Raw Power

Is there a more moronic band name than “Iggy and the Stooges?” Looking at the cover of this, their third album, you’d have every reason to think them to be gas-huffing clowns, midnight wankers, mental defectives. To a certain degree, you’d be right. This is a stupid record - however, stupid and smart are not mutually exclusive. Idiocy and genius sometimes travel together, like the ghosts of Siamese twins.

Raw Power is an album about war-as-sex and sex-as-war. And while it’s sloppy, self-indulgent and out of control, it is also the greatest piece of art to emerge from the imaginal jungles of Viet Nam. Was Iggy a vet? Hell no - while the grunts were dying in the mud, Iggy was in high school drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and Romilar. Did he watch the whole war on TV? Everybody did, eating supper as the seven o’clock news gave us body counts, live executions, and endless fire fights in misty rice paddies.

The album’s first track is “Search and Destroy,” and it ends with “My Death Trip.” In between Iggy howls about disease, penetration, “hallucination true romance,” falling deep into the underworld and dancing “to the beat of the living dead.” In “Search and Destroy” he warns every girl in America to look out - because he’s got a “heart full of napalm” and he’s “using technology.” This is a new kind of war with a new kind of casualties. The smoke still hangs over the jungles and bombed-out cities and this “streetwalking chetah” has already become “the world’s forgotten boy.”

In 1972, glam rock had exploded like an antipersonnel mine full of silver confetti and mylar streamers. A year later, Raw Power exploded with a far less glamorous look and sound. Punk rock is all here already: snarling vocals, sludge-guitar riffing, cretin-hop drums, caveman bass, minimalist chord structure and speed freak energy. The gleam of glam is still here too, though already tainted with street-dirt, beer stains and dried body fluids. The mascara is running down Iggy’s face and his silver lizard pants hang loose from his emaciated hips. He pouts on the back cover, trying for a soulful mirror gaze, though he looks more like a brain damaged transvestite hooker than a Glamor Boy. On the front cover he manages a slightly more dignified pose - staring straight into some celestial amphetamine spotlight glare. Still, with his jutting jaw, sloppy lipstick and blond shag he might be the bastard spawn of Mussolini dressed by his alcoholic burlesque-queen mom.

It all ends with his Death Trip. It’s all revealed in the last track, where the “sick boy sick boy going round” wails, hoots, and barks at some slime-flecked moon. He shouts in an incoherent jabber about someone (everyone?) who must “come and be my enemy.” Then as the band jerks back and forth like a shot-up jeep stuck in a swamp-hole, Iggy gives his big proclamation: “We’re going down in history.”

Who is this “we?” The Stooges, who never made another album? Iggy and some nameless girl in a sleazy hotel room? Dead soldiers? Glam rock refugees? Americans staring at their TV sets? Every survivor of the era who remembers, who keeps listening, who knows?

And what is this “history?” The truth about a lost time and place. A ghost story with a punk-buzz soundtrack. A tale told by an idiot-genius. Or maybe all three.

Faust IV

This is the sound of the other Deutschland. This is Krautrock at its most alien and electro-maniacal. Bright globs and gibbering squirts of stellar sound-plasm, chimes from the sublime reaches of outer space, the grandeur and clear-minded trance of Germans who’ve broken free from history’s gravitational pull. This is Vier, the greatest album by Faust.

While Americans and Brits worshipped at the altars of guitar gods, in Germany, Faust was creating its heretic sound. Synthesizers laid out washes of cold aural slime. A buzzing organ moaned, soft and black and slippery as powdered graphite. Drums, tambourine and vacuum tube bleeps joined in a rackety rhythm. Chang-chord fuzz, shouts of a cretin, a girl muttering in Swedish, xylophones, a Teutonic Donovan crooning over muffled wobble-bass and arpeggio guitar, spells gibbered down a tinfoil-covered toilet paper tube, a long elegant sax solo, hurdy-gurdy bowed strings, rattling gear-click pulse, a keyboard ditty that stops dead on an echo and a voice from the studio talks to the void. What makes this kraut? What makes this rock?

The term “Krautrock” is idiotic, an artifact of Britain’s obsession with Germany as Nazi-land. Like so many labels for revolutionary phenomena, this one was created by its enemies. Would a term like Frog-rock have flourished if the French had produced a mutant crop of brilliantly messy, obscure and bizarre albums in the space of ten years? Calling this sound Krautrock is like calling funk “Chitlin music.” (Funk is ultimately of the lower body, the bowels, and chitlins are the bowels.) Or more to the point, it’s like labeling some of the greatest films of the 1960s “Spaghetti Westerns,” as though all a culture has to offer can be summed up by its most basic food.

But there it is: Krautrock. And given that Faust chose to play with the term, claiming it and naming the first track on their greatest album with this nazoid neologism, we use it here. Krautrock: ironic, iconic, blunt as a hammer blow that misses its mark but hits elsewhere and sets the whole world ringing like a gong.

The name of the band is also a complexity. Faust is both the medieval magic-man who makes a deal with the devil for infinite knowledge and it is “fist,” stark and brutish. Panzerfaust is both the mailed fist of the medieval knight and the handheld rocket launcher used to punch holes in the armor of American, British and Soviet tanks as they ground their way into the heart of Germany.

History is supposedly written by the winners. Here, we offer an alternative: the occult history (the hidden, lost, secret story) of the year when it all began. America had won the war and Germany had lost. American Apollo went to the moon in German-built rockets. The Germans stayed back. After seven years of war, they knew what the barren, blasted lunar surface looked like. They already lived on the moon. American music came with the armies and triumphed too. By the early ‘70s, the conquest was almost complete. But a small group of Germans - a kind of esoteric resistance movement - fought back, not with guns and bombs, but brains and synthesizers.

Faust IV is the true V-2 rocket, though it didn’t really go anywhere, at least not through euclidean space. Faust IV is the vengeance weapon out of Deutschland, blasting through the stellar void, secretly reentering the atmosphere and hitting its numinous target. Those who stand victorious claim the right to decide truth and falsehood. Here, we offer the other, the inner, story. We are the celebrants of the dismissed, forgotten, despised soundscape of that miraculous and mysterious post-lunar year - 1973.

What happened then? What happened here? Everything.

Devil in a Dead Man’s Underwear

See the man, see the God.
Incarnation in progress.
Behold the man, beneath the God,
beware the dog, behind you.
Believe, begone, behave yourself.
Be there, or beware.

Behold: I sing of Spam.
Behold: I GIVE YOU SPAM!
Oblong can, silver crown,
rounded corners, mysterious key without a lock.
Spam-killing man, man-killing Spam.
Calling all gods.
Squeeze and drain the juices,
down the sink, blood and oil
trouble and toil.
When will we three meet again?
In Power, Glory or in Shame?
Spam! The god in a can.
Spam! Baal’s big bad brother.
Spam! Fears no man, eats no ham,
does not give a flying goddamn.

I’m gonna put on the Iron Jock,
and chase Satan round the block.
I’m gonna put on the Iron Fez,
and see what Jahweh says.

The spirits of food dissolve
in my body-acid and rise
as foul vapors into my brain.
Hydrochloric acid, HCL.
The magic letters
an acid bath to cook my ores.
Reagent of pure love
Caustic kisses, candy bliss,
burning in the abdominal abyss.
My body is a bag of acid,
conversion chamber, innermost lake of fire.
Have you been washed in the acid of the Lamb?

Body bag, wanna feel you in my
Body bag, gotta seal you in a
Body bag, wanna touch you in my
Body bag, you’re too much inside my
Body bag, Body bag.

My guts a blast furnace
blessed Bessemer converter.
Hydrogen sulfide, methane
from my vent holes,
flaming nether retrobooster,
deep, deeper, deepest.

On your feet or on your knees
in the grotto of my favorite agonies.
The Church of Beautiful Women
Who Hate Sex.
The Church of Hitting Each Other
With Iron Rods and
Pretending to Like it.
The Church of Our Lady of
Perpetual Mastication.
The Church of Smearing Yourself
with Lard and Baking Until Lightly Browned.
Owwwww! Brown Off!
Victory in my pants.
baby, preemie homunculus
appearing fully formed in my BVDs.
Spam whiz: aerosol processed
meat-food product
squirting out in nacreous jets.

I ain’t just whistling gristle.
Am I blue? You’d be too.
Spewing bones, gizzard, skin
and feathers too.
Don’t you know about the bird?
Everybody knows that the bird comes third.

Evil ones: Juju priests
secret Levite order
Spam-killing men of God.
Evil ones: vegetarian Hecate-jungen
black as a kite, high as night.
Evil Ones: Old Scratch rooting around
the trash. Stick Out Your Can
Here Comes the Garbage Man.
Evil Ones: goat-headed Melchizedeks
with the hots for what’s not.

I feel the heat, I sing of meat,
I long for that throbbing
luncheon treat.
Unspeakable effulgence of byproducts.
Ancient Anathema Cannibal
Spastic God in a Can.
Eating meat, spodee-odee
eating meat.
It slices, it dices, it sacrifices.
Culture is dead. Let’s eat!

I loved that pig, pink and big.
I loved that lamb, the son of Spam.
The pearl without a price.
Drop him in acid
and he disappears.
’s right, pilgrim,
the Mighty Yamm has returned.
Say it proud: I’m back and I’m loud.
The Mighty Yamm and his little lamb
are back for more
of that precious ore.
Digging deep into your mainline,
poking for your hidden vein.
I Yamm what I am and that’s all
what I am
the sweetest of potatoes,
the Uber-tuber,
the root of all evil.
Sleek and hard, throbbing lard
smooth and strong, a mile long.
I sing of me
a perfect gram of the holy I AM.

Devil in a dead man’s underwear,
uh huh.
Devil’s got a dead man’s underwear,
on his head.
He’s the life of every party
he’s a can of poison meat.
Let me introduce you to the
pretty paraclete.
Devil in a dead man’s underwear,
uh huh, uh huh.

Bird, bird, bird,
the irrational word.
Surd, surd, surd,
the irrational bird.
Everybody knows
that the word comes first.
In the beginning was
the bird dance beat
the word made meat
the dove in heat
Must I repeat?

We have met the enemy and he tastes
like ham. Too damn salty.
I am what I am -
goddamn, goddamn.
I am what I eat.
Black bran, the key bone,
fowls of the air special,
the creeping thing plate,
the cloven hoof burger.

Body bag, wanna cook you in this
Body bag, who forsook you in this
Body bag, lost and found inside this
Body bag, break you down into a
Body bag, Body bag.
Seals in flavorful juice.

ziplock, Ziplock, ZIPLOCK.

Eraser Cheese

The high school cafeteria I endured for five years served something we called “eraser cheese.” These little chunks came off an enormous block of government-surplus cheddar, sliced into 3-inch oblongs and vulcanized by the passage of time. Its uncanny power resided in its ability to rub out mistakes in pencil better than any Pink Pearl or Art Gum.

Was it food? Was it a handy classroom tool? Or was it a tiny slab of compressed mystery like a miniature megalith from a dairy-based Stonehenge? Had these gummy little rectangles been transmuted by some academic abracadabra into a substance unknown to humankind? This was the era of moon rocks and lava lamps, mood rings and space-age plastics. More than once I wondered if eraser cheese could bring Superman to his knees as well as kryptonite.

In this state of confusion, if a long boring day spun me into a miserable educational stupor, I might gnaw on a real eraser and derive some satisfaction, if not nutritional value.

In college, I encountered Robbe Grillet’s novel, The Erasers, in which he dwells for 250 pages on soft rubber secrets, murders and lost memory. Soon afterward, David Lynch’s film Eraserhead opened for me vast new vistas of top-of-the-pencil dread and loathing. Had I stumbled onto the periphery of a worldwide conspiracy? Were the dietitians at Gates-Chili High School trying to indoctrinate me into some cult of edible erasure? “You can eat it or you can use it in algebra class,” they seemed to whisper.

As a kid, there was a stale stub of translucent gum eraser in my mother’s desk. It seemed more ancient than any Rosetta stone or Neanderthal bone. Faintly oily, crumbly to the touch, it was used by no one for nothing. In fact it had long ago lost its ability to remove graphite writing. It was like an office fossil, in with the rusty paper clips, bent brass fasteners and dried-up fountain pen cartridges.

So, encountering the eraser cheese there on my cafeteria tray - room temperature, oily, yet unyielding - conjured up a deeper childhood puzzle. What defines something as food, I wanted to know. Caffeine-free Diet Pepsi has absolutely no nutritional value. Yet it’s considered food. At least erasers give the teeth something to do. Eraser cheese, better in my desk than in the lunchroom, confounded my adolescent mind.

I nibbled, I rubbed, and I wondered.

My Date With Batboy

The first time I attended the Monroe County Fair, I got to see an honest to-God-freak show. There was a sword-swallower, a bald guy who pounded framing nails up his nose, a girl who played with snakes and thrashed around in a bogus electric chair, and a two-headed pig fetus floating in a 3-gallon jar.

So, when I went back the following July and was told there were no more prodigies of nature on display - “We’re a family fair now” - I gave up on this annual gathering of rip-off games and tepid rides.

But the hope did not die and when I returned years later delight was mine again, finding that the Fair promoters had gotten back to basics and rescinded the no-freak rule. There, in all its sordid glory, was a tent surrounded by lurid paintings of monsters. A clamoring constant spiel exhorted me to “See the Batboy! He’s only three-and-a-half feet tall. He only weights 50 pounds. The world famous Batboy. Ask him how he got that way!”

Eagerly, I paid my buck and entered the inner zone. This was no fake, no pickled punk as they’d had years before. Yes indeed, there was a real Batboy, if not the real Batboy. He required no cage. And though he was covered with tattoos, and truly misshapen - his ears stuck out and his face was caved in - he proved to be a very polite freak. He sat with a fan blowing on him and a boombox nearby to keep boredom at bay. He nodded and greeted the trickle of fans and nervous gawkers. The kids who hung back, trying to call up a little fear or shock, exited more puzzled than afraid.

When I had him alone, I bought a cheap xerox picture as a souvenir. I lied about my name and he signed it, “Nice to meet you, Boris.”

I got him talking and here’s what I found out: he was from California, he was 26 years old and he’d only been doing this routine for a few months, traveling around the country on the county fair circuit. He did nine-hour stints, with one hour off for lunch.

The general feeling I got was more of embarrassment than terror. He made a few desultory lunges at the kids, but didn’t give even a halfhearted growl or gibber. He seemed more like a bored TV viewer in his temporary living room than a source of freak-show weirdness. He sat in his comfy chair, day after day, and watched the parade of humanity pass by, and he was not terribly impressed. “I see hundred and hundreds of people each day,” he told me. “Some of them want their money back because I don’t scare them.”

But this is not to say that the Fair held no terrors. For free, I experienced the nightmare that called itself The Puppetone Rockers. If Bertoldt Brecht had worked with the Muppets, if a forgotten Euro-trash disco act had its own cable-access kids show, if flea-bitten marionettes writhed in agony in the inferno that yawns beneath Sesame Street, then they might approach the angst generated by Puppetone. Worst of all, a section of the stage detached itself at one point and the two keyboard-pounders drove around the fairgrounds like a float from a Hieronymus Bosch hell-parade. “Superkids! Superkids!” they kept chanting. A curse? A forgotten advertising slogan? A desperate prayer to some unknown, unsavory, god?

I was trapped at one point as a giant pink monstrosity thrashed like a hanged man on the gibbet. Nearer, nearer, it loomed as the drum machine ground out its kiddie death march.

I escaped, barely, and went back to have another talk with Batboy.

Samson With Syphilis

The ending goes like this: the temple at Giza crashing down around his tumescent head. A big operatic finale as he pushes aside the columns, yanking his own chains, growling and grunting and making secret shouts in Dagon’s penetralia, the innermost temple chamber, which collapses on him and swallows him whole.

But that story is just for the rubes.

Initiates, devotees and possessors of the gnosis, know that Dagon’s temple didn’t kill him. It was syphilis.

The strongman was infected, and infectious, carrying a load of sanctified body-spunk and wearing a halo of spirochetes. Faint wriggling bacteria, delicate as dust, ghostly microscopic worms, see-through microorganisms and his see-through man-flesh, too too solid, melted and reconfigured as Dog-name-man-god. Samson was the hound of Hebrew heaven, carrying the sex-pox to the enemy with purple gums and shiny ooze of slaver, howling at the moon and digging for Delilah’s bones.

Samson got his hair cut off because of the rash. His scalp was a suppurating mess: red raised lumps, itchy patches with hard chancres. He cut off his hair to get some air to the scene of the crime.

Samson the mighty man-slut whored his way from Jerusalem to Giza. Then he went blind, like Nietzsche, and deaf like Ludwig Van B. He went gibbering mad in the temple of Dagon, pushing that mill stone round and round for the Philistine Piscine slime-god, grinding dust to finer dust, not helpless because Delilah sheared off his man-mane, but because he was infected, slaving at the pulverizer in a cloud of syphilitic spores which spun round his head, the mill’s spirit-germ counter-spiral.

Lepers got out of the way when he came into town. But women could not resist his manly man-funk, his saline sweat: salt and hormones, mythic oils, a Frankincense monster. They could not resist his throbbing biceps and quads: the wild man Hebrew flex. Priestesses of Dagon, the hierodules and groupies, grew faint as he entered the temple. Their hearts fluttered and their shutters heaved as he allowed them each one a quick touch. A great circumcised muscle of love, a sleek phallic battering ram breaking down the temple door and coming inside, smeared with glycerin to make him shine.

They all wanted his infection - not just his seed to make the monster-child but the spirochete too, the agent of mutagenesis, fertility rites and ecstatic nights, and their wombs the alchemical flasks for the transmutation. Syphilitic seed is an agent of change to convert the fetus, to elevate the women to an altar and the birth to apotheosis. They wanted him as the destroyer and creator, the slayer and the player, the loner and lover.

Now we all know the legend of Samson, the killer of Philistines, destroying whole armies, reaping the fields of his enemies, jawbone as scythe and weapon and rhythmic sound machine. He wades into the enemy singing “why do the heathen rage?” - the last aria from the last opera, accompanied by Delilah’s love-moans and the rattle of teeth in a sun-bleached donkey’s jawbone, percussive buzz-riff, skitter of fragments and the hissing of the high glamor pox.

ME-262

1974: Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath have risen like the Saturn rocket - a tower of thrust and antigravity combustion. They have left the sphere of earth and burned up in reentry.

1974: Blue Oyster Cult’s third album, called Secret Treaties, confirms them as inheritors of the scorched metal crown. Eight songs, eight spells: Career of Evil, Subhuman, Dominance and Submission, ME-262, Cagey Cretins, Harvester of Eyes, Flaming Telepaths, Astronomy.

The album cover shows the band gathered around a German fighter jet, the ME-262, which was sent into the skies as the Reich crumbled and the last days loomed near. A sky-shark, with two tapered jet capsules slung under the wings, with the Kronos symbol on the tail fin where a swastika might have been. A thing of beauty and terror, twice as fast as any Allied airplane, a metallic predator, a oceanic creature liberated from the sea to shoot down bombers which hang “dependent from the sky, like some heavy metal fruit.”

On the cover, the band wears shades, capes and black leather. One holds four German police dogs on straining leashes. On the back cover, the same airplane, but no human figures, only four dead dogs lying spatters of black blood.

On the inner sleeve, a quote that makes reference to Origins of a World War. “These treaties founded a secret science from the stars. Astronomy.”

Also on the slick inner jacket another image, this one in color, of the band and the jet fighter. But the background is different, a scene from a World War spaghetti western. Long shadows on the yellow desert sand, a Mexican church, shadowy men with sombreros, thick mustaches and rifles. And a German shark plane transmuted from Westphalia to Almeria in southern Spain, where all the great Italo-American cowboy films were shot.

And on the disc itself, the song “ME-262,” a hymn to the Lufftwaffe’s secret weapons, to heroes of the last battle.

Singing: “Hitler’s on the phone from Berlin, saying ‘Boy, I’m gonna make you a star.’” Guitar riffs and air raid sirens, rock and roll microsoft word.