Rhino / Wea
1969
The Stooges
About This Album
While the Stooges had a few obvious points of influence -- the swagger of the early Rolling Stones, the horny pound of the Troggs, the fuzztone sneer of a thousand teenage garage bands, and the Velvet Underground's experimental eagerness to leap into the void -- they didn't really sound like anyone else around when their first album hit the streets in 1969. It's hard to say if Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, Dave Alexander, and the man then known as Iggy Stooge were capable of making anything more sophisticated than this, but if they were, they weren't letting on, and the best moments of The Stooges document the blithering and inarticulate fury of the post-adolescent id with stunning accuracy. Ron Asheton's guitar runs (fortified with bracing use of fuzz and wah-wah) are so brutal and concise they achieve a naïve genius, while Scott Asheton's proto-Bo Diddley drums and Dave Alexander's rock-solid bass stomp these tunes into submission with a force that inspires awe. And Iggy's vividly blank vocals fill the "so what?" shrug of a thousand teenagers with a wealth of palpable arrogance and wondrous confusion. Of course, one of the problems with being a trailblazing pioneer is making yourself understood to others, and while former Velvets bassist John Cale seemed sympathetic to what the band was doing, he didn't seem to quite get it, and as a result he made a physically powerful band sound a bit sluggish on tape.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 1,3,5,6 and 8)

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8.

Disc 2

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