
It should go without saying that these are two of the most important signposts on the way to the punk explosion, and that any rock fan with a sense of history owes it to themselves to check them out if they haven't already. What's often lost as we place them in the canon, though, is the fact that both albums sound incredibly good today on their own terms, raw and immediate and dripping with an aggression that's rarely been rivaled.
