1969@50: THE STOOGES

Strange case, this one. It planted aural seeds of music that wouldn't bloom for almost a decade after its release. It was borne of a local scene's garage rock but only slightly sounds like it. It's all barre chords, fuzz wah guitar solos and snarling vocals but the longest track is a glacial, eerie Sanskrit chant with a troubling lyric. The Stooges were part of a scene only by virtue of being in a place and playing live there. A first listen to the more famous of its tracks won't surprise you as to their vintage but this was a band that would drop acid and listen to Harry Partch, not Hendrix. Iggy Pop (as high school student James Osterberg) went to a car factory in nearby Detroit (the original lineup are from University town Ann Arbor) and was haunted by the cataclysmic smashing of a panel beating machine. Also, crucially, he was zapped by the tv he watched as a kid which invited viewers to write in and keep things to twenty-five words or less. The music is rough and all about sex, drugs and rock and roll. This is not the debut disc of a garage band. But nor is it Jim Morrison at the mic with beer and Nietzsche.

A wha wha chord warbles on the guitar like cop movie music. Iggy says, "alright" and the band break into an easy two chord groove like a grimy bar version of the Kinks. In a Marine Corps marching chant he tells us that he's young and bored. The singing is out of the way at about the two minute mark and the rest is a gnashing guitar solo from Ron Asheton. This was a pattern from their live shows. It's fiery and compelling.

A big splatty distorted chord riff gives way to a deep and dramatic descending chord progression that will make anyone who knows think Joy Division. A rare piano track beats out fifths in quavers which is doubled by sleigh bells. It's hissing, crunching, snarling and ululating because it's about sex, not just sex but imagining it, anticipating it, getting burned and abandoned by it. Iggy calls out to his real or imagined other saying he wants to be her dog, in submission but in power. He'll close his mind to feel her hand and lose his heart as long as he's part of her because forever takes seconds. There's no accident in the title altering a cute Beatles rocker from five years before. That was a Ringo song and bubbled with energy but it sounded fun. The Rolling Stones made a hit of it with a sexier rendition. How do you outdo the Stones, especially now they're creating epic blues rock tracks about the Boston Strangler? You go into the heads of this band and you're different when you come out again.

We Will Fall fades up with a drone on producer John Cale's viola. The voices in chorus chant for the entire ten plus minutes: Om shri ram jai. Ram jai jai ram. Iggy comes in sounding spooked and exhausted. He is waiting for someone for love or sex or drugs or something entirely other (perhaps even death) He is vulnerable, anxious, fearful but determined. The temple choir relentlessly chanting in a big spacey darkness around him as he lies on a bed in a hotel with a dim incandescent lightbulb as his only illumination. His vocal, saying only goodbye, fades into the choral swell as Cale's viola takes over with a Celtic lament. The fade is slow. We've been here for ten minutes but it feels both like more and less. I wonder what the first listeners to this record made of it when after two four on the floor rockers gave way to this massive dirge. It is the kind of thing that the Doors at their height would do in terms of mood or style change but this goes much further as the sound of the band is pushed so far back that they're almost absent. Its the voices rising and falling in a ritual and you just don't want the details. It's scary after the opening numbers. Not even the Doors got scary so quickly into an LP. The thing for me, though, is that I don't separate it from the rest of the album because of how early it is in the sequence, it completes the sequence by having gone to that strange dark place only to return to the thrash when you flipped the record.

No Fun starts with another Kinks style two chord riff and handclaps. Iggy comes in quickly with the lyric about being with someone but no one and how boring it is. The lyrics aren't the song the way the way that The Stones' Satisfaction are a rant and a riff. The situation is static and frustrating and even if it just makes it worse to say it over and again it feels better than staring at wall just thinking it. Ron Asheton's solo warbles in on one note until he lights it up and it starts flashing and works Iggy up into a scream. Great stuff, basically.

Real Cool Time would be filler on most albums. We will have a real cool time tonight snarled over a minor key ascent and catty fuzz wah guitar. But in being more of the same it fulfils the record's brief to be a good presentation of the live band and more. It works because it's more of the same (this from someone who considers one of his favourite records - directly influenced by this one - Never Mind the Bollocks to have filler songs).

Ann begins as an anguished rock ballad about a girl, with a tremolo/wha chord descent and straight up rhythm section. Iggy stretches his range with trips up to the tenor range, wrenching the angst from the notes and words. This breaks into a bigger, heavier bass and drums backing as Asheton launches into a blistering guitar workout. Is it about a girl or their home town of Ann Arbor? Could be both. Troubling and strong either way.

Not Right and Little Doll end the album without undue ceremony. Two rockers that work just fine.  The first along the rising minor mode pattern and the final track features the same two chord riff with the same kind of marching chant for the vocal. Both mix hedonism with a hint of darker wishes. Ron Asheton ends things with another determined solo as his brother Scott with bassist Dave Alexander settle into a mesmerising groove. Fade out. Repeat.

It's worth listening to the bonus material on at least the 2005 remaster deluxe version as it highlights something important about this record. It was produced by John Cale, recently departed form The Velvet Underground. The band didn't like the sound of it and remixed most of the tracks for a dirtier vibe which they got but at the expense of the power that Cale knew lurked under the rawness. The stereo panning on the official release hurts in headphones and needs higher volumes through speakers to bring the two sides of the field closer together. That is rawness of experience rather than taste. The panning is too extreme and the vocals end up too loud and flat (in space, not pitch, I mean). It's the album we know and love but Cale's more astute stereo field (with a far better sense of where a lead vocal should be) in tracks like I Wanna Be Your Dog lifts things from rough to sublime. Also you get the full recording of Ann with its trance like coda of  bashing drums, booming bass and Asheton's wailing and gnashing. But the one that was released is the one that the band preferred and that's what I've revisited here.

My own first encounters with this one are patchier than with The Velvet Underground. The Banana album made its rounds on borrowed first editions and cassettes but this one was harder to get to hear. The floating head cover art came straight form the British invasion but the heads seemed to be from a police lineup with Iggy's big goopy expression front and centre which could have been menacing or vacant. This is an album which, in the late '70s when I heard it first, needed big volume on vinyl or it would sound small and amateurish. That's how it did sound and I scoffed at the claim of influence on acts like the Sex Pistols and the Saints as their records sounded huge and filled with anger. Iggy Pop had been hauled from perdition by David Bowie and I did like those albums.

This also gave rise to a rediscovery in music magazines for The Stooges, The Doors and The MC5. It was far too hard to find The Doors in the late '70s but a friend's sister had a copy of The MC5's High Time which, apart from one extended dramatic song sounded like old time boogie rock to me. It wasn't until the early '80s that I heard The Stooges and Funhouse in better circumstances and understood what everyone was on about. There are clear source points to punk and post punk in these grooves and in the menace of the music and the central figure (however inflated, same thing with the Doors). Until I did hear the music properly and went, "ah ha", the hype over The Stooges seemed to be older people trying to muscle in on all that punk rock action by doing the boring thing of saying they'd heard it all before. Well, if they say that and it's having a bigger impact than at first then they probably haven't. Strip that stuff away, though, and you still have rock music played with energy and imagination that lets the dark matter show through all the bright distortion and yelling. You can hear it in this LP but also in PiL and Nirvana decades later without anyone simply repeating what they heard but chasing what they'd seen to make their own path to the same place. That's what influence is, not copying but inspiration. This is one of the starting points.

1969 @ 50: THE DOORS - THE SOFT PARADE

A lot of touring had taken a toll on the young band and they were expected to dole out another bowl o' hits. The previous pizza dish had got through by the skin of its teeth after the first two exhausted the song notebooks. Then again,Waiting for the Sun doesn't have a dud on it (and it got to no. 1 in the album charts) so maybe they could do it under pressure. There had been three singles in the lead up and all of them went on the new album.

It opens with a bang. Actually two bangs. Tell All the People blasts up with big Revue style brass as well as good but standard bass playing augmenting the band. Morrison comes in with his best Cranky Franky croon, telling everyone to follow him ... down. It's like a Messiah but from Vegas with a kicking chorus line and a band in sequined suits. For all that it flows easily and Jim's vocal is pure mastery and the aural jutxaposition of the ringadingding delivery of what might have been mistaken only months later as a kind of Manson call to action carries a pleasant jarring effect.

Touch me is far more recognisably Doors. A funky pulse on the rhythm section and keys leads to the most macho stammer in history: c'mon c'mon c'mon now touch me babe. And the brass pours in like golden syrup. The lusty choruses alternate with a velvety croon over a string section and beef up to a joyous brass supported pre-chorus. There's a genuinely jazzy sax solo before the whole repeats. It's infectious and punchy. And then the final bambambambam on the brass there's a deep voice intoning something I never made out until the recent hi-res remasters. "Stronger than dirt!" Gotcha, I think.

And then after those two it's as though the brass section called it a day and left and the band went, "ok, let's just do the rest normally, then". And this is the problem that a lot of people have with this album: two big show stoppers and a bunch of routine tunes that run into each other. That's a pity because they are mostly perfectly fine Doors songs that would add to any of the other albums. They're just overshadowed. I wonder if this is sequencing.

 The opening pair of tracks are clearly distinct songs but they are only two of three that have expanded orchestral arrangements that put them in the same set. This means that side one of the original release starts with two massive numbers and then seems to slowly deflate. Imagine instead of that using the two larger scaled numbers to sandwich the others and you have some real momentum. Start with BAM, go on a small journey of discovery with Jim in Shaman mode and end with BAM before the grinding blues of the opener of side two with its superior sequencing. OR put some brass on the others on that side (all of them could take it) and you've got a Vegas show but still the Doors. Anyway...

Shaman's Blues starts as a slinky groove that hardens along the way to something more bluesy. Kreiger's guitar is so heavily distorted it sounds cool and violin-like. It's the tone he found on Five to One on the previous album and discovered later by the likes of Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew and anyone who bought an ebow. Here it repeats a sinewy descending figure that plays through everything but the breaks during which it soars. Morrison comes in with his chanting lyric about never being another one like you. He could be singing about a shaman or, I think more likely, his self image as a kind of leader with imposter syndrome. It's a strange piece and if if wasn't overshadowed by the two large scale opening numbers it would get more attention. Its persistent chanting and serpentine figures on the bass, keyboards and guitar really compel.

After a barely audible chant the band breaks into Do It, another blues groove but with more sass. Morrison starts in with a simple plea to listen to the children before addressing them a the ones who will rule the world. This mixes with a more personal sexual plea but that might just be Jim intentionally confusing it. Again the refrain of Please, please, is quite mesmeric. It's a minor but listenable Doors number.

Easy Ride is the kind of goofy knockabout ragtime they were trying to replace the Brecht Weill song of the first album. It comes across as a sexual provocation with plenty of tinkly piano and cheeky swipes on the guitar. It's such a self conscious jokey thing and teeters so close to becoming embarrassing that I usually feel like skipping it. It's often said that The Doors were a solid precursor to prog for their blend of styles like blues and classical. Here they precursed the goofy prog rock naff filler track on every album by bands like Yes, ELP or Genesis. Not a great claim but definite fame.

Side two begins in familiar territory with a fuzzy blues riff, some patter from Jim and the band kicks in to support creating a big driving groove for Wild Child. The lyrics confuse Jesus with his mother but pretty much goes into what might be something obscure and deep or word salad. It's brief, sounds tough and compells through its music alone. The final spoken line "remember when we were in Africa" feels like a tease ... or a mic test.

Running Blue starts with Morrison singing a jaunty lament for Otis Redding, throwing a prety little girl with a red dress on for good measure. The song kicks in with the kind of syncopated rhythm that drives the first two songs, big and spacy but here with brass. Morrision's verses are about missing Otis Redding. Then Robbie Krieger chimes in for the chorus sounding like Bob Dylan in a bluegrass mode. This never works however often you hear it but turns into the sound between Wild Child and the next one.

Wishful Sinful is a rock Sinatra with dramatic bass, big string section and solid dynamics. It's a plain enough ballad with pretty images written by Krieger and sung with great charm and power by Morrison. I have put this song on to listen to by itself many times. The string arrangement is timeless and is augmented, as never before or since on a doors number, by reeds which sit perfectly in the setting. A magnificent track.

In the tradition of epics for the closing track on the bands albums along comes the title number and it's a doozy. Morrison spits out a memory in character about a person in seminary school who said we can petition the lord with prayer. He repeats the phrase with utter contempt before screaming: "You cannot petition the lord with prayer!"

Then, a meltingly beautiful lute and harpsichord descending figure plays under Morrison's crooning plea for sanctuary before he brings it to a hard halt. A cocktail jazz shuffle follows with words about travel before a kind of plinking travelogue theme plays under paradoxical imagery of mothers carrying babies to the river and leather riders selling newspapers before the next halt: The monk bought lunch!

A slow and sleazy blues groove slithers up and pretty much levels out for the rest of the song as Morrison with other voices begins quietly at first but soon rises to a scream with a series of paranoid imagery of dogs, violence, guns. The soft parade has now begun. You could read a lot of Vietnam and the violence of repressed protests of the time, the two high level assassinations of the year before and a lot of other things but this works as well now as it did then. What at first appears deluded or hallucinatory (some of Jim's patter earlier talks about it being the best part of the trip) forms into a screaming recognition of danger in the streets and violence in the corridors of power. If The End was a trippy lament and When the Music's Over an epic funeral dirge The Soft Parade is the sound of Hieronymous Bosch at his canvas, containing the bloody chaos in a vision of hell. When the chanting voices turn to senseless repetition ("calling on the dogs") a huge reverbed Morrison reutrns to sternly intone: "When all else fails we can whip the horse's eyes and make them sleep and cry!"

That last line made me wish that Morrison had been alive to take part in Live Aid's We Are the World.

In the end the soft parade is about contemporary American life. The rat race, the army, the squares and the boy scouts. The hunter was now a soldier and set children on fire instead of finding food. The dogs were not wolves anymore but the minions of security guards and police. From the screamed climax of the song to the droning call to the dogs this song feels like the end of a career. Morrison had two more albums in him before he left and they are my least favourite. Apart from a few standouts (and there are great tracks on them) they feel lost and pointless to me. It's this one, the one that Doors fans slip into the rest of their collections away from the sacred five, that I still find compelling as a kind of aberrant statement, a warning to anyone listening not to get too comfortable, a whispered invitation to get out the side door and run.