By Jim Rowland
Towards the tail end of last year, Cherry Red released the well-received ‘You Think Your Bad, Man?’ box set, collecting together various infamous live recordings of Iggy & The Stooges as they toured the ‘Raw Power’ album before crashing and burning. Now Cherry Red follow that up with ‘Born In A Trailer’, very much a companion piece to that live box set, collecting together the various demo session and rehearsal recordings that the Iggy/James Williamson/Asheton brothers version of the band recorded prior to the recording of the ‘Raw Power’ album and then during the rehearsals for the subsequent tour.
Spread over four discs, ‘Born In A Trailer…’ comprises various studio sessions and rehearsal recordings made in London, New York, Detroit, LA and Michigan. As with the previous box, all this material has been released numerous times before, but rarely collected together in one package. However, if you have Easy Action’s seminal ‘Heavy Liquid’ box set, released in 2005 but now harder to find, then you will have almost all of this collected together already, with one notable exception. In fact, the first three and a half discs of this set are exactly the same as the first three and a half discs of the ‘Heavy Liquid’ box, bringing together the session from the Olympic Studio in London from 1972 prior to ‘Raw Power’ with the rehearsal tapes from Michigan, Detroit and New York in 1973 after it. The difference here is the inclusion of a further eight tracks, including covers of ‘I’m So Glad’ and ‘I’m A Man’, from another Detroit rehearsal showing the band letting off some steam in a bluesy direction.
Disc one is a real highlight here, covering the London Olympic session from ’72 which focuses on arguably one of the best tracks the Stooges ever came up with – ‘I Got A Right’, which featured prominently in the ‘Gimme Danger’ documentary a few years back. It’s a killer slice of high energy proto-punk, and it does help if you like that track as there’s thirteen different takes of it to choose from! Add to that two versions of ‘Gimme Some Skin’, and cracking renditions of ‘I’m Sick Of You’, ‘Tight Pants’ (which became ‘Shake Appeal’) and ‘Scene Of the Crime’, plus throwaway covers of ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Money’, all with pretty decent sound quality, and disc one is an absolute treat.
The sound quality inevitably dips for the various rehearsal tapes on the other three discs, but never to the point of making it hard going listening by any means. You get blistering versions of some ‘Raw Power’ tracks like ‘Raw Power’, ‘Search & Destroy’, ‘Gimme Danger’, ‘Death Trip’ and ‘I Need Somebody’, all raw, energy-packed warts ’n’ all versions, but the real treat are the tracks that sadly never made it to a fourth album. The likes of ‘Rubber Legs’, ‘Open Up & Bleed’, ‘Head On’, ‘Cock In My Pocket’ and ‘Johanna’, plus a fair few others, are all quality tunes and give us a glimpse of what might have been had the Stooges managed to continue on to a fourth album. This is the closest you’re gonna get.
If you’re a keen Stooges fan and don’t have much or even any of this stuff already, then despite the sound quality, this box set would be an essential part of your Stooges collection.
- ‘Born In A Trailer: The Session & Rehearsal Tapes (’72-’73)’ is released on Friday (16 July). You can get your copy HERE.
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