stooges

It's becoming increasingly obvious that some people just can't be given nice things. They've just got to pull them apart because... hell. I don't know what their problem is.

Case in point: Jim Jarmusch's cinematic love letter to the Stooges "Gimme Danger" that screened in Sydney, Australia, last Friday and Sunday nights. A world famous director makes a film about your most favouritst band in the whole wide world and you're going to have a massive sook fest? Why didn't they break out a fucking ouija board and interview all the dead guys?

_{Robert Matheu photo from 2010.}

“Gimme Danger” is not a great movie. It is flawed.

That said, no-one expected the Citizen Kane of rock documentaries. This was a cut about the MTV Iggy doco that you can see online for free, but was mixed in with arty pretensions.

“Gimme Danger” is screening at major film festivals around the world. Tonight (June 17) it is the turn of the State Theatre and the Sydney International Film Festival. The audience is evenly split between film people who might not have heard of the Stooges and are there to judge a film on its filmmaking merits, or hardcore rock pigs who want be blasted with Stooges music.

Tracking the post-Sonic’s Rendezvous Band career of Detroit’s rocking rhythm and blues man, Scott Morgan, gets a little easier next month with the release of three of his solo band albums on a double CD.

UK label Easy Action (who else?) will release the “Scots Pirates”, “Revolutionary Means” and “Rock Action” LPs in re-mastered form as “Revolutionary Action” on October 20.

The 38-song collection will be encased in the usual top-shelf packaging with a bonus cut, the hard-to-find cover version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Can You See Me?”

1. Lookin’ 20p In the 10p Mix
SLEAFORD MODS ARE COMING in 2020!!!!!
Please, I don’t want to argue with you.
All disparaging feedback please send to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

2. New Rock Syndicate
Masami Kawaguchi from Tokyo graced us with his stunning soul again this year. Please refer to everything Penny Ikinger said in her Top 10. This gentleman is the most startling, perfect and inspiring guitarist I have ever seen and a true darling of a human being. Eternally grateful to have met him. Look at anything he has done, please. You’re welcome.

3. The Kids Are Alright
You know when you’re 32 and you think rocknroll has probably hit its comfortable slippers and pipe phase, and will be unlikely to return to what you’ve felt it to be in your life. Then you get to 39 etc. and realise ashamedly that you were very wrong. About most things, pretty much everything - it is an experience that spans generations, and is one of the many joys of ageing.

So many “young people” (definition pending, vomit pooling in throat) made music that blew my tiny mind out of my ears this year. Please pay attention to a band called Cable Ties, and one called Stiff Richards. Important, incendiary, vital, nasty, gorgeous, respectful, clumsy, intricate, hot, cold and wild. You may select which adjective attaches to which band yourself - like a choose your own adventure! God, this one has been bloody ridiculous, I’m sorry and you’re welcome.

Bob Short
Filth, Blood & Roses, Dead Rabids, 4 Stooges, The Light Brigade et al
Sydney, Australia

Twenty-twenty is a phrase used to demonstrate a standard of visual acuity. Providing a Top Ten list for the year of that name using normal standards of vision presents certain difficulties.

The harbinger of our civilization's downfall was, of course, the motion picture "Cats".  This was a movie that spent its first hour-and-a-half introducing a series of characters played by celebrities in bad valley CGI mode licking themselves inappropriately whilst singing and dancing.  Spoiler: It ends with the ritual suicide of the most downtrodden character by balloon. 

Its similarity to the year it announced were too staggering to avoid.  All year, we have been bombarded by celebrities entertaining (themselves) us from their living rooms in bad clothes and makeup whilst the poor and broken down die gasping for breath. 

What stands out in the year that broke the world? And make no bones, the world is broken.  Certainly, rock and roll is broken.  It has been a long time coming but that bucket has been firmly kicked.

There has been illness for a while now.  We've all been getting old.  Most people stop adding new songs to their playlists in their early 20s.  Some of us have kept our ears open much longer but that ultimately makes no difference.  You could make the most stunning new music and no one would be there to listen.  The old aren't interested in the new and the young aren't interested in the old.

DONAT TAHIRAJ
Owner of Phase 4 Records and Cassettes store and the LCMR Records label
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia 

There’s no need to explain what a slightly weird year 2020 was. Sadly and for my back pocket’s sake, Phase 4 Records had to close for most of Autumn which meant I wasn’t as often held captive by some stinky guy banging on about the greatness of some rockist act they read about in "The Wire" at the top of their voice scaring our innocent customers away while I desperately needed to go to the toilet.

Our record label LCMR managed to squeeze out only three 7” EPs for the year – one by a hopelessly obscure Toowoomba punk group, Brian, and two by Xiro, the Brisbane band of the early post-punk era who should’ve gone on to have a great international career but decided not to for the sake of art; or something.

It was a great pleasure putting them all together for those who were all too familiar and the ones who were brave enough to try some music that was completely unknown to them.

Frank Meyer, guitarist and vocalist 
The Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs
James Williamson & The Pink Hearts
Online and TV producer
Stooges archivist
Los Angeles, CA

TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2020

1. Armored Saint - Punching The Sky 
My favorite metal band of 2020 was my favorite metal band in 1984…the mighty Armored Saint. This is their best in a decade and one of the best of their career. John Bush is the Paul Rodgers of metal, a swaggering bluesy beast over vintage yet modern power metal. I fucking love this band.

2. Kix - Midnight Dynamite Re-Lit 
Producer Beau Hill went back and stripped away all that bad ‘80s reverb and my favorite Kix album it sounds the like AC/DC meets Aerosmith album it always should have. And the demos are way cool, junior!

3. Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters
The piano in the opening song “I Want You To Love Me” literally made me burst into tears when I first heard it. And every time since. Not kidding.

4. The City Kids - Things That Never Were 
Best OC Punk band Leeds ever produced! These guys got a Social Distortion by way of Backyard Babies vibe that just won’t quit.

There's not much more information than what's on the poster but onetime Stooge Jimmy Recca (now living in L.A.) is playing a show in Arlington, Virginia. If you want to know about Mr Recca and his Stooges history, you could do no better than reading this interview by Ken Shimamoto originally penned for Easy Action Records.

A Fire of Life – The Stooges (Easy Action)

Pertinent Question: Who else but Easy Actionwould have issued this and shown such a high degree of care? The Stooges are no more. Every listenable recording of the band during any of its phases surely has been exhumed and put into the marketplace by now.

Incorrect.

“A Fire of Life” is the Pop-Asheton-Asheton-Watt-MackayStooges at the height of their reformation powers.

The first half combines broadcast quality sets from Sydney (2006) and New Orleans (2003) while the second act is audio of a pay-for-view, live-in-the-studio 2007 set, showcasing one song from “The Weirdness” with five re-recorded classics. It’s rounded off with an in-store appearance by Iggy, Rock and Ron at Newbury Comics in Minnesota in 2003.

What a fucking great title. Almost as good as The Clash's "All the Young Punks" - itself a take on that Bowie song "All the Young Dudes" - wonder how many 1977 punks got that? Even though it was right in their alley?

You know how, during summer, assorted neighbours will play loud music, usually horrible, and, when the hours wind down and the drink begins to blur the world, they get maudlin and soppy and play those lachrymose ballads...? Sure you do. Well, when this happens at 230 am, that is your cue to dash over, swap their copy of Kamahl's Greatest Hits with any one of these three discs, flick the switch and revel in their dismay.

Either that or, rather suddenly, the party's on again and the police want to know your personal details. Again.

Cherry Red describe this collection as "60 tracks of the finest slices of JSG in its various guises, as established by collectors around the world over the past decade. Including tracks from the USA, New Zealand, Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland, Australia as well as homegrown UK. Some previously unreleased, many first time on CD."

The American college town of Ann Arbor - A2 to the locals - has a lot to answer for. This re-issue of a long out-of-print live recording of some of its famous sons makes it apparent.

Originally released on CD only by Philadelphia's Real O-Mind Records in 2002, it's on vinyl as well as shiny silver disc this time around, and marks the return of David Laing's Grown Up Wrong label.

Everything about this show smokes. Powertane were the vehicle for A2 legend Scott Morgan, a soul prodigy (The Rationals) who made up a quarter of one of the greatest guitar rock and roll bands to ever go MIA in the mists of musical legend status, Sonics Rendezvous Band.

Ron Asheton has the creepiest answering machine message on the planet: "LEAVE...A...MESSAGE.... Thanks a million."

Is it moral to review a bootleg CD? The artist is getting no royalties for his or her work. The artist can’t approve or disapprove the content of the disc. It’s wrong, isn’t it? The trouble is, this is obsession we’re talking about. This is Iggy and the Stooges with James Williamson on guitar. This is the CD you never thought you would hear. This is fucking history. More importantly, it’s fucking great.

“We're the most underground, underground band out there,” says Loren Molinare of the Detroit-born-and-bred early L.A. punk veterans The DoGs, whose second LP “Hypersensitive” from 2012 will finally be released on vinyl via prestige Polish punk ‘n’ roll label Heavy Medication Records on September 1. 

“We’re really proud to reissue this ‘lost classic’ for the first time on vinyl,” says Heavy Medication president Derrick Ogrodny. “We're honored to work with such protopunk legends and think it’s about time these DoGs had their day.”  

“We're one of the last bands with original members that actually sound like a proper Detroit rock band,” continues Molinare, the man Ogrodny calls “the Pete Townshend of punk rock.” “And yes, I mean some things never change. We carry on that tradition. That's what we do.

“We're just kind of picking our spot. We're white trash Detroit rock ‘n’ rollers about the same age as the old black blues men who were out doing it before they died. A lot of our peers have passed away, and we do not take it for granted. 

Call me biased and armed with far too much hindsight for my own good, but for a brief time in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Detroit was the lesser-known but undeniable epicentre of genuine rock and roll. The music industry, as it was, might have had its moneyed roots deeply planted on America’s East and West Coasts, but the real action was occurring deep in the US Midwest.

Sure, there was Motown and its over-ground success that eventually shifted to L.A. to mutate and die but we’re talking a parallel universe here that was populated by a different cast of characters plying a blue-collar strain of music. It’s an eternal truism that musical scenes never last. The Motor City’s rock and roll had its moment but succumbed to fashion, drugs, shifting attention spans – whatever factors play to your own historical biases – and has never recovered.

Hypersensitive – The DoGs (Heavy Medication Records)

Here are two truisms: Life is full of great bands that you’ve heard of but never heard. Hindsight is fantastic because it lets you make up for what you missed the first time around.

This album by the Los Angeles-via-Detroit trio (not to be confused with the French band of the same name) came out on CD in 2002. If you missed it, you’re excused because it didn’t have massive distribution. It re-appearance as a vinyl LP on Heavy Medication is your chance to make amends.

The DoGs grew up in Michigan in the late ‘60s – outside the axis of Detroit and Ann Arbor, it must be said – and were on undercards to bands like the MC5 and the Stooges. They made the move from Lansing to the Motor City as its place in the rock and roll firmament began to decline.

Mighty little French label Pitshark continues to punch above its weight. Not content with issuing exclusive vinyl releases from the likes of the Stooges, Radio Birdman and the New Christs, it’s about to launch a Singles Club with a year’s worth of 7” records in bi-monthly waves.

Seven 45s full of Iggy Pop and Iggy and the Stooges goodness. Packaged in a box with some incident extras (patch, big hole single adapter) thrown in. OK, you probably don’t need this box set from Los Angeles label Cleopatra Records but you may still want it. 

The Golden Age of Iggy and The Stooges continues unabated. With the band on indefinite hiatus, “Raw Power” era guitarist James Williamson is shining new light on a batch of mostly unreleased or never-properly-recorded gems from the band’s back-pages.

It’s been years in the making and "LOUDER THAN LOVE", the long-awaited documentary paying tribute to legendary Detroit music venue the Grande Ballroom, is finally available.

The Grande was the birthplace or breeding ground for the likes of the Stooges, the MC5, The Up and The Rationals. It also became a notorious killing field for visiting international bands who had to undergo a "trial by support band" where the locals did their best to blow them off the stage (sometimes succeeding.)

“LOUDER THAN LOVE: The Grande Ballroom Story” is Tony D’Annunzio’s first independent film as a producer and director.  His movie chronicles the Detroit music scene in the late 1960s, as told through the eyes of the legendary bands that played there.