“This case, I think we have to go all out. I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture to be done on somebody’s part. And we’re just the guys to do it.” – National Lampoon’s Animal House
Had I not been a contributing writer and artist, the one tag-line that would have drawn me in towards this book from about half a mile away would have been: MONSTER ROCK! I don’t know what it is, but I like the sound of it already. Fortunately this book does more than follow up on its promise by offering several unique and distinctive takes on the likes of Skip Spence, The Sonics, The Monks, The Edgar Broughton Band, The Bonzo Dog Band, and Charles Manson’s LIE album from such seasoned veterans as Phil Tonge, Simon Collins, Andy Darlington, Sleazegrinder, Roger Sabin, David Kerekes (the book’s publisher) and Martin Jones, the editor. All of the above are reason enough alone to buy a copy immediately, which will either make you run screaming for the safety and comfort of Q magazine or leave you forever jaded for any rock writing that doesn’t come at you like a feral dog.
As for own contribution – 20,000 words on The Stooges, entitled Messiahs of Voltage: How The Stooges Died For You – my intention from the outset was to write something as wild and unrestrained as the music they made. Responses were mixed. Mojo said that it “outbangs Bangs” but ultimately failed because it was “passionate but wayward,” words that will no doubt be inscribed upon my tombstone. Brutarian magazine were more charitable in suggesting that it was “the single best and most disturbing history of The Stooges ever penned” which is vindication enough for me.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Stooges were just a band, one amongst thousands, maybe even millions by now, who tried, and failed to do….something that rightly and justly remains beyond the means of expression we currently have to hand. They were very much a product of their time and place in a world grinding ever onwards towards an increasingly unpredictable future. They were borne of circumstance and a culture that had bloomed too quickly and was already turning to rot. Iggy was smart enough to see what was going on. He’d read his Dostoyevsky. He saw the vampires and the leeches crawling out their boardrooms, ever hungry for another percentage, another deal, another franchise. Iggy worked against the notion of the ‘super group’ and the ‘superstar’, trying to bridge the gulf between the stage and the audience, using his body, his voice and the sum total of his frustration that none of it was really going to make a difference, that it wasn’t going far enough to the edge of what he suspected lay waiting at the Borderlands of raw honest experience, which had become a place of exile for those locked out of the ‘reality’ of life as defined by Time magazine and the withering husks still clinging to the vacuous dreams of Camelot. He saw that rock & roll was running out of places to hide and virtually everything that was now recognisable and quantifiable had been shackled to the Cool Machine and flogged within an inch of it’s life. Conform, perform and die. The money being made was increasing in direct proportion to the amount of coke being hovered up the noses of jumped-up petrol pump attendants who had been convinced by the slimy tongues of A&R creatures and the willing orifices of gullible strumpets that knowing a G from an A chord gave them a seat on Mt.Olympus. There was more than a whiff of the Fall of Rome about it all and, right on cue, came the Visigoths to sack the place, in the form of The Stooges.
The Stooges remain one of my favourite bands of all time (completing the rock triad of Mudhoney and The Cult) and when tasked with this chapter I saw it as my opportunity to tell the story as I myself would like to read it, and that meant drawing in references from all over the place and defining the band and their music within the context of the times in which they emerged. That meant referring to everything from the Apollo moonshots to VietNam to and highlighting significant cultural events that would give the story of these four mutants the gravity it deserved. The Stooges were a reaction, and a largely unconscious one at that. “I gotta do it now,” Iggy screamed, and he meant it. There and then, do or die, that was the attitude that drove their music and made those first three albums so compelling a prospect and so enduring in their appeal. Without them ‘punk’ and everything else would simply not have occurred and in cultural terms it is almost impossible to overstate their importance. 
I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t “get” The Stooges, but let’s face it, how many times has an open-top car driven past you on a summer’s day with ‘TV Eye’ blasting out of the speakers? No, it’s usually some techno shite, when of course it should be Ron’s guitar, carving a shining path through the aether. For all the alleged “simplicity” of their music, the kind of passion and attitude they brought with them is something very few of their emulators have ever been able to match. I can forgive them their reform and the ill-advised release of The Weirdness because none of that can tarnish what they achieved when they were young and mad and fearless. Their example is one I try to bring to my own work and I think no-one has ever put it better than Scott Kemper when he said of The Stooges:
“This was living and being born and coming for your fucking children in the middle of the night in front of you…from then on rock & roll could never be anything less to me. Whatever I did – whether I was writing or playing – there was blood on the pages, there was blood on the strings, because anything less than that was just bullshit, and a waste of fucking time.”
Amen.
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