Back at the end of July, UPS dropped off a massive box on my porch that contained fifteen LPs worth of the Stooges. This release was the fiftieth anniversary pressing of the Funhouse album. A recut version of the album itself plus the entirety of the recording sessions that went into the album. There's a reissue of Have Some Fun: Live At Ungano's which came out a few Record Store Days ago. There are two singles included along with posters, a slip mat and the requisite book of liner notes and essays. Almost every inch of this thing has some sort of detail to it. The box it was shipped in and the packaging within even had artwork of some kind printed on it.
As soon as I got the email saying the monster was in transit, I pulled every other pressing of Funhouse that I own off of the shelf in preparation of its arrival. You can keep Christmas and birthdays. This obsessive record nerd was getting ready to celebrate one of the best records ever made. It is still odd to me that the Russian bootleg pressing that I have sounds better than the 2005 and 2017 pressings from Rhino and way better than the pressing Sundazed put out years ago. My guess is the Russian bootleg was a hotter mastering so it hits the needle harder.
I picked up the CD version of the Funhouse sessions box set years ago and gave it a listen once through but never spent much time with it after that. This time around, I am on my third listen of the entire thing and I think it's because I now know what went into making the record in the first place. That and the sides are labeled “One” through “Thirty” so it feels like a challenge has been issued to see if I can get through them all.
The Stooges had been playing some version the new songs live for a while before they recorded them so there wasn't much time lost to writing in the studio. They would enter the studio each day as if it were a job site and punched a clock. Each day they picked a song and went to work on it. Forging, refining and sharpening each song until they felt they had it. It was either the last or second to last take of each song that ended up on the album.
The thing about this behemoth that caught my eye was the newly remastered version of the album itself. It was pressed on 180gr vinyl and recut at 45rpm instead of the usual 33rpm so it stretches over three sides and has a nifty etching on side four. Being cut at 45 gives the music some space to spread out within the grooves. So much so that the tone arm would sway back and forth as the record played. I really wish there was a high resolution download of the new mastering included with the box but I know how to get around that.
The guitar tones, snare and high hat generated by the Asheton brothers were all more pronounced and sounded like they would cut a motherfucker in a dark alley. The thing that really grabbed my attention was the clarity of the bass lines. History has not been kind to Dave Alexander but he was a steadier bass player than he got credit for.
By the time the band came crashing in after the opening howl of “T.V. Eye,” I knew this thing was worth every penny. I was hearing new things on a record that I had listened to countless times. Any thoughts about trying to analyze or be academic with the exercise went out the window. I hadn't had that feeling since the first time I listened to the new mastering of The Clash that Mick Jones had worked on. By the time I got to “White Riot,” I was in tears.
A fifteen LP deep dive into one album might seem excessive to some, and it really is. I've found myself laughing at the absurdity of this stack of records and all of the material that went into making the box set. It is a magnificent waste of resources in a time when there is a shortage of medical supplies.
As for the hours and hours of listening to the same seven songs being worked on, there really wasn't any startling revelation of where certain songs came from. There's a change of phrasing here and a change of tempo there but not a whole lot of scrapping and overhauling the songs. It was closer to watching bricklayers at work. “Today we are going to work on 'Loose' until it's done and tomorrow we will work on '1970.'” Listening to an entire LP of the song “Dirt” was damn near hypnotizing. Because of the rhythm section and the way the song crawls along it became more of a meditation from take to take.
At one point while the band was working on “Loose,” I did here Ron Asheton play a riff that eventually ended up on The Weirdness which was released after The Stooges got back together earlier this century. The fact that he walked around with that riff in his back pocket for about thirty years was mind blowing to me and made me drag The Weirdness off of the shelf for the first time in years.
That the session tapes survived has to be due solely to a marvelous clerical error. Tapes take up space and cost money. Every now and then labels and studios would throw out or record over any tapes found laying around when they ran out of storage or a new executive came in and wanted to rearrange everything. A lot of music has been lost to history because no one thought it would have any value at the time. The Funhouse tapes had to have been misplaced or filed on the wrong shelf somewhere because no one at Elektra cared about that band. The tapes most certainly would have been disposed of if they were where they should have been.
There are only two people still living that were in the room when Funhouse was recorded. The man himself, Iggy Pop, and producer Don Gallucci. Iggy posted an essay about Funhouse here and there is an interview with Gallucci in the liner notes. Gallucci was smart enough to get out of the way to let The Stooges be The Stooges. He only made two creative suggestions to the band and both were accepted. Change the opening track from “Loose” to “Down On The Street.” And the other suggestion was to take the breakdown at the end of “Funhouse” and flesh it out into its own song which became “L.A. Blues.” I don't think I could imagine Funhouse starting any other way than with “Down On The Street” that song gets straight to the point and serves as a mission statement for the rest of album. And a weird factoid about Don Gallucci that I learned is that he played keyboard on The Kingsmen's version of “Louie, Louie.”
The studio was set up as if the band were playing a live show and there was as little isolation used as possible when recording. This helped prevent the sanitary sound of their first record. I am so happy that the dirtier, rejected mix of The Stooges that John Cale did finally saw a vinyl pressing earlier this year.
The Stooges were a dirty Rock 'n' Roll band that you wouldn't want to invite to your house for fear that they would raid your medicine cabinet and set your couch on fire so their records should sound that way too. They might not have been the best textbook musicians but I don't think the best textbook musicians could have made Funhouse. Hell, even the backing bands that Iggy put together every so often couldn't contain those songs. There was something about the Asheton brothers and the space and time in which the album occurred that could not be reproduced.
There are a lot of albums from this era of rock music that music writers point to as some sort of gold standard. Even though they are only stating their subjective, personal preference on a topic that really doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, they would be completely wrong unless, by chance, they haven't heard Funhouse. And if that's the case, maybe they should put their pens down.
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