Every year, on the last Sunday of the year, the New York Times Sunday magazine does an issue on significant people who passed away during the previous 52 weeks. I was pleasantly surprised to see in today's paper that they chose to honor Ron Asheton this year. Here is a copy of the text -
In September 1968, a publicist for Elektra Records named Danny Fields flew from New York to Detroit to check out the MC5, a free-jazz-influenced rock band with ties to the radical left. One of the MC5’s guitarists, Wayne Kramer, suggested that Fields also see the group’s “little-brother band,” the Psychedelic Stooges, playing nearby at the University of Michigan that weekend. “It’s become an embarrassing cliché, but it was the music I was waiting to hear my whole life,” Fields told me recently. While the band’s singer, Jim Osterberg, better known as Iggy Pop, dominated the show with his riveting theatrics, it was the almost-still guitarist, Ron Asheton, who supplied Osterberg with much of what he channeled.
“Ron was so gentle,” Fields says. “It’s almost hard to imagine the ferocity of the music he and the band invented. It wasn’t like more of something; it was like different something. It was a new thing that could be called music.”
That new thing would later be called punk rock, but it would take the world years to catch up to the Stooges. In the beginning, the band — which also included Scott Asheton, Ron’s brother, on drums and their friend Dave Alexander on bass — was raw and passionate and had only two set pieces, simple chord progressions over which Iggy improvised, often accompanied by vacuum cleaners, blenders and enormous oil drums whose sounds were amplified by contact microphones. “It was mesmerizing because it was primal,” Kramer says. “A cross between dance and theater and with this brutal sonic assault.”
After Fields persuaded Elektra to sign the band, the Stooges traveled to New York in the spring of 1969 to record an album, though they had only five songs. One of them was “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” their iconic ode to humiliation. Built around a three-chord riff of Asheton’s, the song is an example of minimalist perfection. Still, the group was short of material, so Asheton retreated to his hotel room and in an hour had three more pieces, including another spare gem called “Real Cool Time.” The Stooges’ debut was a visceral rebuke to the overwrought complexity that was then sweeping rock, and Asheton’s stripped-down style would influence numerous guitarists, notably Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Johnny Ramone. The band’s next effort, “Fun House,” came out in 1970 and would be described by Iggy as “variations on a theme by Ron.” It’s hard to overstate the impact of this mélange of psychedelic blues, proto-metal, proto-hardcore and free jazz; the White Stripes’ Jack White, for example, has called “Fun House” the “definitive rock album of America.”
Despite their artistic achievement, both albums sold dismally; Elektra dropped the band, and it broke up, then reunited briefly in 1973 as Iggy and the Stooges. A third album, “Raw Power,” was recorded with help from MainMan, David Bowie’s production company — though Iggy had replaced Asheton with another guitarist. Eventually he asked Asheton to play bass, after auditioning dozens of musicians for the position. “That didn’t make Ronny feel very good, but he played bass like nobody else,” his former girlfriend, Niagara, says. “He was horribly professional.”
Following the record’s release, the Stooges’ minder at MainMan, Leee Black Childers, found them a five-bedroom house (“full of groupies and drugs galore,” Childers recalls) with a pool in the Hollywood Hills to live in while they rehearsed and waited for the opportunity to tour. The setting, however, couldn’t mask MainMan’s indifference or the band’s disintegration as its members turned to heroin — with the exception of Ron, who didn’t use it. “Ron was certainly no straight boy, no angel,” Childers says. (Asheton, who was obsessed with military history, also had a provocative, albeit apolitical, fondness for Nazi memorabilia.) “But I remember him sitting out of the sun on the deck, fully dressed and just watching it all.”
As a teenager, Asheton dropped out of high school and traveled to England hoping to meet the Beatles. “I used to angst at night as a child,” he once said. “I don’t want a normal life.” After the band broke up again in 1974, Iggy Pop pursued a solo career, and Asheton ultimately returned to Ann Arbor. He lived most of the rest of his life in his mother’s house — his father died when he was 15 — and continued to play in bands with the same commitment he showed to the Stooges. “One time Iggy asked Ronnie to play with him on a tour in Europe, but we had our band,” Niagara recalls. “He could have made more money, but he just said: ‘Forget it. I have my own project.’ ”
In 2003, as Iggy’s solo career waned and interest in the Stooges surged, the group reunited again, this time to enormous acclaim. At a show in New York in August that year, Fields reconnected with Asheton for the first time in decades. Since Asheton’s death, Fields has re-examined some photographs he took of the Stooges’ last performances at Max’s Kansas City in 1973. “You have to look for Ron there,” he says. “The band was not going to have any guitarist moving out and stepping front and center. You don’t go up against Iggy physically in any way, but there was just the quietness of him standing there, almost with his eyes closed, sort of dreamy and whacking out this wonderful, gorgeous music.”
Dan Kaufman is a musician and writer living in Brooklyn.
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Subject: New York Times piece on Ron 
Mon Dec 28, 2009 1:54 am
