12. Down On The Street

Stooges: Fun House (Elektra, 1970); composed by Dave Alexander, Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, and James Osterberg

The weirdest thing about the Stooges, even more than Iggy Pop’s atavistic stage routine and the primitivist guitar noise, was how much of an inspiration James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” was. That is not speculation – Iggy has said as much in print, but no one asks him about it much, because so many think they know what “punk” is when they hear it, but that is where you start with this music, not where you end up, necessarily. MC5 were neighbors, but so were Funkadelic when George Clinton was still mixing their albums on Yellow Sunshine. Another oddity is that Scott Asheton could not play the way they wanted him to unless Iggy was literally dancing in the studio and cuing him visually, the way Mick Jagger cued Charlie Watts. This track opens an utterly visionary album with an ignition of low register guitar noise and Iggy’s animal screeches over a straight four. One chord throughout almost the entire track, choked rhythm under Iggy’s spacy ruminations, until the refrains add one more chord, up a major fourth, and just explodes. Then it unexplodes for another verse until it explodes again. What are the verses about? Walking around and looking. And exploding.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).