Happy 55th Anniversary to The Stooges’ eponymous debut album The Stooges, originally released August 5, 1969.
In 1965, Jim Osterberg developed an alter ego called “Hyacinth,” based on a poem he’d written about a flower. The Ann Arbor High School senior would stretch out his arms, bend as if towards the sun, and then shake as if stirred by a breeze. Later that year, he’d even end up engaging Hyacinth in his role as emcee in the high-school talent show—shimmying and skipping across the stage in hypnotic embodiment of the flower. His classmates would remember the performance and regard it as an early incarnation of his eventually much more famous alter ego Iggy Pop.
Other than the strange anomaly of “Hyancinth,” there wasn’t much to indicate that Jim Osterberg would eventually be a dog collar-wearing wild man who would eat microphones, perform circus-like backbends, and invent the stage dive. Sure, Jim’s hair had gotten a bit longer by the end of high school and he’d started playing drums in a band called the Iguanas, but for the most part he was known as a preppy member of the debate team, and class vice-president. He was even voted Most Likely To Succeed.
But clearly, there was another side to Jim Osterberg. The only child of an English teacher father and office-worker mother, he grew up in the Coachville Gardens Trailer Park in neighboring Ypsilanti, and was often secretive about his family’s abode. To the point that he never invited his girlfriends over and was known to lie, telling acquaintances that he lived in ritzy Ann Arbor Hills. It was possibly due to this outsider status that he developed a very acute social sense. “He understood what socially works to charm people,” observed childhood friend Duane Brown.
Still, in hindsight, Osterberg (I’ll continue to refer to him as such a little longer, because to this day he regards Iggy Pop as his alter ego) doesn’t feel like he suffered much due to living in a trailer, though it probably lent him some defiant grit. “I was lucky to live in close quarters in a simple environment with my parents,” he says in Gimme Danger, a documentary on the Stooges. “I got to know my parents—that’s a real treasure.”
Another treasure was that his parents were supportive of his musical aspirations. Their motor home was a two-bedroom with tiny sleeping quarters for Jim and a larger master bedroom. When Jim first became interested in the drums, the Osterbergs allowed him to set up his kit in the living room. “I’d play all weekend long and every night after school,” he recalls. “I had a lot of energy and I’d beat for hours. [My parents] never complained. And after about a year of that, they just gave me the master bedroom.”
The drums would eventually entice Osterberg away from student politics and into the Iguanas, a band that played local high schools and the University of Michigan, until they eventually scored a summer gig at the Ponytail Club in neighboring Harbor Springs. In a twist of luck, Motown acts would often play the Ponytail, and because Osterberg had begun earning a reputation as a proficient drummer, he ended up playing pickup gigs behind legendary groups like the Shangri-Las, the Crystals, the Contours, and the Four Tops.
Around this time, Osterberg got a job at Discount Records, further steeping himself in rock ‘n’ roll. It was at this record shop that he’d first meet two fellow Ann Arbor High students, Ron Asheton, with a Brian Jones coif and a rock-star attitude, and his younger brother Scott, with an ice-blue gaze and a magnetic Elvis broodiness.
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That fall, Osterberg enrolled at the University of Michigan, and he also began getting to know a local band called the Prime Movers, who would come into Discount Records and tease him, calling him “Iguana,” or “Iggy” for short. Soon, the Prime Movers persuaded Iggy to leave the Iguanas and join their band. Energized after seeing a newly electric Bob Dylan play Detroit, Iggy had tired of the Iguanas’ British-invasion schtick and embraced the chance to dabble in something druggier and more bohemian.
Iggy dropped out of the University of Michigan after one semester, and Jeep Holland, the owner of Discount who also managed the Prime Movers, helped Iggy and several other musicians evade the Vietnam draft by coaching them in performances of “insanity.” When it was Iggy’s turn in front of the draft board, he had to strip down to his shorts for the physical exam. “I never wore undies anyway, you know, so it may have been on purpose or just a stroke of luck, so I stripped and I stood there butt naked,” he remembers. “[The guy with the clipboard] asked me if I knew what a queen was, and he asked me if I was gay and I said I was, and he jotted something down and they let me go.”
In the fall of 1966, Iggy left the Prime Movers after discovering that Vivian Shevitz, the assistant manager at Discount, knew Sam Lay of the Butterfield Blues Band. Iggy recognized an opportunity to learn blues drumming from one of the greats, and so he and Vivian squeezed into her sports car and drove two hundred miles to Chicago, cruising around the South Side in search of Lay until they finally found him.
Iggy managed to convince Lay of his musical chops, and so Lay made a few calls and learned that his former harmonica player Big Walter Horton was in need of a drummer. Lay generously gave Iggy a place to stay in his tiny apartment, and over the next few weeks Iggy played various gigs all around town. It wouldn’t take long, however, for him to decide to not only leave Chicago, but to quit the drums for good.
“I smoked a big joint by the river one day and realized that I was not Black,” he says. “I thought I would like to do for our generation what the good Black players were doing for theirs. Eventually, I realized drumming wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I decided to go back to Ann Arbor. But I needed a ride home, so I called Ron, and I talked Ron into working with me.”
Ron Asheton, Iggy’s friend with the Brian Jones hair from Discount Records, was an occasional bassist for a band called The Chosen Few. And Ron’s brother Scott, the Elvis lookalike, had been badgering Iggy to teach him the drums. The Asheton brothers were friends with another music fanatic named Dave Alexander. In fact, Ron dropped out his senior year and Dave sold his motorcycle, and they’d traveled to London to see The Who. That trip had settled it—Ron and Dave were going to be rockstars.
Iggy, the Asheton brothers, and Alexander began rehearsing at the Ashetons’ house, but Iggy discovered that in order to get Ron to practice, he had to ply him with weed. He’d take a 45-minute bus ride to the Asheton’s neighborhood and get Ron sufficiently stoned, which would give the band less than half an hour of practice before the Ashetons’ mother came home and demanded quiet. So in the summer of 1967, the band found a Victorian house with cheap rent. “We were true communists,” Iggy says. “We lived in a communal house, we ate the same food, we practically shared all money pretty equally.”
Like many people living the communal life in the late ’60s, the band got into some weird shit: regular acid trips, books on the occult, and a steady stream of the Mothers of Inventions’ Freak Out! and records by avant-garde composer Harry Partch, featuring instruments of his own creation. In fact, their only tie to normalcy was Ron’s favorite TV show The Three Stooges. The band had been searching for a name, which eventually led Ron to declare that summer, “We’ll be just like The Three Stooges, except psychedelic. We’ll be the Psychedelic Stooges!”
Meanwhile, the Ashetons’ sister Kathy had begun dating Fred “Sonic” Smith, a member of the MC5, the most raucous band in Detroit. MC5 frontman Wayne Kramer also knew Iggy, and had once considered recruiting him into his band. Hence, the MC5 were among those invited to the Psychedelic Stooges’ first house show on Halloween Night 1967.
To say it was a trip is an understatement. Influenced by their obsession with Harry Partch, Scott Asheton fashioned a drum kit out of oil cans, Ron played his bass through effects boxes, and Dave Alexander thudded Ron’s amplifier against its cabinet. As for Iggy, he played the vacuum cleaner and a little Hawaiian guitar with every string tuned to E. Despite the total weirdness, their audience was enthusiastic (everyone was heavily dosed on DMT), and so the Psychedelic Stooges began planning another show.
Not long before their far-out Halloween debut, Iggy had seen the Doors play the University of Michigan. It was in witnessing Jim Morrison’s provocative antics that Iggy became convinced that he, too, could be a frontman. And so the Stooges’ initial avant-garde approach was soon scrapped for convention, with Ron on guitar, Dave on bass, and Scott ditching the oil cans for a traditional drum kit. Meanwhile, Iggy began honing his frontman mojo in earnest.
The band moved into a remote farmhouse they christened the Fun House, where they practiced at feverish volume and developed a sound that bore little resemblance to any existing genre—something both avant-garde and rudimentarily rock ‘n’ roll. Soon, they made their actual, proper debut at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. “‘Shamanistic’ is the word to use about Iggy’s performance,” recalled John Sinclair, the MC5’s manager. A local reporter deemed the Stooges the most exciting act to grace the Grande, and the MC5 themselves were totally blown away.
The Stooges returned to the Grande, opening for the likes of Blood, Sweat & Tears and Sly Stone. They also began sharing the bill with the MC5, who were drawing massive crowds and had begun viewing the Stooges as their “little brother band.” While Iggy went all-out crazy, the Stooges learned to keep their heads down and keep playing. “The group was always very aware of the theatrics of a moment,” says Iggy. “And they never moved, ever.” Then, when the Stooges opened for the Mothers of Invention, Iggy did his first-ever stage dive (“Blood everywhere,” he says, “and that’s how I got that chipped tooth that’s in all the photos”).
Around this time, he began performing shirtless, after reading a book on Egyptian antiquity and realizing that there was something to the Pharaohs’ nakedness. He also briefly shaved his eyebrows, which is how he came to be called “Iggy Pop”—after a childhood classmate of the Ashetons named Jim Popp, who suffered from alopecia.
Then, on September 22, 1968, the Stooges played the University of Michigan with the MC5. An Elektra Records scout named Danny Fields had come to check out the MC5, and frontman Wayne Kramer told Fields he should stick around for the ’5’s little brother band. “I heard this incredible music just booming in the hallway,” Fields recalls. “I heard them before I saw them, and then I saw Iggy. I thought he was just perfection.”
Fields signed both bands to Elektra, and that’s when the Psychedelic Stooges officially became the Stooges, deciding that the shorter name sounded more professional. (Ron Asheton even ended up contacting Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, getting his blessing to use the name.)
As the Stooges prepared to record their first album, Ron experimented, coming up with “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “No Fun.” “That was Ron’s finest hour,” says Iggy. “I remember members of the MC5 going, ‘Um, you got a good riff there.’” The Stooges were fans of the Velvet Underground, and so when Elektra suggested John Cale as producer and that they record in New York, they jumped at the chance. “That record wouldn’t have felt the same if we hadn’t brought it to New York and played it for that person,” says Iggy.
And, indeed, there’s something distinctly New York about The Stooges, which I’d realize after moving to the city in my twenties not long after 9/11. By day, I was interning at a sleazy British “lad” magazine called FHM and by night I was waitressing at a 24-hour diner near Webster Hall. The diner attracted all the East Village freaks, and I’d become friends with the bartender, a towering woman named Toni with a jet-black fringe, a heroin-addict boyfriend, and a killer CD collection. In the wee hours after the club kids had stumbled home, Toni and I would fill ketchup bottles, listen to The Stooges, and gossip about the other (hot) bartender and whether or not our manager was dealing cocaine out of the restaurant (he was).
In that gritty all-night diner, against the backdrop of the garage-rock revival that had begun energizing a post-9/11 New York, The Stooges hummed with renewed relevance. “There’s a Detroit-New York parallel in both eras, right?” observes journalist Jenny Eliscu in Meet Me In The Bathroom. “How fucking weird is it that thirty years after it was argued whether the Stooges were inventing punk in Detroit or the Ramones in New York, that you had Jack White in Detroit and the Strokes in New York?”
There’s actually really no debate whether the Stooges got to punk before everyone else (including the Ramones), but what’s insane is that their debut album would end up being released the same week as Woodstock, the Stooges’ dark discordance far out of step with the groovy, peace-and-love vibe of 1969.
The Hit Factory, where they’d record The Stooges, was situated above a peep show in Times Square, and John Cale showed up wearing a black cape and would also occasionally bring Nico, who would knit and look blasé. “It was like Morticia and Gomez,” recalls Iggy. In order to get a good take, Iggy found he had to dance to keep the band motivated—that’s how accustomed they’d become to his frontman antics.
The Stooges is a record full of defiant boredom, aggressive swagger, and leering horniness, but it’s also tight and razor-precise. Iggy has estimated that there’s no more than 100 words on the album. It was a strategy he’d ripped from his childhood favorite Lunch With Soupy Sales: “Soupy would encourage kids to write, but he said, ‘When you write the letter, make it 25 words or less.’ That always stuck with me. I thought, ‘Keep it short and none of it will be the wrong thing.’”
The Stooges had come to New York with only four songs—“I Wanna Be Your Dog,” No Fun,” “1969,” and “Ann.” The sadomasochistic drone of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was influenced by the Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs” (as well as a simple desire to lie in a woman’s lap), while “No Fun” was inspired by a chord change in “96 Tears” stripped of the blues. “1969” was shaped from a scrap of a Byrds riff Ron had become obsessed with on an acid trip. Meanwhile, “Ann” pays tribute to both Ann Asheton (Ron and Scott’s mother) and an amputee named Anne who Iggy had a crush on.
With only a handful of songs written prior to New York, the Stooges ended up writing half the album at the Chelsea Hotel the day before going into the studio. And, in fact, the tough and punchy “Not Right” had never been played prior—it was completely off the cuff. “The first time we ever played it, that was it—that was the take,” recalled Scott Asheton.
The album’s least punk and most psychedelic track “We Will Fall” sprung from Dave Alexander’s creativity, when he suggested that the band do something with an ‘om’ chant. Ron and Iggy melodized the chant and the song ended up becoming one of the most memorable and striking —setting it starkly apart from the rest of the tracks and lending the album a wholly unique character. To the point that the Stooges believe Alexander dramatically changed their history.
The Stooges is now regarded as a masterpiece, but it was widely ignored in 1969, selling only 32,000 copies. It would take a decade for fans to begin recognizing the album’s importance, and the band itself would be torn apart by drugs, infighting, and the public’s inability to understand their genius. In fact, it wouldn’t be until their reunion at Coachella in 2003 that the Stooges would be gifted the accumulation of their many decades of influence—kids who hadn’t even been born in 1969, much less the late ’70s, singing their songs back to them word for word.
Reflecting on The Stooges, Iggy employs his characteristic brevity. “I was really proud of the clarity of the songs,” he says. “I thought myself that it was a neat, petite, well-organized, good sharp little poke.”
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