A show by the reunited Stooges deals with the boundaries of the self; it’s about private-made-public and public-made-private. It airs ideas (and parts of the body) that usually aren’t laid open, and turns the hey-ho communal experience of rock into an inner monologue. It’s also a choreographed re-enactment of chaos, rude and simple and immaculate. It represents a total thesis on rock ’n’ roll — not by any means the only possible one but a great one. And the Stooges’ show at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights on Monday night was an argument, too: for the re-uniting of old bands without shame or second thought, once they figure out what, philosophically, they were all about in the first place. Iggy Pop, now 59, is the captain of these inside-outside actions. Try to take your eyes off him. How he re-enacts fear, rage, sex, abject boredom, universal love and lethal cynicism, while dancing with originality, remembering lyrics and maintaining the delicate middle-state between having pants on and not having pants on, is why he is he, and you are merely you.
Iggy repeatedly asked for the house lights to be turned on: more boundary-ruptures. At one point, lights fully on, the band started “Real Cool Time,” and Iggy brought the audience into his world, or so it seemed. “Invade the stage!” he begged. “Fly!” About a hundred did, many of them dancing, many trying hungrily to kiss him or pile on him. The road crew suddenly had to protect the band, the backline of amplifiers and Iggy himself, who nonchalantly reached for the arm of a roadie at critical moments. (The mob stayed onstage for “No Fun” as Iggy dodged feet and hands while singing “no fun to be around/walking by myself/no fun to be alone ...”) Iggy Pop is all right with physical danger and leapt into the crowd several times to prove it. One of those times, memorably, was a dead-man dive: he just tipped over into the front rows, face-first.
Most of the set, rendered fast and loud, came from the first two Stooges albums: “The Stooges,” from 1969, and “Fun House,” from 1970. (They don’t play anything from “Raw Power,” their third album.) But the rest of the show — about a third of it — was recent Stooges, since their reunion in 2003, either from the band’s brand-new record “The Weirdness,” or from Iggy Pop’s last solo record, “Skull Ring.” The group seems to have forsworn slow tempos and those wrinkles on the Bo Diddley drum pattern in favor of a fast and generic four-four, which could be an act of abnegation, a necessary anti-nostalgia exercise or both.
The bad news is that the new songs lack grace and sensuality. The good news is that they sound much better live. The band threw its weight behind these grooves: Scott Asheton slammed the downbeats on the snare drum; his brother, the guitarist Ron Asheton, made the songs cohere with the drone of his open E string; the tenor saxophonist Steve Mackay blew serrated, trashy R&B riffs, sometimes run through waves of digital echo. And the bassist Mike Watt — the only nonoriginal member, replacing the deceased Dave Alexander — followed Iggy’s physical cues with half-crazed concentration, like a fisherman refusing to let go of a dangerous catch.
One of the show’s best moments came with no music at all. It was at the end of the new song “I’m Fried.” The band snapped it shut, but Iggy Pop kept dancing: grotesque and pretty, whirling, contorting and pivoting. Either by accident or design, he did what he was trying to do: he got outside himself.
