The Stooges | Iggy & The Stooges

The Stooges dropped their debut record like a lit cigarette on a shag carpet on August 5, 1969, courtesy of Elektra Records, who would eventually learn what it meant to clean up after them. The album, modestly titled The Stooges, hacked its way to number 106 on the Billboard chart, which was about 100 spots higher than anyone sober would have predicted. Critics would later call it proto-punk, a landmark, an influence on hard rock, and probably the sound you’ll hear when the world finally implodes.

Ron Asheton cranked out walls of distortion thick enough to keep the Cold War going another decade, while Iggy Pop shrieked and barked like a street oracle hopped up on glue. For their first stab at history, the band thought five songs would do the job: “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “No Fun,” “1969,” “Ann,” and “We Will Fall.” Five songs, each stretched into endless minutes of guitar noise and bodily thrashing, were enough for a live set, of course, but when Elektra saw this “album,” the label politely said, “Uh, no.”

So the Stooges did what professionals always do when faced with authority: they lied. “Yeah, we’ve got tons of songs,” they told the record company. “We’re basically a jukebox.”

In truth, their original shopping list of songs looked like a late-’60s dada collage. There was “I’m Sick,” a Wurlitzer-driven bolero where Iggy rolled around on stage yelling, “I’m sick! I’m siiiick!” until the audience felt the flu coming on. Then came “Asthma Attack,” which was essentially Iggy turning bronchial distress into art-rock. And then “Dance of the Romance/Goodbye Bozos,” a proto-version of “Little Doll” before Ron Asheton started feeding his feedback addiction like a teenage pyromaniac.

The riffs weren’t exactly stolen, but they nodded so hard you could hear necks cracking. “No Fun” swiped Johnny Cash’s stoic “I Walk the Line” and dunked it in filth, while “I Wanna Be Your Dog” pinched its grunt from Hendrix’s “Highway Chile.” By late ’68, they had seven sorta-songs, which in Stooge-land meant two minutes of an actual tune followed by however long Iggy could writhe on the studio floor without choking on his own spit.

When they showed up at The Hit Factory, Elektra boss Jac Holzman sized them up. “Is that it?” he asked. Ron Asheton assured him this was just “one part of the pie,” which was hilarious because The Stooges didn’t have any pie—they barely had crust. Holzman gave them five days to prove otherwise.

In that time, they whipped up three more. “We Will Fall,” basically Dave Alexander’s idea of chanting as music. “Real Cool Time,” where they pretended to know what fun looked like. And “Not Right,” which served as the entire Stooges creative manifesto. With that, the album was “completed,” if you can call it that—less an album than a declaration of war on taste, structure, and lungs.

Limited colored vinyl LP pressing. 

Track Listings

Side 1

1 1969 
2 I Wanna Be Your Dog 
3 We Will Fall 

Side 2

1 No Fun 
2 Real Cool Time 
3 Ann 
4 Not Right 
5 Little Doll