All those years of griping about Iggy’s metal-head backing bands not cutting it, and now here it is: the Stooges live in 2004. We’ve seen Mr Pop do the hits many times in recent years, but after tonight I can’t think of him ever playing with any other band.
When the Stooges file on and tear into the bloody meat of ‘Loose’ off Funhouse, still the most kinetic electric rock ‘n’ roll record ever made, the feeling is one of disbelief at the sight of drummer Scott Asheton (dressed like the guy who comes to fix your car) and his guitarist brother Ron (in flak jacket, goatee and tinted glasses, looking like the guy who crashed it in the first place) occupying the same stage as Jim Osterberg.
That they sound this vicious after a three decade hiatus is a 50-something affront to Converse-sponsored plastic punkers whose only honourable response would be to slink away in a posture of abject humiliation. Green Day and their ilk specialise in the arrhythmical frenzy of adolescent wrist action. The Stooges deal in the pump and grind of full-body fornication.
My abiding memory of the experience is the sound. I’ll say it again, the sound. Sure, Iggy’s reputation as a reckless and hyperphysical performer is beyond reproach (and there was plenty of crowd surfing and amp-humping tonight), but this reunification with his Michigan kin has made him a better vocalist, one whose non-textual repertoire of hoots and hollers are not mere toss-offs but are in fact as integral to the songs as any of the great lyrics he’s written.
So here we will pay homage to the Stooge noise – a pent-up, piledriving, relentless, menacing, volatile, elemental, feral and utterly uninhibited din that manages to be equal parts industrial and organic. Of their contemporaries, only Crazy Horse are capable of locking into this particular kind of primordial gutbucket throb for any length of time.
To name names: ‘Down On The Street’ is a stripped down revved-up muscle car; ‘1969’ is a bone-jarring Bo Diddley juggernaut oozing liquefied wah-wah all over the upper frequencies; ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and ‘TV Eye’ induce instant Dionysian warp-spasm. When bass-playing Minuteman Mike Watt and Scott Asheton sync up on ‘Dirt’ – a song so greasy and minimalist and crude it’s almost avant-garde – one can only acknowledge that the level of concentration required to play music this intense for 75 minutes is formidable. And when Steve MacKay comes on to breathe demon free jazz saxophone into ‘1970’, ‘Funhouse’ and the ‘Peter Gunn’ waddle of ‘Skull Ring’, the effect is akin to a young Ornette playing White Light/White Heat, and one remembers Miles Davis’s early and prescient endorsement of the band.
So sure, this is the same set they’ve been playing for a year, and one that completely ignores Raw Power (presumably out of a reluctance to exhume the sour last days of Stoogedom). And sure, they took a gamble front-loading the set, the latter third being comprised of the more fair-to-middling elements of the catalogue such as ‘Not Right’ and ‘Little Doll’ – although there was a bilious new tune called ‘My Idea Of Fun’ (“is killing everyone”). But this candidate stayed riveted all the way through to an arse-baring reprise of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’.
Walking through the city centre afterwards, Dublin’s psychogeography felt significantly rawer and realer than it did a couple of hours earlier.