“My personal favourite”: The Stooges song Iggy Pop thought matched Little Richard
Since the dawn of rock and roll, Little Richard has been heralded as the gold standard of the genre, and with good reason, too. From the very beginning, Little Richard pioneered a ruthlessly energetic, rebellious, and adrenaline-fueled sound that inspired all future generations of rock musicians. There are few rock musicians throughout history who do not owe something to Richard, and proto-punk hero Iggy Pop was all too aware of this fact while recording with The Stooges.
Formed in Michigan in 1967, The Stooges were a defiant answer to the self-absorbed ‘peace and love’ era of hippiedom, which had come to dominate the American rock scene. With the advent of mind-bending psychedelia and soft folk rock, it seemed as if all the revolutionary edge had been taken out of rock and roll. The only saving grace during this period was the DIY garage rock scene, which had come to dominate the American underground. Iggy Pop and The Stooges emerged from that garage rock scene and, in many ways, eclipsed it.
At the peak of the hippie years, in the midst of Woodstock, The Stooges unleashed themselves onto the music scene of America. Pioneering an incredibly abrasive and endlessly powerful proto-punk sound, the best way to summarise the difference between The Stooges and the rest of the rock scene at the time is to say that The Stooges were chocked full amphetamines while everyone else was still smoking weed.
Speaking to the fact that Iggy and The Stooges were well ahead of their time, they did not witness a huge degree of success during their initial run of three albums. Nevertheless, these records have since been reappraised and rightly hailed as some of the most important rock albums of all time, particularly their 1973 effort Raw Power.
You can gauge the timeless and all-encompassing quality of Raw Power by looking at all those artists it helped to inspire. Everybody from The Smiths to Metallica was indebted to this record, which saw The Stooges boil down their sound to its roots, certainly living up to the album title.
Reportedly, though, the record was constructed during a strange time for the group, with Pop once recalling, “The band had a nice house to live in, and when I couldn’t come up with the lyrics and live with them at the same time, they put me in Blakes Hotel. I was staying in the basement. I’d stick my head out of the door, and there would be Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret. ‘Oh, I say, it’s Iggy Pop.’”
Perhaps rubbing shoulders with the upper classes led this album to be even more confrontational and uncompromising. Either way, the final product was constructed of multiple innovative and endlessly abrasive tracks, including the likes of ‘Search and Destroy’, which arguably became the band’s defining anthem. For Pop, however, it was ‘Shake Appeal’ which always stood out.
“My personal favourite here is ‘Shake Appeal’,” he told Uncut, “as that was the only three minutes of my life when I was ever going to approximate Little Richard. Although the track is far heavier than anything Little Richard would have ever recorded, it is awash with the same kind of energy and individualism that made Richard such a defining and enduring figure in the early rock and roll scene. The Stooges simply updated that sound, bringing the energy back into a rather bloated and overblown rock scene in America.
