The Stooges
Fun House

A long absence of mine... many things have happened... but let's leave that aside. The important thing is that when you listen obsessively on repeat to the three albums by the legendary Stooges for two months straight or more, you can't help but wonder if everything is okay...

Then you stop by the record store with two beers and a laid-back spirit, just wanting to find one of the aforementioned albums, perhaps the latest, Raw Power, but instead you come across the 2005 reissue double LP of Fun House staring right at you and you can't resist picking it up. 18 euros well spent; you may starve, but at least the heart must be fed... we are still human after all, or at least... I sometimes wonder...

And I think dear old Iggy Pop (back then Iggy Stooge) wondered the same, deep down, clouded by purplish streams of heroin, amidst the colorful carpets of the Funhouse, in the twisted thin outline that lies between the black and fiery red of the cover, which, as if by spontaneous chance, would haunt him like the demon of self-destruction for decades.

And here's this double LP with the original December '70 Elektra version and a second LP of takes (including an unreleased track) mixed in 1999.
I think it would be pointless to explain how important this record is and all that blah blah blah... I think the right attitude towards works like this is perhaps to throw yourself on the couch and spend time together with the needle as it runs through the depraved grooves of these recordings... it's also pointless to talk specifically about the second LP, apart from the magnificent forgotten gem Lost In The Future (incidentally on take 1) that shows us how the Stooges of the Funhouse era were a kind of unstable musical institution: uranium atoms in instruments played just a few meters away in a sort of perverse live setting where Iggy starts off slurring nonsense amidst the total hilarity of his no longer sane fellow troublemakers, including the legendary Asheton rhythm section (Scott on drums and the revolutionary and misunderstood Ron on guitar), Dave Alexander, the group's member of Club27 (who disappeared due to alcoholism in '75, it's still unknown whether he left the group because they did too many drugs or they kicked him out because he did too many...), a jazzy Steven Mackay on sax (new entry), and of course the wild spinning-iguana Iggy Pop.

Down On The street, cadenced, violent rhythm, almost to make us understand from the start what territories we'll soon be ready to explore... a spectacle. 
Follows a fantastic Loose, one of the possibly most beautiful songs ever composed by our guys, with Asheton's typical walls and Iggy's screams adorning it all. It's said enough sessions of Loose were made to fill an entire album... indeed the original remains probably inimitable. Racing ahead!
Different story for TV Eye, where the horny Iggy shouts and growls relying on Ron's roaring strings accompanied by the usual paranoid drumbeat; in all this we always have Mackay's imperial and magmatic bass mixing the hellish broth of the others. The final reprise is a sort of continuum, as if suggesting we listen to this song until death. Almost, almost :P!
Dirt. Dirty, filthiest, barking... whispering... hanged strings and voodoo rhythm on a wonderful bass loop. I'm listening to it now... I'm feeling crap, but with every drag of a cigarette I inhale and exhale; it's all repetition, obsessive repetition, like these bass loops. And then come Asheton's electrifying wah-wahs to capture your spirit. And Iggy is there, bouncing, asking if you know what you feel when you touch him, girl... oh yes, there is fire, damn fire.
Wonderful.
Nice also is take 4 with a more present bass and an alternative loop... though possibly more iconic is the original.

The needle scratches, better lift it, get out of the semi-lazy couchness and grab another beer. And then you move to side B.
And just as there was the acidic 1969 now it's the racing 1970's turn. "I Feel Allright!!!" shouts the iguana under a wonderful riff with the usual rhythm section seasoning it all with a pinch of salt, oil, and not less, black pepper... pure magic here too... worth noting how well it turned out and perhaps with an even more insane sax on the second LP version (take 3 by the way...).
The title track Funhouse starts almost like a sequel to the previous one... reminding us they, the Stooges, are aliens from the future, singing their misunderstood melody in whatever piece they compose. Wonderful groove, as always degenerating as it progresses with Iggy getting angrier and the omnipresent Asheton painting strokes on rust with his 6-stringed lime-coated brushes. 7 and a half minutes that you won't be able to get out of your head.
Honestly I might be raving but I wonder if all the drugs packed in this record have some kind of excitatory, euphoric effect and induce addiction even more than 40 years later... absurd, the effects almost coincide :D.
The degeneration continues but with steady percussion and bass, at least until we almost perceive the non-blues "L.A. Blues": screams and screeching guitars.
It's as if the end of King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man were turned upside down and mixed, like the images on the Funhouse cover, and everything was dipped in red madness played in the eternal darkness of the mad farm (the Funhouse, precisely) where this gem was realized, born almost from what everyone considered manure. In short, summing up, it's five minutes of pure madness where in a single recording the instruments echo, chase each other and thunder while Iggy goes crazy in the room. Pure experimentation even if I believe they didn't even know what they were doing, perhaps only aware of being somehow touched by the hand of the rock goddess passing by...
People started to realize this almost ten years later... but that's another story.

It all ends among feedback and screeches... in a black solitude... from Red to deep dark.
No life lesson, no moral, no epic word to utter.

These gentlemen are the Stooges: take or leave, hate or love, ignore or listen.

And may everything go as it should or shouldn't:
"I been dirt
And I don't care
Cause I'm burning inside
I'm just a yearning inside
And I'm the fire o' life"