Iggy Pop Read online

  Koester ascribes the tension to the fact he’d asked the ‘psyche delic dudes’ not to smoke drugs in his apartment. Iggy hints darkly at sexual predations by Koester and blames Scott Richardson for what ensued. Ron Asheton cheerfully admits that all of them were freaked out by their conviction - ridiculous, says Koester - that Koester was gay. And without a doubt, Jim Osterberg was also trying to show his new friends that he was as tough as they were.

  ‘We were goading him,’ remembers Ron. ‘It was bad, but we were just kids.’

  ‘We were like the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange,’ explains Scott Richardson. ‘We didn’t care what anyone thought.’

  There had been one relatively subdued night, where the five listened to Koester’s rare records and tapes then barricaded themselves into their room with cushions. The mood turned nasty on the second night, as the Ann Arbor quartet started drinking Bali Hi wine, ‘and getting him drunk too,’ says Ron. ‘And teasing him.’

  The Asheton brothers, Scott and Iggy set out to confuse and torture Koester, walking around naked in Iggy’s case, wrestling or piling on top of one another on the floor then jumping up as the confused record-company boss tried to work out what the hell was going on, or shining a desk light in his face to dazzle him. ‘They were doing all kinds of stripteases I had no interest in, I had specified I wanted no drug activity, and I had this viral infection and was feeling shitty . . . it was like a horrible nightmare.’

  When Koester, incensed at being handed that glass of piss, threw all his guests out, it proved a strangely bonding and cathartic experience for the future Stooges. They recount that tale as if it’s slightly shameful but nonetheless a memory they seem to relish: ‘That was the beginning,’ says Ron. ‘That was when Iggy 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 had brought her two sons and daughter from Davenport, Iowa, to Ann Arbor in December 1963 immediately after her husband Ronald’s death; her life was a struggle, for Ronald Senior ’s pension was too meagre for the family to survive, forcing her to take a job at the Ann Arbor Ramada Inn, in addition to looking after three intelligent but feisty teenagers.

  Ronald Asheton Junior believed, like Jim Osterberg, that he was destined to achieve something significant in his life, a belief reinforced by his 1960 encounter with John Kennedy when the Democratic nominee was campaigning in Davenport Iowa. Dressed in his cub scout’s uniform, young Ronald was propelled forward by a surge in the crowd and ended up with his face in the future president’s crotch. As a Secret Service agent attempted to tug him away by his cub-scout scarf, the future president intervened to save the unfortunate scout from being throttled, ordering the agent to ‘leave the kid alone’; Ronald’s fingers brushed those of the charismatic candidate as he was bundled away, star-struck. John F. Kennedy joined Ron’s pantheon of showbiz heroes, alongside Adolf Hitler and The Three Stooges. Soon that select band was joined by The Beatles and the Stones, inspiring Ron to drop out of high school, along with his classmate Dave Alexander, and travel to London, hoping to see John Lennon or Mick Jagger walking down Carnaby Street. He settled for the more than satisfactory alternative of seeing the Who at their superviolent mod peak, bringing home a shard of splintered Rickenbacker as a souvenir. The Who’s Pete Townshend would become his inspiration, although he started out on the bass guitar. After getting kicked out of the Prime Movers, Ron joined Scott Richardson’s snotty English-flavoured R&B band, the Chosen Few, and would soon enjoy the distinction of playing the very first notes to be heard at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom as a live rock ’n’ roll venue: his bass intro to the Stones’ ‘Everybody Needs Somebody’ launched the Chosen Few’s opening set for up and coming band the MC5 in October 1966.

  Scott Asheton, too, was a crucial Dum Dum boy, an aspiring drummer who at one point played with Ron, Dave Alexander and Bill Cheatham in a garage band called the Dirty Shames. As a kid, he’d spent countless hours with his dad discussing plans for racing go-karts and building V8 hot-rods, only for his whole world to fall apart with the premature death of his father. After that he became a wild child, thrown out of the house by his mom, hanging out with his hoodlum-looking friends on State and Liberty, spitting on passers-by. It was his tall, Brando-esque good looks and tough guy cool, together with the wickedly cynical Asheton sense of humour, that first entranced
Jim Osterberg.

  Iggy and the Asheton brothers returned from Chicago at the precise moment that a psychedelic revolution was engulfing Ann Arbor. Its huge student population, cosmopolitan atmosphere and Democrat administration contributed to a liberal ethos which meant that its fines for drugs possession were lower than neighbouring Detroit, and before long the town possessed its own mini Haight-Ashbury in the form of a gaggle of headshops around Liberty and State, at the edge of the university campus.

  Jim, Ron and Scott Asheton had decided to form a band together. They hadn’t by this point decided who would play what - at first the plan was for Scott Asheton, the most physically magnetic of the three, to sing, and Iggy to stay on drums. And as there was no immediate prospect of making money from their music, they needed a source of income. Fortunately, Ann Arbor’s embryonic hippie subculture would become the perfect outlet, as they established their own little niche on the drug-supply chain, buying marijuana plants and drying them to sell on as grass. Jim had moved back into the family trailer on his return from Chicago, and he and Ron discovered that Coachville’s communal laundry and service area was the perfect location to dry the leaves. Unfortunately, they often got high on their own supply, and left the plants drying for so long that they started to cook, filling the building with the distinctive smell of burning grass. Beating a retreat to the trailer, they had to plead ignorance as James Osterberg Senior sniffed the air and asked what they were up to.

  Jim Osterberg was still firmly tethered to the parental purse-strings, particularly when major purchases were required for the trio’s musical experiments. Early in 1967, Jim had his eye on a Farfisa organ and embarked on a campaign to persuade James Senior and Louella to finance the purchase. Eventually Louella agreed on condition that Jim cut his hair; there were complicated negotiations about what constituted a sufficiently short haircut, which revolved around the collar length. Negotiations concluded, Jim opted for a style which was short at the back with long fringe up-front. The results were so bizarre that, according to Ron, Jim attracted the attention of the Ann Arbor police. ‘He was wearing baggy white pants, came here to my mom’s to practise, and the cops stopped him ’cause they thought he was an escaped mental patient. That is how weird he looked, with that little haircut and those big eyes.’ It was a 40-minute bus ride from Coachville to the Ashetons’ home on Lake, and according to Jim, even when he got there, with Ann at work, it was often a long wait until the brothers awoke from their morning nap or marijuana stupor and let him in.

  Over those early months, Ron, Scott and Jim recruited the Ashetons’ friend, Dave Alexander - ‘A spoiled child and a wild thing,’ according to Scott - to assist in their musical experiments. Once the ever-tolerant Ann Asheton started to bridle at the incessant rehearsals at her house, the quartet moved to the Alexanders’; Dave would supply Ron, Scott and Jim with Colt 45 malt liquors as they crafted an embryonic rock opera. At first, they had debated a line-up with both Jim and Scott on drums; after the purchase of the Farfisa, Jim switched to organ, while Ron fed his bass guitar through a fuzz box and wah wah, and Scotty played drums on a 45-minute instrumental epic, which they named ‘The Razor ’s Edge’.

  It was the summer of 1967 when the tiny crew moved into their first band house, a Victorian building on Forest Court, in the heart of the campus. It was being sub-let by a group of University of Michigan students, who naively thought that the earnest Jim Osterberg and his chums were a better prospect than their other applicants, ‘a bunch of broads. But woe betide the day those frat dudes let us in,’ enthuses Ron, ‘’cause we totally destroyed the building.’

  Forest Court was where the band’s distinctive lifestyle evolved, summed up by Kathy Asheton as ‘Crazed, pig-style, crazed bachelors, fun times.’ Jim Osterberg was often recognisable as his wide-eyed, charming self, but equally often the entire band could be found slumped, stoned, in front of the TV until early in the morning, giggling at horror movies or rerun comedies. Slowly, they evolved, like cavemen, their own language. At first, after Jim had cleared out the basement, the three worked on developing their embryonic songs, but after incessant complaints from the neighbours about the noise, they found other diversions. Sometimes they would descend like a marauding tribe on family or neighbours, and denude their houses of everything edible. Frat parties around the campus were other useful venues for loot and pillage - the four could fill their stomachs and disappear with armfuls of drink before the hosts realised what was happening. Yet for all the squalor of their living quarters, the group boasted a certain glamour. ‘They were pioneers - cool, special,’ says Kathy Asheton. ‘They got a lot of attention, they got the girls, they were cool guys, people wanted to be around them.’

  Both Ron and Jim lost their virginity during that psychedelic period. Both were essentially well-brought-up Midwest boys and had delayed that fateful moment, but one friend of the band, Mary Reefer, was an older woman who was taken with Jim’s wide-eyed charm. She embarked on a campaign to seduce Jim, and finally succeeded with such memorable results that young Osterberg rode his bike back to the band house in a kind of trance, utterly transported. So transported, in fact, that he cycled straight into the path of a car, bounced over its hood and then landed on his feet. He arrived back carrying his mangled bike, a beatific grin on his face.

  By the end of their stay at Forest Court, acid had become the band’s new obsession. The four had an older adviser on its use in the person of Ron Richardson, a handsome, slightly nervous, intellectual character, who taught in Ypsilanti’s Sumpter Townships, and who had been the manager of the Chosen Few. Little by little he was persuaded to take on Jim and Ron’s band. Ron boasted two vital qualifications: he owned an old Plymouth Washer Service van, and was involved in University of Michigan tests on LSD, and located a supply of the then-legal compound via a medical school acquaintance. Richardson took such a serious approach to his students’ induction to acid that he required them to complete a rigorous reading list before they took their first trip. Soon, their collective psychedelic experiences became a vital part of the band’s fraternal bonding. Ron, Scott and Jim went first; then later, Dave Alexander’s induction into the band was formalised by a trip with Jim, during which they flashed on The Wind In The Willows, and realised that Dave was Rattie and that Jim was Toad.

  Regular acid trips became a staple of the band’s cultural diet, which also included Dave Alexander’s books on the occult, the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, Pharoah Sanders’ Tauhid albums, Dr John’s album Gris Gris, and the constant background noise of late-night TV, including Ron’s particular favourite, The Three Stooges. Ron was devoted to the comedy trio, whom he had gone to see at the Illinois State Fair as a child, and his own humour, whether dry, gonzo or black, defined the atmosphere of the band house. Ron claims it was he who that summer declared, ‘We’re like the Stooges, but we’re psychedelic. Let call ourselves the Psychedelic Stooges!’

  Around the rest of Ann Arbor there were ripples of interest stirred by what Jim Osterberg and Ron Asheton were cooking up - Jim’s role in the Iguanas and the Prime Movers meant he was well known in the musicians’ community, and the extended gestation period of his new project became a talking point. ‘I bumped into Jim in the middle of the summer and asked what he was doing. He just said, practising!’ says ex-bandmate Jim McLaughlin. ‘He’d been practising for six months, which was hilarious, ’cause I couldn’t remember him rehearsing for more than fifteen minutes with us!’ Other bands on the scene, like the Rationals, and the SRC - a local supergroup formed by the alliance of Chosen Few singer Scott Richardson with hit greaser band the Fugitives - were intrigued, as were other local figures including Jeep Holland, who by now managed both the Rationals and SRC, and the hottest new partnership on the local scene, the MC5 and John Sinclair. The toughest, highest-energy band to come out of Detroit, the MC5 had realised they needed to hitch themselves to the hippie revolution engulfing the US, so they joined up with Sinclair, Detroi
t’s psychedelic guru, in August 1967. Together, they aimed to revolutionise Detroit and the rest of the country with a manifesto based on loud rock ’n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.

  The Psychedelic Stooges boasted a hotline to the MC5 in the form of Ron and Scott’s sister, Kathy Asheton, who had attracted the attentions of MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith; Wayne Kramer, the MC5’s leader, had known Jim from his Prime Movers days, and at one point had considered enticing him into his own band. Hence, when the Psychedelic Stooges decided to unveil the results of their music experiments, it was natural that Sinclair and the ’5 would be invited. And as 1967 rolled on, it was decided that All Hallows Eve, which marked the onset of winter and the time when spirits walked the earth, was a well-starred date. The buzz spread around town for several weeks beforehand.

  The chosen venue for the Psychedelic Stooges’ public debut was Ron Richardson’s house on State Street, a short way out of the centre of Ann Arbor proper. Richardson was responsible for overseeing the guest list, while his wife Nausika was assigned the task of assisting with Jim’s costume. After fighting with him over a Victorian nightdress at an Ann Arbor thrift shop, Nausika admitted Jim’s need was greater; she spent several days cutting aluminium foil into strips and gluing them to a rubber bathing cap to make Jim a metallic silver wig. Influenced by American avant-garde composer Harry Partch, who specialised in bizarre home-made instruments, Jim spent much of his time stoned, looking in the garbage dump at the back of Ron’s house for promising junk. Scott Asheton prepared for his public drumming debut by decorating his improvised drum kit, which was fashioned from oil cans rescued from the dump. He decorated his ‘kit’ with symbols that were the perfect metaphor for the Stooges’ mix of high and low art. In bright colours he painted the om, the winged eye of Horus, and other spiritual symbols from Dave Alexander’s books on Eastern mysticism, then wrote words like ‘shit’ and ‘pussy’ in ultraviolet paint that would only be visible under black lights.