Despite repeatedly asserting, over the course of this blog’s ….jeezus… almost 18-year existence, that Fun House, the second album by The Stooges, released in August of 1970, is the greatest rock’n’roll album of all goddamn time (usually punctuated with a needlessly antagonistic flourish like “if you can’t appreciate the furious majesty of Fun House, you should probably start listening to Janis Ian records and collecting ornamental doilies, because you just don’t understand rock’n’roll played fucking properly!”), I have twice committed what some Stooges purists might consider abject heresy by decrying the 1999 deluxe release of Rhino Records’ sprawling, 7-CD box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions.
I first got candid about it here, and then documented my tragic attempts to unsuccessfully pawn the thing here.
In a nutshell, my issue with the lavish package was that while the original album clocked in at a meaty 36 minutes and 35 seconds of pure, lean rock perfection, this Rhino collection – played from start to finish – takes 7 hours and 52 minutes to get through. More to the point, despite its unwieldy length, the Rhino Box basically only features the same 7 songs, apart from a few, brief dalliances with unfinished compositions. The majority of the box set is comprised of maddeningly multiple takes of each of the original album’s tracks. Disc Two, for example, offers 19 versions of the album’s second song, “Loose.” Those aren’t even all the versions in the box. There are still NINE more versions of “Loose” waiting for you on friggin’ Disc Three. I first heard “Loose” in 1985 and it swiftly became a contender for one of my favorite songs of all time. After trying to sit through 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions in its entirety upon foolhardily purchasing it in 1999, I practically never wanted to hear it again.
As laboriously rhapsodized in those older posts, I used to unrealistically imagine that the original Fun House was swiftly recorded with devil-may-care aplomb over the course of one heady afternoon when Iggy and the boys were fleetingly sober enough to find the “record” button, before traipsing off into the night to snort, smoke-&-drink the town dry and pillage accordingly. The Rhino box set cruelly decimated that fanciful myth, revealing the Stooges to be more meticulously nitpicky perfectionists than slovenly protopunk pirates.
With that sad realization, my copy of the box was relegated first to a high, dusty shelf in my previous apartment (to be spied at and foolishly coveted by similarly nerdy friends of mine) before, upon moving to our current apartment in 2002, my dreaded front-hall closet, to which tragic piles of ephemera from my stupid youth are sentenced, dispatched and summarily crammed into endless dormancy like a Punk Rock Guantanamo Bay.
A few years back, however, I’d been all too efficient in paying off some bills, which found my bank account suddenly leaner that I’d otherwise prefer it. To temporarily remedy this problem, I hastily figured it was as good a time as any to sell my rarely played copy of 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, but my efforts to do so were met with blankly ignorant stares or, at best, tragically low-ball offers that didn’t even come close to half of the cost I’d originally spent on it. As such, I still possess it. It’s in the back of that closet as I type this.
So, here we are in 2023, 53 years after the original album’s release, 24 years after the Rhino box set’s release and 18 years after first posting about my disappointment with it, I fielded a very thoughtful message from one Robert Cook, who wrote….
I'm glad to have the COMPLETE FUNHOUSE SESSIONS. The thing is, no one (or very few) will enjoy listening to different takes of the same song over and over and over in sequence. The way to enjoy this set is to put it on shuffle mode in the CD carousel and let the tracks play at random...AND...limit yourself to 45 minutes to an hour for each listening session.
Or, sequence different takes of each song in the same track order as the released album, and burn each sequence onto a cd-R. Then you can listen to FUNHOUSE, Version A, or FUNHOUSE, Version C, etc., etc. whenever you have a hankering to hear FUNHOUSE. You won't be pummeled into terminal boredom and you'll be listening to different versions of FUNHOUSE each time to play it (them).
I might just have to give that a shot.
Meanwhile,.... here's "Loose."
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