The Stooges’ Debut Album: A Track-By-Track Guide To Every Song

I Wanna Be Your Dog

Brilliant though it is, 1969 is arguably shaded in the nihilism stakes by the second song on The Stooges’ debut album, I Wanna Be Your Dog. Propelled by Ron Asheton’s looming, cyclical guitars, a single-note piano riff played by producer John Cale, and Scott Asheton’s measured, driving beat, it features a Pop lyric dripping with pain, lust and desire (“So messed up, I want you here!”), and it still epitomises what a 2007 BBC Music retrospective called “rock at its most primordial”. Now recognised as a fully-fledged garage-rock classic, I Wanna Be Your Dog has since been covered by acts as diverse as Sonic Youth, Slayer and Uncle Tupelo, but familiarity fails to blunt the edge of the original.

We Will Fall

Of the four tracks hastily thrown together as The Stooges were about to start recording their debut album, the ten-minute We Will Fall is the one most obviously touched by the hand of John Cale. Built upon a doomy, Eastern-sounding mantra (“Oh ji ram ja/Ram ja ja ram”), and with its dream-like ambience punctured by pop’s stream-of-consciousness lyric (“I’ll be ready to see you/Don’t forget to come/Room One-Two-One”), the song comes across like a spiritual cousin of similar late-60s workouts by The Doors (The End, When The Music’s Over) or The Velvet Underground (the Cale-enhanced Black Angel’s Death Song). But while it’s a bit of an anomaly in The Stooges’ catalogue, it’s snot without merit.

No Fun

Though it features another of Pop’s most disaffected lyrics (“No fun to be alone/Walking by myself/No fun to be alone/In love with nobody else”), No Fun has no truck with wallowing in abject misery, as it’s allied to one of The Stooges’ most memorable – and accessible – tunes. Driven by Ron Asheton’s muscular riffing and a hip-shaking groove, this irresistibly brawny anthem later became a touchstone for punk’s first wave (Sex Pistols famously covered it for the flipside of Pretty Vacant), and to this day it remains one of the best Stooges songs, making teenage angst sound positively life-affirming.

Real Cool Time

Real Cool Time was dashed off to order for The Stooges’ debut album, but its desperate intensity still matches the more celebrated likes of I Wanna Be Your Dog and 1969. Another of Ron Asheton’s surly, one-riff monsters, the song clatters and roars for a just-right two minutes 30 seconds, with Pop’s repeated exhortations (“And we will have a real cool time tonight!”) lurching from decadence to despair and back again.

Ann

Ann was actually the first song Iggy Pop submitted for consideration in The Stooges’ repertoire. It was initially rejected, but the band returned to it during sessions for their debut album, after John Cale informed them they still needed one more song to get the record over the line. Something of a dark horse, Ann is the album’s lone ballad, and while still relatively dark and brooding in design, it’s a rare out-and-out love song featuring a velvety Pop vocal worthy of his early hero, Jim Morrison.

Not Right

Fuelled by one of Ron Asheton’s most incessant riffs, Not Right is a searing garage rocker featuring a seemingly dumb yet highly savvy Pop lyric (“I want something, all right/But she can’t help because she’s not right”) delivered with the kind of lunkheaded economy Ramones would turn into an art form half a decade later. Written hurriedly – and specifically for The Stooges – Not Right has a brutal, hypnotic quality which is hard to shake.

Little Doll

The Stooges will always be recognised as arguably the greatest proto-punk band of them all, but their collective love of left-field jazz also bubbles to the surface in places. Later on, they would recruit avant-garde saxophonist Steve Mackay and conclude their second album, Fun House, with the free-form blow-out LA Blues, but here they pay tribute to jazz maestro Pharoah Sanders on Little Doll, which cops its subterranean bassline from Upper Egypt And Lower Egypt, a track on Sanders’ second album, 1966’s Tauhid. In keeping with the song’s experimental vibe, Ron Asheton then brings this proto-metal stomper to a close with a furious, wah-wah-driven solo informed by Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland.

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