Ron Asheton interview part three

R: Oh, yeah. And I respect Jimmy for it. I still eat a lot of that stuff, too. Of course, I eat meat now, but I still love my brown rice and azuki beans and tamari and my miso soup. I still have my George Ozawa misokushi cookbook. I actually have a tamari shaker, the very first one I ever had that I used at the original Stooge house. Still have it. And I still do my stir-fry in a hand-hammered Chinese wok. So yeah, Jimmy Silver was important in that aspect. I love that food and I still...the only thing I stray from now is I sure do like meat, but even then, I don't eat that much meat.

K: So you were doin' all this wild performance stuffin teen clubs?

R: Actually no, not the Stooges. We didn't teen out. They wouldn't hire us. We were lucky...with the Chosen Few, I had played the very first night at the Grande Ballroom, the very first show ever when it opened. The Chosen Few opened up for the MC5, and we had a little medley from the Stones' EP where they do Everybody Needs Somebody, Pain in My Heart, and Route 66. They started out Everybody Needs Somebody with Bill Wyman on the bass going (hums bass line). I played the first notes ever at the Grande, and that was the place that we used to play, and that's the first time I ever saw the MC5.

We were lucky enough to have the Grande in full swing, and that was a good venue for us. There'd be sympathetic people there. The people that came there were supposedly, most of them, hip, so that's where the old Psychedelic Stooges really learned how to play and came forward, playing the Grande Ballroom. Thank God for the Grande Ballroom, or we wouldn't have worked. Later on, we weren't so free-form (a little bit when we were free-form), the MC5 (being that Jimmy Silver was friends with John Sinclair)...we would do some shows with them. Then we quickly got our little first album's worth of tunes together, and then we were able to just go out on our own and play all over the United States, actually. It wasn't widely accepted.

We played a show in Boston with Ten Years After. We opened for Ten Years After -- there was complete silence after every tune. The only person who was applauding for thefirst song was the president of our fan club, and she actually got her life threatened, so she didn't applaud. "Pretty bad vibes in here tonight." Of course, they went crazy for Ten Years After. It must have been hard for all of those people not to react to us when they were all flying on speed. Like Ten Years After -- you could see their faces when Ten Years After was playing, and these people had dropped so much speed, man; they're grinding their teeth and they're in fuckin' heaven, but they didn't like the Stooges. It was lucky for us that we really couldn't have gone out. I mean the club owner wouldtve... "Get these fucks off the stage. " It was hard enough having that first album's worth of tunes, going out and playing.

K: Y'know, you talk about music changing people's lives, well, Funhouse really did that for me back when I was 14, and now my daughter who's 16 is digging some of that music too.

R: It's amazing for me...I remember when Bill Cheatham's daughter was 14-years-old, the day that she discovered the Stooges, and it was like wow, it's what, three generations, and I'm going, "Holy cow, now I now what it feels like to be Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker. " This stuff seems to have an interest, and the interest seems to be growing. It's probably been at its peak the last couple, three years, though when we were actually together, not that many people cared, to tell you the truth.

K: Thirty years down the road, you've actually started to get the respect that you never did.

R: Better late than never, I reckon. Like I said, I'm looking forward to being able to work. I just got back from New York  September 4th or something like that. They flew us in; Mike Watt flew in from San Pedro. Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, and myself did a bunch of interviews to talk about the music that we did for the Velvet Goldmine movie, and it was great to hear those guys, even if I'd worked with them -- we were mostly working, and I didn't get to hear them talk about how important the Stooges, MC5, that stuff was to them. And to hear those guys flattering me when I'm sitting right there was like, "Aww, gee, aww, shucks." It was really cool.

Working with them, and them being popular, it's gonna help. Like I said, I tried to do stuff, but it seems like no one was interested in the projects that I had at the time. 'Cause I've always got a problem with bad timing, wrong place wrong time, or either I'm ahead of my time, or it's just not the right time, so it's always something.

K: Have you got a pretty big backlog of material written?

R: Yeah, as a matter of fact. The songs I gave up for the Velvet Goldmine movie, and then later the Wylde Ratttz, was stuff that I had written originally kinda for Dark Carnival, but Niagara didn't like 'em -- it wasn't stuff she was interested in. So I went, "Ahh,fuck it." Then [1 wrote more material] for the Stooges reunion, and that never happened, so I've got lots of stuff that I'm finally bringing up and getting the opportunity to present. And that's fun for me. I'm always writing new stuff, but I go back and go, "Gee I've always wanted to do that song." So now, hopefully, I'll have a chance, and I did get to recycle a couple of songs that I always wanted to do, for the Wylde Ratttz, which I'm happy about.

So far everyone that's heard it has seemed to like it, seeing that Don Fleming and Jim Dunbar live in New York, of course, so they play it for people and some of the photographers and interviewers have heard little pieces of it, or whatever, so I'm just hoping the record company doesn't dick around. Just put the damn thing out! They spent enough money, so of course they will. For them, it doesn't matter, but for me, "Get it out there!"

I wanna make a record and I do wanna play. I'll go out for a month, but I can't do the big giant road rat shit anymore. If I was being paid really well, it's a different story. When you're like nineteen and twenty-five, you don't care, but we were on the road for three years. I mean, that's all I knew once we made that first Stooges record. We were on the road all the time. We'd come back for two weeks, maybe, and that was the longest period I think we ever had -- I think we had a month off one time. Other than that, we were just continually on the road.

And then, what really soured the road for me was the Raw Power days, when we had nothing, no management, no record company. Or the management...we'd go through a couple of managers, but we didn't know anything, we were lost unless we were on the road. Basically, we were living in cheap hotels and weekly apartments. We just played. When your costume is so filthy that you literally stand it up in the corner at night, or go, "Don'` hang that there, it stinks so bad!" We had to hide our clothes in the bathroom or something, then have to put 'em on every night, never being any place long enough...it was a big thrill to do laundry. Imagine having to go "Oh, no," putting on a totally stinking shirt; the lurex pants that were just coming unraveled, just tearing your skin apart. I said, "That's it, fuck it, man." Eatin' in coffee shops and drinkin' every night, just can't do this, man...don't like it anymore.

For me...I'II go out for a month, and it'll be fun, and it will be different this time, 'cause I think it'll be a more appreciative audience...people that would wanna see something like that. Not just goin' out... " Well, here it is.... "

K: In the Please Kill Me book, your sister made some comment to the effect that when James Williamson joined the Stooges, it was "like a dark cloud descending." Was that just about the junk, or was it other things, too?

R: Y'know, I never read the fuckin' book, 'cause I enjoyed everybody tellin' me all the stuff so much. I got two copies of it, one autographed from Legs (McNeil) and one autographed from Gillian (McCain), with great big dedication pages. I read their dedications, but...

It was the bad junk time. So it was my sister that said that? Y'know, it's weird, because James was shipped to this boys' school, not in Manhattan, but someplace in New York state. We were at the Chelsea Hotel, we were making that first record, and then we played some shows, and he showed up one night at the Chelsea. I was walkin' down the hallway, I went, "Hunh?" and here comes a guy and it was James. I didn't really know James, other than the short time when he was in the Chosen Few, that one show we did together and the one week I was with him, and I think I saw him a couple of other times, he might have come here before he got shipped out.

It was a bad time, because he was a character prone to addiction also, and those guys were into heroin, and they sucked James in. Iggy really turned away from me, 'cause I was the only person [in the band] that didn't do junk...luckily, I had a girlfriend, and we had a house that had separate apartments, and I basically just sealed myself off from them. The only thing I would do was go patrolling at night, to make sure there were no lit cigarette butts, and I'd smell smoke and the mattress would be on fire, and I'd come down and Iggy'd be nodded out on the couch with a Lucky Strike in his mouth about to burn his lips (it had no filter on it), weird stuff like that. I was no longer a part of the band, it was like, " Yeah, he's with her, man, he's not with us, " and I'm like, "Yeah, right, assholes, I wanna be filthy and covered with impetigo and having to spend two hundred dollars a day...yeah, you guys are really cool."

So James came, and I wanted another guitar player, I'm going, "Y'know, I kinda wish I had another guitar player in the band," so we started auditioning people, and James heard about it, James showed up. And I said, "That's it, I wanna play with James. 'Cause all these other guys, they're good players, but they're so not our style. " I mean, this one guy, he was great, he was like Rick Derringer, he could play all the country stuff, and I'm goin', "This sounds stupid, I don't wanna play like that," I mean, it's gotta stay in my Stooge-esque guitar style, and James could play but he was still not totally well-formed in his ideas, to where he took a lot of the style that I had and incorporated it in his own style, but he had been playing a lot longer, so he had a little better expertise. And once those guys hooked up, I was gone. I mean, James and Iggy formed that junkie relationship, and in James, Iggy saw he had a person he could kinda control, and they somehow hit it off, and then the band broke up, and he wound up taking James to England, and then just dissed me and my brother, just dumped us.

So that's what she meant. When James came, it was...even though things were really in bad shape, once he came aboard, it was the total swan song. I mean it was some of the worst times of my life, just to see everything you had done fall apart, only because of drugs. It was fun when we were smoking marijuana and hash, and we had our little acid phase, but we were never into anything, and most everyone...we enjoyed smoking some pot, for me that was about as far as it went, then...BA-BA-BA-BOMM...our road manager, he used to be a junkie, and he brought the heroin in. He had just been clean for those couple of years, and he got back into it, and he drug those guys in, and that was like, "Oh, man"...it was a terrible ending. 'Cause it didn't have to end, but the drugs killed it.

K: It got a lot of people in Michigan in the early 70s.

R: It was a bad thing, and that's why if anyone talks about recreational heroin . "Yeah, it's cool if you just snort it on weekends..." Don't do it.

K: They're droppin' like flies down here in Texas. Six kids so far this month in Dallas/Fort Worth.

R: I know. They don't know what they're gettin' into. Hey, if anyone wants to know, from an "outsider on the inside," I've seen it, and I saw my whole world crumble. Friendships, the music, T'd wake up and, "Oh, I think I'll go down and play the piano today." The little Farfisa. "Hello?" It's gone. Iggy traded it for a spoon of dope. " What?! Goddamn it. Has anyone seen my little Univox amp? I need to do some rehearsing. It's gone?" Iggy would just take musical equipment and trade it for drugs. Y'know, he would never take the Marshall amps, but he'd take everything else...tape recorders, trading records and stuff for drugs. It's terrible. "Well, what's missing today?"

I'd have to nail my door shut when I left the house, my apartment. I had a padlock. Those guys'd come in there and they'd root through the place. They didn't have any money to spend on food or anything, and I'd be feeding them, and "Gee, we're not making any money, so damn, I just gotta feed me and my girlfriend." After a while, I had to lock up my place, 'cause they'd just come in and empty out the refrigerator. I'd come back, and it was a real stress for my girlfriend. She'd make bread and stuff, and those guys would eat it or she'd find it all torn apart downstairs, just eat the soft inside with a whole jar of peanut butter that they stole from us. It was just terrible, man. So just say...BAD. HEROIN BAD.

K: Were those guys using at the time you cut Funhouse, or was that later?

R: No. This all came after that. Probably more for Iggy, because I empathize with him only in the sense that he had set a precedent with his stage antics, and he had to come up with stuff all the time. I didn't know, he actually told me that he took acid for every show for a year. And I went "What?" I was so used to him, I didn't even know he was on acid. His eyes always looked like he was crazy. He just smoked a bunch of pot...He had to come up with stuff, and it did start to drain him, mentally and physically, and he found the heroin probably to be relaxing in the beginning, but then it was like oh, man...

No, it wasn't till after we recorded that. When we did that, we still liked each other, we were still a band, all that was smoked was hashish or marijuana, that was the only drugs. No one was taking...at least I wasn't, or Dave or Scotty; Iggy was taking acid. In other words, it was just back to the so-called soft drugs.

K: Was Don Gallucci really the guy who produced Louie, Louie?

R: Remember that show called...it was a Dick Clark show, it was called...oh, fuck, I keep forgetting the title, it wasn't Swinging Time, but he was "Little Donnie Gallucci" of Don & the Goodtimes. He was on that Dick Clark show every afternoon at four o'clock. They had all the big bands, but it was more a surfer-based, California thing, but they'd have English bands and heavier bands, but he was the house band, so he'd do a couple songs every afternoon. Then he went on to be a producer, and it was really cool. They picked him, and we didn't even know that he was coming to a lot of shows in the beginning, and seeing us play, and then we kinda met him, and knew he was gonna be there, and "He's gonna be your producer," and we're like, "Hunh? Don Gallucci? Why does that sound familiar? If 's Little Donnie!" And don't call him Little Donnie, boy, does he hate that.

He was a short guy, he was always impeccably dressed in a really nice suit, and I'm going, "How is this guy, who's dressed in this really nice suit, gonna relate to the Stooges?" But he did an excellent job. He wanted to capture the show. I think he only changed the order of the set; he switched two songs, I can't even remember. What was even more amazing is when we first met him and we met the engineer, Ross Meyer -- he was pretty quiet, probably in his 50s at the time -- and I thought "Oh boy, we're in trouble." Little did we know we had very competent people in the control room. He finally started talking a little bit, and he goes, "Yeah, this stuffs all right. It's a big change from Barbara Streisand. " Hunh? He just got done doing Barbara Streisand's record. From Barbara Streisand to the Stooges... Whaat?

It turned out they did a fantastic job. And we had a great time, and we'd just come off the road, so our chops were...man, we were there. I mean, it was literally off the road, a week to get our house in order so we could go to L.A. for a month. So we were ready to go, and that's why that record was as smooth and good as it was. We did minimal takes; I don't think we did more than five takes, or four takes, and a lot of times we'd take the first one or the second one. It went really well.

K: The sound of the thing is still contemporary. I don't think anybody has ever matched that guitar sound.

R: Well, basically by then, everybody had learned to play and had a little bit more of a handle on what to do. The first record was a big pain, because all we knew was stack of Marshalls on ten. And that was the big fight. "You can't play a double stack of Marshall amps on ten in this little studio." I'm going, "Yeah, but man, that's the sound." So there'd be big fights...I think the compromise was I went down to like nine. But still, they overcompensated, taking a lot of the edge off. And I used the Flying V for half the tunes, every song but three.

But by the Funhouse record, I went down to a Marshall 50, which could be on nine, ten...just a smaller cabinet, what I call "the refrigerator top;" I think it had six tens in it. And Dave just used a hundred watt with one speaker. So yeah, it was a bigger studio and it was a lot more fun. And we were treated like not stupid kids, but actually "professional musicians," which was like Hunh? I mean, that was only the second time I'd ever been in a recording studio. But by then, being that we'd been on the road so long, we really progressed. We learned an awful lot in a short amount of time. You can see the progression of our playing from the first record to the second record. Gee, that was like a year. We just played so much, everyone's abilities just increased unbelievably. I never thought of it until just recently.

K: It's on the job training.

R: Yeah. "On the job training." That's how the Stooges learned everything..."on the job."

K: It wasn't too long after that when you did that Cincinnati Pop Festival that was on TV.

R: Yeah. Oh boy. I've seen some of the footage; I think I'm in one of the pieces for like one second. All I remember from that was the big video camera guy didn't care about anyone onstage. I had to follow him...his wires were hooked up on my lead cords; he's dragging my fuzztone and wah all across the stage. "Stop it!" as he tried to follow The Antics of Iggy. For me that was a pain in the ass, pulling my stuff all over the stage. Luckily the roadies were smart enough to always tape the cords into the...lotta duct tape, electrician's tape, so there's no way the plugs can be pulled out. He's just pullin' my shit all over the stage.

But it was fun though...playing all those pop festivals. I mean, I can't remember if we recorded the record before or after the Cincinnati Pop Festival. Some of that's a little fuzzy unless I go back and think. 'Cause we were playing that...That whole Funhouse album was our set. Gallucci wanted to capture our set the best he could on record. He did a good job. We were playing all those tunes at the time we recorded them, but we didn't have to be in the studio and go, "Oh, we need some more songs." It was already all there, where like the first record, Jac Holzman who owned Elektra comes back and goes to Iggy, "Well, we're mixing the stuff...we can use some more songs. You got some songs?" "Oh yeah, yeah, we do." So I wrote Real Cool Time, Not Right, and Little Doll, simple as could be, very simple tunes, in like an hour or two, and Iggy'd come, "How you doin'? You got something for me?" He'd go upstairs and write some Iyrics, we rehearsed for a couple of hours and went in and did 'em all in one take. So we were well prepared the second time.

K: It seems funny that John Cale would have made the first album so sterile, coming out of the Velvet Underground, where they were kinda doing what you guys were doing. We keep hearing there's a Stooges box set coming with all these outtakes...you know anything about that?

R: I know that Ben Edmonds does some stuff for Rhino Records. Rhino had access...Elektra gave them all the master tapes, all the stuff they had of the Stooges. So he went out to L.A. to some studio and listened to all the stuff, and I pretty much told him, "Gee, I don't think there's much there," because at that time, no one really ran tapes for jams. We always jammed to warm up. That's how we warmed up -- just get together, we'd jam for an hour or something before we started cutting, but they didn't roll tape. He said he only found some different versions of tunes that he thought were interesting, and maybe one thing which I don't remember, that he said he found. But him and I were gonna go, and he asked me to help him, because he's mixed stuff before, but he's not really a studio person, so him and I were gonna mix it for Rhino and they were gonna put out this box thing, but something happened where they changed their mind. Somebody got fired, and that person apparently was attached to the project, and when somebody gets fired, a lot of times their projects go down the old shitter with 'em.

Then he heard some rumor that they'd come up with some alternative, they were just gonna re-release this...like "The Best of the Stooges," and get three CDs or something, or they were gonna do maybe four, two of them of Stooges, another one Iggy and the Stooges, and then just some Iggy stuff. And then that kinda went nowhere. And I was just remembering the other night that Iggy's record on Virgin did so poorly that to recoup losses, they put out some double CD that they actually used some Stooges on, and it was supposedly out for sale. I hadn't heard anything, and I forgot it, but I was thinkin' about money the other night, and I thought, "Gee, we never got paid for that." Somebody did say that Virgin put out a two-CD thing under the name Iggy Pop that actually had Stooges songs on it. I'm going, "Man, I've gotta tell my lawyer that." So I've never seen it, and I don't know anybody who has it, but a pretty reliable source told me. I can't remember who it was but somebody said that they saw it.

K: Deniz Tek mentioned the possibility of another New Race tour.

R: When'd you talk to him about this?

K: It was probably March.

R: So it was this year. He never mentioned a New Race reunion to me. I know he wanted to put together a band and tour Europe. I dunno. I remember him mentioning my brother. At that time, I'd never gone to Europe myself, and I was really loyal to Dark Carnival, and I think I told him I wanna go with Dark Carnival first, because they wanna go, and it's not fair for me just to cast aside my band and for me to go to Europe without them, and all the recognition just going to that interesting little group of people playing. So I believe that kinda turned him off.

R: I know Dennis Thompson mentioned it the other day. But for me, I dunno. I wanna do something on my own before I go out and do something like that. I'd rather go and take what I want and I don't have to put up with anybody else's ideas and stuff, although I like them and those guys are great and I'm not opposed to doing that, but the first time around, it seems like I'd be cheating my own people or myself. I should go myself and play my tunes. I'm not trying to be real egotistical, but that I should go play Radio Birdman songs the first time I'm in Europe...I mean, I have to go play my songs. With New Race, we did all Birdman songs in Australia except for one Destroy All Monsters, two MC5 songs, and one Stooges song which I don't think even made it to the CD. It just isn't right. It's not fair.

K: Do you think that there's a chance Dark Carnival might get to tour behind this Wylde Ratttz thing?

R: No, because I'm not playing twice. [I'll tour with the Wylde Ratttz because] I really like playing with those guys and the other benefit, which is really a good benefit...it's well paid. Even though I really respect Deniz Tek, I think he's great, I really love his music, and of course Dennis Thompson and I go way back, I think that the Sonic Youth guys and the guys who are happening now, Mark Arm and Mike Watt, there's just a much greater audience. The New Race thing, that'd be a curiosity piece, but the Wylde Ratttz...already, the booking agent said he'd do it in a second, where I think we might have to shop around to find a booking agent to do that particular thing.

K: Having a tie-in with the film would help too, I'd imagine.

R: Yeah. And I know the film is premiering in New York, then they're gonna have a premiere in L.A., and then it'll get limited theatrical release because it has homosexual overtones...I mean, Todd Haynes is gay, he's openly gay, and he has a gay agenda, and Michael Stipe is gay, and he's executive producer. So there it's...it's a love story with no woman in it. The only woman who's in it, who plays like the Angie Bowie character, she's kinda dumped on. But in reality, they treated the Angie character properly, because Angie did have a lot to do with creating David Bowie. But she gets dumped on...in spite of that, when I was doing an interview; Todd and I actually sat down and did an interview, just the two of us with somebody...he actually said that Miramax said, "Hey, listen, you take all this fag shit out of there, and we'll really go gung-ho, we'll really put it in the theaters. " But of course, that's not Todd's vision, and he had integrity enough to say, "No. "

So it'll get limited release, but...I enjoyed it; I got to see it when I was in New York in September. They had a screening for the media and I got to go, and I didn't expect...I thought, "Well..." Thurston Moore had seen it, and he goes, "Well, you know, it's dark, Todd's stuff is always kinda dark, and it does have the homosexual overtones, but I like it. " But as a filmmaker, I was very surprised...we talked about film, I guess he spent seven million dollars and man, it looks more like 25 million on the screen. I was very impressed.

And one thing I was also impressed with...if you like music, it's got tons of music, almost too much. But the music production...it says right at the beginning, "When you see this movie, play the music loud" or whatever. He has the music loud, and it sounds really good. When they did the scene where the fake Iggy character, the Curt Wylde character...they had him down to all the different haircuts, hair colors, actually the same costume, and we did TV Eye, and boy, the band sounded great. It's really great to hear the Wylde Ratttz, us guys, playing that music with a guy pretending he was Iggy. Even though they just hired some actors and it was all backlit so you couldn't see their faces, the actors they chose, they were playing the proper guitars that Dave and I had played. One guy had a white Stratocaster which you could see, and the other guy had a Precision bass, which Dave had for a little while

But to hear that music and to see that, it was actually...I got goosebumps, chills for a few seconds. It's weird to see a movie that's pretty much fictional, but does have a foot in reality that you were part of, and to see that was thrilling, and I actually enjoyed the picture. For me, the homosexual thing...it wasn't like blatant, naked buttfucking stuff, but it didn't bother me at all. I don't think it detracted from what the picture is. I thought it was a damn good movie.

K: That's as close as you'll ever get to seeing the Stooges, I guess.

R: Well, that's what I told all the interviewers. "Hey, if you guys ever wanted a Stooges reunion, on screen here and the Wylde Ratttz, 'Stooges 2000,'that's probably the closest you're gonna get, because those guys love Stooges songs, and the way Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Steve Shelley, and especially Mark Arm...when we first did the Wylde Ratttz thing, Mark Arm, I'd never met him before. Before we tracked my new songs, we just jammed the first night, and then holy shit, the guys all knew the tunes, it wasn't like I had to show them the songs, and when I heard Mark Arm, it sounded just like Iggy. He got to do his Iggy imitation...the Iggy that I liked, when Iggy wasn't a crooner like he is today. He was singing in this real rock voice, and it was like, Whooa, man. It was a weird feeling, like that band, the Wylde Ratttz, is probably the closest anyone will get to experiencing the Stooges.

Dark Carnival came close, 'cause I remember we played shows, and Niagara does her interpretation of Stooges songs. It's Iggy-esque, it's Niagara and her special Niagara treatment, but with that music, we had kids, when we played Australia...Iggy had just been to Australia before we went, and all the kids that came up said, " Well mate, seeing you guys play, mate, was a lot more than seeing Iggy play the Stooges, because it felt like I saw the Stooges when I saw you guys. " They said that Dark Carnival's interpretation made them feel more like they were seeing the Stooges than when they saw Iggy doing his version of the Stooges, and I thought that was really cool. Any kids that come up and say that...and a lotta kids came up saying, "You did it, mate... actually, Iggy's band really sucked. They can't even play Stooges songs. " So that made me feel good. It's expensive to go to Australia; we broke even, so we should be happy. He probably came back with a few bucks. I think I came back with 400 dollars in my pocket. Of course, 1 bought about a thousand dollars worth of souvenirs.

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