THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 33
Me,” Robert Johnson worrying over the
hellhound on his trail. It seemed as if
Pop had learned something about how
to sublimate despair through song, but,
he said, “I realized I wasn’t going to be
Howlin’ Wolf ’s drummer.”
Pop returned to Ann Arbor just as
many of his classmates and neighbors
were being shipped off to war. He man-
aged to avoid being inducted by appear-
ing deranged at his draft examination
(“I did some creative acting,” he said),
and he sublet a small house on campus
with Ron and Scott Asheton and Dave
Alexander. They formed a band called
the Psychedelic Stooges, and began de-
veloping their sound in the basement.
“You can’t believe how dirty and de-
structive and lazy and just untenable
these people were,” Pop said. “Mean-
while, I was crazy as a loon myself.”
Ron Richardson, a friend of Ron
Asheton’s who later became the Stooges’
first manager, was involved in psyche-
delics experiments at the University of
Michigan, and the band often partook
of his supplies. LSD wasn’t criminalized
in the United States until the end of
1968, and drugs more generally were not
particularly difficult to come by on cam-
pus. “This guy came over one night and
gave us all DMT in a bong,” Pop said.
The Stooges played their first pub-
lic show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom,
in March, 1968. Pop had shaved his eye-
brows and slathered his face with white
paint. He wore golf shoes, a rubber swim
cap decorated with several dozen strips
of aluminum foil, and a frock that Ron
Asheton described as “an old white
nightshirt from the eighteen-hundreds.”
The Stooges were not yet interested in
melody, preferring to generate a caus-
tic, demented drone, using a blender, a
vacuum cleaner, several fifty-gallon oil
drums, and a hammer. The P.A. was
cranked to inhumane levels.
Wayne Kramer recalled the show as
feeling instantaneous and electric. “I
was expecting a band. It was way more
than a band. It was primal,” he said.
“Simple is not easy. It was the first time
I ever saw someone dance and inter-
pret the music to the degree he was able
to, live onstage.” He added, “The music
wasn’t pop, it wasn’t rock, it was some-
thing else. It was dark and foreboding
and powerful and hypnotic.” In 1969,
the band lost the “Psychedelic” at the
start of its name, and released its début
album. Pop and Ron Asheton wrote
most of the tracks. “I didn’t have his
riffage, but I could write something sim-
ple,” Pop said.
Those first few years were dangerous.
Not in a vague, something-explosive-is-
starting-here way but in a spilled-blood
w a y. Pop once stage-dived into an empty
room, cracking his front teeth.
In 1970, in Cincinnati, he got
his hands on a jar of peanut
butter, smeared it all over him-
self, and began chucking gobs
of it at the crowd. (There is a
famous photograph of Pop
taken that night, wearing tight
jeans, a studded dog collar,
and a silver lamé glove, walk-
ing upright on the audience’s raised
hands, as if the crowd were a floor made
of people.) He would deliberately pro-
voke the most unsavory character in the
club, in search of a reaction. He was
often zonked on heroin.
Most of Pop’s bandmates were as
stoned and as disobedient as he was.
In 1971, Scott Asheton, who played
drums in the group, got blitzed on the
sedative secobarbital and drove a tall
truck full of rented gear under a low
bridge. The top of the truck peeled off,
Scott was tossed fifteen yards, and ev-
erything inside was destroyed. The story
gets told now as a metaphor: the
Stooges simply refused to acknowledge
the laws of physics.
“Iggy and the Stooges were a giant
opening to me,” the singer and writer
Richard Hell told me. In downtown New
York, in the mid-seventies, Hell devel-
oped a counterpart to the Detroit sound,
performing with the punk bands Televi-
sion and Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
“He was talking about things as they are,
rather than in pop conventions,” Hell
said. “He took all the monotony and frus-
tration and made it great.” In the eight-
ies and nineties, young and discordant
indie-rock bands were equally shaped by
the Stooges’ music. Sonic Youth’s Kim
Gordon described it to me as “dark, sexy,
dangerous, radical music. Those words
hardly describe any music in rock today,
but that’s what the Stooges gave us—
perfect, seemingly effortless rock songs.”
At the time, however, critics and lis-
teners mostly found the band insane—
four angry young men brazenly wreck-ing themselves in service of who knows
what. Even Rolling Stone, a bullhorn
for the counterculture, didn’t entirely
dig it: “Their music is loud, boring,
tasteless, unimaginative and childish. I
kind of like it.” The rock critic Lester
Bangs—a fan—wrote, in Creem, in 1970,
“Antisocial art simply don’t fit in, broth-
ers and sisters. Who wants to be de-
pressed, anyway?”
Yet the band’s tumult ac-
curately reflected the tensions
of the time, including the es-
calation of the Vietnam War.
The Stooges were neither hip-
pies nor pacifists. “Peace and
love wasn’t a big part of it,”
Scott Asheton said, in “Please
Kill Me.” Whatever was hap-
pening in Michigan felt markedly dis-
tant from scenes elsewhere. “What I
noticed about the West Coast bands
was that they had awful rhythm sec-
tions,” Kramer told me. “The bassist was
just the guy who couldn’t play guitar as
well as the other guy. In Detroit, the bar
was very high—it was the home of Mo-
town.” He added, “We were informed
by unionism, and having an organized
voice against corporate power. It seemed
to me that on the West Coast every-
thing was diluted with a kind of Polly-
annaish, utopian vision of the future.”
In 1967, the year the Stooges formed,
Detroit had been flattened by race riots,
in which forty-three people were killed,
hundreds were injured, and nearly four-
teen hundred buildings were burned,
mostly in black neighborhoods. “Iggy
and the Stooges were making a deeper
political statement that had to do with
disenfranchisement and disconnection
from the mainstream,” Kramer said.
Certainly, a song like the Stooges’ “I
Wanna Be Your Dog” didn’t share much
DNA with a moony anthem like the
5th Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the
Sunshine In,” one of the best-selling
singles of 1969, or even with most of
the lineup at Woodstock; the Stooges
weren’t coastal, arty, or conciliatory.
Pop’s lyrics were blunt. “No fun, my
babe/ No fun,” he sang, his voice flat
and clipped.
Pop seemed to regard violence as a
kind of absolution. He routinely muti-
lated himself onstage, carving, exposing,
and contorting his body, performing a
sort of theatrical exorcism for the benefit