IGGY POP AND HIS NEW STOOGES

PROTO-PUNK REDUX

Iggy Pop brings back another version of the Stooges on Ready to Die

by Matt Ashare |  
Published May 8, 2013


"I'm shooting for the sky, because I'm ready to die," growls a playfully grim Iggy Pop  against the relentlessly pounding drums and stinging guitars of the title track to the new album credited to Iggy and the Stooges — the first to bear that moniker since 1973's "Raw Power." But don't believe him: death trips are really nothing new for the now 66-year-old Godfather of Punk, as he's now commonly known. Indeed, Pop developed an early taste for self-lacerating nihilism at the tail end of the ’60s, fronting the troubled Michigan garage band the Stooges. It was in those tumultuous nascent years that Iggy's iconic pop persona coalesced: taking Jim Morrison's animalistic abandon to a whole new level, a shaggy haired Pop appeared shirtless in perilously tight jeans; writhed and flailed with primal abandon to the damaged drone tones of tunes like churning protopunk classic "I Wanna Be Your Dog"; and, according to one citation on his Wikipedia page, earned the dubious distinction of being the "first person to stage-dive." He also, as legend has it, developed a healthy propensity for liberating his privates, thrashing around in smashed glass, and, yes, even vomiting on stage. As Pop, with characteristic aplomb, aptly put it in the opening verse of the searing Stooges anti-anthem "Search and Destroy," "I'm a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm/I'm a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb." Exactly.
    By the time the drug-addled Stooges imploded in 1975, Pop had the bearing of a debauched glam-rock casualty, and was very likely on more than a few OD watch lists. Essentially, he'd become notorious for being notorious, which isn't quite so bad as being famous for being famous a la the Kardashians (or, I suppose, being ridiculous for being ridiculous). Then again, reality TV had yet to be invented, so rockers behaving badly was all the kids had. Nevertheless, David Bowie took a sincere interest and spirited the former Stooge off to Berlin, where the two famous friends collaborated on a pair of 1977 albums — "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life" — that established Pop's bona fides as a solo artist.
    In the decades that followed, Pop largely got by on simply getting by — on playing himself in bands of varying degrees of mediocre, and recording new material that mostly traded on his status as a legendary bad boy; on defying the odds that he'd survive to see the dawn of a new millennium. It wasn't always particularly pretty. But there were a few minor bright spots, like "Candy," his now dated 1990 alt-rock duet with Kate Pierson of the B-52's, which at least charted in the Top 40.
    And then, ten years ago, as a fresh wave of Stooges nostalgia crested and Pop settled in to record the cartoonishly titled, frankly forgettable "Skull Ring," with backing by neo-punk rockers Green Day and Sum 41, the surviving members of the original Stooges reunited and began performing together. Actually, they did more than just live gigs: six years ago, the revived Stooges (brothers Ron and Scott Asheton on guitar and bass, with ’90s punk rocker Mike Watt on bass) convened with Pop to record an ultimately disastrous album of new material dubbed "The Weirdness." It wasn't just that the songs were just plain stupid bad, it was that they were self-consciously bad in a predictably stupid way. Getting into caricature, Pop ranted about greedy awful people in "Greedy Awful People," admitted he was fried in "I'm Fried," and extolled the virtues of being free and freaky in "Free & Freaky," while the band churned out a particularly bloodless, almost mechanical brand of uncharacteristically generic hard stuff.
    Sadly, Ron Asheton passed away in January of 2009, before the Stooges had a chance to redeem themselves, and just a year short of the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But, in yet another improbable twist in the ongoing saga of the Stooges, the band quickly regrouped with James Williamson, the long-retired guitarist who'd helped resurrect the Stooges once before, when he was brought in to help write and record "Raw Power" in ’73. (Williamson went on to earn an engineering degree and ascend to VP of Technology Standards for Sony before retiring in 2009 to rejoin the Stooges.)
    "Ready to Die" reinstates Williamson not just as Pop's main instrumental foil, but also as his primary songwriting partner. In addition, Williamson produced the album. And, while he doesn't quite reign in Pop's penchant for cheap shots and easy laughs, he does a better job than most at steering him toward his strengths as a singer. Indeed, Williamson's hand is evident right from the start, on the hard-driving opener "Burn," a song that churns with distortion and bristles with stinging leads, but still finds a melodic center, as Pop relies on resonant deeper part of his register to deliver portentous, if somewhat vague warnings to nameless bureaucrats. Elsewhere, on "Sex and Money," saxophone and female background vocals push in the general direction of the r&b derivations that Williamson helped bring out on one of Pop's better solo albums, 1979's "New Values." And, the gritty groove of "Dirty Deal" gets Pop nicely worked up over corporate corruption — "System's rigged to favor crooks," he sings, "You don't find that in civic books/It's cool to ask a man/To sign what he don't understand."
    That may not be particularly profound, but it at least rings true in a way that the one major misstep here, the salacious "DD's," strains and fails to do. Suffice to say, a song about Pop's sexual fetishes isn't particularly shocking at this point, and doesn't even make for good comedy. It's just kinda creepy, and not in an interesting way. The real revelations on "Ready To Die" come in the form of three mostly acoustic numbers that place Pop's casual, world-weary croon in a soft focus setting that highlights, rather than downplaying or drowning out, its innately soulful edge. It may seem overly reductive, but "Unfriendly World," with its reflective posture and plaintive admission that "fame and fortune make me sick," and the earnest "The Departed," which opens with a haunting acoustic slide-guitar reprise of the riff from "I Wanna Be Your Dog," just seem well suited to Pop, the elder punk statesman. In those tracks, you get the sense that, with "Ready to Die," Williamson and Pop have rebooted what could very well turn out to be a fertile creative partnership. Either way, if past behavior is any indication, when Pop says he's ready to die, it usually means he's just getting going.