1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 190. The Stooges – Fun House (1970)

 

BAM! Now that’s what I call hard rocking. Compared to the Unholy Trinity of hard rock, which are unmistakably of the Seventies, this one still sounds current. It’s much more punk than the British hard rock bands, heavy pounding rhythms and crunchy guitar licks, with Iggy Pop’s vocals guttural and percussive over the top of it. When he sings “When you cut me down”, he spits out the word “cut” so that it’s almost onomatopoeic, cutting the air. This is the track Dirt, about the only thing on here that counts as a slower track, but it carries no less power for that, in fact to me it probably carries more and is one of the better tracks on here. The final track, L.A. Blues, has nothing blues about it, being almost entirely a wall of noise, like the final beats of a rock track dragged out to the entire five minutes and laced with primal scream therapy.

In many ways it’s the perfect retrospective album for 1970, the birth of a new decade that comes not with the new hope promised by the Summer of Love, but the same old Vietnam War dragging on, and now kidnappings, hostage-taking, bombings, and coups from far left and far right across the world. Tracks like Down In The Street and T.V. Eye rebel against all this, spitting in the eye of authority and convention and like the punks near the end of the decade, unleashing frustrations in a combination of hedonism and rage.

Given that the likes of Joey Ramone and Mark E Smith have both cited this album as inspiration, you can see where the punk of the later decade and beyond got their birth. I loved this one.