This could so easily be written off as just "one of the first punk albums" (a decent enough claim to fame in and of itself) but that would ignore the brilliant variety of it. You get the hard, attitude-laden smack of most of the tracks, swirling with wah-wah guitar and Iggy's vocals flying between a sneer and a drone; but then this is contrasted with the 10 minute long droning chanting dirge of "we will fall", and the delicate 'Ann' (that eventually does bring out the distortion). In some ways, their refusal to make an album that makes 'punk' sense is one of the more punk rock things they could have done.
The story behind it is almost as interesting as the album itself. The record company A&R guy went looking to sign MC5 (for some reason) and after seeing the Stooges, ended up signing them too as kind of an afterthought. An inauspicious start for such an influential band.
Put in the studio with Velvet Underground's John Cale, it quickly became apparent that, regardless of their attitude and live energy, the band only had 3 songs to their name and were sent to a hotel room for 2 days during which time they wrote the rest of the album!
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