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Topic: Iggy Pop and the Stooges Take the Stage Return to archive
17th March 2007 09:10 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Friday, March 16, 2007
Iggy Pop and the Stooges Take the Stage
wired.com

Iggy Pop and the Stooges are being interviewed at SXSW in front of a rapt, capacity crowd that had formed a line snaking through the halls as the start time drew nearer. I shot a few minutes of video before they closed down the videographers; I'll post that here later, as well as a sound recording if it comes out okay.

[Update: Neither the Wi-Fi connection at the Austin Convention Center nor the Fedex/Kinko's here has been able to provide enough bandwidth for me to upload this video to YouTube in four hours-worth of aggrevation. But the video's noteworthy, if only for the fact that Iggy is wearing a single flip flop for some reason, so I'll keep trying, although it might not be up until tomorrow.]

For now, here are some live Iggy snippets (not word for word accurate):

-------------------

They sent me to see the sexy editor of Sixteen magazine for tea at her apartment to see if we hit it off... and I was on the cover" (lots of laughter)

I didn't understand the difference between five dollars and five thousand dollars... so we became artists by default.

Ravi Shankar opened up his instrument and found the music that was already there... Good songs are in the air.

He had that great riff the way I remember it is he had the riff... We were communist, we cooked weird macrobiotic concoctions together, and he would play this riff back and forth, and right away, I knew it was a good one. We weren't recorded at the time, but with that stuff, we were in the book, I knew it right off.

We were actually playing a lot of church socials in church basements.

The word "no" is a great word. In the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction," my favorite part was when [Jagger} sings "no no no..." the construction came from Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line." [I think he's talking about "Search and Destroy"]

I don't care who you are... all the young blades send their laundry home to their mom.

---4pm---

[About "Upper Lower Egypt" (I think, or possibly "I Wanna Be Your Dog")] Picture the Mona Lisa. IF behind her there was like a condo tower, it's not the same picture. Depends on he space, depends on what's around the main subject, and the main subject is his guitar, but the frequencies of the piano play with his guitar, and the sleigh bells play with the drums.

When we first really started trying to play music, we were sitting on the floor. I had love beads and a Hindu mustache, playing rock operas about a guy who lived with a little mouse in a bucolic world, and these guys were trying to back me up, and nobody wanted to listen to that. I looked around and said what they wanted...OK, you want that? OK. There's a little bit of nerd's revenge in there.

It's boring to have your own way, it really is. We were lucky because we came up in a weird time.

That first record was made in a little tiny walkup over a peepshow in Times Square. Tiny little room, tiny little amps, to make some tiny little R&B music.

[Someone] brings Nico to the session who sits there and knits. It creates an atmosphere! In that case we were lucky.

I went to the bowser boutique and I thought "that would look cool on me." I didn't buy them in fashion stores. It was like Abbey Road, we'd walk with our guitar cases to the store... John Wayne almost ran me over. That was cool. He was flying down Westmont, and I was walking alone, sunset, and it's [John Wayne voice] "goddammit." and I was like "it's John Wayne... cool." It creates an atmosphere.

At root, I'm afraid the message was a little anti-psychedelia... we didn't think so, but people started getting upset. It hurt our feelings! It hurt our feelings, well, a just little bit. They were like "they can't play, and we hate him [Iggy]."

Guitarist Ron Asheton on playing Stooges songs without Iggy: It's like when you meet a new girl and you put a mask of your old girlfriend's face on her.

The most intense artistic psychic pain of my life was covering those songs with other players. It was a rock and a hard place. I hated how it sounded, on the other hand they [the songs] are incredible vehicles. You come to town and rock the house. I had a stretch of slogging it out. When I couldn't take that anymore... Professional musicians are the worst. There should be a law against that term. Finally, I went halfway. I have a son who is very wayward, and I was trying to set a proper example for him a few years ago, and instead he corrupted me! Pretty much... we split it even. I invited him to the Brick by Brick sessions and said why don't you bring your friends and you can all sing on a chorus. And his friends came in and I thought "Oh my god." I picked the best ones and made a little mini-Stooges... little pygmy Stooges called the Trolls. They were all tiny little guys, fierce little problems, and they wanted to rock. I did it to give Eric employment. He worked as a tour manager for me for quite some time.

It became a quest... what could I learn from [blues drummer] Sam Lee. I went to his home, his wife was home, she said have some chicken and get out of here. But I went and sat in with different groups, and actually sat in. I was paid ten bucks to play with some of these seriously fine black blues musicians. I was scared in the clubs. I was more scared of the women. I'd never seen such overt sexuality expressed in dancing. But the guys were aged delinquents. They were very entertaining, but they had about as much career perspective as the Three Stooges.

I don't know if this is true, but Sam used to keep a Colt 45 in his holster, and he shot himself while he was playing. That was so cool.

American Indians and bellydancers -- those were influences too. I was really interested in Stone Age people in college.

It's harder to make handmade music now. It's easier to have a computer and send it... but it's harder to get from one end of town to the other. Cars are uglier now too. I hate to sit behind an SUV. I don't like the ones that look like tennis shoes.

There's usually a couple people in any area who can help you, and can put you on. One was Russ Gibb, who was a teacher who wanted to "be around" young people. Then there was John Sinclair, who was going to be an artistic, political leader type of thing. He could have been the next Jesse Jackson. John could put you on at the church socials, and you could open for the MC5. Or The Who, who we met at his place. If you want to play the psychedelic club, you had to go "spend some time" with Russ. We got a hippy hash dealer manager that was friends with John, so that's how we got in with him.

The MC5 were going to play at the Democratic National Convention, and John wanted us to play. I did about 8 somersaults... I wasn't going to pretend I was political. If you pretend you're something you're not, it can bite you later. I also don't like to be bossed around. It's okay, it's water under the dam, and it's cool.

Show business is hope. If you have hope, there is always a way.

Waffles are good. We were foodies early on. They were whole grain... one waffle iron, and I would grind the grains.

We had three houses. In the first two, we hung real well, but we didn't get much done, because we didn't know what to do, and we'd forgotten about the neighbors and the police. It's not that easy doing this form of music -- a lot of people think forget it, I'll just write a theme for that sweater commercial.

I turned up a Farfisa organ, put it up to ten, took a hit of acid, and put my feet up on the keyboard for 4 hours.

Ron Asheton: we were treated like the Three Stooges. We'd not get served because it was a jock restaurant. People were actually trying to run us over crossing the street. I thought, "we're like the Three Stooges, this could work." My favorite... they called up Moe Howard of the Three Stooges to see if it was okay that we were called the Stooges. He said, "I don't mind as long as they don't call themselves the Three Stooges [dialtone sound]." We got the blessing from Moe Howard.

[In the earliest days] We didn't have songs had riffs and these three themes I would sing. "I'm Sick," "Goodbye Bozos" if I hated the crowd, and "Dancing and Romancing" if I was feeling sexy.

[Regarding the fact that their songs are hits now] I don't know about the other two guys, but I think they feel the same way... if you've gone through the sort of hunger and frustration that I did for so many years, I feel very good if somebody knows the song.


[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels]
17th March 2007 01:33 PM
mojoman got my stooges tix un the mail today. oh yeah!!!
17th March 2007 02:46 PM
GotToRollMe A quote I received via email today from Contact Music at http://contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/the%20things%20they%20say%204294_1025308:

"People come up to me once in awhile and yell at me for something I did to their house 23 years ago, like puking in their mailbox." - IGGY POP

And a great interview from The Vancouver Sun:

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=b1227f3e-0ba0-4085-93e8-90467b8eaa5d

Iggy Pop in conversation with the Vancouver Sun
John Mackie, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, March 16, 2007

Iggy Pop in conversation with John Mackie of the Vancouver Sun, over the phone from his home in Miami on Monday, March 12 - the day before the new Stooges record was released in Canada.

Sun: I met you 100 years ago in Vancouver, I guess you were opening for the Pretenders. You got a gold record from A&M records for Blah Blah Blah.

Iggy: "I'm lookin' at it right here. Yeah, it's on the wall behind my hookah pipe."

Sun: Is that the first - or even the only - gold record you've ever gotten?

Iggy: "I think it's the only gold record. [He laughs] I've got quite a few gold and platinum for singles, stuff I did with Death in Vegas, Trainspotting, that sort of thing. But one of my albums, no, you're [Canadians] the only ones that stepped up to the plate. There's some sort of weird rumour going around that Brick by Brick has gone gold in the US, but if it's true, I don't have a record for it."

Sun: Everybody in the world has heard the original Stooges records and they've been a huge influence, but how well did they actually sell?

Iggy: "I don't really have figures, which don't really matter anymore, because there are an awful lot of guys with gold records on their walls working at car washes, you know, or in rehab. But here's what I know: when they first came out, they would sell usually a minimal amount, between 15,000 and 30,000, in the US. Then they would go out of print, and then over the years they all got reprinted and went into the black. Now they are all royalty-bearing.

"The CBS one [Raw Power] is much bigger than the Elektra ones. Because that was a production contract, I basically have one of those Pebbles deals, I don't see the figures, but I know they're high because of the publishing.

"The other two have been selling steadily, a few thousand copies every quarter for goin' on 20 years now. It's a worldwide business, much more than America. And it keeps going up. Where they've really shone is in licensing. That started about four years ago, just about the time the group started doing a lot of work together. The thing that really kicked it off was a very nice usage of I Wanna Be Your Dog in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

"That kind of started the ball rolling, we do very well there. And then the cuts also do well on my Nude and Rude [hits collection]. Nude and Rude has several cuts by the Stooges. So the answer would be I would guess that since they started tracking this stuff in America with Soundscan that none of them would be anywhere near having any evidence of gold or any of that crap.

"But it needs to be noted that North American people are completely deluded as to their relative size or importance in any aspect of life on the planet at this point. We do really well in Brazil, Argentina, Belgium. We're big in Belgium, dude! [laughs] We're huge in Japan, we do very very well in England and France. Germany is steady. We get a very high price every time we play Athens.

"If we go to the former Yugoslavia we're generally invited to the various palaces. So we do well in other ways, and we're doin' real well on the Internet. The disintegration of the existing order is proving to be very good for the Stooges."

Sun: Expand on that.

Iggy: "A certain amount of time back, you could walk into a record store and you would see a huge poster of Bruce Springsteen which had been airbrushed, and major retail space for his products. I'm just using him as an example, he's a good artist. But totally worked on by the industry, totally insider. He would get the shelf space, he would get the huge advertisement, he would get the airplay and the giant push. And somewhere in the corner of the store there would be a picture of me with pimples bleeding, [laughs] and three of my albums.

"But you go on the Internet, and suddenly all that hype doesn't really play out the same way. People themselves, fans, hype the things they like, and people hype the [bleep] out of us [laughs]. It's evened out the playing field a lot.

"That's been good for us. And the other thing that's been good is the new way in which people really experience music, as part of something else. As part of another entertainment form.

"The first step in this was videos. We preceded those, we missed out on that. But the next logical step from videos is inclusion of music in advertising, television, movies, dramas, documentaries and all that. It also is many many more times lucrative, it's much much better paid than traditional radio was. All traditional radio ever was was a demographically disguised advertising opportunity. The songs that got on it were already commercials, you know? So we're doing fine. And it's a different day, a different yard stick."

Sun: It also seems to me that playing live is also more important again.

Iggy: "Yeah, live has come back - because nobody can do it! [laughs] Cause nobody's any [bleeping] good. So if you're decent, you'll stand right out. And we happen to be better than decent."

Sun: What made you want to get back together with the Asheton brothers? And what led to you guys separating way back?

Iggy: "My diagnosis would be nervous exhaustion. The group just went too far, too fast, and finally we ran out of support - from our own pocketbooks, our own nervous systems, and not a big enough public to interest the industry. So we just fell apart.

"We got back together...I think the big thing that happened was Iggy Pop finally succeeded in feathering his own nest. I completed that job, got myself squared away to a certain point where I could do what I wanted. That was probably the key to it.

"At the same time, I ran out of ideas. I couldn't think of anything better to do, or anything else I wanted to do. And there it was, right in front of my face.

"The public response was really strong. You couldn't have predicted that - you could have knocked me over with a feather, I had no idea that there were that many people were that interested. And suddenly there was work for us, you know? So there you go."

Sun: You've done Stooges gigs on and off for the last four years...

"Not on and off. It's all we've done. For three-and-a-half years, all I've done is played in this band, with the exception of one four-hour session. Almost three years ago I did a session for the Teddy Bears, as a guest, because I thought they had a good song. But really this is all I do, and it's all they do. We are a band.

"It's just instead of making the record first, or a reality show, or a new pair of jeans or something, we just shut up and we went out there and played gigs. We kind of earned our spurs."

Sun: Did you try and catch that in the studio with this record?

Iggy: "We tried to catch that, mixed with trying to catch some decent songwriting. A little of both. You're not going to write the same thing over and over. We tried to write what we write now. We have a kind of knack for not interfering with each other. Each guy, each of the three of us holds up his particular end, and it just kind of blends and happens, or it doesn't.

"I never really told Ron 'Don't play something like that, play something like this.' I worked with what he gave me, and I would work it into some sort of a song, put a melody and lyric to it, and then Scott would come in and we'd know in 10 minutes if it was swingin' or not, you know?

"Then we have Steve [McKay] and Mike [Watt], who are frankly much more advanced, better players than we are. [laughs] Although I don't know if Ron and Scott would agree with me. They're really good players on sax and bass, and complete [the sound], polish it up for us a little."

Sun: So what have the Asheton brothers been doing for the last 30 years?

Iggy: "They've both been playing, a lot. Ron's been in more bands than I can remember the names of, but some of them are Destroy All Monsters, New Order. There were two or three others, I can't remember 'em. But he was in the Detroit area. And ditto for Scott. Scott's two big collaborators were a guy named Sonny Vincent, a very hard rocker, and Fred Sonic Smith. Basically they've been playing all this time."

Sun: So they hadn't been sitting around their parents basement waiting for you to call, which I read somewhere.

Iggy: "Mmmmm...that wouldn't be fair. Ron still has the same house that he had when I met him, but his parents are both passed away. Since we've been working a lot, he's got a couple of other houses now, too. It's how it goes, dude."

Sun: Let's talk about some of the songs. I like Trollin', which has the lyric 'My dick is turning into a tree.' What inspired that?

Iggy: "Well you know, I'm sitting here now as we talk...I'm outside and I'm surrounded by trees. [laughs] I like trees. I'm a very organic person. And you know...I could give you a pithy quote like 'One day I looked at it and it looked just like a tree.' [laughs] I noticed a resemblance. It may have been something John Waters said about trees. John Waters [said] 'Have you ever looked at trees and realized how absolutely filthy they are? They're all full of suggestive parts and orifices.' It may have been from that, I don't know.

I started looking at 'em, and it's true. Anyway, it was just something basic and human."

Sun: How about the song 'my idea of fun is killing everyone?'

Iggy: "Well, I was having an off day. [laughs] You know? What can I tell you? Other than that the words are 'attention thrills and then it kills, they make you king, they make you ill.' It probably would have been more accurate of me to sing 'my idea of fun would be getting away from everyone.' But that's really not as exciting. [laughs] It's kind of a juvenile lyric. I have no defense for it. I have since heard that it was stupid, but not stupid enough. So what can I tell you."

Sun: Greedy Awful People, that's a good one.

Iggy: "That's just straight up descriptive. I paint what I see. That's a type I keep running into that gives me a [bleeping] pain in the ass. They usually keep moving into the neighbourhoods I pioneer. It's the gentry, the young gentry."

Sun: Why did you move down to Miami from New York?

Iggy: "Well, I got sick of living with six million other VIPs, frankly. It gets crowded."

Sun: The Jeff Wall photo for Avenue B, how did that come about?

Iggy: "Ohhhhhhhhhh! Ohhhhhhhhhhh! Nobody ever mentions that! Dude, you know he's got a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art now. I've been to his home there, I shot the session in Vancouver with him. They hauled me up from Mexico for it. I got incredibly ill, because it was so cold up there. But it was worth it to do something with him.

"I read a reasonably provocative piece in the New Yorker about the retrospective recently. It's kind of like a review. I was tickled, I was really tickled.

"Well, [doing the cover] was really straight forward artsy craftsy [bleep]. I had an album, and it was special to me. I wanted some sort of a cover that was appropriate. I was staying in Soho at the Mercer Hotel at the corner of Prince and Mercer, and there was a shop that sells nothing but photo books, a specialist shop, about four doors up Mercer street.

"I went in there to see if I could find somebody whose work I liked, with hopes of approaching them. And I found his book. I could see right away that it was really highly theatrical, but at the same time, there was none of that crappy wishy washy...he doesn't pour syrup on it. There's no sugar with him. [laughs] He tends to use...subversively attractive models. The people he pulls in, they are interesting to look at. That's about as much sweeter as the guy uses. But I loved what he did.

"So I tried to get ahold of him through channels, and that failed miserably. The way I got him to do the gig was that I finally just said '[bleep] this,' and on a hunch I called the Vancouver phone directory. I thought a guy like that might be listed, and he was listed. He picked up the phone, and he told me he got a big kick out of that. 'Nobody ever calls me through the directory! If you would do that, okay I'm interested.'

"It was at that time the only commercial gig he'd ever taken. I thought what he did was great. It was really important what he did for me. So many people who I knew through the publicity and public side of the music I do hate that [bleeping] photo."

Sun: Really?

Iggy: "Of course! To them a photo is all about 'Did they airbrush out your mole, did they recolour your skin,' all that crap, you know? They don't get it. People are not very well educated anymore. They need an instant gratification, they don't realize the fact that as time goes on, the look of that photo puts me in a different ballpark, you know? I was real pleased. My only regret was that the photo on the flip side, that was a poster inside in the red pjs, I probably should have made that the cover. I would have, except that the [bleeping] CD format is so small.

But anyway, he's a good cat. I think he was in New York at the same time I was for some reason, we had an interesting conversation. I enjoyed his disdain for New York city. He said 'I'm not impressed with this [bleep], it just looks like a pile of stone masonry to me.' I got a kick out of it, and I really enjoyed working with him. It was very severe, but fair. And he's a good guy."

Sun: Have you ever heard his band, UJ3RK5?

Iggy: "Oh, I should have known he had a band. [laughs] They always have a band, don't they. What's the name of it?"

Sun: UJ3RK5. It's been out of print for 100,000 years. It was a bunch of artists, basically.

Iggy: "Sure, sure, I dig. There were people like that where I grew up in Ann Arbor."

Sun: On that record you do an unbelievable cover of Shakin' All Over.

Iggy: "That's me playing guitar. The reason I did it was because I'd been trying to learn how to play Shakin' All Over on the guitar for like 22 years. [laughs] No, 30. I started playing guitar when I was 21. So let's see, I made that album, I was 48...26 years it took me to learn to play 'dunck dunck dunck dunck dunck dunck dunck, badaladadada-da.' I was so excited, I said 'I'm recordin' that song, so everybody can hear the evidence.' So when I'm about to expire I can play it and say 'Goddamnit, I learned to play [bleeping] Shakin' All Over!'"

Sun: Were you covering the Guess Who version, or the Johnny Kidd and the Pirates version?

"Guess Who dude, Guess Who. Not only that, I saw the Guess Who play it live in 1965, when they came through. I think they called themselves Chad Allan and the Impressions, does that ring and bell to you?"

Sun: It was Chad Allan and the Expressions.

Iggy: "Expressions, alright. I was playing with the Iguanas at a teen club in northern Michigan, and they came through and played it. The guy was the [bleep] on guitar. He wore a pinky ring and a suit, I remember.

Sun: What's next for you? You're about to turn 60, how do you feel about that?

Iggy: "I'll be happy if I'm still walkin' around. That'll be great. If I'm breathing. I've got a helluva schedule right now. I had the intemperance to make a record with a rock band, so I'm doin' all the things you do - talkin' on the phone, goin' on TV shows and scuttling around the world. And then I'm going to do an actual proper American tour.

"Knock wood, if I'm still alive at that point, I'll be on stage at the Warfield in San Francisco that night. So basically my birthday will go something like this. The night before, I'll call in my big guns for some serious sex. She's awesome, and I can still get her out on the road for certain occasions. Then I will struggle to sleep all day. I'll sleep through as much of my birthday as possible. Then I'll wake up and I'll begin to stimulate myself. I'll do the gig, then after I'll get drunk and wish myself a happy birthday. [laughs] I'll wake up a few hours later feeling like a pile of [bleep]. Barely able to carry on. Sounds great, right?"

Sun: Do you look back at some of your hijinks over the years and think 'Oh my God, I can't believe I'm still alive?'

Iggy: "No. The only thing I do...I am constantly force-fed it by others. And it's always a big [bleeping] pain in the ass. I always feel like 'How uncool. Must you bring that up?' [laughs] It's sort of like that. It's a classic denial thing I have going. 'Can't you see that I'm a gentleman of leisure and a pillar of the community now?' That's how I honestly feel. 'How rude!'"

[Edited by GotToRollMe]
17th March 2007 02:47 PM
pdog About one month for me...
17th March 2007 04:30 PM
GotToRollMe
quote:
pdog wrote:
About one month for me...



You'll be getting the birthday show, pdog!
17th March 2007 05:16 PM
mojoman maybe i should swallow a little pill
19th March 2007 07:32 PM
GotToRollMe Interview with Iggy from SXSW:

http://jam.canoe.ca/Music/Artists/S/South_By_Southwest/2007/03/19/3783039-ca.html

Iggy Pop gets candid at SXSW
By Sebastien Chicoine -- For JAM! Showbiz


(PHOTO: Sebastien Chicoine)

Iggy Pop and the Asheton Brothers reminisced about their early days during an interview by Rolling Stone's David Fricke, Friday, at South by Southwest.

James Newell Osterberg, Jr., aka Iggy Pop, is rightly recognized as the Godfather of Punk (and often of heavy metal, too), alongside his bandmates, Ron (guitar) and Scott (drums) Asheton, as well as Dave Alexander on bass, back in the late sixties and early seventies.

The former three were received by the South by Southwest Music Festival last Friday for an interview session conducted by David Fricke, the now senior and once managing editor of Rolling Stone magazine.

The four men chatted for over an hour on the good ol' days when the band lived in the same house, how some of their hits came to be and of his early days as a session drummer in blues bands around Chicago.

Take for instance their name. All three core members were, and still are, fans of the Three Stooges, but originally wanted to call themselves The Psychedelic Stooges, later deciding to drop the psychedelic part. Legend has it, as retold by Iggy, that he actually met Moe and asked him if it was okay that they use the name The Stooges for his band, to which the comedian agreed, adding that it was fine as long as the didn't call themselves the Three Stooges.

As became rapidly obvious during the interview, the musical Stooges certainly didn't have an easy time making it big. Iggy recalled a show they gave in 1970 where they were supposed to get a chance to impress a very important impresario at the time, Frank Barcelona.


Iggy tells: "I had on those really short shorts that chicks wear nowadays, hot pants, and moccasins, because I always thought moccasins were cool. We're up on stage and I grabbed one of Scott's broken drums sticks and started making marks on my skin, and these little specks of blood start coming out. By now, I'm getting pissed at the total lack of reaction in the crowd, so I jumped them (stage dive). Then, after the concert, I walk up to Frank Barcelona, I mean he looked wonderful, he had this 'Goodfellas' look about him, and up I walk, covered with specks of blood, wearing hot pants and moccasins, and he says to me: "Kid, I can't do anything for you, but I'm sure in 25 years, you'll be relevant." The man was a pro, he knew his business," Iggy said.

At this point, Fricke wondered whether The Stooges would've sounded as aggressive had they met success right from the onset of their career. Although Ron did think so, Iggy dampened that point of view a bit. To him, it's inevitable that once you start making money for someone else, music becomes workaday and offered that to him, that's what happened to Alice Cooper who had a few iconic albums in his early career, but by 1975 was playing golf more than he was touring.

"Making it big is what absolutely murdered Alice Cooper's career. I mean, 'I'm 18' or 'Under my Wheels' are works of art, but not 'Million Dollar Babies.'"

What about reviews? After all, not all bands could withstand being called, as they once were in Rolling Stone, a band playing "moronic metal fuelled by Iggy Pop's bestial growls." And that was a positive review.

But actually, Ron has always preferred when the band got negative reviews because, as he put it "everyone wants to see the 'Elephant Man.'"

Still, any band needs some promotional help at one point or another. For Iggy and the Stooges, that came in the form of a cover for Sixteen Magazine.

"Someone in our management knew the lady who ran Sixteen magazine and knew that she was a very horny lady. So they thought we should meet for tea to see if we'd hit it off. And I ended up on the cover of Sixteen."

Interviewer David Fricke noted with humour that with the 12 new tracks on the band's latest album, "The Weirdness," and four others that came out recently, the Stooges catalog of songs has almost doubled. He asked the guys why it always took a very long time for the Stooges to write new material, notwithstanding the fact that it's been 35 years since their last album.

For Iggy Pop, "writing a lot of OK or crappy songs is really easy and it's really hard not to do. Even the best ones in the business write a lot of crap. But writing a great song only happens once in a while, at best. For instance, when Ron started jamming the chords in 'No Fun,' I knew instantly that we would be in the book, but going from those chords riffs to a great song still took a lot of work, jamming it, trying different things with it... As for the lyrics of that track, I always thought that 'no' is a great word. One of my favorite parts of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction is when Mick goes "No no no." And then, on the other hand, you had the Beach Boys, another great band, who had this song where they kept repeating "Fun, fun, fun", so I thought to myself, "Well, there you go.""

The question comes readily to mind, then, about the process of writing this new album. How did it compare the the process back then?

"It was basically the same building blocks approach, but it was refined and faster", according to Ron. Iggy, however, thinks that overall, there were a lesser percentage of great songs, after the process was done, then back in those days.

But part of it also came from the environment in which they evolved in the late sixties and early seventies. After all, recording the second album in L.A., they were surrounded by Andy Warhol and his whole cast and crew from his movie "Heat." It was also John Cale who produced the Stooges' first album.

"There was John Cale, looking like the antagonist in Valley of the Dolls, wearing a Vincent Price type of Dracula cape, and he would come in the studio with Nico... That sets quite an atmosphere, to say the least. While we were doing the second album, I once was almost run over by John Wayne and I thought "how cool," I mean... John Wayne."

Fricke and Iggy Pop talked about Iggy's early days and how his stage antics came to be.

"Back in 66 and 67, I was a drummer and I went to Chicago to be a session player with local blues bands. I'd play 5 sets a night, almost every night of the week, and I'd get paid like 50 or 60 bucks a week, cash. But the first time I set foot in one of those blues clubs, I was blown away by the openly sexual nature of blues dancing. I'd never seen anything like that and it has nothing to do with what you see nowadays in those hip hop videos. That had a great influence on my later stage presence. Blues dancing, belly dancing and Native American ritual dancing, I'd say, are the three main ingredients of who I am on stage."

"And what about the influence of Detroit on the Stooges' sound? Some people said that a lot of the Detroit sound came from working on assembly lines, especially in the beats. What do you think," asked Fricke.

"Actually, I think it comes from that in part, but also from the whole Southern culture that was brought up to Detroit during World War 2 by all these people who migrated to the city to work in the plants", proposes Iggy who, it's not very well known, studied anthropology in college.

Iggy and the band famously lived together in a big house for quite a while. As they recall, they shared pretty much everything, from drugs to women to food, because the guys cooked a lot for each other, also. They were foodies ahead of their time, and macrobiotic, too.

According to Scott, it's absolutely necessary for a band to be able to live together to make it in the music business although it also requires an incredible amount of discipline to write songs in such a setting. According to Iggy, "creation often comes when you don't have to do the pedestrian things that people expect of you."

"You guys definitely lived by the standards of the era, with the psychedelic drugs, the macrobiotic food, the whole communal thing, yet your music always sounded literally anti-psychedelic," noted Fricke.

"Well I guess on some level it does sound anti-psychedelic, but it wasn't, really. The problem was that the psychedelic bands wrote music that prevented them from singing "We hate this guy" even if they did hate us."

Ron then explained that this family approach to their band has always remained true.

"We never really split, even though there was a hiatus between Fun House and Raw Power. None of us ever said "F**k you, I quit!", it's always been more like one of us was exhausted both mentally and physically and needed a break and the others respected that."

As a matter of fact, the Asheton brothers played with a lot of other bands in the meantime, all of which wanted to play Stooges tracks with them, but they often refused, unless it sounded like it should if Iggy was there, which is to say not that often. There's even one song, Dirt, which they always categorically refused to play with anyone but Iggy.

Ultimately, what every musician, what every band wants, is to be known. "Success, to me is when people know your songs. I mean, the proverbial question is and has always been "What song do you play?" I meet people and they tell me I look like I'm in a band. So I tell them, yeah, I'm in a band, The Stooges, a name they generally don't know. Then, it comes: "Oh, I'm not familiar with that. What song do you sing?" When I tell them that I sing that song about a dog and they know, then, I'm happy!"

19th March 2007 11:07 PM
pdog a month from now... Stooges in SF !!!
20th March 2007 02:53 PM
monkey_man Woo Hoo!
20th March 2007 02:54 PM
pdog Happy first Day Of Spring!
20th March 2007 02:59 PM
jb
quote:
pdog wrote:
Happy first Day Of Spring!


Pdog, Pdog,he's our man
if he can't do it, Joey can
Joey, Joey, he's our man,
if he can't do it,
crazy bastard Marko can....
20th March 2007 03:08 PM
pdog Berzerker!
Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
20th March 2007 04:11 PM
monkey_man Iggy are you putting us on?

21st March 2007 11:21 AM
GotToRollMe http://undercover.com.au/News-Story.aspx?id=1766

Iggy Pop Is The Dude, Not The Potato
by Paul Cashmere - March 21 2007

Iggy Pop told a Yahoo audience tonight that "when you hit 45, you are either gonna be the potato or the dude". The 59 year old rock star is definitely "the dude".

Iggy & The Stooges performed to an invite audience tonight (Tuesday March 20th) at Fox Studios in Century City in Los Angeles as part of Yahoo Music's Live Sets showcase specials.

The 9 song set also included a Q&A from the audience. When asked if they make better music when they are fucked up, Ron Asheton replied "I think you do". Asheton said that in the in between time, he worked at Ralph's supermarket.

Iggy attributed his best advice to his "sexy boyish figure, try and not talk to strangers, remember everything my mom told me and go to bed early and wake up early".

Iggy told his anecdote about how he smashed his arm and ended up paralyzed for three months after he got angry when someone turned up at his gig expecting Jimmy Pop (from Bloodhound Gang), not Iggy Pop (from the Stooges). He smashed his hand and arm into a cement wall and ended up in hospital. He said he was told he had a 50/50 chance of recovery at his age.

Ron Asheton's greatest regret was "trading my '63 Strat for a '79 Les Paul". However drummer Scott Asheton said he had "no regrets".

Iggy & The Stooges Live Sets showcase will appear on Yahoo Music in the next few weeks.

The Stooges performed:

Loose
I Wanna Be Your Dog
TV Eye
No Fun
1970
Funhouse/LA Blues
Skull Ring
Trollin'
My Idea Of Fun

21st March 2007 11:22 AM
Saint Sway I REALLY want to go see this show but its WAAAAAAAY far up town. Like 175th street. Which I am pretty sure is somewhere near Omaha.
21st March 2007 11:34 AM
GotToRollMe Yeah, but the A train practically dumps you right at the door!
By the way, I may have a ticket for sale. PM me if you're interested.



[Edited by GotToRollMe]
21st March 2007 11:36 AM
Saint Sway
quote:
GotToRollMe wrote:
Yeah, but the A train practically dumps you right at the door!




how many days does it take to get there from Manhattan?
21st March 2007 11:39 AM
GotToRollMe Only three if you take the express, but meals are complimentary...all the roaches you can catch!

21st March 2007 11:42 AM
Saint Sway do you think they will announce a show downtown??

it would make sense, no?
21st March 2007 11:46 AM
GotToRollMe I doubt it, Sway. Looks like this will be the one and only. Dunno what possessed them to use this "venue":
http://theunitedpalace.com/home.htm
21st March 2007 11:54 AM
Saint Sway looks like a really nice place. Sort of like the Beacon...

Stooges belong at Hammerstein or Roseland

do you have 1 xtra or 2? I need to pick one up for my friend whose a semi-retired punk that doesnt get out much anymore
21st March 2007 11:55 AM
GotToRollMe
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
looks like a really nice place. Sort of like the Beacon...

Stooges belong at Hammerstein or Roseland

do you have 1 xtra or 2? I need to pick one up for my friend whose a semi-retired punk that doesnt get out much anymore



Just the one, and even that's not definite yet. I'll let ya know when it is though.
21st March 2007 11:56 AM
Saint Sway thanks GTRM
21st March 2007 02:49 PM
monkey_man
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
do you think they will announce a show downtown??

it would make sense, no?



They need to separate the true fans from "I was there" crowd!
21st March 2007 06:58 PM
mojoman
quote:
monkey_man wrote:


They need to separate the true fans from "I was there" crowd!



it will be easy to score outside for the real fans
22nd March 2007 11:07 AM
GotToRollMe Iggy and the Hare Krishnas!

An aborted performance at a Hare Krishna music festival (circa 1970). The band are too drunk to play, so they hash out a few notes before Iggy takes off and climbs a fence. The plug is promptly pulled on their set.


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