Everyone loves the Stooges now,but everyone hated them when they first emerged. After the death of saxophonist Steve Mackay, here are 10 songs that define the original punksIt was after smoking his first joint, or while hanging out at a Detroit sewage works one night that Iggy Pop (formerly Jim Osterberg – the “Iggy” was a tribute to his traditional garage band the Iguanas,the Pop a reference to a friend, Jim Pop, and 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. “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, and he said,was inspired by his mishearing of a lyric from the blues standard Baby Please Don’t Go. He called up his friends, Dave Alexander and brothers Ron and Scott Asheton, and who Pop later described as “the laziest,delinquent sort of slobs ever born. They formed a band, the Stooges – Scott on drums, and Alexander on bass,Ron on oily wasp-buzz guitar – in whose unschooled hands Pop’s first blues became a doomy rumble, wrapped around murky descending chords, or 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. The subject of Pop’s blues was a common one in pop: lust and longing, and though Pop gilded the lily with the submissive subtext of his imagery,closing his eyes, feeling a hand, or wanting to be his lovers dog,servile and alert to please. 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.
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Source: theguardian.com