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These Detroit punks tapped into the brutal side of the blues for this primitive classic. They also give a one-note piano tribute to the Kinks‘ “You Really Got Me.” Over the ultimate bone-crunching three-chord guitar riff, Iggy Pop screams about the agony of teenage hormones the way only Iggy Pop can.

From Wikipedia:

Its memorable riff, composed of only three chords (G, F# and E), is played continuously throughout the song (excepting a brief 4-bar bridge). The 3-minute-and-9-second long song, with its raucous, distortion-heavy guitar intro, pounding, single-note piano riff played by producer John Cale and steady, driving beat, is a canonical example of The Stooges‘ heavy metal and punk sound.

From allmusic, reviewing the album:

While the Stooges had a few obvious points of influence — the swagger of the early Rolling Stones, the horny pound of the Troggs, the fuzztone sneer of a thousand teenage garage bands, and the Velvet Underground‘s experimental eagerness to leap into the void — they didn’t really sound like anyone else around when their first album hit the streets in 1969. It’s hard to say if Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, Dave Alexander, and the man then known as Iggy Stooge were capable of making anything more sophisticated than this, but if they were, they weren’t letting on, and the best moments of this record document the blithering inarticulate fury of the post-adolescent id. Ron Asheton’s guitar runs (fortified with bracing use of fuzztone and wah-wah) are so brutal and concise they achieve a naïve genius, while Scott Asheton’s proto-Bo Diddley drums and Dave Alexander’s solid bass stomp these tunes into submission with a force that inspires awe. And Iggy’s vividly blank vocals fill the “so what?” shrug of a thousand teenagers with a wealth of palpable arrogance and wondrous confusion. One of the problems with being a trailblazing pioneer is making yourself understood to others, and while John Cale seemed sympathetic to what the band was doing, he didn’t appear to quite get it, and as a result he made a physically powerful band sound a bit sluggish on tape.

From Pitchfork Media, reviewing the album:

James Osterburg was a man you might not look at twice on the street. Iggy Pop was his animal soul, and when Iggy got loose on a stage just about anything could happen. With the Stooges he was the mesmerizing center of a maelstrom that helped to invent a whole host of rock’s musical clichés, a group that spun primal fury and young adult frustration into some of the ugliest, most brutal, most alive music of its era.

There were other subversive, confrontational rock acts before the Stooges…but nobody before them had the good sense to take it as far over the top as they did. Even the band’s sturdiest compositions have a feeling of instability about them, like they might collapse or fly asunder at any moment, and there are moments when Iggy can’t help screaming and grunting as if he’s trying to challenge Ron Asheton’s guitar to some nihilistic duel. In the middle of the hippie era, their grimy, depraved, and violent take on love and life had no natural place, which is perhaps why it holds up so well.

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This seven-minute, two-chord track on the Velvet Underground‘s first album spiked out its territory with lyrics about shooting up until you felt like Jesus’ son. It gave the Velvets their dark image as New York decadents. “Heroin” speeds up and slows down, becoming a whirling spectacle of guitars and viola. “It wasn’t pro or con,” Reed said. “It was just about taking heroin from the point of view of someone taking it. I’m still not sure what was such a big deal. So there’s a song called ‘Heroin.’ So what?” Drummer Moe Tucker disagreed: “I consider it our greatest triumph.”

From Wikipedia:

“Heroin” was among a three-song set to be re-recorded at T.T.G. Studios, Hollywood before being included on the final release of The Velvet Underground & Nico (along with “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Venus in Furs“). This recording of the song would be the album’s second longest at 7 minutes and 12 seconds, being eclipsed only by “European Son” by about thirty seconds.

“Heroin” begins slowly with Lou Reed’s quiet, melodic guitar and hypnotic drum patterns by Maureen Tucker, soon joined by John Cale‘s droning electric viola and Sterling Morrison‘s steady rhythm guitar. The tempo increases gradually, mimicking the high the narrator receives from the drug, until a frantic crescendo is reached, punctuated by Cale’s shrieking viola and the more punctuated guitar strumming of Reed and Morrison. Tucker’s drumming becomes hurried and louder. The song then slows to the original tempo, and repeats the same pattern before ending.

The song is based on D♭ and a G♭ major chords. Like “Sister Ray“, it features no bass guitar; Reed and Morrison use chords and arpeggios to create the song’s trademark sound. Rolling Stone magazine said “It doesn’t take much to make a great song,” since the song only featured two chords.

Maureen Tucker actually got lost during the recording and stopped drumming for several moments in the middle of the song before picking up the beat again. This coincidental pause came at a dramatic shift in the song, however, and her “mistake” remains an essential element of the song.

From allmusic:

In 1966, when the Byrds‘ “Eight Miles High” and Bob Dylan‘s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” were generating no small controversy for daring to flirt with the subject of recreation drug use, the Velvet Underground crossed a then-unthinkable threshold and began performing a song called “Heroin.” Actually, Lou Reed had written the song in 1964 while still a songwriter for hire for Pickwick Records, but his employers were understandably wary about allowing him to record it, and it wasn’t until the Velvet Underground began performing in late 1965 that the song made its public debut. While “Heroin” hardly endorses drug use, it doesn’t clearly condemn it, either, which made it all the more troubling in the eyes of many listeners; at a time when marijuana was still legally classified as a narcotic, the notion of a rock & roll song discussing a dangerous drug without openly condemning it was practically the same thing as a ringing endorsement. Musically, “Heroin” was every bit as challenging as it was thematically; few rock songs of the period made better or more intelligent use of dynamics, and the slow build through the verses into the manic frenzy of the song’s conclusion sounded like nothing else in rock music at the time. In addition, John Cale’s screeching, atonal viola helped introduce the use of serious dissonance to pop music; along with Roger McGuinn‘s guitar breaks in “Eight Miles High,” it was one of the first examples of the lessons of free jazz or the avant-garde finding a willing student in rock music. While Lou Reed’s solo recording of the song on the live album Rock n Roll Animal smoothed out a few of the rough edges, even in its meekest recorded version the song remained a dark and troubling masterpiece.

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