2. The StoogesThe Stooges
Those three Stooges albums are a monument to what great rock & roll with attitude can be. I always continue to go back to Raw Power but I feel like I’ve had enough of it for the moment. I guess it’s because they did those tours with James Williamson, who is this incredible and brutal guitar player; his playing really is like grievous bodily harm with a guitar. The emotion in his playing is amazing but I think I’ve recently gone on a bit of an overkill with it, so I think I need to leave Raw Power alone for about a year or so and then I’ll go back to it.
I’ve been on tour where I’m due on stage in half an hour and I’m in a bad way, whether it’s tiredness or self-inflicted whatever, and I need that extra lift for the soul and I can put on any of The Stooges’ albums and they’ll galvanise me into life. But there’s something about the first Stooges album. There’s a certain innocence about it and I find it to be quite tribal.
I was lucky enough to hang out with [drummer] Scott Asheton in the last few years before he died. We were out one night and my wife was DJing at a retro rock & roll dance night and the stuff that he wanted to hear was stuff like Shirley Ellis, which made complete sense to me, because that’s what The Stooges sound like to me. It’s quite black sounding and with that mental fuzz guitar, which is totally unapologetic. And it’s got the grooves too. For me, those grooves are as good as Motown or James Brown. With the Asheton brothers, that really is their finest hour in that first album.
They were great throughout all of the Stooges’ albums, but there’s something about that first album. Look at ‘No Fun’ – when the lyrics are done and it gets into that jam and they kind of sound like a troop of spider monkeys that have found their way into someone’s drinks cabinet and get wrecking. There’s a complete sense of abandon.
I love all of their albums but this week I’m loving this one just a little bit more.
