The Stooges
A band that, with three-odd chords and naked noise, turned the boredom of young men in a small Michigan town into punk's first sentence.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and associates ⏳🌊
- MemberIggy Pop
Vocals. A young man raised in a trailer park, he rewrote the grammar of the rock concert with a stage act that hurled his body into the crowd.
- MemberRon Asheton
Guitar and bass. A founding member who forged the Stooges' primal riffs with fuzz and wah-wah pedals, he died in 2009.
- MemberScott Asheton
Drums. Ron's younger brother, nicknamed Rock Action, he built the band's backbone with simple, heavy beats.
- MemberDave Alexander
Bass. A friend of Ron's, he played on the first two albums but left the band in 1970 and died in 1975 at twenty-seven.
- MemberJames Williamson
Guitar. He forged the razor-edged sound of Raw Power, and after working as an engineer he returned to the band in 2009.
- FriendshipDavid Bowie
He brought Iggy to MainMan and mixed Raw Power, and later, in Berlin, he made Iggy's solo albums with him.
I. The boys of Ann Arbor · 1947–1967
(Formation) The band was formed in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This college town, a little over an hour west of Detroit, was seething with the antiwar movement and hippie culture, but the four young men who put the band together belonged more to its fringes than to the campus. The sound that would one day be called the prototype of punk grew out of the boredom of those fringes. (Iggy) The singer, James Osterberg, was born in 1947 in Muskegon, Michigan, and grew up in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, a town neighboring Ann Arbor. His father was a high-school English teacher. He played drums in a high-school band, the Iguanas, and during his time with the blues band the Prime Movers he picked up the nickname "Iggy," taken from the name of his old group. He then went to Chicago, where he drummed alongside blues players. There, he later recalled, he came to the conclusion that rather than imitating someone else's tradition he ought to make the simple, primitive sound of his own neighborhood. (Brothers) The brothers Ron and Scott Asheton were born in Washington, D.C., and after losing their father young they settled in Ann Arbor with their mother. Ron, the elder, took up the guitar; Scott, the younger, the drums. Ron's friend Dave Alexander was so consumed by rock that, as the story goes, he and Ron dropped out of school and crossed to England to see the local bands play before coming home. (Beginning) Around that time Osterberg saw Jim Morrison taunting the audience at a Doors concert and made up his mind to stand at the front of the stage himself. Ron took guitar, Scott drums, and Alexander bass. The name came from the Three Stooges, the slapstick comedy Ron loved, and at first they called themselves the Psychedelic Stooges, with Osterberg using the stage name Iggy Stooge. At their first show, on Halloween 1967, they are said to have pressed even the sound of a miked-up kitchen blender into service.
II. Elektra and John Cale · 1968–1969
(Farmhouse) The band rented a run-down farmhouse outside Ann Arbor, where they lived and rehearsed together, and they called the place the Fun House. Their manager, Jimmy Silver, looked after the household and the bookings. Ron honed a guitar that roared raw through fuzz and wah-wah pedals, while Iggy turned each show into an event in itself, hurling his body into the crowd or crawling across the floor. The stage of Detroit's Grande Ballroom was their school. (Contract) In the fall of 1968 Danny Fields of Elektra Records came to see MC5, a fellow Michigan band, and persuaded the label to sign the Stooges as well. MC5's advance is said to have been $20,000, the Stooges' $5,000. If MC5 were the big-brother band shouting revolutionary slogans, the Stooges were the kid brothers who sang of tedium rather than politics. (Recording) In April 1969, in New York, they recorded their debut album with the former Velvet Underground member John Cale producing. Iggy Pop has recalled many times that when the label complained there weren't enough songs, the band came back having written several new ones overnight. There was wrangling, too, between Cale and a band determined to run their big amplifiers at full volume. The label rejected Cale's mix, and Iggy and Elektra's head, Jac Holzman, remixed the record. (Boredom) Released in August 1969, The Stooges stalled at No. 106 on the Billboard album chart, and the critics were cold. Yet this album, which spat out head-on, over a handful of chords, the boredom, desire and helplessness of small-town youth with nothing to do, pointed almost alone in the opposite direction in 1969, a year ruled by psychedelic extravagance.
The signature song of the debut album recorded in New York with John Cale. It pours a Michigan youth's helpless desire into the simplest of forms.
- Listen to the guitar riff (a short figure repeated throughout the song) in the opening. Ron Asheton, his tone mashed into grit (fuzz), steps down three chords like a staircase, and the riff repeats almost unchanged until the song ends.
- Strain to hear the piano buried behind the guitar. John Cale pounds a single key on the same beat all the way through, building a tension like the ring of metal. On headphones it is far clearer.
- Scott Asheton's drums thud down without flourish, every blow the same weight, while Dave Alexander's bass holds firm beneath them. This repetition, stripped of ornament, is why the song sounds hypnotic.
- Iggy Pop's voice is low and indifferent. A first-person declaration of giving himself over to another comes across at a strange temperature — neither pleading nor threat.
A song that takes for its title the plain boredom of a small town with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Eight years later the Sex Pistols covered it, and it became an anthem of the punk generation.
- Handclaps lie beneath a lazy medium tempo. Feel the paradox: the trappings of upbeat party music, borrowed to underline boredom instead.
- Late in the song comes a moment where Iggy calls out guitarist Ron's name, urging him into a solo. Ron's solo that follows stakes everything not on intricate speed but on the sizzle of the tone itself.
- Across a little over five minutes the song's structure barely changes. A form that circles the same spot comes to resemble its subject, boredom.
- Set it beside the Sex Pistols' 1977 cover and you can hear the original's slack lethargy turning into a faster, angrier voice.
III. Fun House · 1970–1971
(Studio) In May 1970 the band recorded their second album at Elektra's studio in Los Angeles. Producer Don Gallucci, formerly of the Kingsmen, at first tried to set up baffles between the instruments, but in the end he had them all play loud together in one room, as on stage, and put a handheld microphone in Iggy's hand. Steve Mackay, a free-jazz player from Ann Arbor, joined on saxophone, adding a screaming brass tone. (Peanut butter) In June, at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, Iggy walked out over the hands of the crowd and smeared himself with peanut butter handed up to him, and the scene was broadcast on national television. Fun House, released in July, carried the heat of such shows almost intact onto record, but sales were poor. (Cracks) In August, at the Goose Lake festival, Dave Alexander was too drunk to play properly, and the band let him go. Bassists came and went in quick succession in the founding member's place, and guitarist James Williamson, who had known Ron Asheton since their teens, came in as second guitar. Iggy Pop later acknowledged that he was hooked on heroin around this time. (Breakup) The shows grew more and more erratic, and Elektra, having heard the new songs, is said to have ended the contract in 1971. By that summer the band had all but scattered. The unruly noise of Fun House sounded of a piece with the air of 1970, as the optimism of the sixties collapsed, and the band themselves stood in the very middle of that collapse.
The second album, played all at once as if live and captured in a Los Angeles studio. It is the hottest record left by a band that was falling apart.
- Start by listening to how it was recorded. Because they played loud in one room with no baffles, each instrument bleeds into the others' microphones, and though it is a studio album, the air feels like standing in the middle of a concert hall.
- In the opening track, "Down on the Street" — the song in this card's video — Ron's heavy riff and Alexander's bass lock together like a single body. The version released as a single at the time has organ overdubbed by producer Don Gallucci, giving it a different grain from the album take.
- The further you go into side two of the LP, the more the form comes undone. On "Fun House" and "1970" Steve Mackay's saxophone cuts in like a scream, and the closing "L.A. Blues" ends in improvised noise with no set form at all.
- Listen with in mind that Iggy sang into a handheld microphone, and you'll hear moments where his voice moves back and forth and its volume surges and ebbs.
The song in which the heat of Fun House is most sharply concentrated. Like the Cincinnati stage, this is music that collides body-first.
- The song opens with Iggy's piercing cry. It is a first moment that seems less a song than a gesture on stage translated into sound.
- In Ron Asheton's guitar solo, a device worked with the foot to open and close the tone (the wah-wah pedal) twists the sound into a howl. Follow how the tone surges even when he plays the same note.
- Near the end there is a passage where the band stops dead several times and then charges back in. These are breath-matched stops, possible only because they played together without baffles.
- On the theme of a gaze watching someone greedily, Iggy hurls words at the other person roughly, as if spitting them out.
IV. Raw Power · 1971–1973
(Bowie) In September 1971, at the club Max's Kansas City in New York, Iggy met David Bowie. Bowie, already captivated by the Stooges' records, introduced Iggy to manager Tony Defries, and Iggy signed with Defries's company, MainMan, and was set to make a record for Columbia Records. The meeting grew into a long collaboration between the two. (London) In the spring of 1972, Iggy and Williamson crossed over to London. When no suitable rhythm section could be found in England, they sent for the Asheton brothers in Ann Arbor, and Ron, who had always played the band's guitar, had to give up the spot to Williamson and take up the bass. It is said to have been a bitter pill for Ron, but Ron stayed in the band. In July they played a theater in London's King's Cross. (Mix) Recorded that fall at CBS Studios in London, Raw Power was built around Williamson's razor-edged guitar. Bowie mixed the tapes in Los Angeles in a short span of time. Released in February 1973 under the name Iggy and the Stooges, the album had a peculiar sound, with guitar and voice leaping forward while bass and drums came across thin, and the mix remained a point of contention for years. (Danger) Their situation in a strange city, with money and future both uncertain, seeped straight into the songs. “Search and Destroy,” its title borrowed from a Vietnam War operational term, and “Gimme Danger,” which hungers for peril, hold both the bravado and the anxiety of a youth backed into a corner. The album barely sold at the time, but it later became a textbook for punk and hardcore.
The opening track of Raw Power, recorded in London. Borrowing a military operations term, it unleashes the bravado of a youth backed into a corner.
- James Williamson's guitar is the star of the track. Reportedly recorded with a Gibson Les Paul Custom and a Vox amp, Williamson's tone is far sharper and more metallic than Ron's blunt fuzz.
- The guitars are overdubbed in multiple layers. In the solo, listen on headphones for whether different guitars overlap in the left and right channels.
- In Bowie's 1973 mix (the process of blending separately recorded sounds into a finished whole), the voice and guitar leap forward and the bass and drums are thin. Compare it with the version Iggy Pop remixed in 1997, and you can hear how differently the same recording can sound.
- Iggy sings in a first person that struts like a street outlaw, but beneath the exaggerated bravado, loneliness shows through.
The darkest, slowest song on Raw Power. In 2016 Jim Jarmusch's documentary borrowed its title.
- An acoustic guitar opens the song, spreading the chords out one note at a time (arpeggio). It is a rare quiet opening on a Stooges record.
- Iggy sings in a low, whispering style (crooning). Addressing a lover and asking for danger, the delivery holds sweetness and menace at once.
- As the song goes on, electric guitars pile up layer by layer and the tension builds, until Williamson's lead guitar bursts out in the closing section. Follow the arc from stillness to explosion.
- The bassist on this album is Ron Asheton, originally a guitarist. Listen for the passages where the bass moves like a melody.
V. The night at the Michigan Palace · 1973–1975
(Touring) In 1973 the band based itself in Los Angeles and toured across America, and keyboardist Scott Thurston joined, adding piano to the sound. But when album sales disappointed, MainMan cut ties with the band that same year. With neither label nor manager, the touring grew ever more grueling. (New songs) During this period the band steadily played new songs onstage that never received a proper recording. Songs like “Open Up and Bleed” and “Head On” survive only on tapes secretly made by audience members, and were talked about long after the breakup. Even right after their peak album, their creativity did not stop, but there was no vessel to hold it. (Farewell) On February 9, 1974, a show at the Michigan Palace in Detroit became their last. Amid a standoff with a local motorcycle gang, bottles and eggs flew from the crowd, and the band played “Louie Louie” as its final song and left the stage. The recording of that night came out in 1976 on a small French label as Metallic K.O. and became a legendary live album. (Loss) In February 1975, original bassist Dave Alexander died of pulmonary edema at twenty-seven. Years of heavy drinking are said to have ruined Alexander's health. It was the first loss among the four who had founded the band, and the Stooges name would not take a stage again for nearly 30 years.
VI. Scattered paths · 1975–2002
(Going solo) Iggy Pop chose a solo path. In 1977, staying in Berlin with Bowie, Iggy made The Idiot and Lust for Life, and that same year Kill City, recorded with Williamson back in 1975, came out as well. After producing Iggy's 1979 album New Values, Williamson left music to study electronics, later working at Sony as an executive overseeing technical standards. (Brothers) Ron Asheton stayed in Ann Arbor, playing guitar in bands such as New Order and Destroy All Monsters, and even appeared as an actor in low-budget horror films. Scott played drums in Sonic's Rendezvous Band, led by MC5 guitarist Fred 'Sonic' Smith. Fred Smith married Patti Smith in 1980 and settled outside Detroit. (Legacy) Meanwhile, the Stooges had become the ancestors of punk. The Sex Pistols covered “No Fun” in 1977 for the B-side of a single, and Sonic Youth played “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on their 1983 debut album, Confusion Is Sex. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain put Raw Power at the very top of a list of favorite records written in a journal, and Guns N' Roses recorded “Raw Power” in 1993. (Reunion) In 1998, for Todd Haynes's film Velvet Goldmine, Ron put together a makeshift band with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley, former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt and others to record Stooges songs. The encounter led Ron and Watt to share stages, and became the first step toward calling the scattered name back to life.
VII. Return and full stop · 2003–2016
(Re-formation) In the early 2000s Ron Asheton revived a feel for the stage by playing Stooges songs with J Mascis and Mike Watt, and in 2003 Iggy Pop brought in the Asheton brothers to record several tracks together for the solo album Skull Ring. That April, at California's Coachella festival, Iggy, the Asheton brothers and Mike Watt on bass took the stage, and the Stooges were back after some 30 years. Saxophonist Steve Mackay later rejoined as well. (Reward) The reunited band played major festivals around the world, and in 2007 released The Weirdness, recorded by Steve Albini. Critical reaction was mixed, but the sight of tens of thousands singing along to songs that had been ignored in the band's youth was in itself a reward that had arrived late. (Ron) In January 2009 Ron Asheton died of a heart attack at home in Ann Arbor. Ron was sixty. The band called back Williamson, who had left Sony, and kept performing with sets built around the songs of Raw Power, and in 2010 entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2013, with Williamson, they released their final studio album, Ready to Die. (The end) Scott Asheton, who had been away from the stage with health problems, died in March 2014, and in October 2015 Steve Mackay died as well. In 2016 James Williamson said in an interview that, apart from Iggy and Williamson, everyone was gone, and that the Stooges were finished. That same year Jim Jarmusch released Gimme Danger, a documentary telling the band's story, and the half-century chronicle came to a full stop.
Lesser-known stories
In 1999 Rhino Handmade, the limited-edition division of Rhino Records, released a seven-disc box, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions. It gathers, in order, nearly every take left over from the Los Angeles recording sessions, and hearing the same songs run through again and again reveals that an album which sounded like an improvised explosion was in fact a performance honed to nearly the same structure every time. A small, pricey limited edition, it barely reached ordinary listeners. John Cale's original mix of the debut album, rejected by the label, lay buried in the vaults for nearly 40 years before appearing on an expanded edition released in 2010. As a version long known only as an anecdote from the recording process was finally heard as actual sound, it became possible to compare directly how producer and band had been picturing different albums from the same performances. The songs that were played only onstage in 1973~74 and vanished without a proper recording drifted around only on audience tapes and bootlegs. In 2014 James Williamson brought in guest singers and released Re-Licked, an album that recorded these songs in a studio for the first time.
Glossary 📚🔎
Riff
(In rock) A short fragment of guitar or bass melody repeated many times throughout a song. A riff serves as the face of a song, so much so that even without knowing the vocals, you can tell what song it is from just a few bars. It is like a class at sports day settling on its own clapping rhythm for cheering and repeating it over and over, so that even from far away you can tell which class is cheering. The Stooges' “I Wanna Be Your Dog” carries the whole song on a single three-chord riff.
Fuzz
(Meaning) The English word fuzz means lint or down. The name comes from the rough, smeared quality, as if lint had frayed up along the edges of the sound. (In rock) A tone in which the guitar sound is deliberately distorted to make it thick and sizzling, or the device that produces it. Turn a speaker's volume up too high and the sound crackles and breaks up; fuzz creates that breakup on purpose and uses it as style. Ron Asheton used this tone to create the blunt, primitive guitar sound of the early Stooges. (Elsewhere) In American slang it is also used to mean the police.
Wah-wah pedal
(Meaning) Pressing it down and letting it up makes the sound seem to say “wah-wah” like a human voice, so it was named after the sound it imitates. (In rock) A device the guitarist rocks back and forth with a foot to shift the guitar's tone from bright to dark and back. Purse your lips and then open your mouth wide while saying “wow,” and you can feel the color of your voice change; the wah-wah pedal gives the guitar that mouth shape. In solos on songs like “T.V. Eye,” Ron Asheton used it to make the guitar sound as if it were howling.
Mixing
(Meaning) The English word mix means to blend. (In rock) The process of adjusting the levels and left-right placement of separately recorded vocals, guitar, bass and drums, and blending them into one finished sound. Just as tteokbokki made from the same ingredients can taste completely different depending on the ratio of gochujang to sugar, the same recording can sound entirely different depending on who mixes it. Raw Power exists in Bowie's 1973 mix and Iggy Pop's 1997 mix, which differ from each other, and opinion is still divided over which is better.
Overdubbing
(Meaning) Over means on top, and dub means to lay sound onto something. Together they mean laying new sound over sound that is already there. (In rock) A method of separately recording another instrument or voice on top of a previously recorded performance while listening to it. It can make a single guitarist sound like several guitars playing at once. It is similar to laying a transparent sheet over a sketch in art class and adding color one layer at a time. Fun House kept overdubbing to a minimum and was played all at once, whereas Raw Power layered its guitars in multiple overdubs.
Stage diving
(In rock) The act of a singer or player hurling themselves from the stage toward the audience during a show, as the crowd reaches up to hold the body aloft. Iggy Pop is counted among the very first to make this part of the stage act. Think of the trust game played at retreats, where you close your eyes and fall backward and your friends catch you. It is a gesture that tears down the wall between stage and seats and draws the audience into the performance.
Protopunk
(Meaning) Proto comes from Greek and means first, the very first. Protopunk thus means punk that came before punk. (In rock) Bands and music that already had punk's raw, simple, rebellious character before punk rock got its name in the mid-1970s. The Stooges, MC5 and the Velvet Underground are the prime examples. It is easy to picture as the beta version released before a game's official launch. It had no name yet, but the skeleton of what would become punk was already all there.