{"id":433,"date":"2007-03-29T00:04:57","date_gmt":"2007-03-29T04:04:57","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-12-17T21:53:16","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T21:53:16","slug":"shake-some-action-an-evening-with-lemgfu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/shake-some-action-an-evening-with-lemgfu\/","title":{"rendered":"Shake Some Action: An Evening with <em>Funhouse<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/T5__cV7G9z0?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nDuring the first week of freshman year in college I immediately bonded with a fellow supercharged, true believer in rock \u2018n roll named <strong>Doug<\/strong>. The kid had a raw nerve quality that fed into my own need for letting it all hang out. With a wiry build, a head full of thick curls, and a jagged nose, Doug talked in quick spurts, in deep grunts. His days were spent on a teeter-totter of partying his ass off at night and then spending the following morning jogging off the ills of the previous night. In those days I maintained a more even-keeled dedication to destructive behavior, so I rarely saw Doug while the sun shined. <\/p>\n<p>We\u2019d get together a couple of nights a week to do bong hits and examine the grooves of our favorite records. We\u2019d each pull out 3 or 4 records the other guy didn\u2019t know or may not have fully appreciated and then spend a couple of hours pointing out all the transcendent moments, all the while gauging each other\u2019s reaction and calculating <strong>\u201cturn-on points\u201d<\/strong> we might be collecting. (Looking back, no wonder we weren\u2019t getting laid nearly as much as we would have liked.) One record we both loved that we agreed required exclusive examination was <strong>The Stooges\u2019 <em>Funhouse<\/em><\/strong>.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nOne night, following dinner, we planned to score a bag of weed and spend the night listening to nothing but <em>Funhouse<\/em>. Getting inside <em>Funhouse<\/em>. If possible, being <em>Funhouse<\/em>. We checked with all our usual sources, but they were all out. Doug had already acknowledged that he was one trip over the line, so mushrooms were not on the menu. I got in touch with a <strong>Deadhead<\/strong> friend named Rachel, and sure enough, she got me in touch with a friend of a friend who could help us with our plans.<\/p>\n<p>All he had was a quarter ounce of <strong>shake<\/strong>, named so for being what shook free from the highly desired, tightly packed buds. Any bag you bought was sure to include some shake, but a whole bag of shake was a last resort, the bottom of the barrel. Short of outright dirtweed, this was the big bummer of pot purchases. Nevertheless, plans were plans, and the deal went down. The Stooges were never a Humboldt type of band anyhow. We would listen to the album repeatedly until we finished the quarter ounce bag.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s just say the night was one I\u2019d be better off not remembering, but I\u2019ll share. First we listened to the album for content alone, marveling at its energy, the variations on simple <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pentatonic\" title=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pentatonic\" target=\"_blank\">pentatonic riffs<\/a>, and Iggy\u2019s exhortations. How great is <strong>\u201cLoose\u201d<\/strong> when you\u2019re 18, high, and en route to a late-adolescent breakdown? If you can\u2019t get into \u201cLoose\u201d, you must have your head screwed on straight! The true genius of The Stooges really kicks in on \u201cT.V. Eye\u201d, where the band keeps recycling the main riff until a garage version of Coltrane\u2019s \u201csheets of sound\u201d or the most saturated moments of Fripp and Eno\u2019s <em>No Pussyfooting<\/em> album kick in. It\u2019s that moment when the wheel is spinning so fast that it looks like it\u2019s going in reverse. It\u2019s that moment of <strong>irony<\/strong>, as defined by Stephen Dedalus in <em>The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/em>. It\u2019s what\u2019s at the heart of any deep, extended blowout between friends, and we\u2019ve only just begun.<\/p>\n<p>By the second or third spin of the album, say a \u201cnickle\u201d into the bag, Doug wanted to get into the heads of each of The Stooges. He started acting out how he imagined each player might have been moving during the recording sessions, egging me on to help articulate what his gestures represented. As we air-played along to the songs, we got inside the mind of each guy, focusing on his commitment to the primitive and the stupid. We decided that <strong>Ron Asheton<\/strong> and <strong>Dave Alexander<\/strong> were the keys to the record. They lay into their 5-note riffs with all they\u2019ve got, refusing or unable to embellish them. Even when they slow it down for the bloozy \u201cDirt\u201d they resist trying to pull off a fancy triplet that a more accomplished musician could do on a number five times as fast. By keeping it simple and avoiding hotshot mugging, I could fully enjoy <em>da blooz<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Side two is where the band\u2019s beginner\u2019s commitment to the pentatonic scale fully unleashes its glory. <strong>Steven Mackay\u2019s sax<\/strong> enters midway through \u201c1970\u201d, and there\u2019s no need for analysis and articulation of imagined gestures. It\u2019s all there, getting higher and higher. You ain\u2019t never coming down. \u201c1970\u201d is followed by the title track, and this time Mackay\u2019s blowing along from the git-go! <em>Oh, the humanity!<\/em> By the fourth time through this album, Doug and I had little to say to each other. The <em>blurp-blurp-blurp<\/em> of the bong water, inhale, a \u201cHere\u201d through held breath as one passed the bong to the other. By the fifth time through, all the songs started to sound like \u201cL.A. Blues\u201d. The whole evening had saturated to the point of the final minutes of Steve Reich\u2019s early tape piece <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.furious.com\/perfect\/ohm\/reich2.html\" title=\"http:\/\/www.furious.com\/perfect\/ohm\/reich2.html\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cCome Out\u201d<\/a><\/strong>. <\/p>\n<p>The promise of the great tracks on The Stooges\u2019 debut album had been realized. The rot and waste that would set in with <strong>James Williamson<\/strong>\u2019s guitar wankery on <em>Raw Power<\/em> was nowhere near the horizon. The next morning a sweat-soaked, gym short-clad Doug knocked on my door to tell me about his \u201camazing\u201d run. Yeah, right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During the first week of freshman year in college I immediately bonded with a fellow supercharged, true believer in rock \u2018n roll named Doug. The kid had a raw nerve quality that fed into my own need for letting it all hang out. With a wiry build, a head full of thick curls, and a <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/shake-some-action-an-evening-with-lemgfu\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[110],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}