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[One of the sections we featured in Live! Music Review every month was Officially Speaking, reviews of recent authorized albums, both live and studio, put out by different artists and labels. Fuck the big guns of the major music labels - we printed mostly reviews of releases by indie artists and labels. There were plenty to be found there of exceptional merit which normally got buried under an avalanche of big label hype. On this new online relaunch, we will continue that tradition.]
THE STOOGES
Live At Goose Lake, August 8th, 1970
(Third Man Records)
[review by Rev Keith A. Gordon]
VENUE: Goose Lake International Music Festival; Leoni Township, Michigan; August 8th, 1970
SOUND QUALITY: Aging soundboard recording sourced from original ¼” stereo two-track tape. Given its vintage, and that the tape has reportedly been sitting in the basement of a Michigan farmhouse for 50 years, it’s not really that bad. The sound is hollow overall, and somewhat muddy, with the instruments blending together to create a literal tsunami of sonic overkill, Iggy’s vocals stabbing out of the darkness to electrify the audience. Although the tape has been cleaned up and restored, producer Ben Blackwell wisely decided to leave the performance pretty much as it was, with between-song tuning, song introductions, and quiet pauses. As such, the album sounds as close to the original performance as you could possibly recreate after a half-century.
COVER: Nashville/Detroit’s Third Man Records has a reputation for quality packaging, but they went the minimalist route here with a simple cardboard sleeve, no gatefold, with just a couple of fuzzy photos from the festival and an overall graphic lay-out that resembles a high-end bootleg. A four-page over-sized insert provides insightful liner notes by legendary Creem magazine writer/editor Jaan Uhelszki. The insert also offers a nice-sized reproduction of the festival poster and a smaller reproduction of pages from the special edition of the Ann Arbor Sun underground newspaper that was circulated at the festival that includes a list of then-current drug pricing (pot for $10 a lid, California Orange LSD for $1 a tab!).
TRACKLIST: (Side One) Intro • Loose • Down On the Street • T.V. Eye • Dirt (Side Two) 1970 (I Feel Alright) • Fun House • L.A. Blues
COMMENTS: Woodstock gets all the glory, but a number of other rock festivals in the late 1960s and early ‘70s were just as glorious. For example, the Goose Lake International Music Festival was held almost a year after Woodstock, in August 1970 in rural Leoni Township, Michigan – a little over an hour’s drive west of Ann Arbor (and 90 minutes from Detroit). Richard Songer, who had made some cash in construction, was the promoter and he brought in popular Detroit radio DJ and concert promoter Russ Gibb and his partner, Grande Ballroom manager Tom Wright, to help out with the logistics. The festival was planned around an estimated attendance of 60,000 fans and featured free campsites, free parking, and free firewood as well as plenty of bathrooms and showers, medical tents, and a lake with a beach, all surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire to keep out the riff-raff.
Admission for the three-day event was a reasonable $15 (compared to Woodstock’s $18 ticket price) and the promoters came up with the idea to use poker-chip style entry tokens to avoid counterfeited paper tickets. They also built a large, revolving turntable on the stage with two performance spaces, so that one band could go on and perform in front while the previous band was packing up its gear on the other side. Predictably, gate-crashers came in hordes, with an estimated 200,000 fans ultimately attending the festival. The line-up of performing talent included a veritable “who’s who” of national and international rockers, including the James Gang, Mountain, Rod Stewart & the Small Faces, Ten Years After, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Jethro Tull. Drawing from nearby Detroit’s robust and thriving rock scene, the festival also featured performances by a number of local artists including Bob Seger, the MC5, Brownsville Station, Third Power, SRC, Detroit (with Mitch Ryder), and the Stooges. Although billed on the festival poster, Savoy Brown, Alice Cooper, and Joe Cocker did not perform due to contractual problems.
The raucous Goose Lake set by the Stooges on August 8th, 1970 has long been shrouded in notoriety. Three of the four band members were allegedly stoned out of their gourds for the performance, with bassist Dave Alexander said to be so blotto that he couldn’t play a note. But while Alexander’s non-performance would prompt Stooges frontman Iggy Pop to fire the bassist after the show, his longtime friends and bandmates Ron and Scott Asheton have said in several subsequent interviews that Alexander was playing his instrument, just playing some songs better than others, a claim verified by other musicians present at the festival. Regardless, you can judge for yourself with the recent, first-ever release of the Stooges’ Live At Goose Lake by Jack White’s Third Man Records on CD and vinyl.
From a historical perspective, the Goose Lake festival was the last performance by the original Stooges line-up, captured shortly after the release of the band’s seminal sophomore recording, Fun House. In fact, the set list reflects the album’s seven-song track list, although with different sequencing. The other important thing about Live At Goose Lake is that the album is the only known soundboard recording of the original band line-up. Further muddying the waters is the longstanding rumor that the festival promoters pulled the plug on the band just as they were beginning to crank it up, but the album clocks in at roughly 40 minutes, and while you can hear the Stooges being bum-rushed off as the revolving stage turned 180-degrees while they were still playing to bring on Third Power, the next act, they were only given 45 minutes to perform in the first place.
As for the Stooges’ Goose Lake festival performance, it’s a mixed bag. After a brief intro, Iggy launches into “Loose,” a garage-rock rave-up built around Ron Asheton’s flamethrower guitar and brother Scott’s explosive drumbeats. A rowdy performance of “Down On the Street,” with Iggy exhorting the crowd to “ram it,” almost got the band arrested for inciting a riot. Ron Asheton’s fretwork on the song is hypnotic and switchblade-sharp while the chemistry between bassist Alexander and drummer Scott Asheton is readily apparent. Iggy is in full-blown “streetwalkin’ cheetah” mode by the time they crank up “T.V. Eye,” starting the song with a primal howl and Asheton’s big-beat drums, Iggy’s swaggering vocals matched by the band’s instrumental intensity. Side One closes out with “Dirt,” a stoned, stumbling, wired performance that precedes and predicts the “stoner metal” genre that would follow in the ‘70s.
The second side of the album features three songs, kicking off with the incendiary “1970 (I Feel Alright),” a blistering performance with galloping drumbeats and scorching guitar licks matched by Iggy’s rapid-paced vocals in what is a strident, breakneck arrangement that takes no prisoners. On the other hand, saxophonist Steve Mackay’s dominates the performances of “Fun House” and “L.A. Blues,” ending the album on a discordant note. The former song offers Mackay’s chaotic sax riffing above the barely-rhythmic din of the band while the latter song is extended nearly two minutes past its album length into an extended jam that features Iggy scat-singing above the reckless blasts of sax while the band crashes and bangs its way to some sort of cacophonic conclusion. The result is nearly ten-minutes of instrumental anarchy that some listeners may appreciate, but my ears deem to be naught but noise-for-noise’s sake.
The Goose Lake International Music Festival was meant to be the first of many such events, with promoter Richard Songer sinking $1 million into developing the 390-acre park into what he was calling the “world’s first permanent festival site.” The festival’s widespread drug usage and public nudity offended the usual parties, however, with Michigan governor William Milliken denouncing the “deplorable and open sale and use of drugs” while calling for an investigation, the state attorney general Frank Kelley quoted saying that “I think that we have seen the first and last rock concert of that size in Michigan.” There were 160 arrests of concert-goers as they left the event, mostly on drug charges, and Songer himself was subsequently indicted for promoting the sale of drugs, to be acquitted of the charges in December 1971.
The local district attorney got an injunction barring any further concerts at the park, making the Goose Lake International Music Festival the first and last show of its kind. Today the festival site is known as the Greenwood Acres Family Campground. To my knowledge, the Stooges’ show is the only performance from the festival to be legitimately released, although with a cache of soundboard tapes recently unearthed, maybe we’ll hear rare concert performances from other Motor City rockers like Detroit, SRC, or the MC5. As for the Stooges, they soldiered on without Alexander, releasing their classic, influential Raw Power album in 1973, with Ron Asheton moving over to bass guitar and newcomer James Williamson taking over six-string duties.
While the Stooges’ Live At Goose Lake is interesting from a historical perspective, musically it’s at least 1/3 hot trash and 1/3 pure electricity, with the rest falling somewhere in between. There’s a cottage industry in dodgy Iggy/Stooges live recordings, so you probably don’t need this LP unless you’re a Stooges completist or fanatic. If you must have a live Stooges album, track down and buy a copy of Metallic K.O. instead. Grade: C
Adam Gottlieb & OneLove: All Of You [review by Bill Glahn] Tracklist: Intro/ Manifesto/ Under The Viaduct/ Waterfall Blues/ heart beat/ Ode To All Of You/ On The Brink/ Mama/ Who Will Stand/ Water Is Life/ Kylo/ We Need Peace/ Interlude/ After Capitalism All of You mixes elements of ‘60s psychedelia, spoken word, soul (Great Lakes variety), funk, rap, rock, 21st century pop, folk, and world music. If that sounds like a mess, guess again. What holds All of You together musically is a solid rhythm section that would fit nicely into any era of Motown, multiple vocalists (both male and female), as well as the horn section from Fatbook, another dynamic Chicago band (great charts!), who appear on most tracks. What holds it together thematically is a dream for a better world. It’s a great thing to know that our younger folks are still dreaming. And singing about their dreams. The disc opens with Intro, a sample of testimonials and conversations reminiscent in tone to Pink Floyd’s “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast.” This approach is repeated again on one of the final tracks, “Interlude,” and various interjections into other songs as well. Next up is “Manifesto,” a declaration of commitment towards a better world presented in an infectious piece of funk, complete with wah-wah guitar, a short and sweet saxophone solo, and the aforementioned horn section and rhythmic thunder. It continues with a great vocal bridge of “We gotta get up, we gotta get up,” another solo (this time on flute), and a final flash of horn blasts to accompany the vocal theme of the record. Musically, it’s a metaphorical victory. The Battle of Jericho was won with horn blasts, after all. Make no mistake, All Of You, is an invitation to join the conversation of a revolution in progress, one that includes the poorest and disenfranchised among us. Documented are the failures of Capitalism, a failure even its founder, Adam Smith, warned about if workers were not given a seat a the table. It documents such failures in tracks such as “Under The Viaduct” (homelessness), “On The Brink’ (imperialism motivated by corporate profit interests), “Water Is Life” [corporate exploitation of the very resources humans depend on, which incorporates a second unlisted poem, called “My (Ghost) Town”]. Things become problematic with the last track, “After Capitalism,” where Gottlieb reveals his vision as Utopian rather than Socialist. “Your food won’t come from California unless you live in California.” Really? Already he has eliminated all people from the equation who live in climates not conducive to growing things. “No one will work in a factory, or sell popcorn or scan things in shops...” Ouch. While this may come as a surprise to Gottlieb, the overwhelming majority of humans do not have artistic talents. And many have learning disabilities where education has its own barriers. Many find accomplishment in mechanical or technological pursuits, largely perceived by artistic minds as “jobs.” It also leaves a whole lot of folks out of the revolution that get a sense of accomplishment from producing physical things in factories such as tractors and farm equipment, intubators and face-masks, clothing, transportation devices, road workers, etc. etc. etc. Then there’s retail workers, office clerks, all who gain dignity from their work. Do we eliminate them from the revolution as well? All the peppy tempos and “la-la-las” in the world won’t solve these problems. A history lesson maybe, as part of the conversation? Both Josip Broz Tito, the most progressive of Communist dictators and the Nordic experiments (Capitalist countries with Socialist leanings) come to mind. First Tito. Tito was the biggest thorn in the side of Moscow Soviet ambitions. As a war hero fighting fascism during WW2, he had the backing of his Yugoslavian countrymen after the war. He instituted market socialism (corporations owned and self-managed by their employees) which operated in open and free markets of the west. Ethnic tensions were held under control through policies of self-determination by the states – a form of “states rights” with central control. He gave priority to the exportation of education and medical science – basically a Castro who didn’t have to deal with a decades-long embargo (something that forced Castro to deal with Moscow for economic support rather the more ideologically similar Yugoslavia). Even the arts played a part. Yugoslavia’s close proximity to Western Europe exposed them to western pop music coming from the radio stations there. Being a Communist country, Yugoslavia’s currency did not float in the financial markets, only their products did. It was a goods-for-goods scenario. European music conglomerates didn’t need any of the potatoes or cheap tractors that Yugoslavia had to offer. Licensing deals were off the table. But India did and EMI records had a wholly owned subsidiary in India. A deal was forged where Yugoslavia would trade tractors for records of EMI controlled artists (think Beatles, Pink Floyd Chicago, Canned Heat and other artists that came under the EMI umbrella in the UK) manufactured in India. The only country in the Communist block to distribute fully authorized releases (not pirates or counterfeits) was Yugoslavia. Licensing arrangements for Yugoslavian manufacturing were eventually worked out. Tito’s open border policies (both in and out) were essential to allow western bands to tour there. But as with any government controlled by a single individual, power leads to demagoguery and abuse. In 1963 Tito was named “president for life” by the very government he controlled. Tito had survived Stalin’s reign of terror by, after numerous assassination attempts, sending Stalin the following note: “Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send another.” In later years, Tito began diplomatic relations with some of the harsh military fascist regimes of South America (never as cozily as the United States, though). When he died in 1980, his funeral attracted delegates from more counties (of all political ideologies) than any previously held state funeral. Onward to the 21st century. We are faced with a new set of problems than Tito had to deal with. It is true that machines are doing a lot of the functions that were previously performed by humans. But not nearly so fast as Capitalism, run rampant with no controls, is imploding on itself. And taking a civil society along with it. Capitalism’s response is to let people die – by the millions. Capitalist Scandinavian countries (and to a degree, their continental counterparts), have responded with socialist safety nets. But only the Nordic countries have instituted experiments that address the problems on the horizon with programs like a standard and permanent income for replaced workers. Results are somewhat mixed, the most encouraging being a happier existence and more mental stability. While All of You doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions, it has opened the door to discussion. That’s a victory and its most magnificent achievement. It’s time to turn the revolution over to younger folks. I'm easily tired these days as are many of my contemporaries. My only wish is that they look into the rear view mirror once in awhile. There are cautions and victories to be found there.
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