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.
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