The Stooges

A bumper crop of young, brash midwestern dropouts from Michigan, the Stooges come right out of Spiro T. Middle America. All but bass man Dave Alexander come from straightlaced schoolteaching families. They'd just as soon be cruising for burgers along hot rod row, jiving the grease balls, or grooving on the smacked up counterman at the Bickford eatery.

"We've all been friends since grade school," Iggy continues. "We got to be real close when we were the only guys at Ann Arbor High to wear long hair. We were alienated from the rest of the kids and they even made up names for us like smarties, jades and out kids. The pigs at school used to feed us a lot of shit about our hair, so we used to cut classes and split for my folks' trailer out at the Carpenter Trailer Park. That's when we got to thinking about becoming a group."

Back in 1966, Iggy was drumming for a group called the Prime Movers. The group played around Detroit and Ann Arbor, but around the time that Iggy finished high school, it broke up. In the Fall of the same year, Iggy split for Chicago. Scott, Ron and Dave stayed around Ann Arbor, woodshedding and jamming with local groups.

"We were really bored with everything that was happening at the time," Ron Asheton emphasizes. "Rock music was becoming a cliché so we decided to create our own kind of mood, something that people could get involved with."

When Iggy got to Chicago, he bummed around the South Side, living a life that is fenced in by freeways and railyards and invisible borderlines of the Blackstone Rangers and Disciples street gangs. The South Side ghetto and the alienated world of Iggy Stooge met head on.

"I used to hang around some of the South Side bars where Paul Butterfield started out and I got to know his former drummer, Sam Lay," Iggy recalls. "Sam took me in off the streets and I became sort of an apprentice to his music and way of life. Scared stiff...just for a little while, but living with Sam, I realized that we were all in the same boat."