The Stooges – ‘Fun House’
As a new decade dawned on Detroit, proto-punk pioneers The Stooges released what would soon become their magnum opus. Although a commercial failure upon its initial release, Fun House has since grown a dedicated cult following and is arguably the greatest punk rock album of all time.
Immediately, from the kick-off of the first track ‘Down on the Street’, The Stooges assert their musical manifesto. Featuring a heavy blues-inspired riff and the discordant outbursts of frontman Iggy Pop, Fun House wastes no time in transporting the listener to the dirty underbelly of the Detroit proto-punk scene. The sounds of ‘Down on the Street’ almost feel as though someone had pumped The Rolling Stones full of speed and set them loose on the streets of Michigan.
A common frustration with punk music, as a genre, is that much of the music is very simplistic or underdeveloped. Of course, this is usually by design; the ‘here’s three chords, now start a band’ attitude rife throughout the 1970s punk movement favoured attitude over musical skill. The refreshing quality of The Stooges, therefore, is that they manage to master both. Not only do the band demonstrate their intense musical ability on Fun House, with the guitar stylings of Ron Asheton a particular highlight, but they also show the raw power (excuse the pun) of their defiant attitude.
That energetic anger and power rise as the tracklisting progresses, peaking with Iggy’s atavistic wail, which begins ‘T.V. Eye’. With a cryptic meaning surrounding the recurring line “She got a TV Eye on me” – apparently referencing a term Ron and Scott Asheton’s sister used to refer to guys she fancied – the track barely gives you enough time to stop and think about the lyrics. It is no mean feat to make a four-minute track feel like a quick hit of adrenaline akin to the hardcore punk rock that followed decades ago when Fun House first burst onto the scene, but Iggy and The Stooges make it feel effortless.
Allowing the audience to catch a fleeting breath, The Stooges slow things down by the midpoint of the record. ‘Dirt’ is an ode to their blues influences, with the iconic bassline provided by Dave Alexander forming the backbone of the track. Although the song retains the same guitar shredding, sneering attitude and occasional screeches from Iggy that characterise the rest of the album, Pop’s voice feels more tender on ‘Dirt’; it is not dissimilar from the kind of vocal performance he would later employ on solo work like 1977’s The Idiot.
Unsurprisingly, The Stooges revert to their usual adrenaline-fuelled wild ride on the latter half of Fun House. ‘1970’ is arguably the album’s defining track, espousing the ‘live fast, die young’ attitude that Iggy became known for. Contrasting the opening track of their eponymous debut, ‘1969’, the Fun House track encapsulates the development of The Stooges from garage proto-punks to one of the most exciting, angry and frightening groups of the decade.
Put simply, Fun House is an absolute masterpiece. Even if you remove the incredible legacy of influence that it had on later generations, spawning punk, post-punk, and grunge – tracks like ‘L.A. Blues’ even have a James Chance-esque no wave quality to them – the brilliance of the album is clear in isolation. The Stooges were responsible for some of the greatest music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but throughout their discography, they never really topped the electrifying energy of Fun House.
