Battle of the Bands: The Stooges vs. Led Zeppelin, *International Times* (April/May 1971)

Psychologists have fun trying to analyse rock ’n’ roll and the people who participate in that culture. They hope to connect what goes on there to what goes on in the rest of the world. They’re going to have a ball with The Stooges.
– Detroit Free Press (September 1969)

It was not just psychologists who had a ball with The Stooges, rock critics who thought of themselves as being out of step with their peers also got their analytic chops in. The late 1960s early 1970s debate over whether rock music was worthy of intellectual effort or best left alone to struggle or drown in the primordial mire of its own making found its locus in The Stooges. Published in 1971, Twenty-Minute Fandangos And Forever Changes: A Rock Bazaar was the third of Jonathan Eisen’s edited collections, preceded by Age of Rock volumes one and two, published respectively in 1969 and 1970. All three volumes are symptomatic of the then ongoing intellectualisation of rock criticism, nothing more so than the inclusion of Richard Meltzer’s goofball obscurantism, equal parts erudition and claptrap, both confrontational and self-deprecating. For the avid readers of the new rock press, Meltzer played, to near perfection, the classroom boffin and clown – the tormentor of his teachers to the delight of his peers.

Twenty-Minute Fandangos included three fairly lengthy pieces on The Stooges, all focused on their three New York gigs at Ungano’s in August 1970 that followed on from the recording of their second album, Fun House, in May. Eisen included a long piece from Natalie ‘Stoogling’ Schlossman’s Popped, her Stooges’ newsletter, a discussion between Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd about Iggy’s prowess that he culled from a 1970 edition of Gay Power (also quoted at length in Dave Marsh’s piece on the band that ran first in Creem then in Zigzag) and an abridged version of Meltzer’s ‘Getting It Off And Taking It Off: Iggy and the Stooges’, which was first published in his biweekly outlet, ‘Rock and Raunch’, a column for the pornographic magazine Screw. The Stooges also enjoyed a double-page spread of photographs in the book’s plate section: Iggy giving the finger to his audience, courtesy of Lee Childers, and on all fours in ripped jeans by Dustin Pittman, both taken at one or other of the New York gigs. For a group still not much more than a cultish fad, such extensive coverage was indicative of the critical space The Stooges had assumed and been assigned. They were the avant-garde dum-dum band that critics could readily patronise, discuss in erudite terms or dismiss as bozos. Neither position being mutually exclusive.

After witnessing an Ugano’s show, New York’s doyen of rock critics, Lillian Roxon, thought Iggy Stooge the ‘sexiest thing since Mick Jagger’. In her encyclopaedia of rock she described the band under their original name, ‘Psychedelic Stooges’, as having the spirit of W. C. Fields, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Elvis Presley’ – a rock ’n’ roll comedy show. The Stooges were not apparently self-made, rather, ‘they were discovered in 1968’, she wrote, as if they were found in some Michigan backwater by a team of rock ’n’ roll anthropologists led by Prof. Danny Fields, Roxon’s good friend. Reviewing The Stooges’ October New York gigs at the Electric Circus, she wrote of Iggy:

His whole idea is to jolt the audience into a state of fear and shock. When he sings to a girl, or to the audience, he does not do it caressingly but with anger and violence. The girl doesn’t know whether she wants to mother him – or back away. Watching the indecision is part of the sadistic thrill of being in The Stooges audience . . .He seems to embody the violence around in America today.

The Stooges were rock’s pranksters, mocking its pretentions, and a broadcast from the dark side – a cipher for the rotten state of the nation. On the band’s third return to Manhattan in the early summer of 1971, Roxon wrote: ‘The Stooges are definitely the darlings of the avant-garde this year. It must be the spitting’. The ambiguity around how the band should be categorized or how they might be conceived was found in the question of whether they were a crass record company hype or a valid form of artistic expression? Whether synthetic or authentic? The conceptual task of answering the question was left to the critics in the audience. In this hot house atmosphere, as rock’s second generation began to mutate into its third iteration, Iggy’s clowning, his abuse of the audience, was most often received as performance art.

On the point about rock as social communiqué and critique, rock writers had no end of examples they could draw upon, not the least of which was The Stooges’ brothers, the MC5. The Motor City’s finest had been featured in Age of Rock 2 with a lengthy interview conducted by David Walley, first published in a July 1969 edition of Jazz & Pop:

Wayne: We need to talk about music because music really needs to be talked about. It’s the most personal thing. The important product.
David: All right, how is the energy level of music concerned with the MC5’s aims and goals? Is music a radicalizing tool?
Wayne: Oh, there’s no doubt about it. Music is, as you know, the killer efficient communication form. It feels good, it feels better than reading something.
David: It’s sort of like a cathartic effect.
Rob: (laughter) We’re from the Midwest – we don’t know any big words . . .
David: Where do you think this approach is going?

The rhetorical moves made by the band, from being highly self-conscious – ‘killer efficient’ communicants – to humorous self-effacement – ‘we don’t know any big words’ – is the common place in the era’s critical prose/pose. Humour was used to mask the pretentious, to track back from ideas that appeared to be over-reaching. Meltzer was past master of this game, its idiot savant. In a confected 1968 piece for Crawdaddy, republished in Age of Rock 2, he is supposedly being interviewed by Andy Warhol. The question and answer routine falls over itself as the concept of the ‘unknown tongue’ is discussed. Meltzer’s exercise is an absurd melange, a muddle of ideas that is at once a parody of the worst excesses of rock criticism and is the very thing itself. On The Stooges he wrote:

For every rock there’s a criticism and for every raunch there’s an epistemology. So raunch-wise, epistemologically speaking, my criticism of them is this: they dress real well, they have one shirt that’s pink with a shrunken head design, they have another that says Cocaine using the Coca-Cola logo, they have a lot of good shoes and some good boots. They’re what music is all about, going back even further than the first pair of blue suede shoes . . . [Iggy] learned the big beat from pounding on his tinker toys when he was just a youngster. THAT’S THE ONLY TRAINING YOU CAN GET FOR A LIFETIME OF ROCK AND ROLL, which makes the Stooges the only guys who know what they’re doing, including King Crimson.

Meltzer was not alone in his project of splicing the intellectual with the primitive, at its most reductive – The Stooges with King Crimson – it was a mongrelisation of the low and the high, the vulgar and the refined – Lester Bangs, somewhat, and Nick Tosches, wholeheartedly, joined in with similar flights of philosophical excess brought back to ground by earthy troglodyte pleasures.

Tosches’ oxymoronic intellectual primitivism took appreciable form with his sprawling essay ‘The Punk Muse – the lowdown on grease’, first published in Fusion and then collected in Twenty-Minute Fandangos. His point of departure was a critique of ‘honky bluesmen’, young white middle-class musicians who want to play black but can’t because they are not the authentic thing itself:

A straight Honky Music (Honk2) scene is a thing where you have a bunch of guys with teased hair up on a stage doing black blues, singing, with admirable ventriloquial skill, like Howlin’ Wolf in the throes of a Dexedrine orgasm, to a mob of suburban quasi-virgins who compensate for their fear of sex by substituting ‘The Lemon Song’ by Led Zeppelin at a distance of eighty paces for a good stiff dick in the dark meat.

Those who perform and listen to such acts of mimesis are ‘punks’, the honk squared is their muse. Contrary to this aspiring but lowly type is the ‘Grease’, exemplified by The Cleftones, who knew they would never know:

They knew that the secret of the universe was up in Betty’s drawers and in no one else’s. And they never got to know the secret. So they stand, left foot forward, in a timeless void, forever recreating that moment when Gnosis squirmed and said, ‘I’m not that kind of girl’. . . Grease tropes like that, sublimating the electric theme of unrequited love to dazed unrequited hard-on and back again, cultivating it with the lethal dronings of the honk fuck ritual choreography, are heavier and deadlier than anything the Stooges are capable of calculating. That’s because it comes from the heart (id) and not from the ego; poetry is puked not plotted.

As he overlooked Margate sands, T. S. Eliot would have been at odds with Tosches’ formulation, but, with their spitting, The Stooges would have slipped right in alongside The Cleftones. Except, on Tosches terms their artifice excludes them from the canon of Grease. The Cleftones were ‘speaking from the heart’, he wrote, ‘from the inside out as opposed to the I-wish-this-were-the-inside out’, which is where The Stooges did fit in. They are punks, a lesser form, lower on the scale to grease because they are a confection.

Tosches may have rejected The Stooges as ego not id, but the band were a good mirror to his own aesthetic:

Other great Honky Bluesmen of the Golden Age of Classical Grease were the Clovers, who drenched their melodies with the rhythms of the collective foyerfuck of a generation, bead-rolling the surroundings of sex memories and inducing minor key orgasms in parking lots throughout the nation, and the later female vowel-jobbers, Shirelles and Shangri-Las (although they are, in a strictly chronological sense, denizens of the Early Decadence), holy queens of greasefuck poesy, transmitting osmotic tau-waves of epiphanous pussy stench through silver-sequined lamé and jet-black stretch pants, moaning at America's youth for a transubstantial clit-strafe in the time-warp of adolescence. Kiss me there, Billy, kiss me there . . . (Ronettes, early liberators of Sleaze, unsublimated sex) fingertips (odors) . . . There, Billy, there . . .

Tosches’ vulgar turns are as learned as any stanza in The Wasteland, as are his arcane allusions and his shifts from the vernacular to the cultivated, from the profane to the sanctified. Yet Tosches is no more T. S. Eliot than The Stooges are King Crimson.

Opposed to the ‘Classical Grease’ were ‘THE NITWITS. Alias the Assholes. Those who sweetened sex. The Valentines, Playmates, Penguins’. But the Grease could not be suppressed or sanitised, it rolled on. To make his point, Tosches takes a detour into the realm of mathematics, into ‘The Metalflaked Alephteriaries’. The compound of ‘aleph’ and ‘teriaries’ belonged to Tosches alone, but no one, least of all the author, expected the reader to stop, pause and consider what was before them, only to wonder at the display of erudition as he traverses three forms of infinity. His final formation:

One who deals in visions, that is, one who perceives all the infinite rays of one object, or objects of conjugal positions (intersecting rays), is an Alephteriary, someone like the Heartbeats or Eza Pound or Andy Warhol, someone who can make dirt chairs by spilling it the right way. A metalflaked alephteriary is someone who can handle the infinite but, nevertheless, has a little plastic skull on the rear deck of his Olds that, for a right turn, blinks red in the right eye, and, for a left turn, red in the left eye.

Of The Heartbeats 1956 recording ‘A Thousand Miles Away’ – ‘an amazing catatonic blues, which rivals any extant Samuel Beckett soliloquy, with its eternal pledge of “coming home soon”’, Tosches wrote, ‘The basis of the song is the perpetration of desolation by the emission of artificial emotions, the absence of their non-artificial emissions dictating psychotic existentialism’. If this seems more than a two-minute street corner pop record can bear, Tosches provided the (faux) footnote in support: ‘5. See Andrew Duras, “The Year Dionysos Never Showed: A Study of the Heartbeats”, American Journal of Honk/Hieratic Communication, XII: ii (October 1961), pp. 92–117.’ Nothing to argue with there then.

‘The Fall of the House of Grease’, its ‘decadent period’, ran from circa 1958 to 1965, from the tv debut of 77 Sunset Strip to Alan Freed’s death, it was the age of Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes, Paul Anka and Leslie Gore. It was a time of superhype, of ‘punk media’, of Fabian and Dick Clark. In this time zone, The Beatles and Bob Dylan emerged, the latter ‘swept up in the then-big folk punk fad’. For Tosches, Dylan’s catalogue up and until Highway 61 Revisited ‘had perpetuated some of the honkiest bullshit in the history of American music. He had sat there with peach fuzz on his chin, singing like a hardened Negro loner about cold death’. That was the outside looking in, all ego, but then with Highway ‘he saw the whole derangement he’d been involved in and he began to spew out things from his own heart, all those things he used to pretend weren’t in him. . . Take ‘From a Buick 6’, a near perfect song, as good as anything the Heartbeats had ever done. Pure alephteriary’. He followed this with Blonde on Blonde, ‘one of the best rock albums of the decade’. The Beatles were similarly late developers into the state of alephteriary – ‘who the fuck wants to hold somebody’s hand?’ – but the combined effect was to win over ‘hordes of Cerebrum Groupies to become intellectual bodyguards of rock, spouting their dissertations of fantastic spiff genius into the nation’s offset presses and lecture halls . . . The Beatles made rock a punk religion’. They turned rock from a ‘calmative’ experience, you could rip it up on Saturday night but for the rest of the week you conformed. In revolt against this order, The Beatles said the rock experience could last seven days a week and ‘incited, albeit mildly, the feeling of discontent’. In doing so they paved the way for the ‘truly culturally revolutionary groups – the Jefferson Airplane, the Fugs, Country Joe and the Fish, even to a certain extent the Doors’.

Grease is the divine state of being, punk is the unworthy aspirant to that holy order, a rank acolyte. Those who solemnised rock, the cerebrum groupies, were punk critics. Meltzer, Bangs and Tosches were the grease who, from the heart, could see beyond the finite. But ‘punk’ and ‘grease’ were hardly separable from each other any more than the id is from the ego, or pure from impure. Writing in 1969 for the Detroit Free Press, Mike Gormley tacitly pulled together the cerebral and the somatic, the intellectual and the primitive, The Stooges were his test case:

The music they play has been described as stupid rock at its best. Iggy calls it dirty music and the group’s manager, Jimmy Silver, says ‘it’s dance music, fun music for kids’.
Iggy expanded on his definition. ‘The music we play is like a ritual we go through. It sounds like elemented rock but it’s actually based on classical and folk themes that are ancient. There’s a kind of bizarreness to it because we felt bizarre. When we play, a lot of things come out intentionally, so that’s the basic thing. It may be the reason our music is extremely moody. It has very simple moods to it.

Iggy as punk prophet and muse, The Stooges a greaser’s manifesto. Tosches wanted the purity of an untrammelled id, his Heartbeats, but they are a fantasy, his own honky blues; he was on surer ground with extolling the impurity of Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited. With The Stooges, Tosches’ had tried to outdo Meltzer and Bangs, dismissing the band they had lauded to establish his hip credentials. In doing so Tosches ignored his own equation: punk + grease = metalflake alephteriary. Such a formulation meant you could convene with Iggy Stooge to testify on the infinite power of the Heartbeats, the one didn’t exclude the other. They were co-dependents. Meantime, without a care for the infinite, Ron Asheton, posed as the ultimate greaser punk in his pink Star of Hollywood shrunken head shirt, Iron Cross and white buck shoes, and pressed the keys on the jukebox selecting once more The Yardbirds’ ‘I’m a Man’.

What the band has to go on is showmanship. Right now their style is so unique that success comes easily.
But Iggy doesn’t seem to care either way.
‘The Stooges were together for a whole year before we even had a gig, and nobody even thought of us as a band. But I didn’t care, literally didn’t care, and I don’t care now. I don’t exalt some format of the band and I don’t exalt its success. If I want some success, and I happen to be in the mood to accept some success, sure, I’ll take it. I’ll grab for it, or maybe throw it away, or maybe I’ll kiss it . . .’
And that’s the word, straight from Iggy.
– ‘A Painful Exercise in Pure Volume’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin (October 12, 1970)

Lester Bangs didn’t make the cut for Twenty-Minute Fandangos, his two glory shots ‘Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung’ and ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’ were published in the same year as Eisen’s volume, but his two-part review of The Stooges’ Fun House, published in November and December 1970 editions of Creem might have been a late contender. Perhaps it was and Eisen decided that he already had enough Stooges. Whatever, it so closely followed the lines laid by Meltzer and Tosches to suggest it wasn’t because the editor was opposed to Bangs’ sermonising.

‘Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool?’ opens with ‘Anatomy of Disease’ or the critical reaction to The Stooges, who have been abused, derided, condescended to and have faced ‘outright hostility’. Their stage act made for good copy but is too easily dismissed, wrote Bangs, with an ‘instant wag putdown’. Their music appeared so simple anyone should be able to play it, he continued, ‘that so few can produce any reasonable facsimile, whatever their abilities, is overlooked’ and, besides, he added, John Cale got the credit, for whatever it was worth, for their debut. As ‘theme music for suburban high school kids freaked out on reds and puberty and fantasies of nihilistic apocalypses’, The Stooges are scorned and dismissed. They carried within themselves the same sickness that was at large in the culture as a whole, ‘a crazed quaking uncertainty, an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times.’ But if they were rotten with disease, they also carried ‘a strong element of cure, a post derangement sanity’. The critical positions ranked against The Stooges were accepted by Bangs, the hostility shown toward them, the accusations of being mailable amateurs, their sickness, these things were not refuted by him but returned as necessary attributes of rock ’n’ roll: the core of the matter. . . To reject what The Stooges represented was to reject rock ’n’ roll itself.

The Stooges are as important as any band working today, Bangs wrote, but don’t call what they do ‘art or you may wind up with a deluxe pie in the face.

What it is, instead, is what rock and roll at heart is and always has been, beneath the stylistic distortions the last few years have wrought. The Stooges are not for the ages – nothing created now is – but they are most implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.

The Stooges could not be faulted for being what they were, a continuation of rock ’n’ roll’s illegitimacy. The critical establishment were not wrong in their observations, but their value judgement was skewed, distorted and based on bad faith.

To get to a point where Bangs felt he could explain this phenomenon he has first to clear the foul air that surrounded the release of their first album and the hype that surrounded British blues musicians and critical incantations like ‘supergroup’ and ‘superstar’ – Tosches’ Honk2 – that have bewitched and befuddled ‘your poor average kid, cruisin’ addled down the street in vague pursuit of snatch or reds or rock mag newstands’ who otherwise had ‘no truck with the Stooges’. It’s that kid, that malcontent, who Bangs intended to ‘liberate’.

A ‘pre-eminently American kid’, Iggy Stooge was a surrogate for the teenager Bangs was honing in on. Both singer and kid suffer from confusion, doubt and uncertainty, from inertia and boredom – ‘suburban pubescent darkness’. But was this a theme worth pursuing? asked Bangs. Did the travails of a suburban punk measure up to the Black Panthers confrontation with the ‘new social systems’? Comparatively an irrelevance? Weren’t the Stooges simply trading in adolescent caterwauling? And wasn’t Iggy Stooge ‘a blatant fool’? Bangs embraced the argument, and again returned the principal charge of Iggy as clown. He was indeed a fool, but better the fool than the emperor in his new glad rags was how Bangs read the scenario.

If the hype, the record industry, is a joke, cosmic or otherwise, then being a fool is the only legitimate response. If not, ‘fantasies of a puissant “youth culture”, would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off it. Can you imagine Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant conning the audience” “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” – he really gives them nothing, not even a good-natured grinful “Howdy-do” – or Jimmy Page’s arch scowl of supermusician ennui?’. Iggy is Bangs’ court jester, an impertinent figure capable of pricking the airs and vanities of his betters by hurling a cream pie at them. He does this as readily as he succumbs to the indignities his audience imposes by return:

It takes courage to make a fool of yourself, to say, ‘See, this is all a sham, this whole show and all its floodlit drug-jacked realer-than-life trappings, and the fact that you are out there and I am up here means not the slightest thing’. Because it doesn’t. The Stooges have that kind of courage, but few other performers do.

For Bangs The Stooges had the strength to ‘meet their audience on its own terms’ and not respond with ‘solemn grimaces of artistic angst, no sir’.

Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront him – he enters the audience frequently to see what's what and even from the stage his eyes reach out searchingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled strangers who're seldom able to stare him down. It's your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him, why, welcome to it. But the King of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and the authority, and few can. In this sense lg is a true star of the rarest kind – he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.

As to the music it is, wrote Bangs, ‘monotonous and simple on purpose’, ‘mindless rhythmic pulsation . . . providing effective hypnotic counterpoint to the sullen plaint of Iggy’s words’. Their pristine simplicity is compared to the one-finger organ drone of Question Mark and the Mysterians ’96 Tears’ – the ur-text and origin story for The Stooges. Bangs has a profound love and respect for the experimentation of The Yardbirds and The Who, the use of feedback and noise which finds its ultimate locus in the Velvet Underground’s ‘White Heat/White Noise’ but the end result of this sonic experimentation was not liberation but the dead end of ‘Art-rock’ embodied in Sgt. Pepper. Things had taken a wrong turn somewhere back down the line, so Bangs was intent on refiguring the map’s trig points.

Bangs argued that the route out from behind and around this problem was to marry the simple four-four beat of two or three chord rock ’n’ roll and its monotonous melodies with the complexity of free jazz. ‘The Stooges’ music is like that.’ wrote Bangs:

It comes out of an illiterate chaos gradually taking shape as a uniquely personal style, emerges from a tradition of American music . . . that a band can start out bone-primitive, untutored and uncertain, and evolve into a powerful and eloquent ensemble. . . rock is mainly about beginnings, about youth and uncertainty and growing through and out of them. And asserting yourself way before you know what the fuck you’re doing. . . It can’t grow up – when it does, it turns into something else.

After working through the impact (and misfires) of Fun House, Bangs concluded that the Stooges are ‘super-modern’ but definitely not Art. They are a put-on, a joke, but one that reveals the sickness at the heart of things and that revelation comes on like a threat, but a ‘threat that is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation’.

*Detroit Free Press* (December 26, 1969)

When Greil Marcus pulled together his collection of Bangs’ work he opened with ‘Carburetor Dung and Psychotic Reactions’ and followed it with a late 70s consideration of Astral Weeks, both fell under the heading ‘Testaments’: Bangs as advocate for a form of rock ’n’ roll as adolescent discontent matched with his empathetic side. But the Van Morrison interregnum does not last long before it is followed in turn by the ‘Blowing It Up’ section with the lengthy Fun House review and the even longer ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’ screed/manifesto.

‘Carburetor Dung’ opens with Bangs acting the role of Creem’s Uncle Remus for third-generation rock kids: ‘Run here, my towhead grandchildren, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee’. His tale of yore concerns The Yardbirds ’65 before the rot set in with their ‘pretentious and overblown’ progeny of ‘emaciated fops called Led Zeppelin’. His story is part wallow in nostalgia, detailing the impact the Yardbirds had on numerous aspirant players, Bangs wrote: ‘and then punk bands started cropping up who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds sound and reducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter . . . oh, it was beautiful, it was pure folklore, Old America, and sometimes I think those were the best days ever’. Bangs felt the same psychotic reaction as that which had inspired The Shadows of Knight and The Count Five, but in his fantasy it doesn’t end in art and Sgt Pepper. In his alternative history the Count Five continue to record and ineptitude remains a righteous attribute . . . a refusal to conform to the mundane, to kowtow to refined notions of good taste, to grow up.

Bangs’ follow up piece, ‘James Taylor Marked for Death’ switched out The Yardbirds for The Troggs and where Amon Duul had picked up Bangs’ torch of ineptitude in this latest iteration it was passed onto, of course, The Stooges. What changed was that the flame had dimmed, the light he was shining on the juvenile malcontent was receding:

The MC5 might have put you ‘flat on your back’ with ‘nipple stiffners’ and ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’ jams, the Stooges might tie you up in feedback wires while Iggy performed unthinkable experiments on your mind and body, even the Doors might have given you a crawly gust or two, but the Troggs eschewed all trendy gimmicks and kinky theatrics, delivered their proposition with sidewalk directness and absolute sincerity, and came out for any ear that half listens the most powerfully lust-driven outfit in white rock ’n’ roll then or now.

Between the reminisces about teenage fumbling and sex fantasies, Bangs explored what it means for a band like The Stooges to channel these adolescent urges post-the lust driven and feedback paroxysm of The Troggs and The Yardbirds:

I ain’t as desperate as I sound, but ‘Wild Thing’ is rock ’n’ roll at its most majestic and for all the volume of product we don’t have any ‘Wild thing’ these days – a few things come close, maybe a Velvets ‘Head Held High’ or Stooges ‘Little Doll’, but even these are created from a standpoint of intellectualized awareness and consequent calculation.

The imposition of self-reflection in rock ’n’ roll meant the ground had changed, what once fuelled The Troggs is today but a simulacra or at best a waning echo of the real thing. In his introduction to Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock, Greil Marcus considers the explosive moment of Sgt. Pepper that Meltzer is concerned with as the ‘apotheosis of rock-as-art’, which was ‘contradicted by rock's existence as no more than a brute actualization of everyday life.

With Sgt. Pepper, art-was-dead because it suddenly ceased to exist as a realm separate from everyday life – as a unit of significance distant from it. The record was so alive, so surprising, that people suddenly lived their everyday lives with a new intensity. They walked down their streets as if they had never seen them before. They didn't necessarily connect that experience to the appearance of Sgt. Pepper, just as they had not necessarily connected the dulling of their streets to the presence of bad songs, or the vitalization of those streets to the presence of good ones. . . The death of art is what rock 'n' roll, as the brute actualization, had aimed for from the beginning; from the beginning, rock ’n’ roll had meant to change ‘art’ into everyday speech . . . But then the triumph was forgotten; art went back to ‘art’; everyday life went back to banality.

In his review of Fun House and in ‘Carburetor Dung’, Bangs pushed back against that return to the quotidian binary of art and life, he wanted that moment where the two are fused together, or at least the possibility of that fusion as with his fantasy of primitive rock melded together with free jazz, but in ‘James Taylor Marked for Death’ he recognised, like Meltzer, like Tosches and like Marcus, that the act of synthesis changed everything, moreover, even if the streets return to a state of mundanity and art is returned to the gallery, that moment can never be regained, it has passed as certainly as the greaser teen years Bangs never got over, all that is left, as Tosches called it, is punk.

***

*Detroit Free Press* (September 21, 1969)

The Stooges are now firmly established in the rock canon in ways none of their early advocates would have prophesised (or would have wanted) yet in many ways the band’s first critics were as responsible for this state of affairs as anyone, their philosophical disquisitions, whether parodic or not, would leave a mark on a generation or two of writers to come. They promised that The Stooges were always, and in all ways, a more interesting prospect to consider than any other of their peers and contemporaries – a shape shifting object of fascination. The Stooges now, however, are fixed in aspic as the ultimate cult band – a connoisseur’s obsession. Fifty-odd years after the fact they are a familiar yet rare pleasure, available in all formats yet cliquishly exclusive. As the magazine articles, blog posts and books on the Stooges proliferate, as the bootlegs get turned into deluxe reissues and the few feet of extant live footage gets stitched into hagiographic documentaries we have never known more about this band and yet never understood less about them – are psychologists still having a ball with The Stooges? When Bangs and co. were obsessing the Stooges they were not yet a spent force, their potential to make an impression on critics and audiences alike was still in play. After the fact, how to regain that vitality, that tantalising sense of potential? Attempting to capture those moments-in-time is what any decent account or history of the band must reach for if it is going to be more than just another sacrament at the altar of their cult.

This is why Michael S. Begnal’s The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967–71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022) is such a welcome intrusion into the stilled debate. It is an unapologetically academic volume and, as such, returns things to where Bangs, Tosches and Meltzer left off. This is regardless of whether you see their ramblings as pastiche, pseudo-intellectual, pretentious or as the gospel truth. Meltzer, anyway, would surely enjoy Begnal’s use of European high theory to pull open the mummified corpse of the band to once more let loose the reverberations.

Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Attali and Theodor Adorno are Begnal’s key co-conspirators helping him to unwind the tension the band embodied as avant-garde practitioners and as music industry product. You can imagine other theorists and other methods to negotiate the continuum between art and pop, the high and the low, the vulgar and the refined as well as other contexts to make meaning out of The Stooges (a more thoroughgoing take on teen-trash consumption as practiced, in particular, by Ron Asheton – that pink Star of Hollywood shrunken head shirt – would have been in my ideal study), but what’s important is the debate itself that Begnal is stirring up, not his particular methodology. If the theory sticks in your craw, if you won’t meet this scholar at least halfway, then we are stuck with The Stooges as empty godheads at whose shrine we can only offer up more and more arcane pieces of information and newly discovered facts that lead only to more solipsistic inanities, fetishistic practices and smothering sermons on why the band matter to you rather than on the matter of the band itself.

Lost in the Future moves through three key phases in the band’s careening – their initial adventures in Michigan’s art spaces, ballrooms and clubs as the Psychedelic Stooges; the second phase is the two LPs they made for Elektra and the third is dedicated to an unrealised third album. With the implosion of the band in 1971 Begnal ends his disquisition, but a second volume on the Raw Power era is promised.

A noise-art ensemble without melodic intent or song structure and sans the mundane line-up of guitar, bass and drums, the Psychedelic Stooges valued improvisation and playfulness that involved found objects and domestic appliances – producing a subversion of the principles – competence and respect for the generic rules of music making and performance – that the groups, which The Stooges, bottom of the bill, supported, held to be irreducible. Whatever the worth of their art practice, in this iteration The Stooges were so far out they could never be appropriated and packaged by the music industry, until they were . . .

Shucking off the psychedelic tag freed the band of a redundant signifier of their self-identification with rock’s progressive element that by 1968 had turned experiment into conformity. By then ‘psychedelic’ no longer carried an element of provocation nor adventure the band obviously intended it to have, but having a shortened name that continued to pay homage to the Three Stooges, purveyors of the lowest form of comedy imaginable – a dumbshow of physical clowning without an iota of self-reflection or artistic pretension – now that was inflammatory. Sitting outside of both rock’s mainstream and art culture, Begnal argues, The Stooges found purpose in bridging the divide between independence and a collective approach toward creativity, as members within a band and as a band unique among their peers.

When The Stooges entered into a relationship with Elektra records that channel between the communal and the individual was stress-tested. Begnal plots the line of tension that was revealed between the demand that the band conform to the marketplace and their attempt to hold true to the principles they had fashioned for themselves:

Having evolved from their original freeform, experimental approach into something more recognizably rock, there is still the affirmation that, even though Iggy takes the role of frontman, the shared ‘group voice’ – forged in the process of a mutually unfolding artistic evolution – predominates. In opposition to the machine-like aspects of both the hit-driven music industry and a regimented life of factory work, the Stooges’ music centralizes the creative development of organic human interaction.

Against the odds, the first album successfully negotiated this predicament, argues Begnal, but was it a repeatable experience and was that repetition even desirable? This predicament was especially charged, Begnal writes, given that the band ‘were committed to ongoing change and evolution’ and that their ‘deliberately anti-pop stance’ had ‘put them in a particularly difficult position in terms of building a wider audience and selling records’.

Analysing the creation of Fun House is the book’s centre piece, Begnal has clearly listened with dedication and care to the boxed set of the Los Angeles recording sessions. His exploration and evaluation of the development of individual songs and the album overall is erudite and refined, wherein earlier chapters his ideas tumble out in a rush, here he gives them ample breathing space that allows him to take up a more nuanced set of critical positions. His analysis illuminates the problem all bands face if they want to make records for a major company and not compromise on their vision. The conformists, Begnal argues,

can write slickly produced pop ditties, or. If they still insist on projecting some sort of countercultural or rebellious image or sound, they need to make sure it’s emptied of any real danger to the existing order of things, so that it too can be packaged and marketed successfully – recuperated, as Attali puts it (or assimilated, as Gioia puts it). Bands that don’t do one or the other can therefore be easily dismissed, market dynamic likely guaranteeing they will soon disappear from the scene. Most listeners don’t even need to be told to see them as ‘noise’ or as not actually ‘music’, because their tastes have already been formed by this same process.

Beyond the two albums, Begnal dedicates significant space and thought to their live performances, mustering a superb array of primary accounts (if you don’t like his methodology then you can at least harvest the fruits of his bibliographic labour) that effort pays off in what for me was the true delight of the book, his analysis of what would have been their third album if Elektra hadn’t pulled the plug. Concert reviews and interviews with witnesses are arraigned alongside his listening to the Easy Action set You Don’t Want My Name You Want My Action that documented in lo-fi form the five piece band with James Williamson, joining Ron Asheton, on guitar, across four shows from April/May 1971.

While steeped in nihilistic ‘thirst for destruction’, the new songs were not about death per se but rather signify in retrospect the moment of their creation, the desperation that the Stooges must have felt, the intimations of potential extinction, and a strange kind of joy at the same time.

But that potential album, as he writes, was lost to the future, a what could have been that keeps the story of The Stooges still moving ahead, still in virtual if not actual progress. Begnal ends his account on the cusp of tomorrow with the disintegration of the original band and their subsequent consecration – an act of fan based sanctification as it was of a music industry assimilation of their non-conformity, the taming of their radical intent. And yet,

Concomitantly, there is still power in the Stooges’ work that remains and comes through every time we listen to their records. Though they may have often been perceived as ‘lost in the future’ in their own time, and finally animated as ‘classic’ in our time, the raw particularity of their music and the uncompromising nature of their vision continue to prompt us to reconsider what it means to make non-commercial art in a consumerist society.

Begnal’s book is in itself eloquent testimony to the fact that The Stooges continue to inspire listeners, those among us who are not content to accept instant gratification but instead join with the psychologists in having a ball with The Stooges as we follow the lines laid down by Lester Bangs that guarantee a real cool time with liberation as our goal.