The Stooges Have Some Out-Of-My-Mind Fun

“Iggy was scary,” the Stooges former manager Danny Fields told music critic Robert Palmer while recalling the early live performances of the punk-rock precursor. “I was terrified every time he went onstage that he would cause death and/or mayhem, that he would smash someone over the head with a bench, say, or eviscerate himself onstage. It was very, very powerful; I never saw anything like it.”

Yet despite the infamous lore surrounding Iggy Pop’s initial stint with the Stooges — particularly following the release of their 1970 masterwork Fun House — quality recordings of the band’s onstage mayhem has been an abysmal state of affairs.

Thankfully, Rhino Handmade is set to unveil Have Some Fun: Live at Ungano’s, an unreleased reel-to-reel tape recording of a Stooges’s show during their four-night residency at the Ungano’s nightclub in New York City. Recorded just after the release of Fun House, the band performs every cut from the classic album except “L.A. Blues”, and it is also contains a previously unreleased “10-minute-plus psychedelic, freak out jam” titled “Have Some Fun/My Dream Is Dead”.

According to the release’s linear notes composed by the Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, “the sound [on the live album] comes in sheets of earsplitting noise, dense and bleating, as if a sheep is being led to slaughter. You can literally hear the ’60s gasping for breath, the totemic sacrifice of the Stooges.”

Have Some Fun is set to ship on 16 November 2010.

SONG LIST

01 Going to Ungano’s

02 Loose

03 Down on the Street

04 T.V. Eye

05 Dirt

06 1970

07 Fun House

08 Have Some Fun / My Dream Is Dead