“Gimme Danger notes”

Gimme Danger “distribution” owned by “Amazon Studios.”
The early footage shows a troubling lack of full band, just Iggy.
A caption says “In 1973 (The Stooges) were dirt,” though now they’re one of the most influential.
Iggy says “Some gigs I could get it together and sing, some I couldn’t.’”
Iggy says they were “‘upsetting people, usually because of me, wherever we went.”
James Williamson is forming a verbal commentary along the lines of “‘The band was really deteriorating rapidly around that point,’” and there’s a clip of Iggy dancing wildly around in nothing but a thong going “Butt fu**ers / Co** suckers / Wanna run my world…”
He says that Steve Mckay “said he could play drums but couldn’t, but we needed money so bad we just let him play.”
Crowd threw bottles at McKay and said “‘Come on Iggy let’s see you puke,’” according to Willamson.
Iggy confronting people in the audience, “one guy just hauls off and cold cocks him.”
“After that gig, nobody had to say anything, everybody had had it, people were throwing sh** at us all the time…”
Very good version of “Gimme Danger” featured at the opening credits.
{Iggy Pop}: “Buffalo Bob was basically like Timothy Leary for kids watching TV.”
Iggy Pop adopted the Soupy Sez fan latter ethos of “25 words or less” for songwriting purposes.
Iggy Pop spent his childhood as a drummer.
Iggy Pop went to one semester of college then dropped out.
Iggy Pop on his first band The Iguanas: “I was getting really good, and at some point I lost respect for or faith in the group. I decided to go where the real people were doing the real deal.”
Iggy Pop says playing with Afro-American blues boys was “not like white America.”
{Iggy Pop}: “I thought, ‘I would like to do for our generation what the good black players were doing for theirs.’”
{Iggy Pop on being a drummer}: “Eventually I got sick of looking at everybody’s butt all the time.”
Iggy Pop had been a drummer in Motown.
Scott Asheton has on a “B.R.M.C.” shirt for the cinematic interview.
Ron Asheton on trying to go back to high school after playing music: “Ann Arbor was still a lot of frat boys, it was not a lot of ‘us,’” meaning presumably hippies, or something along the lines.
The Asheton brothers actually skipped high school their senior year and flew to England to see The Who play.
{Iggy Pop}: “There was a period when The Stooges resembled The Dirty Shames in that we decided we had a band, and we told people we had a band, but we hadn’t really done any playing.”
The movie breaks into trippy animated effects to depict Iggy Pop buying a marijuana plant, “curing” it in the communal laundry room of his trailer park, and then taking a 45-minute bus in order to go to his bandmate. The mom they draw is a crazy crackhead looking bit**.
{Iggy Pop on the band in its formative days}: “We were not political at all, but we were true communists. We lived in a communal house.” He’s got a very, very poignant tone in his voice as he says this. “When we began to write songs,” he continues, “since we were to ignorant to realize that there was intellectual property, we shared authorship.”
{Iggy Pop on band in formative days}: “We role played a lot, and listened to a lot of music.”
Harry Partsch created his own percussion instruments.
Ron Asheton has an accent like a record label A&R man, so it’s funny to think of him being in this band that would make it such a prerogative to rub everybody the wrong way.
Iggy Pop says you can plug a mic in and “listen to an asthma attack… that’s good free form music.”
According to Iggy Pop, Ron Asheton said “Let’s just call (our band) The Stooges, because we don’t do anything wrong but everybody’s always picking on us.” He also claims that Asheton added that “But we’ll be ‘The Psychedelic Stooges,’” which makes the viewer think that this whole thing was meant as the original band name.
{James Williamson}: “Here’s a bunch of guys who couldn’t even play, but they were playing the Grande Ballroom, and everybody was just mesmerized.”
Iggy would wear “white face” at early shows. He was also in drag, a “maternity” costume.
At early shows, The Stooges would actually do “3 Stooges” type things, such as hurt themselves and throw pies.
In the movie, the narration transitions somewhat quickly to the band talking about attempting to play Motown covers and failing, to all of a sudden there being “1970” playing in the background and Iggy dancing around on stage in sync with the music (“1970” isn’t even on their first album, making the juxtaposition here especially dissonant).
{Iggy Pop}: “In the Ashetons I found primitive man.”
MC5 was an early influence on The Stooges.
John Sinclair was called by Iggy the “grand poo-bah of the streets” in ‘60s Detroit, and he said “The Western world is crumbling and now is the time to continue the assault on this culture.”
It was through John Sinclair that The Stooges were invited to play with the MC5 at the 1968 Democratic Convention, which culminated in “bloody rioting.”
Wayne Kramer of the MC5 told a member of the record industry “If you like us, you’re REEEEALLLLY like our little brother band (The Stooges).”
The Stooges were “discovered by Danny Fields” in a ballroom at U of M effusively described by Ron Asheton as electrified by “Marshall stacks at 10.” Fields was a PR for Elektra Records. Asheton said that Fields said “‘How would you guys like to be, uh, stars?’”
{Iggy Pop}: “Show biz is not a friendly place, and I’ve gotta say, of all the people who ever extended a hand to The Stooges, The MC5 were probably the most genuine about it.”
{Iggy Pop}: “I think when we got signed we realized we didn’t need to be ‘The Psychedelic Stooges’… we could just be ‘The Stooges.’”
“The was Ron’s finest hour, when he came up over the next few months with two great riffs: ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and ‘No Fun.’”
{Iggy Pop}: “The whole group loved New York.”
{Iggy Pop}: “I’d been listening to The Velvets (Underground) a lot… a lot of the simplicity, and the moods, really had an influence on us.”
So Iggy’s Velvets listening and his denizenship in New York seem coincidentally concurrent, or deliberately concurrent on part of artist.
Iggy Pop says that “they” recommended John Cale to produce the first album, presumably the record label, Elektra.
The studio they used was according to Iggy “an R&B studio with tiny little amplifiers, and we came in with our Marshall stacks.”
The film is peppered throughout with excerpts of contemporary popular cinema—the result, while cheesy, is somewhat gratifying and relieving of the tension which would otherwise formulate from the knowledge that you’re listening to a person talk about a situation which would eventually end in human combustion.
Eventually the “3 Stooges” excerpts get really annoying.
The movie is pretty good in large part despite the fact that at one point they start playing the song “We Will Fall.”
{Iggy Pop}: “Double tracking leads with no rhythm guitar: that’s not usually done in rock and roll” (remember Iggy would usually just be jumping around the stage or singing, didn’t play guitar).
Andy Warhol made a suggestion to the band to “Just sing the newspaper… just sing what it says in the newspaper.”
Iggy Pop still doesn’t know what the dog collar means.
{Scott Asheton}: “It was cool.”
One particularly cinematic portion of the movie features a very show-bizzy voice introducing the “world famous Whiskey-a-Go-Go” dance club in Los Angeles who then says “Let’s drop in and see what’s going on,” and it’s The Stooges.
The recording process isn’t described in too much detail… the Fun House material is basically just dolloped on to the general plot with no context.
Iggy Pop says they would “play that whole work (Fun House) and we were pretty much ignoring the stuff from the first album,” when they started playing big festivals in ’70.
James Williamson amusingly refers to Iggy Pop as “the guy” in one interview.
The Stooges opened for the Mothers of Invention at one show.
The “Goose Lake” festival depicted at one point is an interesting juxtaposition—it apparently associates with The Stooges, but it features naked people, and a dude with a redneck accent introducing a “ceremony” where they were going to “plant seeds.” [1]
Iggy Pop first tried heroin sometime around 1970, from a roommate.
Ron Asheton says that when Iggy Pop started heroin “Everything just decayed.”
Regarding a van accident the band had by going under a bridge that was too low the friendly record exec. says “that was the metaphor of the early Stooges”—it’s interesting that he uses the term “metaphor,” since it really happened (“epitome” might have been a choicer articulation) but there’s also something interesting about how he used the term “metaphor” here, as if he’s indicating that real life events have a preternatural knack for materializing as microcosms of larger rules dealing with specific entities like bands.
Iggy Pop likens the Raw Power contract to the boy bands of the ‘90s: “It was insane work demands, ridiculous splits of money.”
The captions also get really annoying in this movie… I’m not really sure why they have them… nothing is ever hard to understand that the people being interviewed say.
Iggy Pop and his partner got arrested once they got to London just for how they looked. He then says of Tony Defries, the band’s new manager who had to go bail them out, “I don’t think he ever really wanted us, I think David Bowie wanted us.”
The cinema blasts into a fast, primitive version of “Penetration,” depicting Raw Power studio days, on which you can palpably hear Bowie’s inaffective “glam” influence.
{James Williamson}: “We wanted to make a hit record (with Raw Power) but we’re so delusional about what’s popular ‘cause all we really care about is what we like.”
{James Williamson}: “Unfortunately on Raw Power you don’t hear the bass that much, but it was good, it was really good.”
Record company “Main Man” actually refused to allow The Stooges to play any gigs whatsoever, starting in about 1972.
Iggy Pop and James Williamson created another band once Main Man dropped The Stooges, “Iggy Pop and James Williamson in Kill City.”
The part about James Williamson studying computer engineering after being in The Stooges gets really boring, especially because Williamson isn’t even featured THAT extensively in the movie’s overall discussion.
The Mike Watt interviews seem somewhat pointless, but entertaining nonetheless.
{Iggy Pop on how he was around 1973}: “I’d run out of things to say.”
{Iggy Pop}: “I started listening to everyone I thought was cool, and then I realized none of them are as cool as The Stooges.”
Mike Watt was in the band Asheton-Asheton-Mascis-Watt which played old Stooges songs.
The commentary on The Stooges playing Coachella seems foreign—nobody associates The Stooges with Coachella, and I don’t think anyone should, frankly.
{Iggy Pop}: “Music is life, and life is not a business. Ron Asheton knew this, and Ron Asheton was cool. The MC5 are cool.”
Tellingly, Iggy refers to Elektra’s Danny Fields in a ceremony speech as “my friend Danny.”
The footage of old Iggy doing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” doesn’t really do it for me either—actually the Stooges album from ’13 was pretty decent, although way more laid back. “I Wanna Be Your Dog” definitely seems anachronistic.
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[1] Wikipedia is fu**in’ ON IT!!!