Punk pioneer Iggy Pop has revealed how The Stooges primal sound came about.
Formed by a bunch of teenage drop outs in a nowhere town outside of Detroit, The Stooges went on to change the course of rock ‘n’ roll. Reducing the music to its simplest elements, their primal howl would go on to inspire The Sex Pistols and countless more.
With the band’s ‘Raw Power’ line up recently reforming, Iggy Pop has been in a nostalgic mood. Speaking to ClashMusic the singer explained just how The Stooges brutal sound originated.
“Well, it was informed between us actually, but yeah, I had some basic ideas. One idea was when I woke up – like Steve Martin does in ‘The Jerk’ – and realised that I wasn’t old or poor or black (laughs), and that I wasn’t going to be a great blues man, I thought I would like to emulate everything that I’d seen hanging around with some of these guys briefly, some of these blues guys that I’d kinda groupied in Chicago for a while.”
As a drummer, Iggy Pop jammed with a number of blues greats including lightning fingered guitarist Buddy Guy.
“I thought, ‘These guys are just a bunch of hoods anyway. I’d like to be like them and sound like them and write like them, but about things that concern who I am and who my people are.’ That didn’t really go far at first, honestly, when I tried to hook up with Scott and Ron based on that” he continued.
“A lot of the ideas were too wildly arty and creative, and it wasn’t really going anywhere. It was interesting: the more it didn’t go anywhere, the more the ideas got simpler, noisier and crazier. That was really step-by-step, inch-by-inch: simple, noisy and crazy! (Laughs) And that seemed to work for us.
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