by Roni Sarig
King Coffey, Butthole Surfers:
There’s no denying they’re the grand influence. I’m pretty sure the bands that today get credited with being grunge will very quickly credit the Stooges as being an influence. Basically the Stooges played grunge music, I guess, with a kind of abandon. They were definitely coming out of the drug culture of Michigan in the late ‘60s, so there’s a psychedelic underpinning to what they’re doing. But Iggy Pop is a true punk rocker as we all know.
Before he became Iggy Pop, James Osterberg grew up in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Through high school Osterberg was a fairly straight, intelligent, socially adjusted kid, at least compared to his juvenile delinquent classmates Ron and Scott Asheton. He played drums with a few garage bands in the nearby college town of Ann Arbor – including the Iguanas, which gave Osterberg the nickname Iggy – and even attended the University of Michigan for a short time. He dropped out in 1966, though, and went to Chicago to pursue his dreams of being a blues musician. Realizing that he needed to find his own means of expression, he returned to Ann Arbor and formed the Psychedelic Stooges – Iggy, bassist Dave Alexander, and the guitar and drum playing Asheton brothers.
Van Conner, Screaming Trees:
I remember being a complete idiot about the Stooges when I was about 18. We played Ann Arbor and Ron Asheton actually came to the show. We talked to him and over the years got to be friends. We have this dream of flying him out to play on a couple Trees songs. That night he was there we played Real Cool Time by the Stooges. We’d always do a Stooges cover as our last song, like Raw Power or Search and Destroy. We listened to those records so many times somebody would just start playing the line and Mark [Lanegan] would start singing.
After a period of rehearsal and indoctrination during which Iggy played for the others all the obscure free-jazz albums that inspired him, the band (soon to be simply the Stooges) debuted on Halloween, 1967. By then, Iggy had become a devotee of the Doors – particularly Jim Morrison’s intensely physical stage persona. The Stooges, though, far outdid the Doors when it came to on-stage anarchy. While the others banged out loud and sloppy blues-rock riffs, a shiftless (and sometimes pantless) Iggy cavorted madly while spewing uptight teen anthems – his own take on the blues. Creating a spectacle the likes of which no audience had seen, Iggy Stooge (as he was known) would smear peanut butter and hamburger meat on his body before performing rock’s earliest stage dives.
Though the Stooges had absolutely no interest in any political movement, early on they aligned themselves with the more established Ann Arbor rock revolutionaries, the MC5. When Elektra Records came to town to sign the MC5 in early 1968, members of that band recommended the label check out their “little brother band,” the Stooges. Impressed, Elektra signed both bands at the same time, though they offered the Stooges – who’d only been a band for six months – one quarter the money that the MC5 got.
The Stooges’ self-titled debut album, released in 1969, was produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale (Velvets’ singer Nico was present at the recordings as well, and soon began an affair with Iggy). Though they hardly had enough material for a whole album, the few songs they’d worked out later became punk rock classics. Among the highlights were No Fun (covered by the Sex Pistols) and I Wanna Be Your Dog (covered by just about everyone else), two roughnecked paeans to teen looserdom. Though on record the group sounded significantly more polished than they did live, the album’s primal riffs and pissed-off singing mark it as one of punk rock’s primary sources. It proved much too raw for mainstream tastes.
Lou Barlow, Sebadoh:
There wasn’t anyone like them at the time. The Stooges cut everything down to such a basic level no one could really handle them. I was always drawn to the Stooges because they were playing in Ann Arbor, near where I grew up. My dad actually worked with Iggy’s mom. And I remember when I was, like, nine I used to think all hippies were violent and wanted to kill everybody. I thought the rock bands coming out of Detroit were the state of rock. Later on I realized they were the exception.
For the following year’s Fun House, Iggy Stooge renamed himself Iggy Pop. Ironically, the record is much less pop-oriented than the debut. Though the tunes were perhaps less memorable, songs like Down on the Street and T.V. Eye certainly rocked harder. While their friends in the MC5 were stripping down their sound, Fun House songs like L.A. Blues and the title track seemed to pick up where the MC5’s earlier wah-wah guitar and free-jazz freakout had left off. A truer expression of the band’s muscle, the addition of saxophone showed the band willing to grow musically. For Elektra, though, Fun House merely convinced them that the Stooges would never be a salable group. After hearing material for the band’s third album, the label decided to drop them.
Intent on continuing to refine its sound, in late 1970 the band fired Alexander (who died in 1975) and hired guitarist James Williamson (Ron Asheton switched to bass). But by then most of the group was heavily into heroin and Iggy himself was in no condition to front a group. (He even turned down the Doors’ offer to become singer when Jim Morrison died.) The Stooges broke up, and in 1971 Iggy headed down to Florida to clean himself up.
A year later, Pop met David Bowie, a rising pop star who had been a fan of the Stooges. As Bowie had recently done with Lou Reed, he offered to help Pop resurrect his career. Signing with Bowie’s management company, Pop went to England, with Williamson, and started work on a new album. Unable to capture the sound he wanted, he eventually brought the Ashetons over as well and re-formed the Stooges. With Pop clearly the focal point, however, the band became known as Iggy & the Stooges.
Nick Cave:
The way Iggy presented himself as the ultimate individual, someone who would not be bound down by anything – the audience, the apparatus of the music industry – and he was just godlike to me in that way.
In 1973, the band produced Raw Power, a record so true to its name the group’s new label, CBS, called Bowie in to remix the record. Bowie’s mix satisfied the label, but didn’t really do justice to the music (Pop remixed it again for its 1997 reissue). Still, the best tracks, like Search & Destroy, combined the mad intensity of Fun House with the hook-filled songwriting of the debut. Acoustic guitar and keyboard touches expanded the sound somewhat, but mostly it was pure hard electric guitar rock – the kind that would be tapped in the creation of both punk and heavy metal in coming years.
Bowie’s support exposed the group to a larger audience than ever, but upon relocating to L.A. old drug habits resurfaced and Stooges’ short-lived return ended. Pop, who was essentially a solo artist by then anyway, hooked up with Bowie in Berlin (after checking into a mental hospital to detoxify himself) and produced two strong pop-oriented albums in 1977, The Idiot and Lust for Life. By then, he was widely acknowledged as an elder statesmen of punk rock, a distinction he’d continue to enjoy through the ‘80s and ‘90s. In addition to an ongoing recording career, Pop has acted in a number of films, including John Waters’ Cry Baby.
Fred Schneider, B-52’s:
A lot of the new wave bands were really influenced by a lot of the garage bands. Iggy probably had a big influence, that real rough, raw, in-your-face thing. Really loud and snotty. It influenced a lot of the new wave bands everywhere. I loved listening to Iggy. Just all that energy.
The other Stooges have been less visible. Williamson recorded one album, Kill City, in collaboration with Pop. Ron Asheton played in a variety of little-known bands, including New Order (U.S., not U.K.) with MC5 drummer Dennis Thompson, and Destroy All Monsters. Recently, Asheton remade a number of Stooges songs with Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, and former Minutemen Mike Watt for the film Velvet Goldmine.
Mike Watt, Minutemen / fIREHOSE / solo:
The Stooges were irrepressible. They had a big effect on L.A. punk. Iggy was there right at the beginning of our scene. Iggy was a big fertilizer, a lot of people were growing their crops in his soil, man.
DI
SCOGRAPHY
The Stooges (Elektra, 1969); a great first burst of dumb, primal rock.
Fun House (Elektra, 1970); a follow-up with an even heavier guitar attack and the addition of some skronky saxophone.
Raw Power (Columbia, 1973; 1997); originally produced by David Bowie and recently remixed by Iggy Pop, this strong final studio recording was issued under the name Iggy & the Stooges.
Metallic K.O. (Import, 1976); a live album that includes the group’s final gig in 1974, augmented by the double album Metallic 2X K.O.
Rough Power (Bomp!, 1994); for Stooges completists, this is Raw Power in its original, rougher version before the Bowie mix.
Open up and Bleed! (Bomp!, 1995); collects post-Raw Power material, live and in rehearsals, previously available on import.
California Bleeding (Bomp!, 1997); collects live material, most never before released, from ‘73 and ‘74.
Year of the Iguana (Bomp!, 1997); a collection drawn from Bomp!’s The Iguana Chronicles releases.
TRIBUTE: Various Artists, We Will Fall: The Iggy Pop Tribute (Royalty, 1997); a tribute to the band’s leader that includes many Stooges songs as well as Pop solo favorites, recorded by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sugar Ray, Joey Ramone, Joan Jett, 7 Year Bitch, and 15 others.
ROKY ERICKSON
13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS
There are a lot of parallels between the psychedelic underground of the ‘60s and punk as far as being creative and anti-establishment. What the Butthole Surfers were doing in the ‘80s – being experimental, pushing the envelope – I thought was parallel to what the 13th Floor Elevators did. Maybe it’s giving ourselves a lot of credit, but I got a sense I could relate to the Elevators. It’s interesting how punk rockers, especially in Texas, took to Roky Erickson. I really can’t think of anyone in American music who’s as mythical to me. And the guy never got his fair due. He even had to go on welfare. He really touches me in a lot of different ways. Working with him was a great thrill, really rewarding.
King Coffey, Butthole Surfers
As one of the earliest (and perhaps the very first) psychedelic rock bands, the 13th Floor Elevators certainly influenced the course of music history through their steady output of red hot rock and input of LSD. It wasn’t until later generations came to appreciate the tortured genius of the Elevators’ frontman Roky Erickson, though, that the band’s true impact was felt, in everything from southern dream poppers R.E.M. to garage punks Mudhoney to Texan wackos the Butthole Surfers. Like Syd Barrett and Daniel Johnston, Erickson’s eccentricities have added to his status as cult icon, but the realities of his mental illness have, tragically, limited his ability to prosper creatively and financially.
Curt Kirkwood, Meat Puppets:
I love Roky. He’s one of the most fantastic poets, and the greatest singer. In the same way that Roy Orbison is an influence, he is. In terms of, like, space-aged doo-wop, R&B. I’ve always been really influenced by weird stuff from Texas. I was born there and moved away when I was pretty young, but was always really into the stuff from there.
In 1965, University of Texas student Tommy Hall decided to form a rock band as a mouthpiece for his radical philosophies on the uses of mind-altering chemicals. Because he was not a musician himself, Hall recruited capable instrumentalists to surround him while he relegated his own duties to lyric – writing and playing the “electric jug.” Having heard the local hit “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” by Austin group the Spades, Hall invited that band’s singer/songwriter – a 17-year-old prodigy named Roger Kynard (Roky) Erickson – to join as well. When he accepted, the band – called the 13th Floor Elevators in some oblique reference to marijuana – was complete.
Signing to the Texas-based International Artists label, the Elevators re-recorded You’re Gonna Miss Me, which became a minor hit in 1966 and a garage rock classic. Early on, though, Hall wired the group into his own agenda, which included daily doses of LSD for everyone in the band and writing songs that encouraged psychoactive drug use as a way of life. On trips to San Francisco, where the Elevators played regularly, their friend Janis Joplin (who nearly joined the band while still living in Texas) introduced them to the similarly acid-friendly music of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
The band’s 1967 debut, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators – reputed to be the first musical use of the term “psychedelic” – came complete with liner notes that outlined Hall’s program: “Recently, it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state. He can then restructure his thinking and change his language so that his thoughts bear more relation to his life and his problems, therefore approaching them more sanely. It this quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this album.” An early acid rock classic, the record mixed Erickson’s bluesy constructions and strong singing with Hall’s drug advocations. It sold well despite its still-controversial subject matter, though soon Texas law enforcement had their eyes on the Elevators as the state’s leading hippie troublemakers.
On the follow-up, Easter Everywhere, the Elevators got even more adventurous, with mesmerizing songs like She Lives (In a Time of Her Own) and Levitation. Unfortunately, in early 1969 the Texas authorities caught up with the band, arresting Roky for possession of one marijuana joint. Erickson pleaded innocent by reason of insanity and was sentenced to a hospital for the criminally insane. Thus the Elevator’s third studio album, Bull of the Woods, written mostly by guitarist Stacy Sutherland, proved to be their last.
Van Conner, Screaming Trees:
Easter Everywhere and Bull in the Woods are really hypnotic. I’ve listened to them a billion times and still put them on. There’s a heart and vibe to them that can freak you out. We have quite a few songs we didn’t put out because we thought they sounded too much like 13th Floor Elevators. The last song on [the Trees’] Uncle Anesthesia has their spacey feel. And Mudhoney had a song called “Thirteenth Floor” that was a total rip-off.
Over the next four years in the psychiatric hospital, Erickson was given electroshock treatment and various drug regimens, the benefits of which were dubious at best. By the time he emerged in 1973 Roky had written a book of messianic poetry and declared himself a Martian. With the slight notoriety engendered by the Elevators’ appearance on 1972’s Nuggets compilation, Erickson briefly attempted to re-form the group, but soon began fronting a series of bands over the next decade with names such as Bleib Alien, the Nervebreakers, Evil Hook Wildlife E.T, and the Resurrectionists.
Away from Hall, Roky began writing new songs – with titles like I Walked with a Zombie, Bloody Hammer, and Don’t Shake Me Lucifer – that came straight out of the fantasy and horror comic books he devoured. Though his thematic fascination with the occult and Satanism would be echoed in escapist heavy metal music, the demons chasing Roky were quite palpable to him. Yet while Erickson’s obsessions had clearly become twisted, his effortless singing and songwriting abilities – capable of producing a classic rocker like Don’t Slander Me or a sweet Buddy Holly-esque tune like Starry Eyes – were amazingly intact.
Jean Smith, Mecca Normal:
I saw an article on him and he seemed to be pretty scattered in his thinking. I was interested what this person’s music sounded like. There’s some very disturbing stuff, like Bloody Hammer. This maniacal accusation against the psychiatric world he’s had to deal with. It’s super-personal – not polite stuff to talk about – and he obviously means it. His sincerity comes through to the degree that it’s uncomfortable. I like that his songs reveal something and get a reaction. I don’t know that music’s mandate is to make you feel good or tap your toe.
Erikson continued to perform and sporadically record into the mid-80s, but has never achieved more than a small cult following. By 1987, a discouraged Roky retired from music entirely. Without any income from the many bootleg releases of his music, he was forced to live on social security outside Austin. The ‘90s have been a bit kinder to Roky. With the help of family, friends, and advocates, Erickso
n improved his financial situation, and a tribute album further raised his profile. Following a 1993 return to the stage at the Austin Music Awards, Roky entered a recording studio for the first time in a decade. Working with local musicians such as Charlie Sexton, Lou Ann Barton, and the Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary, Erickson recorded six new songs released in 1995 on King Coffey’s Trance Syndicate label (with an accompanying book of lyrics on Henry Rollins’ 2.13.61 publishing company). As Roky entered his forties, All That May Do My Rhyme proved he was still one of Texas’s finest singers and songwriters.
DISCOGRAPHY
13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS
The Psychedelic Sounds of... (International Artists, 1967; Charly, 1991); a founding document of the psychedelic era.
Easter Everywhere (International Artists, 1968; Charly, 1991); an adventurous follow up that pointed in new directions.
Elevators Live (International Artists, 1968; Charly, 1991); a good early live recording.
Bull of the Woods (International Artists, 1969; Charly, 1991); recorded as the band was splitting up, it contains few Erickson songs.