Detroit Rock City (9 page)

John Sinclair:
The Stooges had no social aspect or facet whatsoever. Iggy was a genius, and the other guys were his stooges. They weren't called the Stooges for nothing. Literally, he gave each one of them a part.

Iggy Pop:
Russ certainly put us on with fucking everybody, all the time. We basically opened for half of the great young bands and musicians in the world at his place, and I am forever in his debt because of that. We'd be second or third on the bill with these terrific people. It would be Van Morrison or Love or the Who.

Russ Gibb:
Iggy's father taught with me at Fordson High School. I had subbed there when I first came back to teach, and that's where his dad taught. When I first hired him, Iggy's daytime job was working as a counselor at the YMCA summer camp around Ann Arbor.

Iggy Pop:
I was a junior counselor. I went to a day camp in Michigan called Varsity Day Camp, which was run by a fellow who was a basketball star at the U of M, Irv Wisniewski, called Wrong Way Wisniewski because he scored a basket against
his own team. And when I got a little older they gave me a job. I think I started at a buck a day when I was fourteen, teaching little kids how to swim and catching frogs. Russ sort of kept an interest in us. When I got married, I had a marriage ceremony on the lawn of our house in Ann Arbor. Russ called in from the radio station where he was hosting a show, and the gag was—everyone thought it was a Kardashian thing—you know who would marry Iggy Pop? That was a contradiction in terms, so he had a certain outlook on us.

Patti Quatro:
Iggy was like a frat kid, and he was wild. But he was still a frat kid.

Jimmy Recca:
Guys would bring their girlfriends to shows, and the girls would sit and be enamored with Iggy. And he was just like this fucking guy that—this skinny guy. These guys working at Ford Motor Company, they want to do something nice for their girlfriends on their birthdays or their anniversary, and what do they want to do: “Let's go see the Stooges.” The Grande was festival seating. Everybody's crowded up and they're all sitting, and the girls, and Iggy out there working the crowd. And it's like he's got his shirt off, you know, and these guys just stand by, and it would be the biggest thrill to see the Stooges, and they would put the lights right down there on the fucking crowd, man. I'd move in closer to see the whole fucking psychodrama unfold. The girls just want to touch Iggy's chest, and Iggy's, like, looking right at her, and all of a sudden he just hacked out and spit right in this girl's fucking mouth, and next thing you know the guy is looking like, “Whhhatttt? What'd you just do to my fucking girlfriend?” He'd just be set to throw a swing, and the next thing you know these cats would come out of nowhere. I mean these fucking guys, these storm troopers fucking commando. And Iggy was saved.

DJ Dianna (
Club DJ
):
I was just a little girl and I loved the Stooges. They played them on WABX, and I was really into what was going on. But I was fourteen or so. But my mom finally let me go to a Stooges show at the Eastown; my friend's parent took us and dropped us off. It was really cold out—this was 1971. We're sitting, and finally the Stooges come out, Ron comes out, then Scott, and they start the intro, and Iggy comes dancing out and he has no shirt, the jeans—the whole thing—and looks like a complete madman. I was twenty-five feet from the stage, and I think, I have to get closer. The Eastown had a low stage, and you could walk up, and I was tall for my age, five-seven, and the edge hit me in the middle of the chest. So I'm up there watching, and I am literally on the stage, hands resting on the stage, and Iggy comes dancing over to me, and he has this big smile, and he's wriggling away, and he reaches down and runs his hand over my cheek, and I'm
frozen. I can't move; I'm like “Oooooo.” I had very long hair, wavy, down past the middle of my back, and he runs his hand into the back of my hair, and—wham!—he smashed my head into the stage. My cheekbone hit the stage, and he laughed and danced away.

Dennis Dunaway:
The shows with the Stooges at the Eastown Theater always had a lot of violence. Iggy would jump off stage and pick a fight with somebody, and if he picked a fight with you, then you were the hero for the next week or two.

Stirling Silver:
The Stooges opened for everybody, and no one gave a shit.

Niagara (
Destroy All Monsters, Dark Carnival, vocalist, artist
):
Iggy always says, “Everyone says, ‘I was there and I loved you.'” He says we'd have shows where no one was there all the time.

John Kordosh (
Mutants, bassist, journalist
, Creem
magazine
):
At one point I was seeing the Stooges, like, every weekend.

Cathy Gisi (
journalist
, Creem
magazine
):
There were people who didn't bathe for days afterward because there was sweat on them from Iggy.

Russ Gibb:
Iggy did invent the stage dive. The Grande was the only venue in the world where the audience could go right up to the stage. On each side were the dressing rooms, and the girls were crawling all over the place to get with the musicians. And Iggy would do that thing where he would bend over almost all the way backwards. And he fell over backwards, and people thought it was an accident. I don't think so. He would be in the crowd, and next think you knew, he was floating on the audience. All these things were transpiring while I was trying to figure out if I made any money.

Mitch Ryder:
We learned how to jump into the audience. Iggy started it and got caught. That was good. That was a new one. Of course, nobody would catch you in those days. We would leap into the audience and they would make way for you and you would hit the floor. I didn't get that memo. And I didn't get another one. I was talking to James Brown one day way back and I said, “James, you know when you do your knee drop? I do the knee drop in my show too. Man, when I hit those wooden floors, my knees, I feel like they're gonna break.” He just looked at me for a second, and he said, “Huh, you don't wear knee pads?” I said, “knee pads?”

Leni Sinclair:
The Stooges had a house out in the country at one point, and I went over there one time. The Stooges were in their garage, and the garage was sound proofed with egg cartons. They were sitting there in the dark listening to Dr. John doing “I Walk on Gilded Splinters.”

Billy Goodson:
They lived in this white house that had this light bulb glowin' over the back door. All dirt all over the place and cars and stuff. You couldn't find a neighbor or nothin'. You had to drive there. But it was a very, very bizarre place. Really cold.

Steve Forgey:
I had a friend who was going to trade a Marshall bass amp to Dave Alexander, so he gets in his car and drives over to the Funhouse in Ann Arbor. Everyone is stoned to the bone, sitting around looking at the walls. This is in the middle of the day. So he says he's got the amp, where is Dave? Pretty soon Alexander comes stumbling down the stairs, one step at a time, dragging his bass behind him, thump thump, thump. And he says, and I quote my friend, “Mph duh ga dewgathao.”

Iggy Pop:
I used to hang out with Glenn Frey at the Birmingham Hideout a lot. At one point after the Stooges had formed, we used to break up every few years. He was trying to start a band with Bob Seger, you know, he said, “I'm sick of working for Bob Seger. Come on, we could start a great band,” you know.

Rick Kraniak:
The Stooges didn't like me. The band owed Diversified Management money, we were booking them, and I was a junior partner. Dave Leone was booking them. I had to go to the Stooges farm, trail them to the job, and make sure they got there so we could get some of the money they owed us. So I don't think the band—I don't think Iggy—saw me as one of them.

Iggy Pop:
We had no idea about a career at all. What was very important was how we wanted to look and how we wanted to sound and what we wanted to do. Although we didn't use the term then, today it would be “as artists.” That term would have been a little bit too pretentious for us to use then, but that was where we were coming from. I always believed that if you do that superbly, the career would take care of itself.

Hiawatha Bailey:
The Stooges were gods in both Ann Arbor and Detroit. Ron saw me on the Diag at U of M one day when I first came to town, and he said,
“You know what, you're the most suspicious black person I ever saw in my life. Hi.” Then I saw Scott, and I couldn't believe it was the drummer in the Stooges and I was like, [sound effects] . . . Scott goes, “Hey, I know you . . . you know where to get some good drugs? Go get me some drugs.” No, I didn't. I made sure he got them, but I didn't give them to him. I was working for the White Panther party at the time.

Iggy Pop:
Between the first album and
Fun House
, I'd say we had the sound, but what I'd say changed was the drummer. We wanted the more aggressive approach, and the sonics of the band had been sort of a thick-layered guitar sound, guitar-based sonic approach on the first album. I was really, really influenced by what James Brown was doing at the time and also people like Coltrane and Miles Davis to a lesser extent. But especially James Brown. He was in the period of “Can't Stand It,” “Funky Drummer,” that sort of thing. Ron had a riff for something that became “T.V. Eye,” and the original way he was playing it sounded a lot like “No Fun,” and I thought we needed to push a little farther, so I said, “Will you start out, play that single note like you were Hooker?”—John Lee Hooker, who was pretty much a Detroit musician. From a lot of other things on that whole record we used a contrast between parts of each song where the guitar is very spare and you can hear holes. Really, you can hear every, every note the rhythm section is playing, and you can hear big holes in the music and then each song, when it's time, blows to a climax. There's more dynamics, but it's less like usual rock, then we added the saxophone. I was taking a lot of LSD at the time, and that may have had something to do with it too.

Steve Mackay:
When we did “LA Blues” in the studio in Los Angeles, it was originally a hippie vibe. But the producer said, “Let's make a completely different song out of this.” So when we did that, that was when I took some acid. Iggy scared the shit out of me. I was tripping, and just the whole thing was like, “Whoaaaaa, this guy is being really scary now. I better play really scary.” That's exactly how it came out. As the years have gone by, people have said to Jim, “Well, Steve Mackay says he was high on acid for that session,” and he says “Oh well, that's great, Steve. I was on acid every single day.”

Iggy Pop:
All I'd ever had before
Fun House
was recorded was marijuana and LSD. I would call it occasional LSD, but that's a relative term. To me occasional meant about twice a week. Marijuana for me was like when I became conscious in the morning then right through the day, right into the evening. Any time I woke up in
the middle of the night either I was . . . I was smoking it or trying to get it. Acid about twice a week was probably my average. We recorded the album in that way, but towards the end—towards the end of the vocal overdubs and the mixes—two people turned me on to cocaine for the first time, and I was one of those people that takes it and goes, “That's great!” There were some points in some of the songs, the outtro and the verses to “T.V. Eye,” the outtro and maybe the second part of “Loose”—those were done with some coke up my nose. But the rest of them was strictly LSD and marijuana.

Jimmy Recca:
They played the Goose Lake pop festival that summer, 1970. It was, like, a miserable fucking time. It was like 115 degrees all day long, and the Stooges go on at, like, five o'clock in the afternoon and it's fucking like a hundred percent humidity and, you know, it storms on and off all day long. Nothing's in tune, and Traffic was ready to pull out themselves. That's the gig that Dave Alexander quit. They said he was fired. Iggy fired him, but he forgets. Dave just said, “Fuck it.” He was resigned to the fact that they were going to cancel the show and that no one was going to go on, so he just started drinking and took some acid. So he got up on stage, and they put him up there and Iggy may have made a point to embellish on it, and Dave gave him the finger and that was history. After that Iggy, having the power to fire people, did so.

Iggy Pop:
To the best of my recollection, I would say I fired him.

Scott Richardson:
I lived with Dave Alexander. He was an only child, and his parents really doted on him.

Iggy Pop:
But at that point he had been leaving on a regular basis as far as not staying at the group's house for weeks on end, not being in town for weeks on end. He had a girlfriend he was kind of obsessed with. And just not making rehearsals sort of thing. On this particular show he could not play one note on his bass; he just froze. It was, I'm told, a case of being extremely drunk. It could have been. He was a less experienced musician than most of us; he was the guy down the street. He was a really witty kid who never opened up to anybody in the world outside of our group. He got into the group because he was the buddy down the street of Scott, and we needed an extra guy at one time. Also, he had the only car in the group and he did a great job, he really did. When it got to the point where, you know, I was trying to run the group at a really large venue and, you know, there's no bass. That was it. There's a lot of our live recordings on YouTube, and you can
hear it. So we finally fired him. I'm not a formal leader of the group but was like, “I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm not going to play with that guy.”