You had to admire that kind of courage – assuming he lived, of course!” At a Stooges concert, Iggy would jump into the crowd and they’d move aside and he’d land on his face. “I liked them because they were happy,” Holzman said in a Record Collector interview. Elektra boss Jac Holzman trusted Fields’ judgement and also dug the band, even if he was slightly alarmed by Iggy’s onstage antics. The Stooges also impressed Elektra Records A&R man and publicist Danny Fields, whose recommendation led to his label signing the group, along with MC5, in 1968. “You had to admire that kind of courage – assuming he lived!” By early 1968, they were playing well-known Detroit venues such as the Grande Ballroom, often in support of local heroes MC5, who were impressed by The Stooges’ audacious left-field leanings – not least the sort of stage antics which would, in years to come, make Iggy Pop one of the best frontmen in rock. ![]() Initially billed as “The Psychedelic Stooges”, the embryonic outfit made their live debut at their communal State Street house in Ann Arbor, on Halloween night 1967. “It was inevitable that anything creative that Ron did in his life was gonna come back to The Stooges, because he’d already spent probably 17,000 man hours watching The Three Stooges’ films.” “Ron came up with the idea,” Iggy told Clash magazine. With hindsight, it was more or less preordained that the new outfit would be called The Stooges, as Iggy explained in 2010. To achieve his goal, he recruited brothers Ron and Scott Asheton on guitars and drums, respectively, and brought Dave Alexander in to play bass. Upon returning to Detroit, Pop set about realising his vision – which broadly involved cross-breeding the tough urban sound of the blues with the energy of garage-rock trailblazers such as The Sonics and The Kinks. ![]() I wanted to be like them, sound like them and write like them – but write about the things that concern who I am and who my people are.” “But hanging around these blues guys in Chicago made me want to emulate them. ![]() “I knew I wasn’t going to be an old blues man,” he said in a 2010 interview with Clash magazine. Having cut his musical teeth as a teenager in local Ann Arbor beat groups such as The Iguanas and The Prime Movers, Osterberg (whose stage name, Iggy Pop, was set in stone after his stint with the former) was inspired to create a new type of music following a memorable meeting to Chicago in 1967, during which he ended up as a guest in the home of former Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley drummer Sam Lay. “They were too unique in their vision to be anything but themselves” The term “punk” wasn’t in circulation when The Stooges’ debut was first released, on 5 August 1969, but making rock music with an edge was certainly on frontman James Osterberg’s agenda when he formed the band in the late 60s. Initially, they were more in the vein of Harry Partch.”īoth The Stooges’ debut album and its ferocious follow-up, Fun House, now sit proudly in the lineage of what Bobby Hackney, from The Stooges’ Michigan compatriots Death, refers to as “hard-driving Detroit rock’n’roll”. Their material was made up of feedback-laced, repetitive riffs that mutated into extended, hallucinatory improvisations. “They were more like industrial theatre than a ‘rock’ band. “The Stooges were barely a band when they made their first album,” Rhino A&R man and lifelong fan Jason Jones told Vinyl Me, Please in 2020. “They were more like industrial theatre than a ‘rock’ band” Indeed, it’s astonishing that the record was even made at all, for its creators were famously laissez-faire about the way they came up with songs during their early days. It’s often credited as the record that drew up the blueprint for punk, yet The Stooges’ self-titled debut album ended up sounding the way it did almost by accident.
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