The sound is good, clear, coming from the original reel of the initial mix-down. As the story goes, the band were not happy with this mix, and you can see why. Producer John Cale was trying to be fancy with the dials and does some weird things with fade-ins and fade-outs, and just generally has Ron Asheton’s guitar mixed down way too low. I like it as an alternative, a kind of “what if” — but thankfully it was not to be released as the official album in 1969. The version as released is far rawer and noisier and more guitar-centric than this one.
Something that should be cleared up and is not, however, in the new liner notes by Sean L. Maloney (who has previously written an illuminating 33-1/3 Series book on Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers), is that Cale mixed both versions of the album, not only the initial, rejected mix. It is purely a myth (albeit one propagated until recently by Iggy Pop himself) that Iggy and Jac Holzman mixed the released version of the album. That is not true, and did not happen, but sadly it is repeated in the liner notes of this new release. What happened, as delineated in Paul Trynka’s definitive Iggy biography Open Up and Bleed (which was published in 2007), is that Cale remixed it with a producer named Lewis Merenstein, who worked the controls under Cale’s direction. Iggy finally acknowledged that he did not take part in the remix in Jeff Gold’s Total Chaos (2016). Thus, this new album should not be called “John Cale Mix,” because both mixes are John Cale mixes, and I’m not sure why, with the correct information freely available, it is still being portrayed in this manner.
I also find it really strange that this version is being touted as “even gnarlier, more antagonistic” or “too abrasive,” when as noted, it is the released version that is far noisier and more aggressive. This first mix really tamped down the guitar sound, which is just plainly obvious. Yes, there is a kind of rawness to it in the sense that it was just a rough mix, without a lot of finishing touches (aside from extensive use of the faders), and in that sense it is the direct sound of the instruments from the room to the tape. But it doesn’t have the energy or loudness of the version that was ultimately released. Again, it’s great to have as a weird alt-version, but it ultimately confirms that Cale and Merenstein (again, not Pop and Holzman!) subsequently remixing it was for the best. “But what if [the second version] was the tame version?” Maloney asks. No, it’s really not.
I wish that labels would stop trying to market the Stooges with the usual hyperbolic “they were the original punks” kind of language that is now so cliché as to be cringe-inducing. The spine-covering hype card that comes with the Vinyl Me Please package takes this to new heights by claiming, “The original punk album, The Stooges is a Molotov cocktail delivered straight to the faces of the hippies of 1969, an album made by Michigan goons. . .” In fact, neither were the Stooges goons nor were they against hippies. In a 2005 interview by Simon Reynolds in Uncut, Ron Asheton went so far as to say, “we didn’t have any great animosity towards hippies. We certainly had a lot of sex with hippie women! And we listened to the San Francisco bands. It could get a little too earthy and pious. But there was a great divide in America and we were on the same side as the hippies. You don’t shit on an ally!” Further, the image of the Stooges as a bunch of dumb guys really does them a disservice. They knew exactly what they were doing and pursued their art very deliberately and with a musical intelligence that was the equal of anyone’s. Their “musical ineptitude” (to quote Maloney) mistakes a stripped-down approach to rock’n’roll for a lack of artistic consciousness. The Stooges were not stupid.
Of course, there is something to the Stooges being situated at the beginning of punk, if we see it as a continuum, but the punk of 1969-70 existed mostly in the minds and writing of certain music critics and did not quite yet compose a genre with wider recognition, which it accrued later. Yes, there’s a connection, but to throw around the term “punk rock” as if it meant the same thing in 1969 as it did in 1976, or indeed in 1982, is to elide the evolution it went through. I wish that those in charge of commissioning this kind of “Stooges are punk” copy would realize that most of the people who are going to be buying this already know something about the band and don’t need to be presented with the same-old-same-old sensationalism in order to want to have this record.
And perhaps it would have been more appropriate if the inner sleeve had not used a photo by Tom Copi from the spring of 1970, when the Stooges were no longer playing the songs from the first album. There are plenty of good shots of, say, the NYC Pavilion engagement in September 1969, which would have been more relevant to the time period that is involved here. I’m glad this came out. I have wanted to have this mix all on one vinyl record, and the look and feel and sound reproduction of it are great. Of course I was going to buy this. But is it too much to ask that copywriters and project producers bring a bit more scholarship to these ventures?
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| Photos from Discogs |
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