What If?

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and figured that you guys might be interested. We all know that the stooges started out as the psychedelic stooges, performing free form, avant garde music. Eventually they moved away (or evolved/improved, depending on your view) towards more 'traditional' rock, due to pressure from Elektra. So my thought is this: what if, instead of being signed with Elektra, they were signed with a label such as ESP-Disk? If this had happened, I can imagine that the first record would be completely different (Asthma Attack is probably a good indication of what it could have been). Do you think that they would have continued in this vein for long, having record label approval and backing, or would they have still moved towards traditional rock on their own?

Don't mess with success, no matter how delayed.

And who says this was traditional rock anywho? Way too much evidence to the contrary spotlights the Stooges as innovators. Just one F'rinstance: in the Special Features to "Dogs in Space," the worthy Australian punkrock film, practically every person interviewed cites "Raw Power" as their primary influence, unaware of everyone else independently citing the exact same thing as well.

They took from the most rad radio rock of the times, jungle rythms, and with The Doors influence they went extreme and made a mark. Yet, we know their vast amount of influence came well after the fact in the US, and again the Brits had to show most of us what we were ignoring on our own turf.

Eventually they moved away (or evolved/improved, depending on your view) towards more 'traditional' rock,

i remember the cover of Raw Power being quite frightening at the time.

weed_killer wrote:

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and figured that you guys might be interested. We all know that the stooges started out as the psychedelic stooges, performing free form, avant garde music. Eventually they moved away (or evolved/improved, depending on your view) towards more 'traditional' rock, due to pressure from Elektra. So my thought is this: what if, instead of being signed with Elektra, they were signed with a label such as ESP-Disk? If this had happened, I can imagine that the first record would be completely different (Asthma Attack is probably a good indication of what it could have been). Do you think that they would have continued in this vein for long, having record label approval and backing, or would they have still moved towards traditional rock on their own?

Maybe we'd have got some unlistenable underground monster like Cromagnon's Orgasm? I'm happy the way things turned out.

By traditional rock, I meant compared to something like Sun Ra; traditional as in bass,guitar,drums, verse chorus verse type of thing. I fully agree that they were innovators. I was just basing the idea on the fact that The Stooges were heavily influenced by free jazz, and started out as a kind of electrified free jazz band.