There are few if any major rock artists who seem to have a more laissez faire attitude toward bootlegging than
Iggy Pop; his catalog is riddled with semi-authorized live albums from various mysterious labels (mostly based in Europe and the United Kingdom) that document literally dozens of live shows from various points of his career (and in various degrees of fidelity). Only the most obsessive
Iggy fan is capable of keeping track of all these semi-legit (or wholly non-legit) releases, and in recent years
Iggy himself has taken it upon himself to try making sense of this aspect of his recorded legacy; he's authorized a pair of box sets from Easy Action Records,
Where the Faces Shine, Vol. 1 and
Vol. 2, which collect some of the better live recordings that have surfaced over the years, and now Shout! Factory has issued
Roadkill Rising - The Bootleg Collection: 1977-2009, a four-disc set gathering highlights from 21 different shows, starting with the 1977 tour in support of his solo debut,
The Idiot, and concluding with five numbers from a French radio concert promoting
Preliminaires. There's long been a real need for a well-curated set that would separate the wheat from the chaff in
Iggy's glut of live albums, but
Roadkill Rising falls short of the ideal anthology. While most of the performances here are quite good and the fidelity is always at least adequate,
Roadkill Rising seems to have been stitched together with little rhyme or reason. The material is arranged chronologically, but beyond that, one set of tunes stumbles into another without making sense of their different sonic and musical characteristics as
Iggy's backing bands (none of whom are credited) and musical approaches shift from concert to concert throughout this set, leaving
Roadkill Rising in dire need of some sense of focus. (It also doesn't help that often
Iggy will start introducing one song only to begin singing something else when the splice from one gig to another occurs.) And while there's a desperate and confessional air to some of the early shows on disc one and the combination of
Stooges reunion gigs and the jazz-influenced
Preliminaires material makes disc four exciting, what's in the middle often feels like a slog through the more inconsistent eras of
Iggy's career. Few artists of
Iggy Pop's stature are in greater need of a box set that would put the ups and downs of their body of work into proper perspective, and
Roadkill Rising suggests that his live recordings could use one all their own -- one that handles this often remarkable music with greater care and attention than it receives here. ~ Mark Deming