Stooges - A Proto-Punk Revelation

The seeds of punk in full hippie bloom. The end of everything ("No Fun") in the age of utopias. The savage fury of a musical anarchy absurdly ahead of its time, and for that reason utterly incomprehensible to its contemporaries. For once, the adjective "revolutionary" doesn't feel out of place, when talking about the Stooges from Detroit. One of the most explosive and prescient experiences in the entire history of rock, so much so that it spawned an endless stream of clones over the years. And yet, in the end, it all burned out in just four years. In that lethal trio of albums that blew underground America apart at the turn of the '60s and '70s.

Detroit, the industrial city par excellence, capital of the automobile industry, reveals its heart of darkness, rotten and nihilistic, rising up as the new Mecca for a generation of proto-punks thirsty for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Because that, at bottom, is what the Stooges offer. The pure elixir of rock, muddied though by a perverse, sordid aura, inherited from the most dissolute bacchanals of the Velvet Underground and the most unsettling liturgies of Jim Morrison's Doors. It's precisely Morrison who turns out to be the road-to-Damascus revelation for young James Jewel Osterberg (Ypsilanti, Michigan, 1947), better known later as Iggy Pop (from the name of an odd character back in his hometown, Jim Popp, whom the other band members said he resembled once he'd shaved off his eyebrows). One day, bewitched by Morrison's performances, Osterberg makes a decision as drastic as it is irreversible, one that will change his life forever: to emulate his Dionysian hero, trying his own hand at the role of outrageous performer.

And yet the teenage James — son of an office worker and a teacher, raised with his family in a trailer (due to a bizarre choice made by his father, not out of poverty) — seems destined for an ordinary life: school, sports, "normal" friendships. What derails him is his passion for rock'n'roll, which develops at the dawn of the '60s, when he forms the Megaton Two (together with his friend Jim McLaughlin), out of which core The Iguanas (hence his famous nickname) and the Prime Movers later bloom.

Having dodged military service and dropped out of university, Iggy cuts loose and sinks into a whirlwind of drugs and suburban highs. Keeping him company, in the small township of Ann Arbor (on the outskirts of Detroit), are the two Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, on guitar and drums respectively. The three of them found the Psychedelic Stooges, as a tribute to the comedy trio "The Three Stooges", also recruiting a friend of theirs, bassist Dave Alexander.

They make their debut on Halloween night in 1967. And it's precisely the frontman's charisma that draws a crowd of curious onlookers to their earliest shows. Iggy Stooge — as he now calls himself — is an animal on stage, a lustful satyr who sets the audience ablaze through every form of exhibitionism, including savage self-harm. During live shows he often inflicts wounds on his chest and arms; and some consider him the true inventor of stage diving (the leap into the fans in the front rows). "Back then there was chaos pretty much everywhere, the only certainties you had were on stage, while once you stepped down everything turned mysterious again," Iggy would later recall. "The man who discovered me and brought me to Elektra Records was captivated not by our music but by the violence with which I exposed myself to the audience when we played the clubs in Los Angeles."

Danny Fields of Elektra is in Detroit in 1968 to sign the MC5, our heroes' "older brothers" as well as their fierce supporters. The Stooges' live shows leave him stunned. "They're an infernal pandemonium," he swears to everyone, betting on the four hooligans from Michigan. The label — one of the most far-sighted in the history of rock — suggests the band drop the word "Psychedelic", by now no longer so fashionable. Only the Stooges remain. A dynamite quartet, as powerful as it is mesmerizing, alternating between unbridled outbursts and genuine "ceremonials", slow and hypnotic. Just as shocking for the era as the performances are the lyrics, raw and licentious in the best Velvet Underground tradition.

The tireless Iggy also earns himself a bit more notoriety thanks to a turbulent relationship with Nico, muse of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. His relationship with girlfriend Paulette Benson, with whom he'd already had a son (Eric), instead comes to an end.

It's August 1969 when Elektra releases the band's debut album, simply titled The Stooges. Brought in to produce it is none other than John Cale, by then already at odds with the Velvet Underground and ready to bet on the talent of this bunch of misfits. The result is a record that's harsh, raw and "garage" in sound, but far less spartan and crude than one might imagine. Because beyond detonating their saturated guitars and raising their mighty rhythmic walls, the Stooges also know how to write songs. With dry, direct refrains that go straight for the jugular, evocative atmospheres, and a vocal delivery that always adds morbidity and magnetism. Right out of the gate comes a blow as sharp as "1969": a danceable boogie rhythm, a concise rock'n'roll chorus, a bass that pumps blood, Iggy bawling out his boredom: "It's another year for me and you/ Another year with nothing to do". An anthem (the Sisters of Mercy would later turn it dark) but it's still, in a sense, all rather "classic". Almost a filthy version of Bo Diddley. Leading the listener by the hand into the middle of the orgy comes the following "I Wanna Be Your Dog". Three chords on guitar, to start. And three minutes of delirium, amid screams, caustic feedback and obscene sexual propositions, sealed by Asheton's stinging solo. Iggy's cavernous howl invokes an animalistic, total love: “Now I’m ready to close my eyes/ And now I’m ready to close my mind/ And now I’m ready to feel your hand/ And lose my heart on the burning sands/ And now I wanna be your dog”.

Having stretched the tension to breaking point, the Stooges slow things down. But "We Will Fall" is another room of perdition, this time dark, suffocating, oppressive: a psychedelic sabbath drawn from an Indian ritual chant, dragging on for ten minutes, with John Cale's obsessive viola giving no quarter, the distant wah-wah of the guitars, Iggy's alienating spoken-word delivery and ghostly choruses in the background. It's perhaps the most Velvet Underground-like moment on the record (though also very Doors-like), alongside "Ann", another fine, dark and unsettling slow number: Iggy's murky voice drowns in a web of raw guitars, and his cry this time is choked, the mournful swoon of an impossible love: “I looked into your cool cool eyes/ I felt so fine, I felt so fine/ I floated in your swimming pools/ I felt so weak, I felt so blue”. Pure poetry of depravity. But then the drums pick up speed and the guitar explodes into one of the most searing distortions ever recorded.

The album's other proto-punk manifesto is "No Fun". That is, the nihilism of the Sex Pistols ten years early, shattering the dreams of Woodstock. Goodbye flower-power, goodbye Age of Aquarius. The party's over, there's only nothingness left. The alienated sound of America's industrial outskirts condensed into a handful of riffs, convulsions and handclaps, with Asheton's usual blistering solo sealing the deal. Rotten & co. would certainly not forget it, dedicating a cover to it on the B-side of the single "Pretty Vacant".

Even the album's seemingly minor tracks reveal a stunning power: "Real Cool Time" is a bacchanal of abrasive riffs and frenzied drumming, with the inevitable Asheton solo closing things out; the other jolt of adrenaline that is "Not Right" and the red-light nightmare of "Little Doll" follow the same tried-and-tested blueprint — primal, distorted riffs, blasts of bass, hammering drums — backing the vocal theatrics of an Iggy forever wrestling with his lustful, frustrated delirium.

Despite the buzz, though, the record doesn't break through commercially: sales fall well short of expectations, even if those lucky thirty-five thousand buyers, to paraphrase Eno, probably all went on to become musicians themselves, just like everyone who bought "VU & Nico". And yet it's already clear that this is a "classic" in the making. The Stooges' sound, in fact, carries no particular marker of its time. Iggy's voice recalls an even dirtier, more depraved Mick Jagger. Ron Asheton's guitar tone is disintegrated, distorted, unmistakable. Together with their fellow Detroiters the MC5, the Stooges give voice to the rage and malaise of a generation of youth who, at that very moment, were celebrating themselves at rock's massive gatherings. Their music is a descent into the hell of boredom, decadence, perdition. A nihilistic "no future" ante-litteram. Iggy & the Stooges would become the post-summer-of-love icons of a movement that celebrates the moral and psychic decay of the human race, setting themselves up as the "borderliners" of a society devoted to consumerism and the extreme cult of well-being.

But it's above all musically that The Stooges would prove to be a crucial turning point, fueling the garage-rock revival of the years to come and serving as the definitive cornerstone for the punk-wave generation.

To promote the record, the Michigan quartet throws itself into intense live activity, with its leader as the undisputed showman. In Cincinnati, Iggy Pop spends a good part of the show out among the crowd, and when he climbs back on stage he's completely smeared in peanut butter. In Boston, to warm up a distracted audience, he leaps and writhes across the stage, then cuts his chest open and starts bleeding. The shock value is total. And no less turbulent is his private life, which sees him marry nineteen-year-old Wendy Weisberg, only to have it annulled by mutual agreement a month later.

The Stooges' second act unfolds in 1970. And it takes its name, ironically given by Iggy, from the farmhouse near Ann Arbor that hosted their deranged recording sessions: Funhouse, the house of fun.

Having rejected Cale's "too intellectual" production in favor of the more visceral touch of Don Gallucci (already a veteran of the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie"), the band dares to raise the stakes even further, churning out an incendiary album, fittingly branded with its fire-red artwork.

The first three tracks are nothing more than an appetizer, a taste of the "sonic crime" that will fully materialize in the second half of the record. The filthy blues of "Down On The Street" – with its overbearing riff and the barking of an out-of-control Iggy – oozes all the ferocity of an album that puts immediacy and improvisation above any pose. The din of "Loose" brushes up against hard rock, with furious drumming and Asheton's fiery phrasing, while the programmatic scream of "T.V. Eye" triggers another acid delirium at supersonic speed. The seven minutes of "Dirt", in a sense, anticipate the torrential atmospheres of side B: a distorted, magnetic blues, with Iggy's voice skillfully backed by Asheton's messy but devastatingly effective guitar work. "Dirt" ends with a sense of emptiness and anticipation, which will erupt savagely into the already-mentioned second half of the album.

A sinister, menacing guitar attack marks the start of "1970", the first real assault on the listener's coronary arteries, who within minutes will be indelibly "ravaged" by the incredible blend of rage, death-rattles and animal instinct that pervades the whole record. Then comes the chaotic, sinful, "primal-scream"-style finale of "1970", in which Pop's raw, abrasive screams give rise to a nightmare from which there seems to be no waking up. It's the triumph of Iggy's (almost) hardcore voice, brilliantly accompanied by a disjointed, dazed sax, played on this occasion by a formidable Steven McKay, lending a sense of total emptiness and disorientation. "I Feel Alright" repeats the formula, Pop flaunting his sandpapered vocal cords ever more, as if marking out a fate already sealed. Decadent, in its own way.

With the "erotic-sadomasochistic cauldron" of "1970" spent, here comes the lascivious funk of the title track, its ideal continuation, almost as if it were a body, an entity unto itself, lost in its aura of eternal unhappiness and urban rage. Here McKay's sax is masterful, superbly thickening the atmosphere at the edges of reality. It's a festival of macabre, ultra-distorted, savage sounds, a grand-guignol melting pot centered on the sick, drugged, solitary scream of the Iguana. Guitar, sax, voice and bone-dry drums seem to follow their own separate paths, though in reality everything is miraculously held in balance by a razor-thin thread that remains intact until the record's very end.

Then comes the finale: a maelstrom of madness and self-destruction in which the four young men from Detroit vent their rage. "L.A. Blues" isn't a blues at all, but an implausible, indigestible jumble of ultra-saturated guitars, anarchic drumming and sax teetering between inconceivable shrieks, deliberate dissonance and brief flashes of lucidity: a celebration of the most primitive, deranged and nihilistic noise imaginable. A long, grating, piercing hiss, and then Iggy Pop's voice, exhausted and rasping, arrives to announce the epilogue of a story with no equal in the history of rock.

The new tour to promote the album takes the sons of the Motor City across America. The chameleonic Iggy sheds his skin once again, becoming Pop (from his supposed resemblance to Jim Popp, a guy who lived in Ann Arbor). But the first frictions within the band begin to surface.

In 1971 Iggy, Ron, Scott and Dave part ways badly, due to cocaine problems and artistic differences. The Stooges' furious sound is thus muffled, like an amplifier suddenly unplugged.

The band, however, is not ready to be buried just yet. David Bowie, who had exploded in England with the masterpiece "Ziggy Stardust" in the summer of 1972, publicly invites Iggy and co. back into the fray and puts them in the hands of his manager, Tony DeFries. And so the new Stooges (rechristened Iggy & The Stooges) reform in London, with Ron Asheton moved to bass and James Williamson on lead guitar. The effects will be more than evident.

The band, however, doesn't let itself get swept up at all (unlike Mott The Hoople or Lou Reed, to name the two albums produced by Bowie) by the raging glam fad, and rejects David's production, who will only step in later, at the mixing stage (ruining the original sound, according to some).

The music is still terribly loud, depraved and animalistic. "Search And Destroy", "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell" and "Death Trip" are assaults on the coronary arteries that continue, albeit in more subdued tones, the "rape-the-listener" approach traced out in Funhouse. And yet, besides being more "restrained" (a rather paradoxical term), Raw Power, having abandoned the kind of "wall of sound" built up by Ron Asheton, comes across as far more varied than the two previous albums. "Gimme Danger" is a killer ballad of intense beauty, "Penetration" is tinged with an unusual yet fascinating use of celesta, while "I Need Somebody" offers up a demonic blues, and "Shake Appeal" could be described as voodoobilly ante litteram.

Raw Power offers this and much more.

With Jim Morrison buried in Paris, Iggy Pop now has a clear path ahead. His, without a shadow of a doubt, is the throne of the great stage animals, the great attractions in that great traveling circus that is rock'n'roll.

Raw Power, however, is also the Stooges' swan song: their final, turbulent concert at the Michigan Palace in Detroit, immortalized on the live album Metallic Ko (1976), marks the band's breakup, sadly symbolized by the Fun House razed to the ground to make way for a highway.

The four go their separate ways. Iggy Pop goes through a period of deep crisis, before being resurrected at the court of the Thin White Duke, launching a successful solo career. Scott Asheton joins Fred "Sonic" Smith's (ex-MC5) Sonic's Rendezvous Band. His brother Ron drifts through various bands: from ex-MC5 member Dennis Thompson's New Order to Destroy All Monsters, and on to New Race, again with Thompson and former members of Radio Birdman. And Dave Alexander, the great bassist on the first two records, dies in 1975, aged 27, from pneumonia brought on by years of alcohol excess.

In one of rock's recurring historical twists, 2007 brings their sensational reunion. The groundwork, in truth, had already been laid four years earlier, when the ex-Stooges had already come back together (Pop on vocals, the Asheton brothers on guitar and drums, and new bassist Mike Watt, former member of Minutemen and fIREHOSE), taking part in the recording sessions for Iggy Pop's solo album "Skull Ring" and resuming live activity, in which MacKay also took part.

But it's a pointless reunion. As if the Stones had broken up after “Exile On Main Street” and reformed in 2000 instead of ageing in front of our eyes. The “Stooges” idea – a cliché of rock, of punk, of rebellious, decadent youth music, blah blah blah – is too strong, too crystallized, untouchable, so codified that it's become elusive.

So in The Weirdness Iggy Pop, the Ashetons and Mike Watt play at being the Stooges and have a lot of fun doing it. It's produced by Steve Albini, but his presence isn't essential or decisive, except for giving the drums that typical airy “Albini sound” which here seems to have little to do with anything. Asheton's guitar dominates, Iggy hams it up as always but in this case lays it on thick (sixty years old and “my idea of fun is killing everyone”), Watt is there and isn't there. McKay is there with his sax, yes, but here he mostly sounds like a piano-bar session man, melodic when needed and spent when he's meant to go all out.

The songs? Yes, there are some of those too, a few interesting outbursts (“My Idea”, the crude chorus of “Free & Freaky”, “Greedy Awful People”, the all-too-predictable but effective “I’m Fried”, the not-quite-successful attempt of “Mexican Guy”, which dares to revisit the territory of Funhouse) and a couple of softer tracks: “The Weirdness”, a lumbering ballad fit for a retired Hell’s Angels gathering, and “Passing Cloud”, a classic mood piece to close out the tracklist. Then other filler, which doesn't add much to an album that's anything but flawless. But what emerges above all else from the dozen tracks of The Weirdness is the idea of a band putting itself back on stage in light of everything that's been said, written, thought and imagined by others in its absence.

The weight of the decades is too much, the operation sits halfway between harmless fun and taking the piss out of themselves and the paying audience, so it's best to have a laugh about it rather than get too worked up because “these aren't the real Stooges”.

Compromising the reborn band's future prospects, on January 6, 2009 came the news of Ron Asheton's death, struck down by a heart attack.

And while anthologies, live albums, bootlegs and collections of every kind keep proliferating, testament to a myth that never fades, all that's left to do is keep drinking from the primal fury of their music. And never turn the volume down, not even a little.

After the substantial failure of the Albini-helmed restyling operation (The Weirdness) and the death of one of their iconic figures (the legendary guitarist Ron Asheton), the new Stooges seemed intent on playing the last card left in their hand: yet another historical-stylistic reshuffle that saw James Williamson return to the lineup, and the consequent celebration of the glories of Raw Power, the last true Stooges album worthy of the name, first with the reissue of the original (in 2010) and then with a live tribute (Raw Power Live: In The Hands Of The Fans, 2011). Which in itself wasn't bad news at all — quite the opposite: the big problem (and not the only one) with the new Ready To Die (2013) is that nothing remains of that garage-glam, smudged-eyeliner-and-switchblade sound, whether we're talking about the music or, even less, the songwriting. Indeed, despite Williamson's efforts (he's also the producer), who indulges in his typical drawn-out, insistent and somewhat overbearing solos, and the presence of excellent musicians like Mike Watt on bass and Steve Mackay on sax, the riffage is modest and Pop's voice, charismatic and weathered as you like, has by now almost entirely lost the bite of his best performances.

A track like "Dirty Deal", jagged and dissonant punk'n'roll with the sax up front, really delivers the goods, if nothing else, while "Dd's" has to be said to have a decent groove, and picturing 66-year-old Pop worshipping a pair of "double D" boobs (roughly our "quinta" cup size) is always kind of endearing and funny ("I'm down on my knees/ for your Dd's"). We could add an acoustic, introspective track, typical of latter-day Iggy, like the almost alt-country "The Departed", but the overall judgment wouldn't change much.

As for the rest, it's like a giant Viagra pill that doesn't work, between adolescent, going-nowhere "punk anthems" like "Job" or "Gun" or the funkier "Sex And Money", and cranking up the guitar volumes doesn't help much either, as in that kind of 80s street-rock that is the title track.

Taken as a whole, more than the old or new Stooges, it recalls a lesser version of some of the Iguana's solo records from the early 90s.

Contributions by Alan Tasselli (“Funhouse”), Mauro Vecchio (“Raw Power”), Luca Fusari (“The Weirdness”), Simone Coacci (“Ready To Die”)

Biographical references

Paul Trynka – Iggy Pop – Lust For Life (Arcana)

Federico Guglielmi – Cuore Selvaggio (Mucchio Extra, 2009)

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