• Included in the Personal Posts List.
• My turntable has been on the blink lately (it runs a tiny bit slow), so I have been opening up some of my recent CD purchases.

Martin Winfree

December 4, 2012

My turntable has been on the blink lately (it runs a tiny bit slow), so I have been opening up some of my recent CD purchases. The trio that is playing now includes the Invisible Eyes album, which is this month’s UARB. The second is Iggy and the Stooges’ Open Up and Bleed, a part of the Iguana Chronicles, which is a series of albums taken from tracks on a big box full of tapes that James Williamson dropped off at the offices of Bomp! Records as a reward shortly after Bomp inexplicably became the only label to release his and Iggy Pop’s first post-Stooges LP, Kill City. (The series is named after Iggy Pop’s first band, the Iguanas). These are then-new songs that were recorded (mostly in practice sessions) in 1973 after the tour to support the Stooges’ last studio album, Raw Power; they could have become their next album if things had gone right. As I write, I am playing the title song, “Open Up and Bleed” again; it has been playing in my head all through making and eating breakfast. The next track, “Johanna” is a fairly rare Stooges song, I’ve read; I have a piece of a live version on another album in the series. Both are among their fairly slow numbers but simmer with undisguised fury. The third CD is by a band called Les Hell on Heels, an all-female band that (at least based on my first couple of listenings) beats the Donnas and the Pandoras at their own game. Another future UARB, without question. Remarkably I got all three on sale at the Bomp mailorder site; the Invisible Eyes CD is still on sale for $3, and they might all be for all I know.