No Fun

Ron Asheton is dead. For those who don't know, he may have been solely responsible for giving a million guitarists who couldn't "play" but had scads of heart and soul the courage to get out there & do what needed to be done. How did he wield such power? Easy: he was The Stooges guitarist.

Ron was a rudimentary soloist in a time when rock guitarists were masturbating all over the fretboard. When everything else was peace & love, he was greasey & garage-y & full of Nazi memorabilia.

From jump street I was prepared to hate The Stooges. They were the "brother band" of the MC5, with whom at the time I was going through a nasty breakup (my aunt found the 5's lp, which I had lent my wiener cousin, and she went all Tipper Gore over it to my mother about its youth-corrupting properties, and I was banned from the stereo. Begrudgingly I inched towards safer rock & roll. How f#%king stupid was I?). So I figured here's more feedback-laden, out of control high energy noise, nothing like Clapton or The Airplane (yeah, no shit). Cut to a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1969, & as I was getting in the shower, radio by the sink, WABX is featuring the first ever airplay of the 1st Stooges lp. First up: "No Fun". It was ... primal. Very basic, very rocking, handclaps & fuzzbox. Iggy's voice was the snottiest, most teenage voice I had heard at that point. The Stooges were dripping with "cool". I was too young to catch their shows at that point, but had heard and read all about them. I couldn't imagine their world, until that Saturday afternoon. Sold!

Initially I thought Ron Asheton, who was so not like Clapton or Jerry Garcia or those other counter-culture guitar heroes, played no better than the pork-brained guitarist in my first garage band. I was "going to school" daily on my generation's rock & roll at that time. At 15 I was trying to wrap my head around not only The Stooges & MC5, but also The Velvet Underground, Coltrane, Howlin' Wolf and Sun Ra. Thank God for WABX.

Wait, this is supposed to be about Ron Asheton, not me. OK. He and original Stooge bassist Dave Alexander went to England in the mid-60s and saw The Who - of which he said he had never seen such pandemonium. I guess that was it for him.

No Who, no Kinks, no ? & The Mysterians, no Velvets, no Hendrix: no Stooges; No Stooges: no Dolls, no Ramones, no Pistols, no Clash, no Fall, no Sonic Youth, no Jack White.

I saw Ron play four times. The first was 1971, just before The Stooges hooked up with Bowie. No plans for any new album at the time, I think the singer was "hurting" and they were about to go on hiatus. What I remember about that show is that Iggy spent the entire set on the floor in the audience & I never saw him. The next two times were in 1973, deep in the throes of glam-rock, the "Raw Power" years when Ron was pushed to playing bass to make room for sheet metal amphetamine guitarist James Williamson. Both '73 shows were famous ones: one was at the St Clair Shores Ice Arena, which was just outrageous because of the venue and the fact that I could literally reach out & touch the band, and they were stellar. The other was the (in)famous final show at the Michigan Palace, where the band were bottled off the stage by a biker gang. They never played again - until the 4th and final time I saw them - 30 years later at the 2003 reunion gig at Pine Knob, with Ron back on guitar. He looked old & fat, like your uncle who pulled out his guitar to rattle off the classic Stooge licks. But he was perfect, it was surreal, and they would go on to do the exact same show for four years, right down to what I originally thought were ad lib moments.

I hope he got some bread from these shows over the past five or so years. The post-reunion album sucked, but what can you do? 60-year-old Stooges can't write 20-year-old Stooges material and still be believable.

And heartbreakingly, The Stooges are being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame this year. Well, they always did want to be someone's dog.