IF YOU HAVE read or seen Paul Trynka's Open Up and Bleed or Jim Jarmusch's Gimme Danger or Iggy's own I Need More, as I have, you have already seen a lot of these photos and heard or read a lot of these stories...but you are going to acquire this book anyway, as I did, because...well, because.
The punk band I was in from 1979 to 1983 had a standing policy: we covered at least one song from each Stooges album and each Iggy album. I think we had three apiece from the debut and from Raw Power.
Total Chaos is a coffee table book, in effect, lots of large format photos, most of Iggy and the band but also of news clippings, show posters and legal correspondence, plus Gold's interview with Mr. Osterberg himself providing a running commentary on the images, a kind of voiceover for the slide show.
The very idea a coffee-table book about the Stooges is a little incongruous. It's hard to imagine them having anything so bourgeois as a coffee table at the Funhouse, to say nothing of having a book whose main purpose was to be available for browsing on a coffee table, unless it was of Nazi regalia.
And, as noted above, it's mainly photos you've seen before, glittery Iggy, dog-collar Iggy, Iggy at King's Cross, and stories you've heard before, Danny Fields discovering them at the U. of M. student union, recording with John Cale in a cape, drugs, groupies, John Sinclair, David Bowie....
...but we don't mind hearing the story of Hamburg, the Cavern, Brian Epstein, and the Maharishi again and again, do we? Or the story of Greenwich Village, Joan Baez, booed at Newport, motorcycle accident, basement tapes? For me, this is one of those stories. If there's ever a Total Chaos II, I'm getting that one too.
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