said, we should be in a band, and start something.’
CHAPTER 3
The Dum Dum Boys
It is Saturday 5 July 1969, a clear, balmy day in Pottawatamie Beach, and as the Stooges finish their opening number, the brilliantly lamebrained ‘1969’, Iggy Stooge looks blankly at the Saugatuck festival audience and announces, ‘I’d like to dedicate the set today to Brian Jones, the dead Stone. Oh well, being dead’s better than playing here.’
As they battle their way through their set, perhaps a quarter of the audience - high-school dropouts, a smattering of intellectuals, assorted misfits - is entranced, the remainder indifferent or actively hostile. One fan, Cub Koda of the band Brownsville Station, stands by the side of the stage to admire the spectacle of the freeform feedback-saturated jam which closes their twenty-minute performance. As uncontrollable shrieks squeal out of the PA stacks, Dave Alexander takes the neck of his Mosrite bass and jams it into the gap between two Marshall cabinets, then starts to hump them. Ron Asheton, in aviator shades and leather jacket, tosses his Fender Stratocaster to the stage; it moans and howls as he bends the whammy bar with his foot. Drummer Rock Action pounds out a Bo Diddley jungle rhythm on his tomtoms before suddenly losing the beat and, in a fit of childish frustration, starts kicking over the kit.
Iggy Stooge, meanwhile, simply writhes on the floor, in what looks like some shamanic trance, or even an asthma attack, blood trickling from his bottom lip where he’s smacked himself with the microphone.
Koda looks on, entranced, as Iggy leans over and starts to throw up in the middle of the stage, when suddenly he senses someone leaning behind him, trying to get a better view. He glances behind and sees it’s Muddy Waters, the grand patriarch of Chicago blues, who will be playing the headlining set in a couple of hours.
Muddy watches, fascinated and perhaps appalled, for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head, points at the stage and shouts over the feedback: ‘I don’t like that. Those boys need to get themselves an act!’
‘Muddy!’ laughs Cub. ‘That is the act!’
For a generation of kids, 1967 was a pivotal year. Jim Osterberg was one of them, for it was over that extraordinary summer that he lost his virginity, dropped acid and left home for good. But there was a more crucial rite of passage. Over this period, this ambitious, solitary figure became part of a raggle-taggle band of brothers, influencing their path through life and, in turn, having the course of his life, and even the shape of his own personality, irrevocably altered. For better or worse, the Stooges were the making of Jim Osterberg.
The Stooges could only have existed in Ann Arbor, for no other town was as smart and as dumb. They originated at a place where high art met greaser thuggery, where the intellectual met the dysfunctional. And that collision was exemplified by the moment that Jim Osterberg teamed up with the Asheton brothers; the moment when the Boy Most Likely To became, as he boasts, ‘corrupted!’
There are people who saw the Stooges up close who suggest that Iggy’s bandmates were programmed by their leader. ‘They were his stooges. Teenage glueheads, I’m not trying to slander them,’ as John Sinclair puts it. Others maintain the Asheton brothers had just as profound an effect on their leader, who adopted their values and tough-guy persona. Some fellow musicians, such as Scott Richardson, contend that ‘for the people that really understood, Ron Asheton was the creative force behind the whole thing’. Ann Arbor High student, Bill Cheatham, later a Dum Dum boy in his own right, describes how Jim Osterberg ‘felt he was an outcast. [But] Ronnie, Scotty and I, we were outcasts.’ And without doubt, much of the alienation, boredom and gonzo humour that pervades the persona of Iggy Pop originates from his fellow Stooges, Scott Asheton and Ronald F. Asheton Junior.
Ann Asheton
CHAPTER 3
The Dum Dum Boys
It is Saturday 5 July 1969, a clear, balmy day in Pottawatamie Beach, and as the Stooges finish their opening number, the brilliantly lamebrained ‘1969’, Iggy Stooge looks blankly at the Saugatuck festival audience and announces, ‘I’d like to dedicate the set today to Brian Jones, the dead Stone. Oh well, being dead’s better than playing here.’
As they battle their way through their set, perhaps a quarter of the audience - high-school dropouts, a smattering of intellectuals, assorted misfits - is entranced, the remainder indifferent or actively hostile. One fan, Cub Koda of the band Brownsville Station, stands by the side of the stage to admire the spectacle of the freeform feedback-saturated jam which closes their twenty-minute performance. As uncontrollable shrieks squeal out of the PA stacks, Dave Alexander takes the neck of his Mosrite bass and jams it into the gap between two Marshall cabinets, then starts to hump them. Ron Asheton, in aviator shades and leather jacket, tosses his Fender Stratocaster to the stage; it moans and howls as he bends the whammy bar with his foot. Drummer Rock Action pounds out a Bo Diddley jungle rhythm on his tomtoms before suddenly losing the beat and, in a fit of childish frustration, starts kicking over the kit.
Iggy Stooge, meanwhile, simply writhes on the floor, in what looks like some shamanic trance, or even an asthma attack, blood trickling from his bottom lip where he’s smacked himself with the microphone.
Koda looks on, entranced, as Iggy leans over and starts to throw up in the middle of the stage, when suddenly he senses someone leaning behind him, trying to get a better view. He glances behind and sees it’s Muddy Waters, the grand patriarch of Chicago blues, who will be playing the headlining set in a couple of hours.
Muddy watches, fascinated and perhaps appalled, for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head, points at the stage and shouts over the feedback: ‘I don’t like that. Those boys need to get themselves an act!’
‘Muddy!’ laughs Cub. ‘That is the act!’
For a generation of kids, 1967 was a pivotal year. Jim Osterberg was one of them, for it was over that extraordinary summer that he lost his virginity, dropped acid and left home for good. But there was a more crucial rite of passage. Over this period, this ambitious, solitary figure became part of a raggle-taggle band of brothers, influencing their path through life and, in turn, having the course of his life, and even the shape of his own personality, irrevocably altered. For better or worse, the Stooges were the making of Jim Osterberg.
The Stooges could only have existed in Ann Arbor, for no other town was as smart and as dumb. They originated at a place where high art met greaser thuggery, where the intellectual met the dysfunctional. And that collision was exemplified by the moment that Jim Osterberg teamed up with the Asheton brothers; the moment when the Boy Most Likely To became, as he boasts, ‘corrupted!’
There are people who saw the Stooges up close who suggest that Iggy’s bandmates were programmed by their leader. ‘They were his stooges. Teenage glueheads, I’m not trying to slander them,’ as John Sinclair puts it. Others maintain the Asheton brothers had just as profound an effect on their leader, who adopted their values and tough-guy persona. Some fellow musicians, such as Scott Richardson, contend that ‘for the people that really understood, Ron Asheton was the creative force behind the whole thing’. Ann Arbor High student, Bill Cheatham, later a Dum Dum boy in his own right, describes how Jim Osterberg ‘felt he was an outcast. [But] Ronnie, Scotty and I, we were outcasts.’ And without doubt, much of the alienation, boredom and gonzo humour that pervades the persona of Iggy Pop originates from his fellow Stooges, Scott Asheton and Ronald F. Asheton Junior.
Ann Asheton
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