206: Fun House, by the Stooges

The Stooges (USA)
Fun House (1970)
7 tracks, 37 minutes
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After the idyllic soundscapes of yesterday chilled us all right out, let’s get angry today.

Fun House is the second of only three albums by original incarnation of The Stooges, and the last one before Iggy Pop took a starring role in the band’s name. They remind me quite a lot of their contemporaries The Doors, actually. They were both taking the psychedelic rock of the 1960s into fresh new places, but where Jim Morisson’s crew seem to lean more into the prog rock side of things, Iggy’s were definitely what we can now call proto-punk.

This music is simply incandescent. It has so much from music that preceded it, from Hendrix’s psych-blues and The Who’s hard rock, obviously a lot from the psychedelic era and even cues from free jazz with Steve Mackay’s saxophone, but there is something in there that sets it so apart from all of these others. It’s aggressive, anarchic and chaotic; it’s angry but it also sounds like it was a whole lot of fun to make – and it is to listen to, too. Although this record pre-dates punk by a good few years, that aesthetic is clearly starting to take shape on Fun House, and it ends up being an electrifying ‘best of both worlds.’

This is one of those ‘cult’ albums that never really achieved the success it deserved in its first run, but blew up later. It’s a sign of a band truly ahead of their time – the world mustn’t have been ready for the Stooges’ sound at that point. Once people’s ears had gotten more used to the looser, unpredictable and flailing attitude that would come to embody punk, Fun House began to make sense again. It’s strange that such an amazing album – now rightly regarded as one of the most influential in rock – wasn’t rated at the time, but at least we know now.

The version I have is actually a two-disc affair with a bunch of demos, outtakes and other miscellanea on the second disc, but that’s really only for completists. Stick to the original seven tracks if you want a tightly-packed 37 minutes of intense but perfectly balanced noise that sounds as much a part of what came before it as what came after.