WE WI L L FAL L Taking it back to 1969 with the release of The Stooges debut album and its hand in fostering a new world of music-making Who said a fall from grace was such a bad thing? In the year 1969, music lived its days in the sunshine, prompting hoards of dropouts to fly about with flowers in their hair. While the year is memorialized by two fingers in the shape of a peace sign, the tail end of the Summer of Love gave us an album that was better symbolized by a giant middle finger. On August 5th, 1969, The Stooges made their debut with a self-titled album so primal it proved to be the cardinal sign of what would become punk rock. Before Iggy was the Pop, he was simply James Newall Ostenberg, a kid born to a struggling family in a suburban town in Michigan. He was first a drummer for a band he formed in the early sixties called The Iguanas and after letting the project go, he adopted the name Iggy as his newfound title. By 1967, things would start happening for Iggy. At a homecoming dance at the University of Michigan, four of LA’s golden boys showed up to play a set and struck a chord deep within Ostenberg — he was itching to start a riot just like the frontman he saw before him. The band was none other than The Doors who had just released their second album Strange Days the month prior following their absolutely detonated debut. The stage commander he admired was, of course, Jim Morrison. Iggy jumped in on the project of brothers Scott and Ron Asheton and their jam buddy Dave Alexander which was initially called The Psychedelic Stooges, and when later shorted, The Stooges were born. Iggy yearned to ooze the audacity Morrison carried with him and he didn’t fall short. At the Stooges debut show on Halloween night
of 1967, Iggy propped a blender and a vacuum cleaner up to the mic to taunt the audience. The audience had no idea who this hellion of humble stature was but grew increasingly intrigued. This was only a minuscule tap into his antics in the years to follow, from rolling around in glass at the Whisky-A-Go-Go during a set and bleeding so badly that even Alice Cooper winced enough to take him to the hospital, to spewing chunks on his audience and getting a Lewinsky on stage, Iggy was a beast of a man and a god for it. This was the precursor to punk rock, the music took a second seat. Barley even a band yet, The Stooges were quickly signed with LA label, Elektra, the very same label who cashed in on The Doors. With signage meant a new record and a new record meant killer production to get it off the ground. There was one man for the job that immediately came to mind, ex Velvet Underground bassist and avant-garde demi-god, John Cale. He was an obvious choice and his ability to see the appeal in the ugly and execute a primitive sound in a way that translated on record just as unhinged as it did face to face was unmatched. This early in the game, The Stooges only had five songs on their roster. They lied to Cale and said they had eight, and polished off the last three tracks in the span of one sleepless night. In Cale’s own words, the intent with the album was the capture the evil in Iggy’s voice. He mixed the whole thing low to capture the haunting drone in contrast to the uncivil spit in the lyrics. With ebbs and flows that all resulted in raw angst, this was the Stooges. As the story goes, the big-wigs at Elektra didn’t share Cales’s same sentiment. Upon hearing the final product, the CEO of Elektra, Jac Holzman, fired Cale immediately. Holzman wanted The Doors 2.0 and Cale refused. With this switch up, Holzman remixed the album to feel less sinister and more commercial, and the original tapes were lost. Though the intent was cleaning it up for commercial reception, The Stooges was a flop when handed to the public. It clashed hard with what was topping charts and its abrasiveness wasn’t ready to be accepted. Ironic that an album known for being too irreverent to sell was actually the second draft that had been smoothened around the edges. A commercial failure maybe, but this album was hardly forgotten. The whole process of putting out this debut served as the perfect metaphor for the start of punk. The Stooges wasn’t intended to be a best-selling record, it was meant to find the people who related to it and understood it.
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