I found a seat among my fellow journalists in the conference room and listened intently for the next hour and a half as the Stooges (Iggy Pop, Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton) regaled us with candid vignettes about their humble beginnings. They spoke of their early days as psychedelic kids in the ‘60s who just wanted to be cool, and of the punk pressures that tore the band apart in the mid ‘70s. They expounded upon the making of their latest album, The Weirdness, their upcoming reunion tour, and where they see their place within what Iggy calls today’s “tuna-melt standard of music.” What follows is a mix of scatterbrained profundity and amusing insights...
As told to David Fricke, the Stooges on...
...Bad Reviews
Iggy Pop: I had a problem with them. What passes for intelligent generally isn’t. Period.
...Early 1960s promotional efforts by Elektra Records
IP: There was something called Sixteen Magazine and it was run very a very horny lady. [Elektra] sent me to have tea at her apartment and see if we hit if off. And, uh, I was on the cover. It was professionalism only (laughs).
...Songwriting
IP: It's really easy to write hundreds of really crappy or okay songs. It's really hard not to. And unfortunately, for people who really love music, all your great heroes, even the best ones write a bunch of shit that’s no good. For me, with "No Fun," [Ron] had that great riff, and the way I remember this was, we were a living band. Like, we were communists. We lived together, we cooked weird macrobiotic concoctions together, did the same drugs, were with the same girls but not at the same time, and he would play this riff back and forth and right away I knew, "that’s a good one!" We weren’t recorded yet at the time and I knew when I heard that stuff that we’re in the book. I knew it right off. And its funny, I'm going to jump ahead, years later I made a film with Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits, and Jarmusch started playing "No Fun" on a guitar and Tom said, "Hey, that’s a good one…you gotta good one there Jim!" And Jim was, “Well it's one of his actually…” (laughs). But so [Ron had the riff] and we would try it out. We were playing church socials. We were playing in the basement of a Methodist church. They’d let us play and I’d try out different things. Somewhere along the line I got the idea of "No Fun." I wanted to have fun and "no" is a great word. The idea for [the song’s] construction is from "Walk the Line." I was listening to "Walk the Line" a lot and I said to [Ron], "Why don’t we make it with an E in there," so he put the E in there. And then little by little, a bridge and then it's about filling in. The kind of person I am, I can't get away with singing about calling my mom on the phone. But that’s part of real experience, when you’re a young blade and you go out and act cool and be an artist, all of them, I don’t care who they are…they send their laundry home, they hit up their mother for 10 bucks.
...Psychedelic Beginnings
IP: We were experimental. Look, when we first really started trying to play music, I’ll be honest, I was sitting on a living room floor, I had little long beads, a little Hindu mustache, and I was playing on an organ little rock operas about a guy who lived with a little mouse and really, in a bucolic world, these guys were trying to back me up but nobody wanted to listen to that. I looked around and looked at what they wanted and said, "Okay, you want that? Okay." There’s a little bit of nerd’s revenge in there. And you do get changed by the audience and then by the industry. What I remember, whenever we made records, we were always told from the beginning basically in the nicest way, "What you're doing is shit, you're no fucking good, you don’t know what you're fucking doing, this album will change you and you’ll have a chance to have a sandwich."
...The Early Records
Ron Asheton: The first record, we did have a tiny studio and there was my Marshall stack and, how I played, I turned it on and started playing and John Cale goes, “You can't do that, that’s not how you record. In the studio there’s leakage.” What do mean there’s leakage? So we had a sit down strike. We literally went in to that vocal booth, lit some candles, incense, broke out the hash pipe until we came to a compromise. Cale would come in and there was talk until the compromise. That’s how it worked, we just sort of set our precedents and it worked out well and we came to an understanding. That was number one. Our number two record was totally different. The first record was my first time in the studio so it was a bit intimidating but that’s what made it fun too because I always liked to be a little bit nervous, a little bit of the unknown brings out the part of you that you didn’t know was in you. You see a side of yourself that you’ve never seen before and I really like that when it happens.
IP: Nobody knew what to do with us and we were always in weird situations. The first record, Times Square used to be very seedy, not like it is now. It used to be like a cheap carnival…pimps all over the street. That first record was made in a little tiny walk-up over a peep show. You walked up a little flight of little crappy stairs, wooden stairs, it was a tiny little room with tiny little amps to make music and our producer was John Cale and he looks like the antagonist from "Beyond the valley of the dolls" he’s wearing a Dracula cape…it creates an atmosphere! In that sense we were lucky. The second record we made in Los Angeles. Charles Manson had just done what he did and we stayed at a place called the Tropicana Motel, on Sunset Boulevard, a famous old rock hotel. The inhabitants were ourselves, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, the entire cast of something called Heat which was the latest Warhol insane movie, and right next to me Ed Sanders was writing the book The Family about the Mansons and scowling at me saying, "You don’t even know what that dog collar means do you!?" I had just gone to a boutique and saw this dog collar and thought that would look cool! I didn’t buy them in fashion places. So, a lot of atmosphere. We would take our guitars, it was like Abby Road, walk to the studio down off the corner of Santa Monica and La Cienega and, walking in there, I saw the lead singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders, [Ron] saw Jim Morrison at the liquor store, John Wayne almost ran me over one day. And I thought it was cool. He’s flying down the street and I'm just walking along looking at the sunset, you know uuuuhhh, and he’s “DAMMIT!” and I was like, “It's John Wayne! Coooool.” That sort of thing creates an atmosphere. Penelope Spheeris, who went on to do [The Decline of Western Civilization] and this and that, she started her career with a movie about that hotel called Hollywod Vice…it’s a crappy movie (laughs).
...Playing Stooges songs with musicians other than the original members
IP: Honestly, very particularly with that material that’s probably the most artistic, psychic pain that I've known in my life would be the many years of covering those songs with other players, always just between a rock and a hard place, because on one hand I hated how it sounded, I knew how it should sound, and on the other hand they are incredible vehicles you can come to town and play and rock the house, you will leave and you will be able to buy dinner. As we all do and all will in our lives, I had a fair stretch of sliding out. It actually, the best it got, when I finally couldn’t take that anymore because professional musicians are the worst, there should be a law against that term, there really should be. It's just horrible, painful.
...Chicago blues in the '60s and dancing
IP: On three occasions I was hired to play drums with seriously fine black blues musicians and I would go around their clubs and I was scared in the clubs. I was more scared of the women than the guys. I had never seen such overt sexuality expressed as in the blues dancing. It's more than those hip-hop videos now. It was absolutely, wow! But what I always learned what that the guys were kind of aged delinquents and they were very entertaining and they had about as much career perspective as a member of the Three Stooges. So I thought to do that with [Ron and Scott]. [That blues dancing and sexuality] influenced me a lot. But also, American Indians and belly dancers…those three. I don’t know where it came from. I couldn’t dance. I was one of those guys who would drop the girl. They would play and I just thought, we’re not going to get anywhere if somebody doesn’t get this party started. I started moving around a little bit and it was kinda odd, it was kind of like Big Bird or something at first.
...Hanging out as a band and the great communist lifestyle
Scott Asheton: I tell young bands that’s what they need to do. It keeps you together. If you can't live together and be a band, and be a family and be a band, then it's not going to work. If you’ve got the guy who lives on the other side of town and doesn’t get off work till 5 o'clock, the other guy’s got a girlfriend who he wants to see. I tell 'em, get a house, you all live in the same place, you can set up your equipment in your living room and everyday get down there in that living room and play. That’s what we did. We cooked together, we ate the same food.
RA: One of my favorite memories was the TV room that we called the Wall Room. We took whatever we liked from the newspaper or magazines and just pinned it up on the wall. I had his divorce papers and pinned them up. And we watched TV every night and I would go to the bins and hundred-pound bags of grain and grind grain and make waffles while the little black and white TV was playing and we were sitting in different crummy chairs, smoking dope, watching TV…that’s like really hanging out. Waffles are good.
IP: We were foodies early on.
RA: But the whole grain was still macrobiotic. One waffle iron. I would grind the grain.
IP: It's not easy doing this kind of music and I think that’s why most people skip it and think, "Oh I’ll just write a theme for that sweater commercial."
==
Looking back, I might argue with Nick Oliveri’s decree that SXSW needs more rock. I saw it rear its sweaty, volatile head in the raging audiences and bloody fist-fights during Qui’s several shows. I saw it surface in the Stooges' survivalist, rebel confidence intact after all these years, even in their description of how they used to grind their own grain to make waffles. The true, fuck-all attitude of Rock and Roll was very much in full effect, even if you had to wade through cowfields or simply just shut up and listen to find it. Not to mention, after talking with Oliveri that last night, I ended up completely missing Turbonegro’s set altogether. Why? Because I was drunk and passed out in a merch booth at the venue. It doesn’t get more ridiculously Rock and Roll than that.
Part III and the final installment in SXSW Surveillance. Want to read the first two parts? They're conveniently located here and here.
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