‘Heavy Liquid’: The album that best encapsulates the energy of The Stooges
Many rock and roll bands have come and gone over the years, each trying to establish themselves as the new face of musical rebellion. The irony is, of course, that all these attempts are futile; no band will ever be quite as rebellious or revolutionary as The Stooges. Disciples of garage rock, the Michigan outfit carved out an abrasively original sound, signalling the end of the ‘peace and love’ years of the 1960s and ushering in the darker, angrier era of 1970s punk rock.
Garage rock, as a genre, was built upon young groups making DIY music in humble surroundings without any profound musical proficiency. This is one of the many ways that The Stooges differed from the norm. Yes, Iggy Pop might have been the sweating lunatic moving sporadically across the stage like a speed-riddled runaway train, but the musicians that backed him – Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, and Dave Alexander – were as talented and profoundly musically minded as anybody else within the rock scene of the late 1960s. This unique combination of talent and raw energy led The Stooges to produce some vital albums.
Records like Raw Power or Fun House changed the lineage of rock and roll indefinitely, reflecting the absolute peak of the garage rock movement and inspiring virtually every future punk and alternative rock musician around the globe. However, the record label Elektra was fairly sceptical about how audiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s would react to this newfound sound.
As a result of this understandable uncertainty, various aspects of The Stooges’ powerful sound were toned down for the final release. For instance, The Velvet Underground’s John Cale originally mixed their 1969 debut, but his version was deemed too heavy for Elektra, and the final edition of the album was much more polished and presentable than the defiantly abrasive proto-punk that Cale had mixed.
While these final albums remain masterpieces in their own right, the only way to truly get a glimpse at the unadulterated, powerful fuzz of The Stooges is to look at their studio sessions and live performances. In that sense, no album encapsulates the energy, power, or originality of The Stooges quite as well as the compilation Heavy Liquid. Originally released as a box set in 2005, with a more digestible version released by Easy Action in 2017, the album is largely composed of material from the Raw Power sessions.
Given the fact that Raw Power is, as the title would suggest, the rawest and most stripped-back of all The Stooges’ albums, the studio sessions for the album are wonderfully visceral. In fact, if you look at the first section of the 2017 cut of Heavy Liquid, taken from the Olympic Studio sessions in London in 1972, those tracks act as a perfect summation of The Stooges as a whole.
Kicking off with the rallying cry of ‘I Got A Right’ – a track which never made the final cut for Raw Power but remains one of the greatest punk anthems of all time – and then moving into a cover of ‘Louie Louie’, The Stooges break down musical boundaries while paying tributes to their DIY roots in the garage rock movement. The band continue to espouse their influences on their sneering take on the Motown classic ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ – paying tribute to their fellow musical revolutionaries in Michigan.
In addition to the quality of performance and songwriting captured on Heavy Liquid, the compilation is also imbued with a sense of spontaneity and even improvisation, which tends to get lost on the final mix of The Stooges’ studio records. The compilation allows a glimpse at the bare bones of Iggy Pop’s band, providing unparalleled insight into potentially the most important American rock and roll band of all time. After all, there is no punk, alternative rock, grunge, or even glam rock without the pioneering force of nature that was The Stooges.
