Most vintage Stooges concert recordings sound too awful to interest more than hardcore fans, because incredible performances are sunk in a swamp of low fidelity. These murky live tracks and songs-in-progress offer glimpses of how the band’s fourth album could have sounded had they retained record label support. All of this is historically important material. New listeners rarely know where to start in the Stooges’ discography. A Thousand Lights: Live in 1970 the Heavy Liquid box set Have Some Fun: Live at Ungano’s You Don’t Want My Name… You Want My Action More Power. The titles could fill a book: Metallic K.O. Since the band’s demise, devoted fans and opportunistic profiteers have done the only thing they could: gathered all live audience recordings, rehearsal and demo tapes, then released them as bootleg or semiofficial posthumous albums. One of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest tragedies is the fact that no one seems to have recorded an entire original Stooges concert on high fidelity multi-track, or professionally filmed an entire performance. Yet one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest tragedies is the fact that no one seems to have recorded an entire original Stooges concert on high fidelity multitrack or professionally filmed an entire performance. The shirtless singer was the most beautiful specimen many listeners had ever seen. At Max’s Kansas City in 1973, he rolled on some glasses and kept performing as blood squirted from the wound. At the New York club Ungano’s in 1970, Iggy walked across tables, hung from exposed pipes in the club’s ceiling, did a backflip, and leapt back onstage. “hey could do twenty minutes and be brilliant, then all of a sudden the set would go to hell in a handcart.” At the Goose Lake Festival in 1970, Iggy accidentally incited the inebriated crowd to tear down a fence. Musician Cub Koda, who witnessed many gigs, agreed. “We never knew what would happen,” Stooges guitarist James Williamson said in Open Up and Bleed. He cut himself, danced, posed, got fondled and punched, and by dissolving the barrier between audience and performer, changed rock ‘n’ roll. Their incendiary live shows were legendary. They released three studio albums during their brief first life, wrote enough songs for a fourth, paved the way for metal and punk rock, influenced musicians from Davie Bowie to the Sex Pistols, popularized stage diving and crowd-surfing, and were so generally ahead of their time that they disbanded before the world finally came to appreciate their music. The Stooges existed from late 1967 to early 1974. According to Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop biography, Open Up and Bleed, Columbia Records recorded the Stooges’ show “with the idea of releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed.” When I first read that sentence a few years ago, my heart skipped the proverbial beat and I scribbled on the page: Unreleased live show? I was a devoted enough Stooges fan to know that if this is true, this shelved live album would be the only known full multitrack recording ever made of a vintage Stooges concert. This was KISS’s first show, having changed their name from Wicked Lester earlier that year. A New York glam band named Teenage Lust played second, and a new local band named KISS opened. Iggy and the Stooges played third, though the venue’s marquee only listed Iggy Pop, because Columbia Records had only signed Iggy, not the band. In 1973, East Coast rock promoter Howard Stein assembled a special New Year’s Eve concert at New York City’s Academy of Music. Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2019 | 48 minutes (8,041 words)
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