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Anteater · 03-08-2010, 03:50 PM

The Stooges – Fun House (1970)

"RWARWWWARRGH."

1. Down on the Street (3:42)
2. Loose (3:33)
3. T.V. Eye (4:17)
4. Dirt (7:00)
5. 1970 (5:15)
6. Fun House (7:46)
7. L.A. Blues (4:55)

Chaos. Savagery. The thrill of a rave at the climax of an insurmountable high. At a time when art-rock was quickly beginning to dominate airwaves, saturated by Hammond organs, synthesizers and the occasional Moog, a young Iggy Pop and his fellow Stooges were keeping things hot, crushing and manic to the point of rapture, blowing the minds of hundreds upon hundreds at live venues with with their eclectic yet electric sonic sledgehammer of an approach to rock. It was during the height of this creative onslaught that they pulled together 1970's Fun House, an album which reconciles the rawness of their infamous stage performances with an almost jazzy sense of improvisation.

The results, needless to say, are spectacular.

We kick off the curb with 'Down On The Street', driven by a characteristic unpolished riff tethered to the earth by Iggy's whooping and a gridlocked drum beat. Almost tame by these guys' standards, it's still a fine start to an album that only grows more and more unhinged with every passing note.

'Loose' and 'T.V. Eye" serve as pacer pieces of sorts, amping up the energy a bit and settling in your mind to the crunching pulse that makes Fun House what is is: shit in your face walls of sound that doesn't care about anything. The tone is remarkably different between each though; the former embodies rock's primal urges to **** and pillage, the latter an excursion into paranoia. And that's what makes this album great: it embraces the ugliness and negativity of people and turns it into rave material.

From here on out, we begin to move into the real wasteland though, with longer tracks that give the band room to bleed their sentiments like rags and to entrance audiences into these expanses. 'Dirt', '1970', and the jazzy title cut are all cravings for love, for life, for a good time when there's none to be found, and that's something anyone can dig whether its 1970 or 2010. In brief, these are songs for us.

But then, suddenly, it all comes crashing down in one final, hellish blast from the apocalypse in the five minutes of 'L.A. Blues'. The drums and sax loose all sense of sanity, with Iggy screaming amidst the madness and dissonance of a world about to end. The high is over, the joy is fading, and the horsemen bring calamity and cleansing as fire tears the sky to nothingness.

Fifty some-odd years ago, poet T.S. Eliot wrote the world would end with a not with a bang, but a whimper. Me? I'm of the opinion that it ends to this song.

Neither quite punk nor like most of the rock of it's time, Fun House, like the rest of the early Stooges' discography, is regarded as a timeless classic by every man and woman who has ever screamed at heavens for the sake of screaming, a testament to those who love to live. Its really not hard to see why!