Forget, for just a minute, the Stooges' legacy as punk progenitors.

Forget that frontman Iggy Pop predated the aggressive theatrics of the Sex Pistols by nearly a decade. Try to erase from your mind the Motor City grind of Ron Asheton's guitar and the psycho notion of tossing jazz saxophone into a primordial rock stew.

Ben Edmonds, a Detroit rock writer, suggests you listen to the Stooges box set 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions in another context.

"Outside of Detroit, the Stooges were probably the most despised band of their time — when they weren't being actively ignored," Edmonds said.

The seven-disc set excavates the Stooges' every move during the tracking of their magnum opus, Fun House (1970). Fans can listen to the Stooges holed up against the world, painting each stroke of their masterpiece, and then some, even as the metaphoric masses outside derided them.

The box, released in January, presents the entire May 11–24, 1970, sessions in chronological order: eight hours of takes on "T.V. Eye," "1970" and Fun House's five other cuts; 32 runs through "Loose"; one previously unknown track; a rare single; and every horn bleat, lyric change and scrap of studio dialogue that went into one of the most influential punk discs in history.

Although he confessed that he still hadn't listened to the box in its entirety, Asheton said recently that an initial listen brought back a wash of memories: not only of the particular amplifiers and fuzz boxes he used in making Fun House, but also of being a movie fanatic from Detroit walking the streets of Los Angeles, where the disc was cut, for the first time. Once, he said, he was nearly run over by a limo, only to hear John Wayne's voice bellow from inside, "f---ing hippie assh---!"

Heavy-Handed Bashing

Asheton, 51, said the box also allowed him to ruminate on his old band: his brother Scott Asheton on drums; Pop (born James Osterberg); Steven MacKay on sax; and bassist Dave Alexander, who died in 1975 after a bout with alcoholism.

"I have played Stooges songs in every band I've been in since the Stooges, and you can't capture certain things," Ron Asheton said from his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. "My brother's absolutely heavy-handed bashing, his simple Charlie Watts-with-Arnold Schwarzenegger pounding. And Dave Alexander, his droney, snaking bass playing. It's punchy at times, but it reminds me of a sidewinder rattlesnake going through the desert."

Unlike most rock albums, Fun House was cut live in the studio, meaning that each take includes the entire band. According to Edmonds, a Detroit scene-maker since 1969 and author of the liner notes to the box set, producer Don Gallucci worked through take after take, hoping to burn off some of the excess energy the Stooges were carrying from a recent stint on the road.

One early stomp through "Fun House" stretches past the 11-minute mark. "Let me in!" Pop shouts over and over, trying to find an opening to shimmy his vocals into the groove. He later unleashes a hail of freak-out screams, before MacKay rips lines from his horn that sound more like bagpipes than sax.

Next time around, Scott Asheton intros the song with "Wipeout" drums, and Edmonds says he can hear MacKay slip some of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme into the sax lines.

Listening to the set, "You feel as if you're the additional person standing in the recording both at the birth of some momentous piece of American music," said David Baker, archivist at Rhino's boutique Handmade label, which released the set.

Other cuts show Pop continually refining lyrics he'd initially tested on the road. On "1970," for instance, the line he eventually sings as "All night till it blow away" starts off "All night in a world that's lame."

"If you've ever seen Iggy onstage, you know that a lot of times he won't stick to the script as far as lyrics go," Edmonds said. "It's pretty much just sounds that come off the top of his head. Especially in those days, when the Stooges' live sound was just this wild maelstrom of sound that Iggy functioned within somehow. He would just make noises to accompany the music."

In addition to dozens of alternate takes of songs Stooges fans know, the set includes an unreleased dirge called "Lost in the Future." More surprising is the version of "Down in the Street" issued at the time as a single (RealAudio excerpt of original Fun House version) — complete with overdubbed keyboards added by Elektra Records in a futile bid at AM radio airplay.

'Performance Art'

Although they reassembled with varying lineups in subsequent years, 1970 marked the end of the line for this particular set of the Stooges, which many consider the band's definitive incarnation.

1970 is, of course, the kind of exhaustive window into the creative process that the casual fan will find excessive, the kind of reverential treatment typically reserved for the likes of jazz great Louis Armstrong or country pioneer Hank Williams Sr.

But it also offers a rare illumination of a musical masterstroke. Take after take, even on the false starts and crash-and-burns, there's intriguing evidence of how these outcast musicians bonded.

"This wasn't like a band," said Wayne Kramer, former guitarist for Stooges contemporaries the MC5. "This was like performance art. They're only a band in retrospect. ... The songs weren't so much like verse-chorus as they were these little excursions into the darker side of Iggy's psyche. They were great."