By 1974, five years after releasing their debut LP, the Stooges had imploded. The band’s inflammatory shows caught the attention of musicians like David Bowie, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and the future Ramones, who latched onto the wildness and self-degradation of Pop’s act. In performance, as Iggy Pop, he swallowed up the room with his physical contortions, his drag getups, and his deranged, wounded howl. Offstage, Jim Osterberg was small and shy. As the band’s frontman, Pop earned a reputation for his outrageous stage presence. Where British Invasion bands moved in friendly lockstep, the Stooges played with an almost confrontational looseness, as if at any moment they could quit their instruments and go at each other’s throats. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs.So that’s what I did.” He called his high school friend Ron Asheton to come take him back to Detroit, and with Ron’s brother Scott Asheton and their friend Dave Alexander, they rounded up the Stooges.Īcross three studio albums, the Stooges channeled their violent white ennui into an abject, unraveled rendition of the blues Pop had studied so fervently.
“I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. “I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it,” he said decades later in an interview for Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. He slept on Lay’s floor and absorbed the music around him. Lay let Pop shadow him, and eventually Pop started sitting in on gigs. At age 19, in 1966, Pop-then known as Jim Osterberg, Jr.-left his native Michigan for Chicago and arrived at the West Side doorstep of blues drummer Sam Lay, hoping to be taken under his wing. In these groundbreaking artists he heard a vitality and backbone that hadn’t translated to their diluted white mimics. He had unearthed the blues originators of popular bands like the Beatles and the Kinks, and started listening to Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and John Lee Hooker instead.
In the mid-1960s, after years of listening to the British Invasion, a teenage Iggy Pop got sick of rock’n’roll.
0 kommentar(er)
