Millions would later answer the Stooges’ call to apathy the group, however, would implode years before this affirmation arrived. Things are not going well.” In 1969’s tribal stomp, Pop sensed the Stooges weren’t alone in their funk, however he saw this blues descending “all across the USA”, as the fag-end of the psychedelic era offered little beyond “another year for me and you / Another year with nothing to do”. “It was one of our worst gigs ever,” remembered Pop to Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, years later. Iggy penned the lyrics after he spent his 21st birthday playing a disastrous support slot to Cream, tripping on two tabs of orange acid and screaming “Fuck you!” at the audience, who were loudly demanding the arrival of Clapton, Bruce and Baker.
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1969, the opening track of the album, served up a mean Bo Diddley tattoo, a menacing two-chord riff, stinging bolts of acid-fried guitar (they’d once been called the Psychedelic Stooges for a reason), and Pop’s snotty drawl, yowling a bone-simple anthem to boredom, nihilism and disaffection, key ingredients in what would later be known as “punk rock”. Pop was tapping a vein coined by Lou Reed’s Venus in Furs in 1967, and coining an anthem much-covered by the generations that followed.īy the time they found themselves in New York’s Hit Factory studio with Cale recording their debut album, the Stooges had already survived a debut gig at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom where Iggy shaved off his eyebrows, daubed himself in white face-paint and glitter and sported a tin-foil afro passed through a period of performing with home-made noise-makers including a blender and a vacuum cleaner and got signed to Elektra Records – home of the Doors, whose Jim Morrison was an early influence on Ig – for $5,000, on the insistence of fellow Detroit misfits and new Elektra signings MC5. The subject of Pop’s blues was a common one in pop: lust and longing, though Pop gilded the lily with the submissive subtext of his imagery, closing his eyes, feeling a hand, and wanting to be his lover’s dog, servile and ready to please.
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They formed a band, the Stooges – Scott on drums, Alexander on bass, Ron on oily wasp-buzz guitar – in whose unschooled hands Pop’s first blues became a doomy rumble, wrapped around dark descending chords, death-rattle drums and, when recorded by John Cale in 1969, the genius of sleigh bells and a piano incessantly trilling out the same note. He called up his friends, Dave Alexander and brothers Ron and Scott Asheton, who Pop later described as “the laziest, delinquent sort of slobs ever born”.
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“I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase – either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs.” I Wanna Be Your Dog, he said, was inspired by his mishearing of a lyric from the blues standard Baby Please Don’t Go. It was after smoking his first joint, while hanging out at a Detroit sewage works one night that Iggy Pop (formerly Jim Osterberg – the “Iggy” was a tribute to his old garage band the Iguanas, the Pop a reference to a friend, Jim Pop, with a nervous condition that gave him alopecia) experienced a revelation: he could write his own blues songs, and describe his own situation in song just as the original bluesman had.