Iggy Pop (9 page)

The Psychedelic Stooges boasted a hotline to the MC5 in the form of Ron and Scott’s sister, Kathy Asheton, who had attracted the attentions of MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith; Wayne Kramer, the MC5’s leader, had known Jim from his Prime Movers days, and at one point had considered enticing him into his own band. Hence, when the Psychedelic Stooges decided to unveil the results of their music experiments, it was natural that Sinclair and the ’5 would be invited. And as 1967 rolled on, it was decided that All Hallows Eve, which marked the onset of winter and the time when spirits walked the earth, was a well-starred date. The buzz spread around town for several weeks beforehand.

The chosen venue for the Psychedelic Stooges’ public debut was Ron Richardson’s house on State Street, a short way out of the centre of Ann Arbor proper. Richardson was responsible for overseeing the guest list, while his wife Nausika was assigned the task of assisting with Jim’s costume. After fighting with him over a Victorian nightdress at an Ann Arbor thrift shop, Nausika admitted Jim’s need was greater; she spent several days cutting aluminium foil into strips and gluing them to a rubber bathing cap to make Jim a metallic silver wig. Influenced by American avant-garde composer Harry Partch, who specialised in bizarre home-made instruments, Jim spent much of his time stoned, looking in the garbage dump at the back of Ron’s house for promising junk. Scott Asheton prepared for his public drumming debut by decorating his improvised drum kit, which was fashioned from oil cans rescued from the dump. He decorated his ‘kit’ with symbols that were the perfect metaphor for the Stooges’ mix of high and low art. In bright colours he painted the om, the winged eye of Horus, and other spiritual symbols from Dave Alexander’s books on Eastern mysticism, then wrote words like ‘shit’ and ‘pussy’ in ultraviolet paint that would only be visible under black lights.

October the thirty-first was a busy night on the hippie calendar, and many of those who attended the party were on their way to or from another celebration. Bill Kirchen, of the psychedelic band the Seventh Seal and later Commander Cody, perhaps best sums up the ambience when he points out that ‘DMT was the dominant drug, that night especially. Of all the drugs I’ve ever done, that was definitely the one that most made you worry you’d done something permanent to your brain. You’d have to have someone hold the pipe for you and rest your head back on something so you wouldn’t fall over when you did it, it was so gnarly.’

Dozens of people drifted in and out of the band’s debut party; most of Ann Arbor ’s beautiful people were present, including John Sinclair and his friends Michael McLatchy and Jimmy Silver, Panther’s friend Jesse Crawford, and the MC5’s Rob Tyner. The room was festooned with tapestries, the aroma of pot hung heavy in the air, and the noise when it started was casual. Iggy sat cross-legged on the floor playing a Hawaiian guitar with every string tuned to E. Ron played his bass through a variety of effects boxes, while Scott maintained a basic Bo Diddley beat. Dave Alexander’s role was restricted to twirling the amplifier dials, or smashing Ron’s Kustom amplifier against its cabinet, sending reverberating roars echoing through the room - and surrounding neighbourhood, for the volume at which they played was, everyone agrees, simply staggering: ‘They were long instrumental pieces, and it must’ve been like being badly beaten to listen to them,’ Iggy reminisces fondly.

Bill Kirchen was unmoved by the spectacle (‘I thought, this will never play’), but the people the band needed to impress, John Sinclair and crew, were convinced. ‘I loved it, because it was out there, but in a rock ’n’ roll context. Taking this sterile European avant-garde stuff and translating it into a thing kids can listen to,’ remembers Sinclair, who was shaken - both literally and metaphor ically - by the deafening sound levels in Ron Richardson’s living room, and impressed by the variety of drugs circulating in the tiny audience. One of Sinclair’s friends had brought a small carrier bag with nearly a hundred joints, all wrapped neatly and passed out freely among the party goers; everyone crammed into the kitchen was getting loaded on Freon propellant, spraying aerosols into balloons and then inhaling the contents, or getting high on amyl nitrate poppers. The disorientating mix of pharmaceuticals was exacerbated by the aural onslaught. Ron and Scott’s rhythmic backdrop occasionally faltered as Ron’s overloaded amp kept blowing fuses, while Iggy moved from the Hawaiian guitar to coax noises out of more improvised instruments, including a vacuum cleaner and the appropriately named Osterizer - a Waring blender half filled with water, into which he’d insert a microphone to produce rippling white noise, like a waterfall, or a Theremin, the ethereal, spooky sci-fi instrument familiar from the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’.

By the time Ron’s amplifier finally gave up the ghost after its last fuse blew, many of the audience had fled, some of them, like Sinclair, in a psychotic state: ‘I was paranoid I was so high, convinced they could hear this noise at the police station two miles down the road.’ Instead, it was left to Brother J.C. Crawford - later best known for his hip, motherfucker-laced preachers’ intro to the MC5’s
Kick Out The Jams
album - to close the performance, by announcing, ‘This is a magical night, the first night of Zenta New Year.’ Despite his early exit, John Sinclair was taken with the band. Iggy’s charisma, even the ex-drummer’s dancing ability, made a real impression on Detroit’s foremost hippie visionary, but the MC5 guru also came away with the conviction that the Psychedelic Stooges needed ‘a bit more insulation between them and the rest of the world’. He meant the sound, but his remark could equally have applied to the band’s brittle egos.

Crazed, loud and drug-drenched, the Psychedelic Stooges’ debut performance was unsurprisingly regarded as memorable, and the reaction was positive enough for the band to start planning their next show. But this was not the music that would later be associated with the Stooges. By now Ann Arbor ’s alternative arts scene was well established, and the Once Group - a loose collective of avant-garde musicians, performers and film fans - had overcome the suspicions of the University of Michigan and started to draw like-minded intellectuals from around the US. The Stooges’ out-there experimentation and improvised instrumentation fitted perfectly into this arty, intellectual niche. To most observers, Jim Osterberg was an intellectual first, a rock ’n’ roller second. Russ Gibb, a high-school teacher who’d been inspired by Sinclair to open the Grande Ballroom, the venue that nurtured both the MC5 and the Stooges in their infancy, was introduced to Osterberg by Rob Tyner and the MC5 that fall, and was instantly impressed with the earnest, impassioned youth. ‘The MC5 were working-class kids from the industrial suburbs of Detroit. Iggy’s dad was a teacher at a beautiful high school, and he came from Ann Arbor, from a much higher class status.’

Gibb was a crucial connection, one of the main players in Michigan’s fast-moving rock scene. He was equally capable of getting what he wanted from stoned revolutionaries like John Sinclair or straights like his bank manager, and like many people who could charm the pants off others, he appreciated the skills of another such operator. ‘He was a charming man. Iggy played second fiddle to the [MC] Five, deferred to them. But he was no one’s fool.’ According to Gibb, while he had some dealing with Psychedelic Stooges manager Ron Richardson, there was never any doubt it was Iggy who was running the show, and there was an open offer to the Stooges to play at the Grande whenever they felt ready.

Although Ron Richardson was a wise, intellectual character, he was also an unworldly one. He was christened ‘the Mad Professor’ by Ron Asheton’s grandma, and was always tinkering with gadgets and attempting to repair things that simply couldn’t be fixed. He was skilled at cramming knowledge into supposedly difficult kids in a poor part of Ypsilanti, but being ‘camp counsellor’ to the Psychedelic Stooges was a much tougher challenge. After Ron, Nausika and band moved to Toad Hall, a farmhouse on Vreeland Road out in Ypsilanti, Richardson made futile attempts to stem the neighbours’ incessant complaints about the noise by gluing egg cartons to the wall. It seemed to Ron that the entire band expected to live off his teacher’s salary, although Jim earned some cash waiting tables at the Virginian restaurant, while Ron Asheton worked at a local headshop, the Pigments of the Imagination, where he would spend much of his time stoned, looking on benevolently as the customers rifled the shop. Eventually, Richardson’s tolerance became exhausted. One day when his and Nausika’s food had disappeared from the refrigerator, he decided to cut off the heating until the perpetrator owned up, but he was subject to an amplified mutiny as Iggy picked up a microphone and led the others in a chant of ‘We hate the Mad Professor’. ‘They were sucking me dry,’ the professor concluded, ‘and I was beginning to freak out.’ The confrontation did, however, have a profound musical implication, for Jim Osterberg would later claim that the band’s heavily amplified chant was the first time the Stooges mastered an intense, threatening musical groove. This new discovery combined with the influence of Doors singer Jim Morrison, who had entranced Jim as he staggered around drunk for his show at the University of Michigan on 20 October 1967, howling like a gorilla and ‘enraging the fratboys’, says Jim. Morrison’s antics and provocation of the audience convinced Jim that he too could be a singer, inspiring his move to fronting a more conventional line-up, with Ron switching to guitar and Dave Alexander playing bass.

For all his truculence, Jim Osterberg was smart enough to have already identified a successor to the Mad Professor, in the person of Jimmy Silver. A close friend of John Sinclair, Jimmy came from a talented Jewish intellectual family - his father served in the Johnson administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health - and had come to Ann Arbor to enrol at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Jimmy had already been approached by Ron Richardson to assist with his troublesome charges and had declined. The band’s singer, however, was much more persuasive. ‘He sold it to me perfectly, that I would be part of this great mission. ’ Silver’s first job was to inform his predecessor that his services were no longer required - and also to persuade him to let the Psychedelic Stooges retain the use of his Plymouth Washer Service van. Happy to be relieved of his burden, the professor readily agreed.

Intelligent, forceful and charismatic, Jimmy Silver, aided by his wife Susan, proved the ideal person to steer the Psychedelic Stooges. He was a paternal figure who could impose some degree of organisation. He could negotiate their always complex relations with what became their ‘big brother’ band, the MC5, and sweet-talk often reluctant local promoters into booking his charges. He even ministered to their nutritional needs, improving their health with a macrobiotic diet which he and Susan had researched. But it was still a tough job - ‘Like herding cats,’ he recalls. ‘They were completely immature in most ways. Then they could drink alcohol and take drugs and get even further over the wall.’

Jim was both a leader and a follower to his bandmates. He learned from his fellow Stooges, and frequently, as in the episode with Bob Koester, set out to outdo them, to validate his membership of their gang. Hence he was quite capable of being, as Jimmy Silver observes, ‘a wilful and destructive child’. But in quiet moments - particularly during the occasional weeks when Jimmy and Susan would wean him off drugs and alcohol and nurture him on a macrobiotic diet to eliminate his asthma - he demonstrated the preternatural insight he’d demonstrated at school. ‘One of those days when we were looking after him I realised what a brilliant, analytical mind he had. He had an ability to identify what attracted people - and what would make them want to do what he needed or wanted.’ After some months, Silver realised that in some respects he was the one being managed; that Jim would set aside ‘quality time’ to nurture their relationship, to bond with Silver, ‘or allow me to feel like I was bonding with him’. Yet Jim did it in such an honest, open fashion that it never felt calculating or manipulative. Only in retrospect did Silver realise how Jim had managed to entice him into managing the Psychedelic Stooges by offering him the chance to be a part of something bigger than himself - intuitively, he’d worked out what was the driving force of Silver’s life.

From early in 1968, Jimmy and Susan lived with the Psychedelic Stooges at close quarters, moving in with them to what would become the fabled Fun House, a large wood-framed farmhouse at 2666 Packard, some way out of Ann Arbor toward Ypsilanti, which had been spotted by Ann Asheton. The farmhouse was up for rent at a bargain price because it was due to be demolished to make way for a highway (in forthcoming years its owner, Farmer Baylis, aka the Bear, would drive over and mournfully survey its increasingly decrepit condition). It would become the seat of the Stooges empire, and was christened Stooge Hall, or the Fun House. The name was appropriate, for it was a location that local girls and boys couldn’t wait to visit - although the girls in particular faced the prospect of being chased round the farmhouse in complete darkness to the music of Harry Partch, a fiendish sensory-deprivation technique that today would doubtless qualify as cruel and inhuman treatment.

In those early months, the Psychedelic Stooges worked fitfully, spending perhaps half an hour in the evening rehearsing at mind-boggling volume. Jimmy Silver, who heard all their practice sessions, observed that they possessed a surprising musical sophistication, demonstrated by their brilliant pastiches of their Ann Arbor rivals: ‘They could perfectly mimic the style of bands like Bob Seger, the Rationals, Ted Nugent - but they sounded even better than those bands could sound themselves in their own style!’ Silver thought this surplus material could become a lucrative sideline, and tried to persuade them to demo their material for other bands to record, but his suggestions were rejected. Instead, Jim and Ron concentrated on developing music that bore no relation to any existing style, music that existed on a completely unconscious, unmediated level, unrestricted by conventional structure. It would be the perfect collision of highbrow and gonzo. Jim drew on all the avant-garde precedents he’d learned about from Bob Sheff, while Ron and Scott drew on their honest, rock ’n’ roll dumb aggression. Yet that interaction was rendered more complex because, as Jim points out, ‘Ron has an elegance as an instrumentalist and a writer that I lack.’ Although in later years there would be disputes about who had written what in the Stooges, with Iggy Pop claiming to have written every single note of the music, it’s clear that most of the early songs derived from Ron’s ideas and riffs. Asheton’s guitar style was simple, its intelligent minimalism and intense delivery heavily influenced by the ultraviolent guitar assault he’d seen Pete Townshend unleash back in London. But sculpting songs out of the chaos of ideas was a slow process. As Jimmy Silver recalls, the band’s musical stamina was such that even rehearsing for more than forty-five minutes was a strain, ‘and they couldn’t physically play for more than fifteen minutes, twenty at the most’.