It's a great, balanced review and how cool is it to be able to read the work of someone is as smart and still as committed as Jenkins is? And who actually saw the fabled '73 Kennedy Center show. Now that's a double bill!
Listening to "The Weirdness," the first Stooges album in 34 years, longtime fans might wonder if Iggy Pop and his recently reunited cohorts remember how to be the band they were in the early 1970s. Any such doubts were quickly banished Thursday night at the 9:30 club, where the proto-punk musicians' reflexes proved undiminished. The band's 80-minute set was hampered only by "The Weirdness's" second-string material.
Seen up close, Iggy looks like the 60-year-old he'll become later this month, but he's as limber and energetic as he was in the Stooges' heyday. Sleek, shirtless and a bit simian, Iggy prowled the stage, wearing low-slung pants that threatened to slip all the way off by the time the show ended with the evening's second, sloppier version of "I Wanna Be Your Dog." He threw himself into the audience a few times, and welcomed fans onstage to dance to the teen anti-anthems "Real Cool Time" and "No Fun."
Those songs are all from the quartet's 1969 debut, but the Stooges took just as much from their 1970 follow-up, "Fun House." (The band entirely bypassed "Raw Power," the David Bowie-produced 1973 album for which guitarist Ron Asheton was demoted to bass.) Drummer Scott Asheton switched fluidly from the metronomic beats of the first album to the more swinging rhythms of the second, and saxophonist Steve Mackay joined for "Fun House's" title song and "I Feel Alright." The only problem was that the set peaked there, before the band trudged through such lesser new material as "Trollin'."
Inevitably, the Stooges weren't as threatening as at their last D.C. gig, opening for Mott the Hoople at the Kennedy Center in 1973. That show ended prematurely, when Iggy appeared to be bleeding and the band's power was cut. (From this writer's vantage point, the red stuff on his chest looked more like fruit-pie filling than blood.)
Iggy's not as self-destructive these days, but the main difference between the two shows is that venues like the 9:30 club now exist. The larger world may never accept the Stooges, but there's a part that has.
-- Mark Jenkins
