Hat Full Of Mayhem

There's a song on the first Stooges album called 'we will fall' that's billed as a ten minute tone poem. It's kind of atypical for the Stooges (thank god). It is a poem – got that - and it's set against the background of someone chanting what sounds like "Oh, Sri Ram Jam, Jam Jar Door Jamb", although I'm sure that's not quite accurate. My pithy rock critic friend Estebanovitch [1], on first hearing this - and shortly before pressing the "next!" button - remarked: "Proving once again that Sanskrit is not the natural language of Rock 'n' Roll." Well, true. Natural language of SF, I think, but I'll allow it's not a one stop shop for all your punk rock needs.

I did listen to it again later, after he was out of the car. It's accompanied by one of those scrapy/drone instruments – a violin, a hurdy-gurdy, or perhaps a comb-and-toilet-paper – that are sadly underused in popular music. I hadn't realized it was actually a Hindu chant myself. I thought it was the Stooges' attempt to go one better than the Yardbirds and go gloriously wigged-out Gregorian. It has a certain Velvet Underground vibe, too.

It certainly worked as a mantra, or a macro as they call them now. After a few minutes I had a powerful urge to lower my head and run full-tilt into a brick wall. Usually Iggy Pop and Stooges songs have a much quicker and happier effect on me. They bypass the brain entirely and speak to something else. The id, possibly. It's impossible to hear the opening chords of 'now i wanna be your dog', 'TV Eye' or 'no fun' without feeling that same sick here-we-go feeling that you get shortly after you've [inadvertently] ingested a powerful drug and it's doing something untoward to your perception. That may be just me, but I don't think so. If they could distill this and bottle it, it would sell very well. Actually, they did. They're called Iggy Pop records.

I love Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

The above links are non-embedded videos or music. And glorious too, they are, so I encourage you to click them. For an embed, let's go to Velvet Goldmine – one of my favorite movies – and see Curt Wild performing 'TV Eye' in a thinly veiled pastiche of Iggy. Ewan McGregor has as different build to Iggy, hasn't he? And this being Ewan, you get to see all of his 'build', so this is extremely not work safe.




[1] I said, "pithy".