(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / Schwules Museum Berlin)
Sat 18 October 2025 21:00, UK
Sometimes an album comes along and on the very first listen, it grabs you by the lapels and shakes you like a secondhand Skoda trundling over a cattle-grid at 70. The brooding intensity of both Henry Rollins and Billy Corgan has no doubt done that to many folks.
But what record stopped both of these disparate figures in their tracks? Well, it seems both of their outputs have been heavily indebted to the unrivalled roar of Fun House by The Stooges.
When Rollins first heard it, he had a very different view of music from the one that it helped to shape. “In the summer of 1981, I leave Washington DC to join Black Flag, and they’re a whole other animal,” he recalled in a chat with Goldmine.
Bold and daring, Rollins quickly became aware that his days flipping burgers were set to be a thing of the past. “They’d ask me what bands I liked, and I would list them, and they thought almost every one sucked. ‘I like the Clash’. ‘Poseurs’. ‘I like the Sex Pistols.’ The Damned.’ They just thought punk rock was utter crap,” he added.
Rollins continued: “At one point, one of the band members said, ‘Look, if you want to be in this band you’ve got to be down with Black Sabbath, the Stooges, and the MC5,’” Rollins now thought his days flipping burgers might be back on the cards. These darker, more mysterious groups were relative unknown entities to him.
That was about to change. “One day, in the van,” he says, “I put on Fun House. Upon first listen, a few things hit me: OK, this is my favourite record, and it’s the purest record I’ve ever heard, and I’m never going to do anything that good. All of that remains true to this day.”
Iggy Pop and the Stooges performing in 2007. (Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
The album is an atom splitter, detonating from nowhere and severing the shackles of stilted rock ‘n’ roll with perfect attitude, punchy riffs, oft-overlooked melodicism, and something akin to a mutiny against mundanity. For Rollins, the rest of his life lay ahead. And he wouldn’t be the first.
Corgan was equally moved by the poetic carnage of the Stooges’ sophomore 1970s classic. “It put the punk into metal or the other way around. Essential listening,” he said when championing it as one of the finest record in history. The irony wasn’t lost on him that the record predates both of the genres that he said it blended.
Rollins and Corgan would attempt a similar act of alchemy with their own sounds – taking what they loved, and making it deeply individual, and daringly performative. Alas, while coupling genres might be increasingly commonplace, inventing something new from the mix like the Stooges, Rollins and Corgan is something very rare.
As Charlie Steen of the band Shame told us in a recent interview regarding the Stooges’ continued influence some 50 years later, “The Stooges changed my life. Only three albums to their name and these three records seem to have altered the fate and direction of so much that came after them. The list of artists that cite this band as the reason they picked up an instrument is endless.”
Also joining the trio that the duo of this article has become is Michael Gira. The fierce Swans frontman concurred that “early Stooges” were groundbreaking, crowning them his “idols”, and once again showcasing the ripples of this rarified “pure” classic in the uncompromised passion of his music. Fuck the mainstream, it’s funner down the Fun House.
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