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Underground > Radio & Music >

The Stooges play Funhouse in its entirety

10:57 / 16.05.05

i am very exited about seeing the stooges play a decent venue (and not supporting limp bizkit as they did last year at castle donnington) in august but am wondering about the wisdom of them performing the whole of a classic lp from start to finish as though it was brian wilson performing the smile LP (which does make sense)

i just think, while funhouse is great it wasn't writeen to be performed like that and there might be better ways to play their amazing back catalogue. and is this just part of the awful rockist classicism approach to music peddled by Mojo and the like?

also anyone else going or anyone seen them this year can tell me just how brilliant it will be?

All Acting Regiment

11:47 / 16.05.05

Yes- it does seem a bit rock classicist. Maybe it would be better to play a selection of all their best stuff?

Bit of Gimme Danger, be reet.

07:32 / 17.05.05

I'm still a little cynical about the Stooges reunion to be honest.

I'm sure they're still a fairly rockin' live group and stuff, and if they wanna ride the wave of their current hipster popularity and make some of the cash they never got to make back in the day, well good for them, but..

..the idea of them running through 'Fun House' and bringing anything like the same energy and impact and menace to it as they did back in 1970 is a total IMPOSSIBILITY.

They were meddling with forces they couldn't comprehend back when they made that album - letting the noise genie out of the bottle and letting it tear their heads off.

In the intervening 30 years those forces have been thoroughly isolated, studied, explored, sanitised and deemed acceptable and fun.

Even if they took the stage and made exactly the same noises in exactly the same order, it would at best be regarded as a good show at which people had a good rockin' time.... fair enough, but don't forget that in it's original context it was a primitive roar from hell.

(Oh, and for the record, I think the reformed Stooges are only doing material from the original '68-'70 era, not from the James Williamson "Iggy and the.." line-up - so no Raw Power for us no matter how loud we shout I'm afraid!)

09:28 / 17.05.05

Yep,

the big problem with the reunion is the utter lack of Williamson era stuff.

Now I love a bit of early stooges primality, and i've nodded out many a time to "little doll" and its ilk, but Williamson could actually write these things called songs, with structure, and pre-choruses etc.

Hmmpphhh...

I have the live reunion DVD, and after about 3 songs, Iggy starts to look rrrreeeaaallll tired...

Go to the Mudhoney one instead, where they're playing all of Superfuzzbigmuff...mmm

14:14 / 17.05.05

Hmm, yeah, but the Mudhoney gig kind of suffers from the opposite problem. Mudhoney are still an active, creative, cool band. Their last album ruled. I'm tempted to go just cos I want to see them, but I'd far rather have them do a regular set and play the songs they want to play, rather than grudgingly running through a load of material they wrote 15 years ago..

Cat Power doing 'the Covers Record' on the other hand - that's the hot ticket as far as I'm concerned.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

14:48 / 17.05.05

It's probably best to remember the performing the full album thing is a one-off event featuring a bunch of artists. The whole point of the event is recognising what are now classic rock albums, right?!

Anyway, I saw the Stooges on Randalls Island In NYC and it was fucking amazing. So I have to totally disagree with you Rizla! I wasn't expecting a whole lot, truth be told, but I was completely swept up in it and it was absolutely fantastic. Honestly, probably my best gig going band seeing experience.

Iggy used to perform a lot Williamson era stuff solo, but we had none of that obviously. (Some of my friends saw him at a festival doing Search and Destroy/Raw Power and the like).

And as for Iggy tiring, I dunno. Not when I saw him, for sure! A great outdoor show, with it threatening to close early because of an impending storm and fear of something possibly worse... Iggy leaping on to TV cameras and shaking them near the end of the set, getting almost the whole crowd on the stage dancing. Bringing back the gogo dancers who had been dancing between bands! It was fucking havoc, in the most excellent way.

So yeah, it's acceptable and fun now, (Although it still felt dangerous, security, storms, people thrown off the stage) and sure, the hipsters love it. But it still felt bloody amazing.

And that's what counts.

15:07 / 17.05.05

but suedey what you are talking about is the tension i am worrying about, the danger and chaos that make those first 2 lps so totally brilliant reduced to the classicism of playing an LP in it's entirity as though it was a classical suite of songs

but what the hell, i'm going, i'm going to get loaded and have a good time and hope that for a few trancendental minutes i lose myself in the moment

feel less caring about patti smith performing horses in it's entirity as, besides piss factory and hey joe, she has always been full of her own Importance as an Artist, which is fine and suits that approach to the music.

15:41 / 17.05.05

Well, I have the FunHouse box set, and let me tell you, it's filled with the Stooges doing the same songs over and over, and each take is pretty much IDENTICAL. Therefore, them being able to replicate the album onstage doesn't seem an impossibility to me.

Sure, they're a bit older now and the original bassist is dead, but I think they have what it takes. In fact, it could be argued that Asheton is a better guitarist NOW than he was in 1970...though he's still no James Williamson! (I'm one of the very few who prefers Iggy and the Stooges to the Stooges who created the S/T album and FunHouse.)

Self-promotion time! I reviewed some Stooges material on Julian Cope's site -- one's for an LP that compiled tracks from the boxset, and the other's an EP of material the Williamson-era group recorded before Raw Power:

Declaration of War

I'm Sick of You

03:04 / 21.05.05

Riz- You should try to go to the Mudhoney show. I saw them a few weeks ago and they opened with Mudride, played all of Superfuzz Bigmuff except Halloween (which is, I think, the only song Arm doesn't really want to do anymore). I don't remember the entire setlist but I know thay played Flat Out Fucked, Here Comes Sickness and When Tomorrow Hits. Where The Flavor Is and a bunch of other newer songs were mixed into the set but they're not burned into my brain like the older stuff so I couldn't tell you exactly which songs they played (though Tomorrow Hit Today seemed to get the shaft again).

So, yeah, heavy on the "hits" but Superfuzz Bigmuff is only 20 minutes long so you're almost guaranteed some newer stuff.

not-so-deadly netshade

03:18 / 22.05.05

I too, was at that Randall's Island show...and the Stooges were pretty freakin' insane. Having Mike Watt on the bass (who appeared to be bleeding from the fingers by the 2nd or 3rd song) helped tremendously.

Unless my memory deceives me, they opened up with "Loose" and then played a selection of tunes from those first two records. And believe me, it had IMPACT.

I was pretty pissed off about the lack of stuff from Raw Power in the set though...

13:50 / 23.05.05

"I'm one of the very few who prefers Iggy and the Stooges to the Stooges who created the S/T album and FunHouse.."

So glad to see somebody else who feels the same.
The Stooges always feel to me so half-written.
For example, "No fun" is a fine riff, but one that goes on too long, and so much of Funhouse could do with plucking.

I love the atmosphere of those first two records, but they don't do it for me like Raw Power does;
That Celeste line on "Penetration", the way the guitar almost goes too high for the speakers to cope as "Your pretty face is going to hell" kicks in

...mmm, now there's a record to love...

07:05 / 31.08.05

>"No fun" is a fine riff, but one that goes on too long, >and so much of Funhouse could do with plucking.

i tell you last night at Hammersmith it couldn't go on long enough for me, a total treat, the stooges at their wild dangerous best, the music teetering on the brink of noise and chaos, Iggy as wild and fine as you could want him to be, the crowd totally swept up in it, like some revenge of the geeks, where all the date-less and the scruffs and the weird kids get to go mental for a night

there must have been a hundred on stage for No Fun, Iggy baiting them on, everything looking like it was slipping out of control, the asheton brothers digging deep to create a sound to match

just a brilliant night, as good as you could have wanted it to be.

The Return Of Rothkoid

02:22 / 02.09.05

Mudhoney live now are still pretty good. Saw them a couple of months ago and they still cut it, for sure - AND the new stuff is OK, too. I think they just have a veeeery sloooow way of doing things: about four times as long as other bands.

Is this Stooges thing sort of similar to Suede playing that row of gigs where they played their albums in their entirety? Probably for different reasons, of course, but still...

(And also, wasn't there a bunch of gigs recently in London where artists played albums in full - Dirty Three being one of them? Is this just a new trend? A cool thing to do?)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

05:54 / 02.09.05

Yeah, "album gigs" seem to be The New Thing... not sure how I feel about that, really...

Been reading the reviews of the Stooges in yesterday's papers- pretty much all of them say it rocked like fuck. I really wish I'd gone now.

09:57 / 02.09.05

LP gigs have some advantages, like not having to listen to half a set of the new lp by bends who peaked many years earlier, but if does smack of that whole mojo-generation of rock classicism that preserves the glories of the past in aspic

saying that funhouse was one of the best rock gigs i have been to in 20 years of concert going for it's sheer visceral energy and sense of danger and it felt a millio mile away from a genteel and pristine reporduction of an LP that you might imagine for this sort of event, it was dangerous, or as a close an approximation as you are going to get at a gig, tho maybe a slightly different experience for those seated in the balcony?