Stooges Back to Destroy

On October 7th, rock's first true punk band, the Stooges, walked into a Chicago studio to make their first album in more than thirty years -- and nailed a master take of the record's first track, "Trollin'." In seven days, singer Iggy Pop, guitarist Ron Asheton and drummer Scott Asheton, Ron's brother -- with bassist Mike Watt replacing Dave Alexander, who died in 1975 -- cut fourteen more songs, two a day. The album, to be released in March by Virgin Records (titled The Weirdness, after one of the songs), was done live in the studio, including vocals.

"I fucked up two of them," Iggy says, "and redid those. But I didn't do 'OK, line one!' nineteen times. It was 'On your mark, get set, go!' -- all the way through."

It has always been thus. Ron Asheton recalls the sessions for the Stooges' 1969 debut. They did five songs -- their whole songbook at the time -- and thought they were finished. When producer John Cale and Elektra Records head Jac Holzman asked if the band had more songs, "We lied -- 'Yeah, sure,' " Ron says. He and Iggy then wrote three more "in a couple of hours. We had one day of rehearsal and did them the next day all in one take."

The original Stooges made one more LP, 1970's Fun House, with free-blowing saxophonist Steve Mackay, before breaking up. (Mackay plays on the new album.) A re-formed lineup with guitarist James Williamson and Ron Asheton on bass made 1973's Raw Power, then also fell apart. For the rest of the century, Iggy made solo albums while touring with set lists full of Stooges tunes. But when he reunited the band for a 2003 Coachella show (after getting the Ashetons to play on his Skull Ring album), Iggy understood what he had been missing. "I'd been doing covers with these other groups," he says. "I hadn't been doing the detail work."

Iggy then applied that lesson to recording. "It's a new world," he says. "You can't do six songs and a freakout anymore." For the first time, he and the Ashetons (now all in their late fifties) made demos. "This band had never demo'ed shit," Iggy cracks -- in the Sixties, the stage show "was our demos." Over the last three years, the three met at Iggy's practice space near his home in Florida and wrote more than forty pieces of music. Iggy chose those he wanted to put words to and the order in which they would be recorded. The album's first six tracks -- "Trollin'," "If You Have Friends," "A.T.M.," "My Idea of Fun," "The Weirdness" and "Free and Freaky in the U.S.A." -- were cut in that sequence. (Rick Rubin and Jack White expressed interest in producing, but the Stooges did it themselves with engineer Steve Albini.)

Aside from the extra discipline and a guest vocal by Brendan Benson, "nothing's changed," Ron says, noting that his signature wah-wah attack is all over the album: "I cannot go without the wah." As for the huge expectation that has built up since Fun House, "I'm not concerned," he says. "We're getting on, doing our jobs." And if people don't like it? He responds with vintage Stooges brio. "Tough titties, man."