Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (13 page)

DISCOGRAPHY

Kick out the Jams
(Elektra, 1969)
; the controversial and thoroughly raucous live debut.

Back in the USA
(Atlantic, 1970; Rhino, 1992)
; the stripped-down studio follow-up.

High Time
(Atlantic, 1971; Rhino, 1992)
; the final album, which attempted to find a cohesive middle ground between the first two records.

Babes in Arms
(ROIR, 1983)
; a collection of outtakes and rarities.

Power Trip
(Alive, 1994)
; a mix of live and rare studio recordings, including the 18-minute freak-out
I’m Mad like Eldridge Cleaver
.

Teen Age Lust
(Total Energy/Alive, 1996)
; a live recording from a 1970 concert.

Ice Pick Slim
(Alive, 1997)
; more live recordings, these from 1968.

THE STOOGES

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

They were more relative to my world.
No Fun
, a song about a girl hanging out smoking a cigarette, spoke volumes about what was going on in my world, as opposed to “Lord I was born a ramblin’ man” by the Allman Brothers, which was what everybody in my school was listening to... When Iggy came to New York in ‘76, he met people like the Ramones and the Dead Boys and they were like, “Your albums are so important to us, we’ve started bands because of those albums.” They sold thirteen copies of their records, but those thirteen people went on to form bands that were themselves influential, who influenced
Black Flag
, who influenced Nirvana, who influenced Green Day.

Without the burdens of artsiness (like the Velvet Underground) or political conviction (like the
MC5
), the Stooges and their leader Iggy Pop barreled into the late ‘60s hippie rock scene, taking white trash garage rock to the ultimate point of frenzy, where it sounded so brutal and depraved it had to be ignored by all respectable society. Yet it managed to catch on all over the place in the ‘70s, influencing early New York pre-punk bands like
Suicide
and the New York Dolls, British punks like the Sex Pistols and the Damned, and L.A. punk and hardcore groups like the
Germs
and
Black Flag
. In the ‘80s, the Stooges’ raw power was tapped by metal bands like Guns ‘n’ Roses, and then, in the ‘90s, by the grunge bands

King Coffey, Butthole Surfers:

There’s no denying they’re the grand influence. I’m pretty sure the bands that today get credited with being grunge will very quickly credit the Stooges as being an influence. Basically the Stooges played grunge music, I guess, with a kind of abandon. They were definitely coming out of the drug culture of Michigan in the late ‘60s, so there’s a psychedelic underpinning to what they’re doing. But Iggy Pop is a true punk rocker as we all know.

Before he became Iggy Pop, James Osterberg grew up in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Through high school Osterberg was a fairly straight, intelligent, socially adjusted kid, at least compared to his juvenile delinquent classmates Ron and Scott Asheton. He played drums with a few garage bands in the nearby college town of Ann Arbor – including the Iguanas, which gave Osterberg the nickname Iggy – and even attended the University of Michigan for a short time. He dropped out in 1966, though, and went to Chicago to pursue his dreams of being a blues musician. Realizing that he needed to find his own means of expression, he returned to Ann Arbor and formed the Psychedelic Stooges – Iggy, bassist Dave Alexander, and the guitar and drum playing Asheton brothers.

Van Conner, Screaming Trees:

I remember being a complete idiot about the Stooges when I was about 18. We played Ann Arbor and Ron Asheton actually came to the show. We talked to him and over the years got to be friends. We have this dream of flying him out to play on a couple Trees songs. That night he was there we played
Real Cool Time
by the Stooges. We’d always do a Stooges cover as our last song, like
Raw Power
or
Search and Destroy
. We listened to those records so many times somebody would just start playing the line and Mark [Lanegan] would start singing.

After a period of rehearsal and indoctrination during which Iggy played for the others all the obscure free-jazz albums that inspired him, the band (soon to be simply the Stooges) debuted on Halloween, 1967. By then, Iggy had become a devotee of the Doors – particularly Jim Morrison’s intensely physical stage persona. The Stooges, though, far outdid the Doors when it came to on-stage anarchy. While the others banged out loud and sloppy blues-rock riffs, a shiftless (and sometimes pantless) Iggy cavorted madly while spewing uptight teen anthems – his own take on the blues. Creating a spectacle the likes of which no audience had seen, Iggy Stooge (as he was known) would smear peanut butter and hamburger meat on his body before performing rock’s earliest stage dives.

Though the Stooges had absolutely no interest in any political movement, early on they aligned themselves with the more established Ann Arbor rock revolutionaries, the
MC5
. When Elektra Records came to town to sign the
MC5
in early 1968, members of that band recommended the label check out their “little brother band,” the Stooges. Impressed, Elektra signed both bands at the same time, though they offered the Stooges – who’d only been a band for six months – one quarter the money that the
MC5
got.

The Stooges’ self-titled debut album, released in 1969, was produced by the Velvet Underground’s
John Cale
(Velvets’ singer Nico was present at the recordings as well, and soon began an affair with Iggy). Though they hardly had enough material for a whole album, the few songs they’d worked out later became punk rock classics. Among the highlights were
No Fun
(covered by the Sex Pistols) and
I Wanna Be Your Dog
(covered by just about everyone else), two roughnecked paeans to teen looserdom. Though on record the group sounded significantly more polished than they did live, the album’s primal riffs and pissed-off singing mark it as one of punk rock’s primary sources. It proved much too raw for mainstream tastes.

Lou Barlow, Sebadoh:

There wasn’t anyone like them at the time. The Stooges cut everything down to such a basic level no one could really handle them. I was always drawn to the Stooges because they were playing in Ann Arbor, near where I grew up. My dad actually worked with Iggy’s mom. And I remember when I was, like, nine I used to think all hippies were violent and wanted to kill everybody. I thought the rock bands coming out of Detroit were the state of rock. Later on I realized they were the exception.

For the following year’s
Fun House
, Iggy Stooge renamed himself Iggy Pop. Ironically, the record is much less pop-oriented than the debut. Though the tunes were perhaps less memorable, songs like
Down on the Street
and
T.V. Eye
certainly rocked harder. While their friends in the
MC5
were stripping down their sound,
Fun House
songs like
L.A. Blues
and the title track seemed to pick up where the
MC5
’s earlier wah-wah guitar and free-jazz freakout had left off. A truer expression of the band’s muscle, the addition of saxophone showed the band willing to grow musically. For Elektra, though,
Fun House
merely convinced them that the Stooges would never be a salable group. After hearing material for the band’s third album, the label decided to drop them.

Intent on continuing to refine its sound, in late 1970 the band fired Alexander (who died in 1975) and hired guitarist James Williamson (Ron Asheton switched to bass). But by then most of the group was heavily into heroin and Iggy himself was in no condition to front a group. (He even turned down the Doors’ offer to become singer when Jim Morrison died.) The Stooges broke up, and in 1971 Iggy headed down to Florida to clean himself up.

A year later, Pop met David Bowie, a rising pop star who had been a fan of the Stooges. As Bowie had recently done with Lou Reed, he offered to help Pop resurrect his career. Signing with Bowie’s management company, Pop went to England, with Williamson, and started work on a new album. Unable to capture the sound he wanted, he eventually brought the Ashetons over as well and re-formed the Stooges. With Pop clearly the focal point, however, the band became known as Iggy & the Stooges.

Nick Cave:

The way Iggy presented himself as the ultimate individual, someone who would not be bound down by anything – the audience, the apparatus of the music industry – and he was just godlike to me in that way.

In 1973, the band produced
Raw Power
, a record so true to its name the group’s new label, CBS, called Bowie in to remix the record. Bowie’s mix satisfied the label, but didn’t really do justice to the music (Pop remixed it again for its 1997 reissue). Still, the best tracks, like
Search & Destroy
, combined the mad intensity of
Fun House
with the hook-filled songwriting of the debut. Acoustic guitar and keyboard touches expanded the sound somewhat, but mostly it was pure hard electric guitar rock – the kind that would be tapped in the creation of both punk and heavy metal in coming years.

Bowie’s support exposed the group to a larger audience than ever, but upon relocating to L.A. old drug habits resurfaced and Stooges’ short-lived return ended. Pop, who was essentially a solo artist by then anyway, hooked up with Bowie in Berlin (after checking into a mental hospital to detoxify himself) and produced two strong pop-oriented albums in 1977, The Idiot and Lust for Life. By then, he was widely acknowledged as an elder statesmen of punk rock, a distinction he’d continue to enjoy through the ‘80s and ‘90s. In addition to an ongoing recording career, Pop has acted in a number of films, including John Waters’ Cry Baby.

Fred Schneider, B-52’s:

A lot of the new wave bands were really influenced by a lot of the garage bands. Iggy probably had a big influence, that real rough, raw, in-your-face thing. Really loud and snotty. It influenced a lot of the new wave bands everywhere. I loved listening to Iggy. Just all that energy.

The other Stooges have been less visible. Williamson recorded one album, Kill City, in collaboration with Pop. Ron Asheton played in a variety of little-known bands, including New Order (U.S., not U.K.) with
MC5
drummer Dennis Thompson, and Destroy All Monsters. Recently, Asheton remade a number of Stooges songs with Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, and former
Minutemen
Mike Watt for the film Velvet Goldmine.

Mike Watt,
Minutemen
/ fIREHOSE / solo:

The Stooges were irrepressible. They had a big effect on L.A. punk. Iggy was there right at the beginning of our scene. Iggy was a big fertilizer, a lot of people were growing their crops in his soil, man.

DISCOGRAPHY

The Stooges
(Elektra, 1969)
; a great first burst of dumb, primal rock.

Fun House
(Elektra, 1970)
; a follow-up with an even heavier guitar attack and the addition of some skronky saxophone.

Raw Power
(Columbia, 1973; 1997)
; originally produced by David Bowie and recently remixed by Iggy Pop, this strong final studio recording was issued under the name Iggy & the Stooges.

Metallic K.O.
(Import, 1976)
; a live album that includes the group’s final gig in 1974, augmented by the double album
Metallic 2X K.O.

Rough Power
(Bomp!, 1994)
; for Stooges completists, this is
Raw Power
in its original, rougher version before the Bowie mix.

Open up and Bleed!
(Bomp!, 1995)
; collects post-
Raw Power
material, live and in rehearsals, previously available on import.

California Bleeding
(Bomp!, 1997)
; collects live material, most never before released, from ‘73 and ‘74.

Year of the Iguana
(Bomp!, 1997)
; a collection drawn from Bomp!’s
The Iguana Chronicles
releases.

TRIBUTE: Various Artists,
We Will Fall: The Iggy Pop Tribute
(Royalty, 1997); a tribute to the band’s leader that includes many Stooges songs as well as Pop solo favorites, recorded by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sugar Ray, Joey Ramone, Joan Jett, 7 Year Bitch, and 15 others.

ROKY ERICKSON

13
^TH
FLOOR ELEVATORS

There are a lot of parallels between the psychedelic underground of the ‘60s and punk as far as being creative and anti-establishment. What the Butthole Surfers were doing in the ‘80s – being experimental, pushing the envelope – I thought was parallel to what the 13
^th
Floor Elevators did. Maybe it’s giving ourselves a lot of credit, but I got a sense I could relate to the Elevators. It’s interesting how punk rockers, especially in Texas, took to Roky Erickson. I really can’t think of anyone in American music who’s as mythical to me. And the guy never got his fair due. He even had to go on welfare. He really touches me in a lot of different ways. Working with him was a great thrill, really rewarding.