(The Stooges)
By the time Williamson entered The Stooges in the late ’70s, the band was already in the depths of drugs and destitution. As the guy who tried to hold it together, Williamson recounts the good, the bloody, and the time Iggy got his ass kicked by a biker.
Financially, we were pretty bad off and needed to get paid for gigs because we desperately needed to eat. There was this one Stooges gig around 1971. Our drummer, Scott Asheton, was driving the equipment truck for the first time. He just felt like doing it and didn’t know anything about trucks. One of the first things you should learn is to check the bridge clearance when driving under one. The truck was a little higher than the bridge, and it didn’t go so well. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt, but he smashed into the thing head-on and ended up in the hospital. He obviously couldn’t make the gig that night, so we were without a drummer, but we did the show. Iggy started by asking the crowd, “Can anybody play drums?”
Steve Mackay, who played sax on the Fun House album, is the kind of guy who’ll just say yes to anything. He said, “Yeah! I can play,” but, of course, he couldn’t. The songs we had aren’t all that easy to play. They’re pretty frenetic, and you have to know what’s going on. We tried playing with Steve on drums, and it was absolutely horrible. Iggy spent the entire show trying to teach Steve how to play. We filled the hour, and while I feel bad about it, we still got paid. Our shows were always chaotic, so the crowd wasn’t sure if this was just a typical night, only much worse.
We were not an act. Everything we did was for real and improvised spur-of-the-moment. We never had discussions before the show about how we needed to make that night extra crazy. We weren’t an Alice Cooper-type band that had everything worked out. The roots of the band had more in common with a “happening.” It was the late ’60s, and things would just happen on the stage. After we developed a repertoire, it became a little more regimented in the sense that we had a setlist. Certain Iggy moves had been done in previous shows, but we never knew any more than the audience did.
I didn’t personally witness the “peanut butter incident,” but someone in the crowd handed him the peanut butter jar. I believe Iggy was on acid and smeared it all over himself. It’s an incredibly iconic image, and it definitely wasn’t staged. Everybody was doing psychedelics in the band, and I was no different. We tried it all. The first lineup of The Stooges, which was originally called The Psychedelic Stooges, were really into that, but they were mostly just jamming out and not playing songs. Once they made the first record and started playing the songs live, they were over that psychedelic period.
There wasn’t much Iggy could do that would shock me. I’d seen most of everything, but one time we stayed at the Watergate Hotel in D.C. and played the venue right next to it. One of the girls that Iggy was dating gave him THC, and he was stoned out of his gourd right before the show. We were doing our best efforts to get him coherent for the show, but nothing was working. We got to the point where he could actually get on his feet, and we arrived at the venue very late. Backstage, the promoter was absolutely livid. He was so furious with us that he took off his Rolex and smashed it against the wall. He was screaming about how he’d see to it that we’d never play the East Coast again and all this craziness. Once again, we wouldn’t be deterred, so we went on. Our road manager literally had to throw Iggy onto the stage. He was staggering around, and the first thing he did was fall off the front of the stage. Everybody in the audience thought it was part of the show, so they loved it. But, Iggy could barely even talk.
There’s a lot of backstory to the time Iggy cut himself on stage. Mainly, his girlfriend was supposed to come to New York to meet him, then abruptly decided not to, which got him all upset. He didn’t smash the glass; it was already shattered on the floor. He initially fell onto it, and when it didn’t hurt that much—or he just didn’t care—he started making all these little cuts on his chest. It was mostly just surface bleeding, but it definitely made for a gory scene. It creeped a lot of people out, and they were trying to get him to the hospital so he didn’t bleed to death. I didn’t feel that he was in any danger, but it’s one of the things everybody remembers about the band.
Mostly, those kind of antics caused me a lot of frustration. That was a very low point in the band because some of us were trying to make a living doing this. My main focus was playing shows and making good records. We were trying to be professionals, and that kinda stuff was a little too out-of-control. That tour culminated in the show we did at the Michigan Palace. The night before, our manager had booked us into a small club near Detroit called the Rock & Roll Farm. None of us knew that it was actually a biker bar. Iggy was doing his thing out in the audience, and he slithered up to a biker who was leaning against a mirror.
We were accustomed to Iggy going into the audience and it taking a while for his vocals to come back. The biker had cold cocked him, and Iggy was out cold on the floor. The rest of us were on stage still playing the tunes, but after awhile, we began looking at each other, thinking, “OK…this is a little too long.” Eventually, the crowd parted, and there he was on the floor. We didn’t get paid that night, and luckily we got out alive. It was a really hostile night. Not to be deterred, Iggy went on the radio early the next morning and heckled the bikers.
All those bikers showed up at the Michigan Palace show the following night and immediately started chucking anything that wasn’t nailed down at Iggy. Bottles, change, cameras…it didn’t matter. That recording turned into the live record Metallic K.O., which ended up being one of our most famous albums. That tour was really hand-to-mouth. We had our manager’s credit card, which had long since been declined, but in those days, the instant communication wasn’t there. We’d use that thing with no credit, run out on bills, and do whatever we had to do to keep going.
That lifestyle completely wore me out, and that last show at the Michigan Palace made us realize that we didn’t need it anymore. It was insult to injury if you’re not even getting paid to have beer bottles chucked at your head the whole show. That was the end of that phase of The Stooges. We had some demos that eventually got turned into the Kill City record in 1975, but that was really the end of it. I went on to work at Sony, where I got fat, dumb, and happy. In 2009, Ronnie Asheton died, and I had taken early retirement from Sony. It worked out to be the perfect time for me to come back and play with the band.
We did the Ready to Die album and toured together. It was fascinating because in the ’70s, nobody thought we were worth a damn. When we came back in the 2000s, we were huge! The first show I did with the reunion band was in São Paulo, Brazil, for 40,000 people. I had never even been in front of 2,000 people in my whole life. My only thought was, “God, I hope I remember the chords!” I hadn’t played guitar in forty years, so I had to do a lot of woodshedding before that one. A whole new generation had discovered the band, and there were a bunch of twenty-somethings at those shows, which was really cool to see. The next thing I knew, we were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
We got all the accolades and vindication that we never got back in the day. It was really satisfying and strange. I’m always amazed at the influence we’ve had. People go ape over our stuff, and I feel weird because I don’t know how to play guitar any other way. It’s something I developed as a kid on my own, as a reaction to being a teenager. I don’t feel there’s really anything special about it, but others seem to think it’s pretty cool. Who am I to complain?