Iggy And The Stooges – Double Danger – Review

Iggy And The Stooges

Double Danger (Bomp!)
by Jon Sarre

Nobody said for sure, but I think I heard this is the last volume in Bomp’s Iguana Chronicles series. The release of live tapes, two shows — in this case, New York and Baltimore — can maybe be taken as a signifier of a barrel scraped to the dregs, ‘specially, I figure, in the case of the Stooges. I kinda wonder if there exists a live recording where ya get the ugly glamor, “raw power” (maybe a cliché seein’ they named an album that’n’all) and demented genius that the three studio LPs provide. Every gig recording, including Double Danger, is kinda dodgy: the mixes are invariably bad, Ron Asheton’s bass (and I’ve never heard a pre-Raw Power live set with Ronnie Frank on guitar, what’s up with that?) and Scott Thurston’s keys are up too high, James Williamson’s Berry/Richards chordage varies from barely bein’ there to non-existent. As a result, the songs (which are essentially the same for both sets on this two disc release) don’t exactly sound all that great, in fact, you’d probably conclude that “they sucked live.”

The Stooges’ set itself, at that time, late ’73, consisted of Raw Power material (“Gimme Danger,” “Search and Destroy,” “I Need Somebody” and “Raw Power”) plus the post-Power also-ran stuff (better collected in the studio on Bomp’s Open Up and Bleed and Jesus Loves the Stooges) which were apparently under consideration for a fourth record that never got made, tho’ Iggy and Williamson re-recorded some of that on Kill City. This more obscure stuff is probably rightly so, as the band was not exactly at the height of their creative powers (Iggy, Williamson and Scott “Rock Action” Asheton all had varying degrees of substance abuse problems and Columbia Records and the band’s management company were readying to rid themselves of what can best be described as a touring trainwreck colliding head on with a fiery jet-liner crash. Funny how punk rock arising in a big part round the Stooges’ shaggy-dog music’n’legend saved ’em from landin’ face-down in the history books as “the Worst band in the World: Ever”).

For my money, the also somewhat readily available Metallic 2XKO, the tapes of the last Stooges show (Michigan Palace, Detroit 10/6/73), bootlegged for years on the French label SkyDog and recently re-booted by a Spanish concern (either Impossible or Münster, I fugget), is a better waste of yer entertainment budget, if only for Iggy’s humorous ‘tween song banter: “I don’t care if you throw all the ice in the world. You’re payin’ five bucks and I’m makin’ ten thousand baybeh, so screw ya!” That and the hurled beer bottles audibly impacting against the band. Since Iggy only calls some woman “a cunt” on Double Danger and then quickly adds he’s just kidding, these shows come off as a little more, uh, sedate.
(www.bomp.com)