Rocks Off With Roxon: Lillian Speaks to OZ

OZ #44 (September 1972)

A wonderful interview by Louise Ferrier with Lillian Roxon, given while she was in London to take part in the Bowie hype, July 1972.

Lillian talks about how quotidian Rolling Stone has become and how fanzines have filled the void it has left, she gives a name check to Who Put the Bomp and Greg Shaw, a thumbs up for a Kinks’ zine, is hip to one by ‘two crazy girls’ called Bilge (gotta read that) and a Linda McCartney hate-zine . . . Mick Jagger’s promo machine . . . The influence of the Cockettes and Marc Bolan on Jagger . . . Lennon and Yoko as media stars . . . Brigid Polk and Warhol . . . Germaine Greer (of course) . . .

On Bowie: ‘I really enjoyed Bowie. I think he is beautiful beyond belief. If you’re going to be a rock and roll star you’d better be beautiful . . . He’s a very sexy act’.

On Lou Reed: He is ‘one of the greatest song writers ever and at the moment is not at the highest point of happiness in his life. I don’t think his performance here would have been his best. His best is unbelievable. He generates incredible excitement’.

On Iggy Stooge/Pop: ‘The first time you see Iggy it is fantastic, but after that it’s not quite the same. The guy who handles David wants to put him in films. Iggy is beautiful. I would do different things with him. English audiences are just stunned when he does his things like prowling out into the audience’.

On being bitten on her tit by Angie Bowie  . . . on bad sex in NYC . . . better in Boston . . . better still with a vibrator . . . on the cut of Tom Jones’ trousers and his shared love for Elvis . . . and EP on politics . . .

I wonder if the transcript or tape of Louise Ferrier’s talk with Lillian still exists . . . the unedited/unexpurgated version would be something else . . .

Signed 'Iggy Pop' – a fan's scapbook

A fan’s photobook of snaps, taken at the Whisky A-Go-Go, up for auction (October 2023) at Bonhams . . . starting price $800 but doesn’t appear to have reached its reserve . . . not sure which of the three runs they had at the venue in 1973 these are from

Billboard (November 3, 1973)

The Actionist – Iggy Stooge in Vogue (August 1970)

The Punk Muse and its Killer Efficient Communicants – Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches and Lester Bangs on The Stooges, or Michael Begnal’s Future/Now

Battle of the Bands: The Stooges vs. Led Zeppelin, International Times (April/May 1971)

Psychologists have fun trying to analyse rock ’n’ roll and the people who participate in that culture. They hope to connect what goes on there to what goes on in the rest of the world. They’re going to have a ball with The Stooges.

–      Detroit Free Press (September 1969)

It was not just psychologists who had a ball with The Stooges, rock critics who thought of themselves as being out of step with their peers also got their analytic chops in. The late 1960s early 1970s debate over whether rock music was worthy of intellectual effort or best left alone to struggle or drown in the primordial mire of its own making found its locus in The Stooges. Published in 1971, Twenty-Minute Fandangos And Forever Changes: A Rock Bazaar was the third of Jonathan Eisen’s edited collections, preceded by Age of Rock volumes one and two, published respectively in 1969 and 1970. All three volumes are symptomatic of the then ongoing intellectualisation of rock criticism, nothing more so than the inclusion of Richard Meltzer’s goofball obscurantism, equal parts erudition and claptrap, both confrontational and self-deprecating. For the avid readers of the new rock press, Meltzer played, to near perfection, the classroom boffin and clown – the tormentor of his teachers to the delight of his peers.

Twenty-Minute Fandangos included three fairly lengthy pieces on The Stooges, all focused on their three New York gigs at Ungano’s in August 1970 that followed on from the recording of their second album, Fun House, in May. Eisen included a long piece from Natalie ‘Stoogling’ Schlossman’s Popped, her Stooges’ newsletter, a discussion between Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd about Iggy’s prowess that he culled from a 1970 edition of Gay Power (also quoted at length in Dave Marsh’s piece on the band that ran first in Creem then in Zigzag) and an abridged version of Meltzer’s ‘Getting It Off And Taking It Off: Iggy and the Stooges’, which was first published in his biweekly outlet, ‘Rock and Raunch’, a column for the pornographic magazine Screw. The Stooges also enjoyed a double-page spread of photographs in the book’s plate section: Iggy giving the finger to his audience, courtesy of Lee Childers, and on all fours in ripped jeans by Dustin Pittman, both taken at one or other of the New York gigs. For a group still not much more than a cultish fad, such extensive coverage was indicative of the critical space The Stooges had assumed and been assigned. They were the avant-garde dum-dum band that critics could readily patronise, discuss in erudite terms or dismiss as bozos. Neither position being mutually exclusive.

After witnessing an Ugano’s show, New York’s doyen of rock critics, Lillian Roxon,  thought Iggy Stooge the ‘sexiest thing since Mick Jagger’. In her encyclopaedia of rock she described the band under their original name, ‘Psychedelic Stooges’, as having the spirit of W. C. Fields, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Elvis Presley’ ­– a rock ’n’ roll comedy show. The Stooges were not apparently self-made, rather, ‘they were discovered in 1968’, she wrote, as if they were found in some Michigan backwater by a team of rock ’n’ roll anthropologists led by Prof. Danny Fields, Roxon’s good friend. Reviewing The Stooges’ October New York gigs at the Electric Circus, she wrote of Iggy:

His whole idea is to jolt the audience into a state of fear and shock. When he sings to a girl, or to the audience, he does not do it caressingly but with anger and violence. The girl doesn’t know whether she wants to mother him – or back away. Watching the indecision is part of the sadistic thrill of being in The Stooges audience . . .He seems to embody the violence around in America today.

The Stooges were rock’s pranksters, mocking its pretentions, and a broadcast from the dark side – a cipher for the rotten state of the nation. On the band’s third return to Manhattan in the early summer of 1971, Roxon wrote: ‘The Stooges are definitely the darlings of the avant-garde this year. It must be the spitting’. The ambiguity around how the band should be categorized or how they might be conceived was found in the question of whether they were a crass record company hype or a valid form of artistic expression? Whether synthetic or authentic? The conceptual task of answering the question was left to the critics in the audience. In this hot house atmosphere, as rock’s second generation began to mutate into its third iteration, Iggy’s clowning, his abuse of the audience, was most often received as performance art.

On the point about rock as social communiqué and critique, rock writers had no end of examples they could draw upon, not the least of which was The Stooges’ brothers, the MC5. The Motor City’s finest had been featured in Age of Rock 2 with a lengthy interview conducted by David Walley, first published in a July 1969 edition of Jazz & Pop:

Wayne: We need to talk about music because music really needs to be talked about. It’s the most personal thing. The important product.

David: All right, how is the energy level of music concerned with the MC5’s aims and goals? Is music a radicalizing tool?

Wayne: Oh, there’s no doubt about it. Music is, as you know, the killer efficient communication form. It feels good, it feels better than reading something.

David: It’s sort of like a cathartic effect.

Rob: (laughter) We’re from the Midwest – we don’t know any big words . . .

David: Where do you think this approach is going?

The rhetorical moves made by the band, from being highly self-conscious – ‘killer efficient’ communicants – to humorous self-effacement – ‘we don’t know any big words’ – is the common place in the era’s critical prose/pose. Humour was used to mask the pretentious, to track back from ideas that appeared to be over-reaching. Meltzer was past master of this game, its idiot savant. In a confected 1968 piece for Crawdaddy, republished in Age of Rock 2, he is supposedly being interviewed by Andy Warhol. The question and answer routine falls over itself as the concept of the ‘unknown tongue’ is discussed. Meltzer’s exercise is an absurd melange, a muddle of ideas that is at once a parody of the worst excesses of rock criticism and is the very thing itself. On The Stooges he wrote:

For every rock there’s a criticism and for every raunch there’s an epistemology. So raunch-wise, epistemologically speaking, my criticism of them is this: they dress real well, they have one shirt that’s pink with a shrunken head design, they have another that says Cocaine using the Coca-Cola logo, they have a lot of good shoes and some good boots. They’re what music is all about, going back even further than the first pair of blue suede shoes . . . [Iggy] learned the big beat from pounding on his tinker toys when he was just a youngster. THAT’S THE ONLY TRAINING YOU CAN GET FOR A LIFETIME OF ROCK AND ROLL, which makes the Stooges the only guys who know what they’re doing, including King Crimson.

Meltzer was not alone in his project of splicing the intellectual with the primitive, at its most reductive – The Stooges with King Crimson – it was a mongrelisation of the low and the high, the vulgar and the refined – Lester Bangs, somewhat, and Nick Tosches, wholeheartedly, joined in with similar flights of philosophical excess brought back to ground by earthy troglodyte pleasures.

Tosches’ oxymoronic intellectual primitivism took appreciable form with his sprawling essay ‘The Punk Muse – the lowdown on grease’, first published in Fusion and then collected in Twenty-Minute Fandangos. His point of departure was a critique of ‘honky bluesmen’, young white middle-class musicians who want to play black but can’t because they are not the authentic thing itself:

A straight Honky Music (Honk2) scene is a thing where you have a bunch of guys with teased hair up on a stage doing black blues, singing, with admirable ventriloquial skill, like Howlin’ Wolf in the throes of a Dexedrine orgasm, to a mob of suburban quasi-virgins who compensate for their fear of sex by substituting ‘The Lemon Song’ by Led Zeppelin at a distance of eighty paces for a good stiff dick in the dark meat.

Those who perform and listen to such acts of mimesis are ‘punks’, the honk squared is their muse. Contrary to this aspiring but lowly type is the ‘Grease’, exemplified by The Cleftones, who knew they would never know:

They knew that the secret of the universe was up in Betty’s drawers and in no one else’s. And they never got to know the secret. So they stand, left foot forward, in a timeless void, forever recreating that moment when Gnosis squirmed and said, ‘I’m not that kind of girl’. . . Grease tropes like that, sublimating the electric theme of unrequited love to dazed unrequited hard-on and back again, cultivating it with the lethal dronings of the honk fuck ritual choreography, are heavier and deadlier than anything the Stooges are capable of calculating. That’s because it comes from the heart (id) and not from the ego; poetry is puked not plotted.

As he overlooked Margate sands, T. S. Eliot would have been at odds with Tosches’ formulation, but, with their spitting, The Stooges would have slipped right in alongside The Cleftones. Except, on Tosches terms their artifice excludes them from the canon of Grease. The Cleftones were ‘speaking from the heart’, he wrote, ‘from the inside out as opposed to the I-wish-this-were-the-inside out’, which is where The Stooges did fit in. They are punks, a lesser form, lower on the scale to grease because they are a confection.

Tosches may have rejected The Stooges as ego not id, but the band were a good mirror to his own aesthetic:

Other great Honky Bluesmen of the Golden Age of Classical Grease were the Clovers, who drenched their melodies with the rhythms of the collective foyerfuck of a generation, bead-rolling the surroundings of sex memories and inducing minor key orgasms in parking lots throughout the nation, and the later female vowel-jobbers, Shirelles and Shangri-Las (although they are, in a strictly chronological sense, denizens of the Early Decadence), holy queens of greasefuck poesy, transmitting osmotic tau-waves of epiphanous pussy stench through silver-sequined lamé and jet-black stretch pants, moaning at America's youth for a transubstantial clit-strafe in the time-warp of adolescence. Kiss me there, Billy, kiss me there . . . (Ronettes, early liberators of Sleaze, unsublimated sex) fingertips (odors)    . . .  There, Billy, there . . .

Tosches’ vulgar turns are as learned as any stanza in The Wasteland, as are his arcane allusions and his shifts from the vernacular to the cultivated, from the profane to the sanctified. Yet Tosches is no more T. S. Eliot than The Stooges are King Crimson.

Opposed to the ‘Classical Grease’ were ‘THE NITWITS. Alias the Assholes. Those who sweetened sex. The Valentines, Playmates, Penguins’. But the Grease could not be suppressed or sanitised, it rolled on. To make his point, Tosches takes a detour into the realm of mathematics, into ‘The Metalflaked Alephteriaries’. The compound of ‘aleph’ and ‘teriaries’ belonged to Tosches alone, but no one, least of all the author, expected the reader to stop, pause and consider what was before them, only to wonder at the display of erudition as he traverses three forms of infinity. His final formation:

One who deals in visions, that is, one who perceives all the infinite rays of one object, or objects of conjugal positions (intersecting rays), is an Alephteriary, someone like the Heartbeats or Eza Pound or Andy Warhol, someone who can make dirt chairs by spilling it the right way. A metalflaked alephteriary is someone who can handle the infinite but, nevertheless, has a little plastic skull on the rear deck of his Olds that, for a right turn, blinks red in the right eye, and, for a left turn, red in the left eye.

Of The Heartbeats 1956 recording ‘A Thousand Miles Away’ – ‘an amazing catatonic blues, which rivals any extant Samuel Beckett soliloquy, with its eternal pledge of “coming home soon”’, Tosches wrote, ‘The basis of the song is the perpetration of desolation by the emission of artificial emotions, the absence of their non-artificial emissions dictating psychotic existentialism’. If this seems more than a two-minute street corner pop record can bear, Tosches provided the (faux) footnote in support: ‘5. See Andrew Duras, “The Year Dionysos Never Showed: A Study of the Heartbeats”, American Journal of Honk/Hieratic Communication, XII: ii (October 1961), pp. 92–117.’ Nothing to argue with there then.

‘The Fall of the House of Grease’, its ‘decadent period’, ran from circa 1958 to 1965, from the tv debut of 77 Sunset Strip to Alan Freed’s death, it was the age of Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes, Paul Anka and Leslie Gore. It was a time of superhype, of ‘punk media’, of Fabian and Dick Clark. In this time zone, The Beatles and Bob Dylan emerged, the latter ‘swept up in the then-big folk punk fad’. For Tosches, Dylan’s catalogue up and until Highway 61 Revisited ‘had perpetuated some of the honkiest bullshit in the history of American music. He had sat there with peach fuzz on his chin, singing like a hardened Negro loner about cold death’. That was the outside looking in, all ego, but then with Highway ‘he saw the whole derangement he’d been involved in and he began to spew out things from his own heart, all those things he used to pretend weren’t in him. . . Take ‘From a Buick 6’, a near perfect song, as good as anything the Heartbeats had ever done. Pure alephteriary’. He followed this with Blonde on Blonde, ‘one of the best rock albums of the decade’. The Beatles were similarly late developers into the state of alephteriary – ‘who the fuck wants to hold somebody’s hand?’ – but the combined effect was to win over ‘hordes of Cerebrum Groupies to become intellectual bodyguards of rock, spouting their dissertations of fantastic spiff genius into the nation’s offset presses and lecture halls . . . The Beatles made rock a punk religion’. They turned rock from a ‘calmative’ experience, you could rip it up on Saturday night but for the rest of the week you conformed. In revolt against this order, The Beatles said the rock experience could last seven days a week and ‘incited, albeit mildly, the feeling of discontent’. In doing so they paved the way for the ‘truly culturally revolutionary groups – the Jefferson Airplane, the Fugs, Country Joe and the Fish, even to a certain extent the Doors’.

Grease is the divine state of being, punk is the unworthy aspirant to that holy order, a rank acolyte. Those who solemnised rock, the cerebrum groupies, were punk critics. Meltzer, Bangs and Tosches were the grease who, from the heart, could see beyond the finite. But ‘punk’ and ‘grease’ were hardly separable from each other any more than the id is from the ego, or pure from impure. Writing in 1969 for the Detroit Free Press, Mike Gormley tacitly pulled together the cerebral and the somatic, the intellectual and the primitive, The Stooges were his test case:

The music they play has been described as stupid rock at its best. Iggy calls it dirty music and the group’s manager, Jimmy Silver, says ‘it’s dance music, fun music for kids’.

Iggy expanded on his definition. ‘The music we play is like a ritual we go through. It sounds like elemented rock but it’s actually based on classical and folk themes that are ancient. There’s a kind of bizarreness to it because we felt bizarre. When we play, a lot of things come out intentionally, so that’s the basic thing. It may be the reason our music is extremely moody. It has very simple moods to it.

Iggy as punk prophet and muse, The Stooges a greaser’s manifesto. Tosches wanted the purity of an untrammelled id, his Heartbeats, but they are a fantasy, his own honky blues; he was on surer ground with extolling the impurity of Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited.  With The Stooges, Tosches’ had tried to outdo Meltzer and Bangs, dismissing the band they had lauded to establish his hip credentials. In doing so Tosches ignored his own equation: punk + grease = metalflake alephteriary. Such a formulation meant you could convene with Iggy Stooge to testify on the infinite power of the Heartbeats, the one didn’t exclude the other. They were co-dependents. Meantime, without a care for the infinite, Ron Asheton, posed as the ultimate greaser punk in his pink Star of Hollywood shrunken head shirt, Iron Cross and white buck shoes, and pressed the keys on the jukebox selecting once more The Yardbirds’ ‘I’m a Man’.

What the band has to go on is showmanship. Right now their style is so unique that success comes easily.

But Iggy doesn’t seem to care either way.

‘The Stooges were together for a whole year before we even had a gig, and nobody even thought of us as a band. But I didn’t care, literally didn’t care, and I don’t care now. I don’t exalt some format of the band and I don’t exalt its success. If I want some success, and I happen to be in the mood to accept some success, sure, I’ll take it. I’ll grab for it, or maybe throw it away, or maybe I’ll kiss it . . .’

And that’s the word, straight from Iggy.

–      ‘A Painful Exercise in Pure Volume’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin (October 12, 1970)

Lester Bangs didn’t make the cut for Twenty-Minute Fandangos, his two glory shots ‘Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung’ and ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’ were published in the same year as Eisen’s volume, but his two-part review of The Stooges’ Fun House, published in November and December 1970 editions of Creem might have been a late contender. Perhaps it was and Eisen decided that he already had enough Stooges. Whatever, it so closely followed the lines laid by Meltzer and Tosches to suggest it wasn’t because the editor was opposed to Bangs’ sermonising.

‘Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool?’ opens with ‘Anatomy of Disease’ or the critical reaction to The Stooges, who have been abused, derided, condescended to and have faced ‘outright hostility’. Their stage act made for good copy but is too easily dismissed, wrote Bangs, with an ‘instant wag putdown’. Their music appeared so simple anyone should be able to play it, he continued, ‘that so few can produce any reasonable facsimile, whatever their abilities, is overlooked’ and, besides, he added, John Cale got the credit, for whatever it was worth, for their debut. As ‘theme music for suburban high school kids freaked out on reds and puberty and fantasies of nihilistic apocalypses’, The Stooges are scorned and dismissed. They carried within themselves the same sickness that was at large in the culture as a whole, ‘a crazed quaking uncertainty, an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times.’ But if they were rotten with disease, they also carried ‘a strong element of cure, a post derangement sanity’. The critical positions ranked against The Stooges were accepted by Bangs, the hostility shown toward them, the accusations of being mailable amateurs, their sickness, these things were not refuted by him but returned as necessary attributes of rock ’n’ roll: the core of the matter. . . To reject what The Stooges represented was to reject rock ’n’ roll itself.

The Stooges are as important as any band working today, Bangs wrote, but don’t call what they do ‘art or you may wind up with a deluxe pie in the face.

What it is, instead, is what rock and roll at heart is and always has been, beneath the stylistic distortions the last few years have wrought. The Stooges are not for the ages – nothing created now is – but they are most implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.

The Stooges could not be faulted for being what they were, a continuation of rock ’n’ roll’s illegitimacy. The critical establishment were not wrong in their observations, but their value judgement was skewed, distorted and based on bad faith.

To get to a point where Bangs felt he could explain this phenomenon he has first to clear the foul air that surrounded the release of their first album and the hype that surrounded British blues musicians and critical incantations like ‘supergroup’ and ‘superstar’ – Tosches’ Honk2 – that have bewitched and befuddled ‘your poor average kid, cruisin’ addled down the street in vague pursuit of snatch or reds or rock mag newstands’ who otherwise had ‘no truck with the Stooges’. It’s that kid, that malcontent, who Bangs intended to ‘liberate’.

A ‘pre-eminently American kid’, Iggy Stooge was a surrogate for the teenager Bangs was honing in on. Both singer and kid suffer from confusion, doubt and uncertainty, from inertia and boredom – ‘suburban pubescent darkness’. But was this a theme worth pursuing? asked Bangs. Did the travails of a suburban punk measure up to the Black Panthers confrontation with the ‘new social systems’? Comparatively an irrelevance? Weren’t the Stooges simply trading in adolescent caterwauling? And wasn’t Iggy Stooge ‘a blatant fool’? Bangs embraced the argument, and again returned the principal charge of Iggy as clown. He was indeed a fool, but better the fool than the emperor in his new glad rags was how Bangs read the scenario.

If the hype, the record industry, is a joke, cosmic or otherwise, then being a fool is the only legitimate response. If not, ‘fantasies of a puissant “youth culture”, would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off it. Can you imagine Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant conning the audience” “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” – he really gives them nothing, not even a good-natured grinful “Howdy-do” – or Jimmy Page’s arch scowl of supermusician ennui?’. Iggy is Bangs’ court jester, an impertinent figure capable of pricking the airs and vanities of his betters by hurling a cream pie at them. He does this as readily as he succumbs to the indignities his audience imposes by return:

It takes courage to make a fool of yourself, to say, ‘See, this is all a sham, this whole show and all its floodlit drug-jacked realer-than-life trappings, and the fact that you are out there and I am up here means not the slightest thing’. Because it doesn’t. The Stooges have that kind of courage, but few other performers do.

For Bangs The Stooges had the strength to ‘meet their audience on its own terms’ and not respond with ‘solemn grimaces of artistic angst, no sir’.

Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront him – he enters the audience frequently to see what's what and even from the stage his eyes reach out searchingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled strangers who're seldom able to stare him down. It's your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him, why, welcome to it. But the King of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and the authority, and few can. In this sense lg is a true star of the rarest kind – he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.

As to the music it is, wrote Bangs, ‘monotonous and simple on purpose’, ‘mindless rhythmic pulsation . . . providing effective hypnotic counterpoint to the sullen plaint of Iggy’s words’. Their pristine simplicity is compared to the one-finger organ drone of Question Mark and the Mysterians ’96 Tears’ – the ur-text and origin story for The Stooges. Bangs has a profound love and respect for the experimentation of The Yardbirds and The Who, the use of feedback and noise which finds its ultimate locus in the Velvet Underground’s ‘White Heat/White Noise’ but the end result of this sonic experimentation was not liberation but the dead end of ‘Art-rock’ embodied in Sgt. Pepper. Things had taken a wrong turn somewhere back down the line, so Bangs was intent on refiguring the map’s trig points.

Bangs argued that the route out from behind and around this problem was to marry the simple four-four beat of two or three chord rock ’n’ roll and its monotonous melodies with the complexity of free jazz. ‘The Stooges’ music is like that.’ wrote Bangs:

It comes out of an illiterate chaos gradually taking shape as a uniquely personal style, emerges from a tradition of American music . . . that a band can start out bone-primitive, untutored and uncertain, and evolve into a powerful and eloquent ensemble. . . rock is mainly about beginnings, about youth and uncertainty and growing through and out of them. And asserting yourself way before you know what the fuck you’re doing. . . It can’t grow up – when it does, it turns into something else.

After working through the impact (and misfires) of Fun House, Bangs concluded that the Stooges are ‘super-modern’ but definitely not Art. They are a put-on, a joke, but one that reveals the sickness at the heart of things and that revelation comes on like a threat, but a ‘threat that is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation’.

Detroit Free Press (December 26, 1969)

When Greil Marcus pulled together his collection of Bangs’ work he opened with ‘Carburetor Dung and Psychotic Reactions’ and followed it with a late 70s consideration of Astral Weeks, both fell under the heading ‘Testaments’: Bangs as advocate for a form of rock ’n’ roll as adolescent discontent matched with his empathetic side. But the Van Morrison interregnum does not last long before it is followed in turn by the ‘Blowing It Up’ section with the lengthy Fun House review and the even longer ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’ screed/manifesto.

‘Carburetor Dung’ opens with Bangs acting the role of Creem’s Uncle Remus for third-generation rock kids: ‘Run here, my towhead grandchildren, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee’. His tale of yore concerns The Yardbirds ’65 before the rot set in with their ‘pretentious and overblown’ progeny of ‘emaciated fops called Led Zeppelin’. His story is part wallow in nostalgia, detailing the impact the Yardbirds had on numerous aspirant players, Bangs wrote: ‘and then punk bands started cropping up who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds sound and reducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter . . . oh, it was beautiful, it was pure folklore, Old America, and sometimes I think those were the best days ever’. Bangs felt the same psychotic reaction as that which had inspired The Shadows of Knight and The Count Five, but in his fantasy it doesn’t end in art and Sgt Pepper. In his alternative history the Count Five continue to record and ineptitude remains a righteous attribute . . . a refusal to conform to the mundane, to kowtow to refined notions of good taste, to grow up.

Bangs’ follow up piece, ‘James Taylor Marked for Death’ switched out The Yardbirds for The Troggs and where Amon Duul had picked up Bangs’ torch of ineptitude in this latest iteration it was passed onto, of course, The Stooges. What changed was that the flame had dimmed, the light he was shining on the juvenile malcontent was receding:

The MC5 might have put you ‘flat on your back’ with ‘nipple stiffners’ and ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’ jams, the Stooges might tie you up in feedback wires while Iggy performed unthinkable experiments on your mind and body, even the Doors might have given you a crawly gust or two, but the Troggs eschewed all trendy gimmicks and kinky theatrics, delivered their proposition with sidewalk directness and absolute sincerity, and came out for any ear that half listens the most powerfully lust-driven outfit in white rock ’n’ roll then or now.

Between the reminisces about teenage fumbling and sex fantasies, Bangs explored what it means for a band like The Stooges to channel these adolescent urges post-the lust driven and feedback paroxysm  of The Troggs and The Yardbirds:

I ain’t as desperate as I sound, but ‘Wild Thing’ is rock ’n’ roll at its most majestic and for all the volume of product we don’t have any ‘Wild thing’ these days – a few things come close, maybe a Velvets ‘Head Held High’ or Stooges ‘Little Doll’, but even these are created from a standpoint of intellectualized awareness and consequent calculation.

The imposition of self-reflection in rock ’n’ roll meant the ground had changed, what once fuelled The Troggs is today but a simulacra or at best a waning echo of the real thing. In his introduction to Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock, Greil Marcus considers the explosive moment of Sgt. Pepper that Meltzer is concerned with as the ‘apotheosis of rock-as-art’, which was ‘contradicted by rock's existence as no more than a brute actualization of everyday life.

With Sgt. Pepper, art-was-dead because it suddenly ceased to exist as a realm separate from everyday life – as a unit of significance distant from it. The record was so alive, so surprising, that people suddenly lived their everyday lives with a new intensity. They walked down their streets as if they had never seen them before. They didn't necessarily connect that experience to the appearance of Sgt. Pepper, just as they had not necessarily connected the dulling of their streets to the presence of bad songs, or the vitalization of those streets to the presence of good ones. . . The death of art is what rock 'n' roll, as the brute actualization, had aimed for from the beginning; from the beginning, rock ’n’ roll had meant to change ‘art’ into everyday speech . . . But then the triumph was forgotten; art went back to ‘art’; everyday life went back to banality.

In his review of Fun House and in ‘Carburetor Dung’, Bangs pushed back against that return to the quotidian binary of art and life, he wanted that moment where the two are fused together, or at least the possibility of that fusion as with his fantasy of primitive rock melded together with free jazz, but in ‘James Taylor Marked for Death’ he recognised, like Meltzer, like Tosches and like Marcus, that the act of synthesis changed everything, moreover, even if the streets return to a state of mundanity and art is returned to the gallery, that moment can never be regained, it has passed as certainly as the greaser teen years Bangs never got over, all that is left, as Tosches called it, is punk.

***

Detroit Free Press (September 21, 1969)

The Stooges are now firmly established in the rock canon in ways none of their early advocates would have prophesised (or would have wanted) yet in many ways the band’s first critics were as responsible for this state of affairs as anyone, their philosophical disquisitions, whether parodic or not, would leave a mark on a generation or two of writers to come. They promised that The Stooges were always, and in all ways, a more interesting prospect to consider than any other of their peers and contemporaries – a shape shifting object of fascination. The Stooges now, however, are fixed in aspic as the ultimate cult band – a connoisseur’s obsession. Fifty-odd years after the fact they are a familiar yet rare pleasure, available in all formats yet cliquishly exclusive. As the magazine articles, blog posts and books on the Stooges proliferate, as the bootlegs get turned into deluxe reissues and the few feet of extant live footage gets stitched into hagiographic documentaries we have never known more about this band and yet never understood less about them – are psychologists still having a ball with The Stooges? When Bangs and co. were obsessing the Stooges they were not yet a spent force, their potential to make an impression on critics and audiences alike was still in play. After the fact, how to regain that vitality, that tantalising sense of potential? Attempting to capture those moments-in-time is what any decent account or history of the band must reach for if it is going to be more than just another sacrament at the altar of their cult.

This is why Michael S. Begnal’s The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967–71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022) is such a welcome intrusion into the stilled debate. It is an unapologetically academic volume and, as such, returns things to where Bangs, Tosches and  Meltzer left off. This is regardless of whether you see their ramblings as pastiche, pseudo-intellectual, pretentious or as the gospel truth. Meltzer, anyway, would surely enjoy Begnal’s use of European high theory to pull open the mummified corpse of the band to once more let loose the reverberations.

Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Attali and Theodor Adorno are Begnal’s key co-conspirators helping him to unwind the tension the band embodied as avant-garde practitioners and as music industry product. You can imagine other theorists and other methods to negotiate the continuum between art and pop, the high and the low, the vulgar and the refined as well as other contexts to make meaning out of The Stooges (a more thoroughgoing take on teen-trash consumption as practiced, in particular, by Ron Asheton – that pink Star of Hollywood shrunken head shirt –  would have been in my ideal study), but what’s important is the debate itself that Begnal is stirring up, not his particular methodology. If the theory sticks in your craw, if you won’t meet this scholar at least halfway, then we are stuck with The Stooges as empty godheads at whose shrine we can only offer up more and more arcane pieces of information and newly discovered facts that lead only to more solipsistic inanities, fetishistic practices and smothering sermons on why the band matter to you rather than on the matter of the band itself.

Lost in the Future moves through three key phases in the band’s careening – their initial adventures in Michigan’s art spaces, ballrooms and clubs as the Psychedelic Stooges; the second phase is the two LPs they made for Elektra and the third is dedicated to an unrealised third album. With the implosion of the band in 1971 Begnal ends his disquisition, but a second volume on the Raw Power era is promised.

A noise-art ensemble without melodic intent or song structure and sans the mundane line-up of guitar, bass and drums, the Psychedelic Stooges valued improvisation and playfulness that involved found objects and domestic appliances – producing a subversion of the principles ­– competence and respect for the generic rules of music making and performance – that the groups, which The Stooges, bottom of the bill, supported, held to be irreducible. Whatever the worth of their art practice, in this iteration The Stooges were so far out they could never be appropriated and packaged by the music industry, until they were . . .

Shucking off the psychedelic tag freed the band of a redundant signifier of their self-identification with rock’s progressive element that by 1968 had turned experiment into conformity. By then ‘psychedelic’ no longer carried an element of provocation nor adventure the band obviously intended it to have, but having a shortened name that continued to pay homage to the Three Stooges, purveyors of the lowest form of comedy imaginable – a dumbshow of physical clowning without an iota of self-reflection or artistic pretension – now that was inflammatory. Sitting outside of both rock’s mainstream and art culture, Begnal argues, The Stooges found purpose in bridging the divide between independence and a collective approach toward creativity, as members within a band and as a band unique among their peers.

When The Stooges entered into a relationship with Elektra records that channel between the communal and the individual was stress-tested. Begnal plots the line of tension that was revealed between the demand that the band conform to the marketplace and their attempt to hold true to the principles they had fashioned for themselves:

Having evolved from their original freeform, experimental approach into something more recognizably rock, there is still the affirmation that, even though Iggy takes the role of frontman, the shared ‘group voice’ – forged in the process of a mutually unfolding artistic evolution – predominates. In opposition to the machine-like aspects of both the hit-driven music industry and a regimented life of factory work, the Stooges’ music centralizes the creative development of organic human interaction.

Against the odds, the first album successfully negotiated this predicament, argues Begnal, but was it a repeatable experience and was that repetition even desirable? This predicament was especially charged, Begnal writes, given that the band ‘were committed to ongoing change and evolution’ and that their ‘deliberately anti-pop stance’ had ‘put them in a particularly difficult position in terms of building a wider audience and selling records’.

Analysing the creation of Fun House is the book’s centre piece, Begnal has clearly listened with dedication and care to the boxed set of the Los Angeles recording sessions. His exploration and evaluation of the development of individual songs and the album overall is erudite and refined, wherein earlier chapters his ideas tumble out in a rush, here he gives them ample breathing space that allows him to take up a more nuanced set of critical positions. His analysis illuminates the problem all bands face if they want to make records for a major company and not compromise on their vision. The conformists, Begnal argues,

can write slickly produced pop ditties, or. If they still insist on projecting some sort of countercultural or rebellious image or sound, they need to make sure it’s emptied of any real danger to the existing order of things, so that it too can be packaged and marketed successfully – recuperated, as Attali puts it (or assimilated, as Gioia puts it). Bands that don’t do one or the other can therefore be easily dismissed, market dynamic likely guaranteeing they will soon disappear from the scene. Most listeners don’t even need to be told to see them as ‘noise’ or as not actually ‘music’, because their tastes have already been formed by this same process.

Beyond the two albums, Begnal dedicates significant space and thought to their live performances, mustering a superb array of primary accounts (if you don’t like his methodology then you can at least harvest the fruits of his bibliographic labour) that effort pays off in what for me was the true delight of the book, his analysis of what would have been their third album if Elektra hadn’t pulled the plug. Concert reviews and interviews with witnesses are arraigned alongside his listening to the Easy Action set You Don’t Want My Name You Want My Action that documented in lo-fi form the five piece band with James Williamson, joining Ron Asheton, on guitar, across four shows from April/May 1971.

While steeped in nihilistic ‘thirst for destruction’, the new songs were not about death per se but rather signify in retrospect the moment of their creation, the desperation that the Stooges must have felt, the intimations of potential extinction, and a strange kind of joy at the same time.

But that potential album, as he writes, was lost to the future, a what could have been that keeps the story of The Stooges still moving ahead, still in virtual if not actual progress. Begnal ends his account on the cusp of tomorrow with the disintegration of the original band and their subsequent consecration – an act of fan based sanctification as it was of a music industry assimilation of their non-conformity, the taming of their radical intent.  And yet,

Concomitantly, there is still power in the Stooges’ work that remains and comes through every time we listen to their records. Though they may have often been perceived as ‘lost in the future’ in their own time, and finally animated as ‘classic’ in our time, the raw particularity of their music and the uncompromising nature of their vision continue to prompt us to reconsider what it means to make non-commercial art in a consumerist society.

Begnal’s book is in itself eloquent testimony to the fact that The Stooges continue to inspire listeners, those among us who are not content to accept instant gratification but instead join with the psychologists in having a ball with The Stooges as we follow the lines laid down by Lester Bangs that guarantee a real cool time with liberation as our goal.

A Biography – Robert Milliken, 'Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock'

‘If you asked me who was the world’s first pop journalist’, Jim Fouratt told Robert Milliken, ‘in the sense of translating sixties culture, art, fashion, music and politics in a popular way, Tom Wolfe got the credit but I think it was Lillian Roxon. The way she did it was to be in the scene yet objective about it, while Tom Wolfe was around the scene, and reported on it, but never part of the scene like Lillian was. Lillian genuinely loved rock and roll, not just the music but the lifestyle’.

Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock (2002) is as fine a biography as any I’ve read. From her family’s flight from Nazis to exile and new beginnings in Australia to her death in New York, aged 40, in 1973. In between, Milliken tells the story of how Roxon became one of the significant players in the New York rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, one of the movers and shakers who held court at Max’s Kansas City. Her student years and the Australian bohemian scene in first Brisbane then Sydney and her start in journalism are succinctly, but evocatively evoked, before her move to Manhattan, aged 27, as the 50’s tipped into the following decade.

Australian newspaper culture, the nascent Murdoch empire, tabloid journalism and Roxon’s place in this as an independent, career-minded young woman is portrayed with a deft touch that moves eloquently between historical context and her personal situation, both private and public. Roxon and her friends were great letter writers so Milliken has a treasure trove’s worth of material to draw on, which he adroitly pulls together with her published words and interviews with those who were closest to her as friends and colleagues.

Though it is the third act of her story that most interests me, her family’s history and her early life, especially in Sydney, are crisply and effectively etched to provide a sure sense of who she was and where she came from. I didn’t skip a page.

Her relationships with Linda McCartney and Germaine Greer are given generous space, never overbearingly so, but for me that is all peripheral to her friendship with Danny Fields, Lisa Robinson, Leee Black Childers, Lenny Kaye and the like and her mentorship of young writers like Richard Meltzer, who told Milliken:

Compared to so-called gossip writers, when Lillian wrote ‘scene pieces’ she had a playfulness that was so much more authentic, and never nasty or ill-tempered in the slightest. She wrote from a state of genuine affection for probably a wider range of rock-roll characters than any other rockwriter I have any recollection of. The only exception I can think of was Carole King. She hated Carole King (but then so did most of her colleagues).

In a June 1971 column for the Sunday News, Roxon wrote:

Carole King may have a number one single and a number one album, but I find her as boring as my girlfriends who are always on the phone to me whining about the problems they have ‘communicating’ and having ‘meaningful relationships’. She is like every messed-up neurotic girl you ever had to confront in group therapy. Sincere, certainly, well-meaning, too - a nice girl, not bad looking, super-talented, but exasperating and totally unexciting. You know, of course, what her success means - that rock is going to go into a ‘Dark Shadows’ period. Those moody broody songs about getting it all together and facing the world bravely are going to take over the air-waves, and then what are we going to dance to? The Pathetique Sonata? . . . You can learn more about being a human being from Tina Turner's body language than from all of Carole's fortune cookie philosophising.

That kiss-off line is so beautifully on point. If you can’t dance to Carole King you can pull back the rug and frug along with Ike and Tina, the Ronettes and the Shangri-las:

A contact sheet showing Andy Warhol attending an event at the Action House nightclub in Island Park, Long Island, New York, 4th December 1966. Among those attending are Nico (top, left), her son, Christian Aaron Boulogne (top, centre). The Velvet Underground were on the bill for the evening, along with The Fugs, The Ronettes (second row, far right) and The Shangri-Las.

RONETTES/There are two kinds of lady singers - the angels and the devils. The angels sing ethereal songs in ethereal voices and wear long, loose gowns. The devils sing earthy songs in earthy voices and their gowns fit where gowns should fit. The Ronettes were every teenage boy's dream of a teenage devil in triplicate. Brazen, shapely and without any illusions about men and sex. They were like girlie magazines come alive and set to music. Their song Do I Love You made the boys feel like men. Nothing psychedelic there, just straight from the hip or wherever.

THE SHANGRI-LAS/From time immemorial the bitch goddess has haunted and fascinated man. And so, of course, has the girl next door. The Shangri-las were both, a real bargain for the boy who wanted everything in a girl and the girl who wanted to be that everything. They played it soft and tough at the same time. Their toughest song was Leader Of The Pack. (He was the head of the motorcycle gang and she was his tough mama. Then he dies. Tough mama goes soft, but not for long. You know whoever gets to be the next leader gets her too. Teased hair, doe eyes, ankle bracelet and all.) It was the necrophilia of it all that shocked the adults, not the funkiness of three bitchy white girls who told it straight out that in motor-bike gangs you don't just hold hands. The Shangri-las were akin to Clyde Barrow's Bonnie, in a reversal of the proverbial image, the velvet hands in the iron gloves.

The Ronettes and Shangri-las quotes are from Lillian Roxon’s Encylopedia of Rock. Here she wrote of the Rolling Stones who, unlike The Beatles, ‘had never seen soap and water. And where the adorable little wind-up Beatle moptops wanted no more than to hold a hand, the hateful rasping Stones were bent on rape, pillage and plunder. Well, at least satisfaction . . . No one had ever seen a white man move on stage the way Jagger moved . . .

Right from the start he parodied himself completely but that worked for him, not against him. His lips and no-hips drove every relevant point home; a not-so-distant relative of the Shangri-las’ Leader of the Pack, he laid it on the line. Most of the girls who watched had never before had the word put on them quite so explicitly. It was heady stuff for fourteen-year-old virgins, and others besides.

Milliken spends little time analysing Roxon’s work, he’s content to let her friends and colleagues act as her interpreters. That’s fine, even if it means you have to go back to the work to figure out just why she was held in such high regard. Unfortunately, not much of her writing  is readily available, certainly not in any curated form, and the Encyclopedia is long out of print. If too little of her work is included in the biography (there are some selected writings at its end but these are mostly from the Encyclopedia alongside a few key pieces on the women’s movement, Germaine Greer and Creedence Clearwater Revival). What’s also missing is a more detailed account of how she spent her time and what she wrote about in the last five years of her life, her trips to London, her radio show appearances and her support of third generation rock artists like Iggy and the Stooges, David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the New York Dolls all demand a fuller account.

Even at this late date, I’m going to take a position on defining Lillian Roxon as the ‘Mother of Rock’. It’s a misnomer, the maternal diminishes and marginalises her activity to one of a nurturing figure rather than a full participant with an original and unique voice that is worth listening to in its own right. That said, Milliken has written a studiously researched and eloquent biography. It’s an admirable achievement. Someone, however, needs to supplement Milliken’s book with a reader that genuinely covers the range of her outputs.

Last words go to Lillian Roxon, on moving into new accommodation she had it fumigated to exterminate the pests that Germaine Greer had, to her chagrin, suggested defined her:

I now live alone with no colonies of roaches and one life size poster of Iggy Stooge mother naked to cheer me up.

Richard Bernstein Iggy Pop (1970) edition of 100 silkscreen on paper. 42” x 32” Is that ‘life size’? Yours for $5K from Sotherbys [HERE}

Iggy and the Stooges at Max's – Rock Scene Reports

With the New York Dolls on the cover, Rock Scene (March 1974) ran large with the Stooges’ Max’s Kansas City gigs on July 30–31st and August 6–7th, 1973 (the mag was bimonthly which meant it went to print two months or more before the the date line on its cover).

Lillian Roxon’s death was reported along with a photograph of her kissing Lenny Kaye. They were both at Max’s for The Stooges:

It was a night of feathers and glitter, and crowds of people coming to hear rock and roll. Lillian was working, that’s why she was there – but she knew it was An Event too. That’s why she wore her feathers and makeup.

Lenny Kaye wrote up the report of the gig

Celebrity nights . . . the first two were marred by poor sound, for the second two it was ‘near perfect’

It was almost as if the band had realized that they’d gone as far as they could go in one particular direction, the oft-predicted way of on-stage suicide not to be theirs; they drew back from the edge, wary and knowledgably watchful, all senses alert.

Fred Kirby pictured top right second down filed a report for Variety, published August 8, 1973.

Billboard (August 25, 1973)

Iggy’s turn to play the on-looker . . . at Mott the Hoople/New York Dolls afterparty following their show at Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden (August 3, 1973) where Iggy walked into a glass door, hence the sticking plaster . . .

Sounds (August 25, 1973)

also from Sounds (August 25, 1973)

A complete run of Rock Scene can be found HERE

The sexiest thing since Mick Jagger . . . says Lillian Roxon

and that would be Iggy Stooge . . .

I recently picked up a copy of Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, the 1971 paperback edition with a new, very short, introduction that tried to capture how much had happened since the book was first published in 1969. CSNY had formed, Led Zeppelin had become the most popular band in the world, The Beatles had quit and the Jackson Five filled Madison Square Garden (and so did Grand Funk Railroad), but the most significant event was that Iggy Stooge had emerged and she was smitten ‘. . . with the sexiest thing since Mick Jagger’.

The Encyclopedia’s 1969 entry for The Stooges is easily missed as it falls under their longer name ‘The Psychedelic Stooges’. That these unknown Detroit hoodlums get an entry while bands with a history and a profile, like The Pretty Things, don’t make the grade might suggest that her friend, and the explorer responsible for discovering the them in 1968, Danny Fields was getting the hype in early.

Intrigued, I went looking for some other things Roxon had written about The Stooges. She was the New York correspondent for Sydney Morning Herald so I trawled through the paper’s archive, which gave me little more than the two articles Per Nilsen cites in his estimable Iggy & The Stooges On Stage 1967–1974. Other than those two, the band made a few brief appearances in the paper. Roxon used The Stooges to illustrate one of the directions contemporary music was heading: the theatrical, shock rock approach shared with Alice Cooper. There’s a note that Astor records have picked up the license for Elektra and will be releasing the Stooges album, and a review of Fun House by Michael Symons. The ‘Some Pop Primitive’ in the headline for the review refers not to the ‘world’s most frantic band’ but to Melanie . . . go figure (see below at the bottom of this post).

Both her Australian reviews of the live Stooges experience are from Electric Circus gigs (October 23, 1970 and May 14 & 25, 1971). A wider search also revealed an audio recording of a two minute syndicated review of the 1971 shows, ‘Can A Boy Named Iggy Be The Silver Messiah?’ which is just a joy to hear. (radio here)

Sydney Morning Herald (November 1, 1970)

His whole idea is to jolt the audience into a state of fear and shock. When he sings to a girl, or to the audience, he does not do it caressingly but with anger and violence. The girl doesn’t know whether she wants to mother him – or back away. Watching the indecision is part of the sadistic thrill of being in The Stooges audience . . .He seems to embody the violence around in America today.

Sydney Morning Herald (June 6, 1971)

The Stooges are definitely the darlings of the avant garde this year. It must be the spitting.

 Other than her contract with the Herald, Roxon also penned a weekly column, ‘The Top Of Pop’, for New York’s Sunday News. It’s a great primer to the scene circa 1971–73. Iggy received a fair number of mentions in the sidebar, ‘Amplifications’, along the lines of ‘Iggy Stooge are you serious about making a movie with Andy Warhol?’ (10/71), Iggy of the Stooges joining Lou Reed and the Flamin’ Groovies in London and references to seeing Bowie in Aylesbury with a strong suggestion that she joined other critics that night at the King Sound gig: ‘Detroit’s Iggy Pop wears his hair sprayed silver off stage. . . (with a well worn Marc Bolan T-shirt) . . . glove-tight studded silver pants, eyeliner and black lipstick.’ (July 30, 1972). All echoing the previous week’s column:

Sunday News (July 23, 1972)

Her first proper review of The Stooges for the Sunday News was of their return, after London, to their home town for a gig at the Ford Auditorium (March 27 1973). Roxon matched her impressions of the Detroit gig with, her longtime favourites, The Kinks in New York. She thought Ray Davis and Iggy were a ‘pair of rock aristocrats’. A strange combination, but they shared an honesty in their art that she appreciated whatever the differences in their performance styles and music.

Sunday News (April 6, 1973)

Gone in Detroit was the glittered torso of the Electric Circus gig, when she last saw Iggy. She wrote, ‘too many people have copied it, and he’s into something a little more substantial than glitter rock, anyway.’ Raw Power is a recent release, a collection of ‘enraged screams’ and on stage, in red bikini briefs beneath ‘an old embroidered and fringed piano shawl tied into an insane little sarong’, Iggy is still, as at the Electric Circus, breaking through the fourth wall, sitting in the lap of audience members, dragging young women on to his podium: ‘there is nothing he wouldn’t do on stage. He’ll do the first stage rape one of these days, and don’t think he doesn’t get close’.

Roxon was an enthusiastic champion of Bowie and Bolan, and helped boost the New York Dolls right from the start. When The Stooges made their return to New York at Max’s Kansas City in July/August ‘73 she covered it along with a review of the first Dolls album

New York Sunday News (August 5, 1973)

A week after that post and three days on from the final Stooges’ gig at Max’s she was dead. Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls her final story.

New York Sunday News (August 11, 1973)

Sydney Morning Herald’s Fun House review

Sydney Morning Herald (December 19, 1970)

Go-Karting with The Stooges' Ron Asheton

Keith Moon and Ron Asheton both liked to wear t-shirts, but while The Who’s drummer went through a whole catalogue of POP designs, The Stooges’ guitarist only favoured the one. His shirt of choice featured Stroker McGurk tear-arsing about on a go-kart: ‘fun on wheels – for everyone!’. Tom Medley was the cartoonist, his main gig in the fifties was with Hot Rod magazine (see here). I suspect Ron bought quite a few Stroker T’s, cos he wore it from at least the Autumn of ‘68 to the Summer of ‘72. As a teenager my shirts rarely survived two washes . . .

Outside the Stooge Manor House, September 1968. Photo Ron Richardson in The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story

Iggy steals Ron’s shirt: The Stooges at the Fifth Forum, July 1969. Photographs by Peter Yates (from here)

Out On The Street: Ann Arbor, 1969. Photo Glen Craig in Total Chaos: The Story of The Stooges

from Ed Caraeff Iggy and the Stooges: One Night at the Whiskey, 1970

Fun House sessions by Ed Caraeff. May 23, 1970

Cincinnati Pop Festival, 13 June 1970. Photo by Tom Copi

King Sound, Kings Cross, London July 15, 1972. Photo Mick Rock

To be continued . . . .

Iggy and the Stooges London Sessions 1972

The good people at Easy Action records have just released a double 45 of primo alternate versions of Raw Power era recordings to complement the best collection, without question, of Iggy and the Stooges’ studio outtakes, Heavy Liquid, and to celebrate it being almost 50 years since the King Sound King’s Cross gig. Get the 45s here

Elegantly designed by Dave Twist, the gatefold sleeve features four Byron Newman photographs taken in CBS studios during the recording of Raw Power, three to my knowledge previously unpublished

‘I Got A Right’ and ‘Tight Pants’ are alternates to those featured on Heavy Liquid. ‘Search and Destroy’, ‘Death Trip’ and ‘Gimme Danger’ are from the Raw Power sessions and released for the first-time by Easy Action. They were initially aired on the bootleg Etiqueta Negra de Lugo from ten years back, but good luck finding a copy . . .

One of the five photographers present at King Sound (see here), Byron Newman has around 15 images of the band in the studio, on the stage and out and about in London. Many of these will be featured in Easy Action and Per Nilsen’s book of the band’s live performances, which is now scheduled for the Autumn 2022.

Rear of the bootleg sleeve and the two inners from Heavy Liquid

One of the myths of the album sessions was that Iggy messed up the mix, overloading elements onto a few tracks so that by the time Bowie got involved his options were limited. The CBS studio outtakes show this not to be the case. Moreover, Mike Ross-Trevor, one of CBS Studio’s engineers, chipped into a debate on these matters on a Steve Hoffman forum thread in 2016:

Inside . . . Heavy Liquid and London Sessions

Fats Domino plays the Club International – David Parkinson was there

Fats Domino’s sell-out Hammersmith Odeon appearance in April 1973 was covered by Waxie Maxie in the July ‘73 issue of Club International (volume 2, number 7). As per his self-given remit, his lead into the story managed a sex scenario that featured rock n roll records and a little ultra violence between the day’s youth cults . . . Perfect Max in fact. Fats bought his own band, which must have disappointed the Allstars, but none of that matters much because we’re not here to celebrate Teddy Boy Rock ‘n’ Roll, Mr. Domino or even Mr. Needham. My purpose here is to give your peepers the chance to glance over David Parkinson’s photographs. The one above being all you will ever need to see in order to understand the appeal of rock ‘n’ roll in 1972–73.

I can’t let this post go by without also noting that this is all in the same issue that David Parkinson ran a spread on Malcolm McLaren’s Let It Rock clobber that ran for seven pages. Style and attitude never better displayed . . . visit Paul Gorman’s webpages for a fuller account of Parkinson, Mclaren and Club International, be warned you will get lost in there: https://www.paulgormanis.com/

For anyone looking to track down a copy of this issue of Club International here’s the cover, which features Iggy Pop on stage at the King Sound July 1972 gig, as photographed by Mick Rock

Test Pressing – Iggy and the Stooges 'Raw Power'

In May 2020 a test pressing of Raw Power went up for auction on eBay, the price eventually going beyond the few shillings I had saved, but I kept the images that were posted

Dated December 8, 1972, two months before its US release on February 7, 1973. it should be in a museum or even better in my collection, it’s a one-off (or one of a very few). It would be the jewel in any collector’s crown. – a fetish item for the ages. But, you know, it is just a white label pressing of a stock copy, I’ve got a couple of those and, having not won the auction, I’ve still got the coin in my pocket.

But take a closer look. The timings suggest side one and two were flipped, which adds to the uniqueness. Then look again, side 1 has five tracks, not the four on the release version, and side 2 has only three.

So what was the running order? Dave Marsh’s hyper-enthusiastic review in Creem’s March 1973 edition gives a couple of clues.

He lists the title track as the second band on the top side, so my guess is it still kicks off with ‘Search & Destroy’, but which mix I wonder? Iggy’s? Or Bowie’s as found uniquely on the original UK release? Whatever, ‘Gimme Danger’ is the third track. After that no more clues from DM.

Working with the timings given on the white labels, and some some addition and subtraction on my part, Side 2 must be:

Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell

I Need Somebody

Death Trip

Side 1 then would look something like this:

Search and Destroy

Raw Power

Gimme Danger

Shake Appeal

Penetration

How’s that play in your head? While you’re pondering over this sequence and whether it rolls better this way than it does following Tony Defries’ edict that the songs needed to go fast one, slow one, fast one , as was eventually released, Dave Marsh wrote that their are ‘nine songs’ on the album, not the eight we have and love, perhaps he was shit at counting or adding up . . . or he had a different review copy. Think on that dear collector.

For those Raw Power devotees out there, here’s Mick Rock’s little known review of the album in the UK skin mag Club International (July 1973). More of this kinda thing is buried deep in Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll. Available to preorder or in the shops early next month . . . Get Some!

Photographing Iggy and the Stooges at King Sound, Kings Cross, 1972

MICK ROCK WAS NOT ALONE . . .

pic Byron Newman

Much of the research for Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll was with the magazines and newspapers of the era. Not just NME, but now forgotten journals like Strange Days and Cream. The latter had nothing to do with the more infamous American monthly Creem. Quite why it chose such a banal name is anyone’s guess; it ran from May 1971 until October 1973 and published some outstanding pieces by Nik Cohn and early reports by Ian MacDonald and Charles Shaar Murray. Nick Kent’s fulsome tribute to his hero, Iggy Pop, ‘Punk Messiah of the Teenage Wasteland’ appeared in the October 1972 edition. The two images that accompanied his piece, both shot at the King’s Cross gig in July, were credited to Pennie Smith and Byron.

The November issue of Cream had Alice Cooper on the cover and a report on Fear and Loathing in the Top 20, it was illustrated by another image of Iggy at King Sound credited to Pennie Smith. Her work at Frendz and later at the NME would leave a photographic legacy every bit the equal of Mick Rock, but unlike him, her Iggy and the Stooges images have not much featured in her portfolio. I sometimes think, though, we may have been looking at them all the time and taking it as a given they were the work of Mick Rock.

Byron was a new name to me and it took awhile to find out his surname was Newman. With that information he is not so hard to Google. He photographed Bowie in 1972 alongside work for soft porn magazine Men Only and, later, Game. He would eventually make his career (and I guess fortune) with Playboy. Other than the onstage shots at King’s Cross, he also photographed James Williamson in a London cemetery and, in some places, is credited with the only known picture of the Iggy and James working in a London studio during the recording of Raw Power

from the booklet for the deluxe reissue of Raw Power. The Stooges Unofficial Facebook page has posted four more Byron Newman pix from the recording session

One more from Byron, this is from a 1972 edition of the French magazine Actuel. I found this on Deadnest’s facebook page [here]

A fourth photographer at King Sound was Alec Byrne. I’ve not found any contemporary use of his pictures, at least not with his credit, but two are beautifully reproduced in his collection London Rock: The Unseen Archive (2017)

Mojo #346 (Sept. ‘22) plugs Bryne’s book and looks through his archive of images from the gig but only reproduces the one. The outside possibility of a slim dedicated volume is raised and an exhibition in LA this summer . . . O Blessed we would be . . .

additional images have been posted on Alec Byrne’s Instagram: [HERE]

Patrice Kindl was the fifth photographer on the scene, so to speak. His images are known through their use on a couple of live albums, featuring performances from the Whiskey Ago-Go, which were released in France by Revenge in the late 1980s. Cropping and reversing of images might suggest otherwise, but there’s a good amount of duplication across the two sleeves and on the CD Search and Destroy: Raw Mixes Vol. 3 (Curtiss). Getting his subject in focus wasn’t Kindl’s strong point.

Unheard by all but the few hundred in attendance, the images from the gig, however, have left an indelible mark; a set of traces that the next generation, using Mick Rock’s sleeve design for Raw Power as their north star, would follow.

After London, Iggy got high in the Hollywood Hills and it would not be until 1976 that he climbed down. Nick Kent would remain a true believer, sending back a report from around the time Iggy and Williamson were demoing the tracks that would eventually be released as Kill City. A little earlier Sounds put Iggy on their cover with a report on his Toronto gigs. Inevitiably it was illiustrated with photographs from King’s Cross, uncredited again, but my guess is these are also a mix of Byron and Pennie Smith.

pic. Byron Newman

In April 1974 the NME carried a news item announcing an impending UK tour, nine venues had confirmed, among them the Rainbow Rooms at Biba where the New York Dolls had played. Iggy would also make an Old Grey Whistle Test appearance. Another Pennie Smith (?) image from the London show was used to illustrate the hype. The gigs of course never happened and the King Sound, King’s Cross pictures were left alone to reverberate in splendid isolation until next needed to confirm the image of the World’s Forgotten Boy.

The above was run in the January/February 1975 issue of Edinburgh’s Hot Wacks fanzine (#5) to fill a gap left by the non-arrival of advertising copy from Camden’s Rock On shop. To my radar eye these are not from Mick Rock’s archive, but if not who took them?

Sounds (September 18, 1976) Pennie Smith

Disc (March 3, 1973) . . . Iggy to make film . . . now there’s a thought. Pic is Mick Rock (heavily cropped)

Per Nilsen and Carlton P. Sandercock’s coffee table assemblage of Stooges performances and recording sessions, 1967-74 is as essential as it comes . . . Features a good few previously unpublished Byron Newman images, same for Pennie Smith. Patrice Kindle are mostly familiar but in much better quality . . . Mick Rock and Alec Bryne are not present, too expensive to license I’d guess. Get your copy here

Dirty Little Billy and His Two Confederates

Latest project: tracking the dirty traces left by Billy the Kid, Arthur Rimbaud and James Osterberg jr.

Iggy and Elton Take CREEM In Their Coffee

I’ve recently acquired a few issues of Creem circa 1971-75 that between their glossy covers are deteriorating as fast as any 50 year-old British inky. I never read the magazine back in the day, I doubt it could have been readily found in Hemel Hempstead’s newsagents, but since those faraway days it has taken on something of a mythic status, hosting, as it did, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Edmonds, Greg Shaw and on occasion Nick Tosches and Greil Marcus. It also, I was surprised to discover, gave fairly regular space for pieces by British writers, mostly from the NME, like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray. There was a regular column, ‘Letter from Britain’ from the always entertaining Simon Frith, whose singles reviews in Let It Rock easily rivalled his American equivalent, Juke Box Jury, that Greg Shaw put together for Creem and for his own magazine, Bomp.

To some extent the magazine lives up to its reputation, it has a terrific sense of community, between the writers most obviously, but also between them and their readers, which was something NME tried to emulate. But what the British weeklies did much better than their monthly American cousin was to create a sense of an unfolding narrative. NME and Melody Maker pulled their readers into the heat of the action, you can see this clearly in the reporting on and around Bowie throughout 1972, each new move he made was eagerly anticipated, reported on and responded to. The music papers produced a remarkable feeling of immediacy (and intimacy). By contrast Creem is all reaction, everything has already happened. It features last month’s story, NME and MM were about tomorrow.

An exemption to the lack of the future tense in Creem is the coverage afforded to the figure of Iggy Pop who runs loose and fast across a number of the issues I have, often he appears as just a note on what he’s doing in London or Hollywood but always with anticipation that he is about to deliver and in doing so change the very fabric of rock culture. Must have been frustrating as hell to have been a proselytiser for the Stooges back in those days, because, at least in retrospect, Iggy was always going to disappoint.

In the news stub above, from January 1974, Iggy is sharing coffee and donuts with Elton John while the Stooges are undertaking a week’s engagement at Richard’s in Atlanta, Georgia. One of those shows was recorded and released in the deluxe Raw Power box from a few years ago and were witnessed by James ‘The Hound’ Marshall, who has written about his teenage road trip from New York to Georgia to see the band [here]. Elton sat through two shows, appearing on stage during one of them in a gorilla costume. He said of Iggy, “I simply can’t understand why he’s not a huge star.’  

He should have asked Pete Townshend, he sure knew why Iggy was never gonna clean up. In the same issue he’s interviewed by CSM about Quadrophenia as well as things like Bowie’s Pinups and the overlaps between the two albums, especially as they relate to rock history and rock stars. On the latter, some of CSM’s colleagues think stars should conform to the image of a noble savage. Inevitably, then, Iggy is raised as a sort of exemplar of the type and the conversation skirts around whether he might appeal to the kid in the ‘Punk and Godfather’. Townshend thinks not. Songs aimed at teenagers need to contain ‘a lot of the tight, integrated, directed, pointed frustration of a fifteen or sixteen year-old . . . But someone like Iggy and the Stooges couldn’t grasp that if they stood on their heads, because inside they’re old men.’ Now that’s an image worth pondering over . . .