The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71

Lost in the Future

Michael S. Begnal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000480160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Rockmusik

The Stooges have come to be considered one of the most important rock bands, especially in regard to the formation of punk. By emphasizing their influence on later developments, however, critics tend to overlook the significance of the band in their own context and era. The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71 addresses such oversights.

Utilizing the lenses of cultural criticism and sound studies (drawing on the thinking of Theodor Adorno, Jacques Attali, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others), as well as contemporary and archival texts, this extensively researched study analyzes the trajectory and musical output of the original Stooges. During the late 1960s and early 70s, a moment when the dissonant energy of rock'n'roll was more than ever being subsumed by the record industry, the Stooges were initially commercial failures, with the band's "noisy" music and singer Iggy Pop's "bizarre" onstage performances confusing their label, Elektra Records. As Begnal argues, the Stooges embodied a tension between market forces and an innovative, avant-garde artistic vision, as they sought to liberate audiences from passivity and stimulate an immanent joy in the rock'n'roll moment.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the Stooges that will appeal both to rock fans and scholars (especially in the fields of cultural studies, the long Sixties, musicology, punk studies, and performance studies).

1 Becoming the Stooges

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126522-2

To understand the context in which the Stooges found themselves “situated at the vanguard” (to recall Pierre Bourdieu),¹ it is necessary to start at the very beginning. Before they became the heavy rock band that recorded two albums for Elektra Records, they were a different sort of band altogether. Not yet called the Stooges, they began in 1967 as the Psychedelic Stooges, a freeform noise group that incorporated homemade instruments, a Farfisa organ, and a drum set made of discarded oil cans. The story of their origins bears discussion, because one reason for their importance lies in their willingness to reject the dictates of the marketplace and to evolve according to the needs of their own organic creative process. Critiquing the market-driven pop-music industry in his 1938 essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” Theodor Adorno held out the hope that listeners might break free of its grasp and begin to “demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things, as the sort of radical beginning that can only thrive under the protection of the unshaken real world.”² Though the Stooges’ method was to feel things out for themselves rather than take cues from cultural theorists such as Adorno, their aims corresponded with the artistic approach he envisioned thirty years before, the making of a body of new music that did not fit a “prepared” format, for liberated audiences.

Accordingly, when they started the band, the Stooges made the conscious decision not to imitate anyone, but rather to open themselves up to new possibility. As Ron Asheton said in a 1998 interview,

We wanted to do something very different. So that was the start.... And then add our madness and our own inexpertise. When you don’t know what to play, you’re not restricted by a style. So many people are taught to play a certain way. When you have that free mind, ignorance is bliss and you come up with some really interesting stuff.³

At this point, they could hardly be classified as a rock band in the typical sense. For example, there was not even yet a guitar—Ron was on bass (which he played through a fuzz box and wah pedal), Scott Asheton on drums, and Iggy Pop initially on organ, then Hawaiian guitar and other assorted instruments (such as a microphoned blender, vacuum cleaner, and washboard). It was sometime in early 1968, after they had already played a couple of shows, that Ron moved to guitar, Iggy made the switch to fronting the band as vocalist, and the Ashetons’ longtime friend Dave Alexander was asked to join on bass. It’s worth remembering that the Stooges were together for two years before they even recorded their first album, and in that period they were free to experiment without the pressures of the record industry to worry about, to be as completely open and improvisatory as they wanted to be.

It would be a mistake, though, to disregard the wider context in which the group worked, as if their genius emerged ex nihilo in the seclusion of their practice space. As unique and innovative as their sound was, the band members were not isolated from the musical currents that surrounded them. In fact, they were part of a cultural ferment that centered on Detroit and stretched to encompass their hometown of Ann Arbor as well. As David A. Carson observes, Ann Arbor was “far enough away to have its own identity, yet close enough to bond with the emerging Detroit rock scene.”⁴ Also based in Ann Arbor were the Rationals, the SRC, and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, as well as Jeep Holland’s A-Square record label. Along with the MC5, Detroit’s plethora of bands included the Up (managed by John Sinclair’s brother, David), the Frost (led by guitarist Dick Wagner), the Jagged Edge, the Third Power, and nationally successful groups such as Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the Bob Seger System, the Amboy Dukes, and Frijid Pink. Understanding what set the Stooges apart also entails understanding the culture they were a part of, locally and nationally, the musical and even political ideas that impacted their development.

The Blues and Not the Blues

One formula that the Stooges broke with at this time was the obvious imitation of the blues in the popular form of blues rock. As the story goes, James Osterberg—known as Jim to his friends but called Iggy from his time as drummer of the Ann Arbor band the Iguanas—had been playing in the local blues outfit the Prime Movers. Splitting with the Prime Movers in late 1966, Iggy moved to Chicago to immerse himself further in the blues, was taken under the wing of Sam Lay (the original drummer of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band), and played drums for a number of Chicago musicians, including Big Walter Horton, James Cotton, and J. B. Hutto.⁵ In early 1967, however, Iggy experienced something of an epiphany, deciding that he could never embody the same kind of authenticity that, for him, Black blues players had, and returned to Ann Arbor to start something new. As he states in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me (1996), “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, which is what most white blues bands did.”⁶ On the one hand, such a statement is reductive, ahistorical, and rife with racial essentialism (the notion that the blues is simply “natural” to African Americans, rather than being a specific artistic response to social, cultural, and economic circumstances), prompting Katherine E. Wadkins to observe that “Pop realizes that these men were so skilled in their musicianship that he should not even bother to imitate it, yet he undercuts their superiority by claiming musicianship was ‘natural’ to them and required no practice.”⁷ Here, Iggy clearly invests in an idealized image of the bluesman that was not uncommon among white musicians.

On the other hand, however, Iggy’s abandoning of the readily identifiable blues style suggests a wish to avoid the more overt forms of cultural appropriation that many blues-rock players engaged in throughout the 1960s and 70s, and up through the present (one immediately thinks of Led Zeppelin, who were actually sued for copyright infringement, but others come to mind as well: Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, Canned Heat, etc.). This is not to say that there cannot be cultural exchange, but it would be folly to deny that, as a form, the blues was originated by African American musicians,⁸ often with little economic benefit to show for it. Of course, rock’n’roll in its basic material is a hybrid of Black and white musical traditions—while the blues has continued to be a touchstone, country and “hillbilly” music was equally as important in rock’s formation (though, if one searches deeply enough into country, the effaced influence of Black musical traditions often appears there as well). As Joe Carducci argues, “What made these forms capable of spontaneously combusting into something to be called rock and roll were the media of radio and records. The commercial apparatus loosed music from its social context.”⁹ Though Carducci stridently condemns the commercial aspects of rock, his observation reminds us how permeated by capitalism music had become by the 1940s or so, when rock’n’roll was beginning to take shape. Moreover, the proliferation of the “commercial apparatus” allowed the illusion to take hold that musical forms such as the blues and rhythm and blues existed without a social context, which in turn made it easier for those in control of the industry to exploit them.

The engagement with and the exploitation of Black forms by white musicians is widely documented, and the “white blues” model could be a lucrative one. Many Detroit-area musicians, including members of the Stooges, the MC5, and the SRC, in fact got their starts imitating blues-influenced British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. Before the Stooges, for example, Ron Asheton was in the Chosen Few (with Scott Richardson, later of the SRC), a cover band in that very mold.¹⁰ So, there are layers and permutations of influence and exchange, with the blues being filtered in different ways. The Stooges’ relationship to the blues is therefore complicated. Its presence is there, inescapably, as it is on virtually all rock’n’roll, and Wadkins sees the “marriage of low-fidelity garage rock and the misreading of Black musicianship” as crucial to the Stooges’ sound (as well as to later punk rock).¹¹ While others have read Pop’s statements about the blues as a rejection, Wadkins makes the point that, as white musicians thinking about the blues, the band’s grappling with questions of authenticity and imitation, of originality and appropriation, played a major and ongoing role in their sound. While there would be no attempt to “make a studious copy” of blues heroes, no eight- or twelve-bar chord progressions, it does not mean that the blues was entirely absent.

In fact, there are salient blues elements in the Stooges’ music. As Evan Rapport observes, another blues style (different from the twelve-bar structure that was more easily recognized as blues) was the open-ended, riff-based form of “country” blues, as exemplified by Bukka White, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and others. Rapport argues that “Some groups, such as the MC5 and Stooges, took this particular blues aesthetic to the extreme” and that they “cultivated harmonic and melodic approaches that retained the powerful affect of black musical resources even when obscured, such as blues-based riffs and vamps.”¹² In other words, the strategy of building a groove and improvising on one primary chord (sometimes referred to as modal playing), which the Stooges so frequently engaged in, itself had blues precedents that were seemingly “obscured” or heard as something other than the blues by those whose knowledge of these various musical traditions was limited. Further, the Stooges added new elements that floated above their blues structures, such as Ron Asheton’s heavily distorted guitar sound. Yet, as Steve Waksman observes in Instruments of Desire (1999), amplified guitar distortion itself originates with the blues: “Over the course of the 1950s, blues guitarists would employ increasingly coarse, distorted tones, extending the expressive palette of the electric guitar in new directions.”¹³ By the 60s, of course, guitar distortion had long become associated with rock and therefore was more usually perceived as a feature of white music than it was of Black music.

Other currents further obscured direct blues comparisons. As earlier noted, Harry Partch was a major influence on the Stooges in this period, which both Ron and Iggy have discussed. Partch eschewed traditional tonal systems and built his own instruments, including suspended glass bowls called Cloud Chamber Bowls, which became the impetus for Iggy putting a microphone in a blender as it whirred some added water. Benjamin Piekut points out that the Cloud Chamber Bowls appear on the cover of Partch’s Plectra & Percussion Dances LP (1953), the 1957 or 1962 reissue of which Iggy found at Ann Arbor’s Discount Records in 1967.¹⁴ Partch’s bowls did not contain water, however, so Iggy can be said to have elaborated upon the original idea. As Partch himself had written in Genesis of a Music (1949), “What I do h...