Fun House

Seven tracks, and most resist removal. Down on the Street must open: a riff that sets the record’s pulse and a voice already half a howl. Dirt must close side one, because it is the first time the record slows, and its long smouldering vamp is what the side has been driving toward. L.A. Blues must end the record: the songs have been coming apart since 1970, and the last track is what is left when the song is gone. The test gives in two places. Loose is the most removable song, a third fast riff-song beside the first and third, doing what they do with less. The title track is long by vamp more than by need. The record is necessary in its arc more than in every minute.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure, as far as it can be stated: at the end of the sixties the body’s appetite outlasts the counterculture’s promise of transcendence, and what remains is want without object, release without freedom. The record says it mostly by sound, and that is credited fully: Loose’s lunge, T.V. Eye’s scream, the saxophone in 1970 arriving as possession. The words say it plainly when they speak. “I’ve been dirt” is self-abasement turned to boast; “I feel alright”, chanted over a band at full force, is the joke and the truth of the year at once. What holds the axis below the bar is the line between mood and meaning: the condition is rendered with great force and little articulated, and much of its stated meaning is supplied by the year on the sleeve.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of one kind: frenzy, the Dionysian rather than the grand. Dirt reaches it by withholding, a slow vamp in which Ron Asheton’s wah guitar rises over a bass that barely moves, and the voice stays inside the groove until it breaks. 1970 reaches it by addition: the saxophone enters a song already at full tilt and lifts it past what a rock band could do alone. The title track is a rite in progress, a voice calling the band on. L.A. Blues is terror more than transport, a noise with no centre. Height comes on four or five of seven tracks. What holds the figure is the single register: little grandeur, no beauty in the narrow sense, and the first two songs have drive more than height.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The archetype is close at hand and partly built: the bacchanal. The record is shaped as a rite that begins as dance music in the street, passes through abasement in Dirt and possession in 1970, calls the celebrants in with the title track and ends in a frenzy where the form is torn apart. The singer is the sacrificial body at the centre, carried in the voice. The sequence bears that weight, and that is why the figure is not lower. What holds it well below the bar is that no one in the songs bears the rite. The title’s carnival is a word, and the particulars, a street, a television, a Saturday night, stay particular without turning figural. The myth is enacted by the sequence and evoked by the legend; it is not built.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance in 1970 was heavy blues-rock, the expanding album of the late sixties, the garage band, James Brown’s vamp and the band’s own first record of 1969, produced by John Cale. The turn is large: a rock band stripped of the period’s polish, carrying the free jazz of Coltrane’s and Ayler’s late years into a garage riff on its second side and ending in a track of pure noise. The stake was real and was paid: the record failed on release and was little heard for years. What holds it at the bar is the path. The MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, from the same city and label, had set free jazz beside garage rock a year before; the Velvet Underground had made noise and drone a rock language. The swerve is the fusion and its intensity.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because what it knows is escalation past control, and the sequence is that escalation. The sequence is counted here, once. Side one is songs, tightening into the slow burn of Dirt; side two adds the horn, and with each track the song form gives more ground, until L.A. Blues has none. Tracks lengthen from under four minutes toward eight, and the saxophone divides the halves exactly by side. The sound is form as well: a band heard as one body, a voice in the room rather than above it, so that the subject, the body past restraint, is also how the record sounds. What holds it below the top: the first three tracks are close in shape and could be reordered without loss.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over fifty-six years, real and largely formal. The issue of the complete session reels is the plainest sign of yield: a public large enough to want every take of seven tracks, and the takes show how the band found its versions, which has kept the making open to study. Musicians have returned to the record across five decades. The recording itself repays return: the interplay of Scott Asheton’s drums with the bass, the way the saxophone sits in the guitar’s register, the order in which the parts drop away in L.A. Blues. The semantic yield is thin. The words are few and repeated, and once their charge is felt they do not reorganise on return; much of what listeners find beyond the sound is projection invited by a raw surface.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is rock in its own years, and the contest is with the polished, expanding rock album. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that the raw intensity of a band playing at full force could be the whole content of an album, and that rock could take free jazz’s abandon without its harmony. That is a real reorganisation of what a rock record could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: punk in New York and London, and Detroit’s heirs, drew on the Stooges, and this record’s live sound and its turn to noise were taken up again by hardcore and noise rock; the Damned recorded 1970 as I Feel Alright on their first album in 1977. The reach is delayed, and shared with the band’s first record and with Raw Power.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-six years: form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, reissued and remastered, and the session reels survive beside it. Presence is the charge. The record failed on release and was little heard for years; its presence since has grown and is continuous now, in print and streamed, placed high whenever the rock album is counted, and kept alive by musicians. It remains wider among musicians and critics than among the public, and no song from it is a standard of broadcast. The fabric is little fixed to its year: the sound rests on almost no period technology, and a band in a room has aged less than the studio sound of 1970. The interrupted early presence holds the figure.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing. Gallucci’s production keeps the band whole and stripped, and the sound is the content. Ron Asheton’s guitar, wah-pedalled and riff-bound, is narrow in vocabulary and exact in use; Scott Asheton’s drumming holds the vamps without slackening across seven minutes; Dave Alexander’s bass on Dirt is a model of restraint. Steve Mackay’s saxophone is placed to fight the guitar rather than decorate it. The voice ranges from the croon inside Dirt to the scream of T.V. Eye. The faults: the range of means is narrow, every track built on a riff and a vamp; the mix is dense and at points muddy, the bass sometimes lost; and the title track’s long stretches are held by energy more than arrangement.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One law governs the record: the body driven past restraint, by riff, repetition and volume. Take the two most distant elements: Down on the Street, a tight riff-song of under four minutes, and L.A. Blues, a noise with no metre and no song. They obey the same law; the second is the first carried to its end, and the sequence makes that visible. Dirt, the slowest track, is the same drive held back, and its restraint is felt as pressure. The saxophone, a voice from another tradition, is bent to the law rather than standing apart from it. What holds the figure is the range the law governs: one tempo of feeling, from tense to frenzied, and one register of sound. Much of the unity is the unity of a narrow range.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The body and its appetite are held fully, as lust, abasement and release. Consciousness is held, but as a single state, compulsion, not as a mind moving among states. The street and the Saturday night stand for a youth with nothing to do; television enters in T.V. Eye as the eye of desire. The year is held in a title and a chant, and the end of a decade is felt in the sound. The sacred, inverted as a rite, is evoked by the shape. Labour, the family, the state, history beyond the year and the natural order are absent, and the city that made the band is heard only in the force of the playing. Few orders, held hard: that is what holds the figure lowest.

Score: 6.5 / 10