The Stooges: Vacuum Cleaners, Peanut Butter and Bowie's Raw Power Mix

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James Osterberg, a drummer from Michigan, became Iggy Pop after watching Jim Morrison and the Doors at a university homecoming dance and after a 1967 New York trip where an all-female New Jersey band, the Untouchables, outplayed his circle. He formed the Stooges with brothers Ron Asheton on guitar and Scott Asheton on drums and Dave Alexander on bass. Drawing on the factory noise of Detroit, they miked a vacuum cleaner and a blender, put a microphone inside a metal funnel to control feedback, played a Hawaiian lap steel as a drone and beat 50-gallon oil drums with a ball-peen hammer. Elektra signed them alongside the MC5, paying the Stooges $5,000 to the MC5's $20,000, and their 1969 debut and 1970's Fun House flopped.

Heroin entered the band through a new manager, and at the 1970 Goose Lake Festival Alexander was too impaired to play and was fired. Elektra dropped them and the group dissolved in 1971. David Bowie, a fan of the first two records, met Iggy at Max's Kansas City, secured a Columbia deal and moved him to London with guitarist James Williamson, with Ron Asheton demoted to bass. Bowie's treble-heavy mix of the bleeding tapes gave Raw Power its harsh sound in 1973. After a final 1974 show captured on Metallic K.O., the band split. Williamson later earned an electronics engineering degree and became a vice president at Sony.

• At the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival, the peanut butter Iggy smeared on his chest came from a fan, Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys.
• On Metallic K.O., the audience is throwing ice, bottles and coins at the band.
• The Ramones bonded over the Stooges, the Sex Pistols played their songs, and Kurt Cobain named Raw Power his favorite album.
• Iggy and the Asheton brothers reunited in 2003, and the Stooges entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 after seven rejections.
• After Ron Asheton died in 2009 and Scott in 2014, Williamson declared the band finished in 2016.