TAKE FIVE: IGGY POP AND THE STOOGES

Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007 | 7:25 a.m.

Saturday lineup: Daft Punk, Iggy & the Stooges, the Shins, Cypress Hill, Queens of the Stone Age, Public Enemy, STS9, Thievery Corporation, M.I.A. and others

Sunday lineup: Rage Against the Machine, Moe, Muse, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Umphrey's McGee, Robert Randolph & the Family Band, Ghostface Killah and others

When: Noon Saturday and Sunday (plus night shows at various venues , admission not included in festival tickets)

Where: Sam Boyd Stadium

Tickets: $79.50 for one day, $146.50 for both; unlvtickets.com

Information: www.vegoose.com

Iggy Pop and the Stooges landed with a giant critical thud in 1969.

Rolling Stone, still a hip magazine at the time, dismissed the band's first record, "The Stooges," with this line: "Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish." But fun nevertheless, the magazine added.

A year later, when the band had another record called "Fun House" in the bag, legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, writing in two issues of Creem, agreed - but said his rival publication was missing something special in the tribal drum rhythms and monstrous guitar riffs of the Ann Arbor, Mich. , misfits.

"When me and my friends would hear something we didn't like on the radio, the standard phrase was 'That guy should be killed,' " Iggy told The New York Times in 1992. "You'd really want to kill this person that was singing this phony song. 'I've seen fire and I've seen rain' - give me a break! You've seen the bedroom in your mom's house! It was a very extreme point of view."

As singer-songwriter James Taylor was finding his audience with sweet and gentle acoustic ditties, here were the Stooges , singing about sex, boredom and destruction - in a decidedly violent manner. The Stooges had unwittingly birthed punk, years before the Ramones and the Sex Pistols debuted.

But the band and its music were perhaps a little too original for the times, and the Stooges broke up after their third critical failure, "Raw Power," in 1973. (Drug habits didn't help.) With Iggy hitting a wall in his solo career, and the Stooges long retired from the music business and working construction jobs, the group re - formed in 2003.

Rekindling their original manic spirit, the Stooges have toured on and off for the past four years, and released "The Weirdness," their first album in 33 years, in March.

On Saturday they headline Vegoose, playing their seminal "Fun House" album in its entirety. Here are five reasons why Iggy and the Stooges still matter:

Respect

The Stooges, and "Fun House" in particular, birthed three generations of punk rockers, from the Ramones to Nirvana to the White Stripes. Jack White called the record "by proxy the definitive rock album of America." Chances are, if you listen to anything involving an electric guitar, the artist owes a debt to Iggy and the Stooges.

After watching the band perform the song "TV Eye" at the 2003 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, rock critic Neil Strauss wrote in The New York Times, "It was more than clear that in the 33 years since the song was recorded, (punk rock) has largely been variations on a theme. And the first two Stooges albums are the theme."

History

"Fun House," according to Henry Rollins, is " 30-some minutes of loose and dangerous music played by bad men and should be heard once at least."

The record was recorded live on 12 reels of 3M Scotch brand audiotape over about eight days in a Los Angeles studio in May 1970, and Saturday is a chance to see most of the original lineup that laid down the historic tracks. (Bassist Mike Watt, formerly of the Minutemen and Firehose, takes the place of Dave Alexander, who died in 1975.)

Raw power

The songs on "Fun House" are so raw that Elektra Records executives, who dropped the band after hearing them in 1970, are still reeling from the experience.

Iggy grunts, hoots, howls, hollers, screams and cries over what can be described only as a perverse blend of punk and jazz, complete with jamming from saxophonist Steven Mackay. Nothing like it has been heard since.

"We had a sound and we always delivered," Iggy wrote in his memoir. "It was a sweeping sound, like Mongolian horsemen charging in, thousands of them, little Tartars with swords, frequencies only a geek can hear."

Bangs described it as the sound of a band that had settled on the concept before learning to play their instruments. In a word: primal.

Spectacle

There are few artists who can match an Iggy Pop performance, even as the Stooges front man turns 60.

"He does a better job of making a fool of himself on stage and vinyl than almost any other performer I've ever seen," Bangs once wrote.

Iggy, of course, is infamous for baiting his audience, but has matured a bit since the Stooges ' heyday. Back then, he gouged himself with broken glass, beat his chest with drumsticks and smeared himself with peanut butter. Now, fueled by little more than rigorous exercise and a few glasses of Bordeaux, Iggy gyrates across the stage, bending and twisting into unimaginable positions for his age. In short: a man possessed.

Still, watch out. Those of you in front may get spit on.

Cool time

You likely won't recognize any songs from a Carnival cruise commercial, or from Iggy's spotty solo career. On recent dates, the band has been drawing solidly from its first two albums, which still sound refreshingly raw and uncompromising.

Back then, it was a release.

"In Desolation Row and Woodstock-Altamont Nation the switchblade is mightier and speaks more eloquently than the penknife," Bangs wrote. "But this threat is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation."

Amen, brother.